Google’s Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) documents the first known uses of their Gemini AI assistant to actively participate in live malware attacks, with the capability to do things like generate scripts and change up obfuscation methods on the fly without a hacker’s input.
The quiet entry and very long breach window without detection does definitely point to nation-state hackers. The list of Ribbon Communications clients certainly raises serious concerns about the security breach, when one sees not just Verizon present but also the U.S. Defense Department, Softbank and City of Los Angeles among others.
Vagueness in terms seems to be the common thread among all groups critical of the cybercrime treaty. There are concerns that overly broad definitions of what constitute crimes could lead to various abuses by more authoritarian governments, and that these governments might also shut down vulnerability testing and disclosure by threatening ethical hackers.
In the wake of publication of the “SessionReaper” vulnerability for Adobe Commerce, attackers have begun exploiting it in the wild. A patch was issued at the time of public disclosure, but organizations have reportedly been slow to apply it and criminals have been taking advantage.
Anyone still concerned about wild claims of 2.5 billion or 183 million Gmail passwords stolen that have appeared in recent weeks can relax and breathe easy. Google has confirmed that it has not suffered any kind of mass data breach.
The non-profit Cyberspace Solarium Commission (CSC) has issued an annual opinion report on the state of US federal cyber defense since 2020, and this year’s edition is noteworthy for being the first in which preparedness is seen as having regressed from prior years.
Amazon says that the infamous AWS outage that took place for about 12 hours on October 20 and caused disruptions for thousands of businesses is now fully remediated, but organizations are still struggling to catch up with some of the backups and issues it caused.
The conditions are ripe for the F5 theft to spiral into further security breaches, with not just source code but inside information on undisclosed vulnerabilities that had yet to be patched exposed to the hackers. The Chinese team suspected of being behind it is an espionage-focused outfit that specializes in quietly penetrating organizations in the US and Europe.
The good news from the UK report is that no incidents recorded over the year rose to the level of a “national cyber emergency,” the most serious designation … However, 18 cyber incidents in the second most serious category is bad news when that number was at just six the year before and virtually did not even exist just two years prior.
More sophisticated foreign adversaries have figured out how to exploit model “grey zones” in AI tools, however, building attack tools gradually from smaller pieces that individually do not present as threats.