An alternative version of the Signal messaging app that was thought to be safe enough for high-level U.S. government officials has suspended service indefinitely after a security breach, and the incident has raised serious questions about how confidential and classified communications are being handled.
Marks & Spencer and Co-op had reported that their IT help desks were convinced by a caller to reset an employee password. DragonForce has claimed credit for the attacks, all of which impacted major UK retailers, including Harrods.
A desire to replace the password as the world’s default authentication method has been circulating in the tech world for some time, but there have been almost no moves to force the issue to date. That has changed with Microsoft’s new passwordless policy for new accounts, though it is still far from the “death of the password.”
Organizations also increasingly can’t avoid SaaS models, and sometimes are even stuck with those that do not have a satisfactory security track record. That substantially increases the broader risk of some sort of major catastrophe that could harm an entire national economy stemming from just one third-party security breach.
All of the big LLMs are vulnerable to a new type of prompt injection attack that targets their safety policies, according to security firm HiddenLayer. The attack essentially fully jailbreaks the AI models, exposing the system prompt as well as enabling all different types of dangerous requests.
When it comes to zero-days and spyware, China and North Korea’s hacking teams head up the leaderboard with five 2024 incidents each. Russia had three, and South Korea one; another three were likely the work of APT groups but a specific nation was not pinned down.
The size of the health insurance breach, 4.7 million of about 6 million Blue Shield California customers, is not the only point of concern. The breach window was reportedly open from April 2021 to January 2024, nearly three continuous years. And the loss of health data was also only detected in February of this year.
Of all the cyber attacks examined in the 2025 DBIR, 22% kicked off with credential abuse. Vulnerability exploitation has been making a strong push to take the lead over the last two years, however, with its most recent surge putting it at 20% (and ahead of phishing at 16%).
The 2015 Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act is set to expire this September. The programs the cybersecurity law authorizes not only facilitate information sharing, but also offer legal protections to private partners that might otherwise be hesitant to engage with the government for fear of repercussions.
China made the seeming admission at a secret meeting taking place in Geneva in December. The WSJ source said that the admission of Volt Typhoon cyber attacks was not entirely direct, rather “somewhat ambiguous” in nature but still enough to “startle” US officials.