The Register - Anti-Virus

Cut off one head, two more grow back in its place

RansomHub, the ransomware collective that emerged earlier this year, quickly gained momentum, outpacing its criminal colleagues and hitting its victims especially hard. The group named and shamed hundreds of organizations on its leak site, while demanding exorbitant payments across various industries.…

Santa Satya pops one more issue into his sack just in time for Christmas

The trickle of known issues with Windows 11 24H2 has continued with a new one just in time for festive season: installed the operating system using removable media? There's a chance it might stop receiving security updates.…

Rob Joyce explains how it's done

Video  In 2018, Rob Joyce, then Donald Trump's White House Cybersecurity Coordinator, gave a surprise talk at the legendary hacking conference Shmoocon about his hobby.…

Botnet's operators 'driven by similar interests as that of the Chinese state'

After the Mozi botnet mysteriously disappeared last year, a new and seemingly more powerful botnet, Androxgh0st, rose from its ashes and has quickly become a major threat to critical infrastructure.…

35 years since AIDS first borked a PC and we're still no closer to a solution

Feature  Your Christmas holidays looked quite different in the '80s to how they do today. While some will remember what it was like to wake up on the 25th back then, some of you won't even have been born. The food hasn't changed much. Turkey, stuffing, Brussels sprouts… that's all been around for some time.…

Easier to let those old phones gather dust in a drawer, survey finds

The UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has warned that many adults don't know how to wipe their old devices, and a worrying number of young people just don't care.…

Mummy, where do zero days come from?

Opinion  One of the charms of coding is that malice can be indistinguishable from incompetence. Last week's Who, Me? story about financial transfer test software running amok is a case in point.…

Dual Russian-Israeli national arrested in August

An alleged LockBit ransomware developer is in custody in Israel and awaiting extradition to the United States.…

Also, Ascension notifies 5.6M victims, Krispy Kreme bandits come forward, LockBit 4.0 released, and more

in brief  Google has announced plans to allow its business customers to begin "fingerprinting" users next year, and the UK Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) isn't happy about it. …

Yes, LLMs can do the heavy lifting. But good luck getting one to give evidence

CANALYS FORUMS APAC  Generative AI is being enthusiastically adopted in almost every field, but infosec experts are divided on whether it is truly helpful for red team raiders who test enterprise systems.…

Recent campaign targeted 20,000 folk across UK and Europe with this tactic, Unit 42 warns

Unknown criminals went on a phishing expedition that targeted about 20,000 users across the automotive, chemical and industrial compound manufacturing sectors in Europe, and tried to steal account credentials and then hijack the victims' Microsoft Azure cloud infrastructure.…

It could end up like Huawei -Trump's gonna get ya, get ya, get ya

updated  The Feds may ban the sale of TP-Link routers in the US over ongoing national security concerns about Chinese-made devices being used in cyberattacks.…

Enrollment invitations will continue until security improves

Microsoft last week lauded the success of its efforts to convince customers to use passkeys instead of passwords, without actually quantifying that success.…

All it took to make an Google Edge TPU give up model hyperparameters was specific hardware, a novel attack technique … and several days

Computer scientists from North Carolina State University have devised a way to copy AI models running on Google Edge Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), as used in Google Pixel phones and third-party machine learning accelerators.…

Not that you needed another reason to enable the 'known senders' setting

Criminals are spoofing Google Calendar emails in a financially motivated phishing expedition that has already affected about 300 organizations with more than 4,000 emails sent over four weeks, according to Check Point researchers.…

Victims' feelings might get hurt, global cops contend, and that could hinder reporting

Interpol wants to put an end to the online scam known as "pig butchering" – through linguistic policing, rather than law enforcement.…

You applied the patch that could stop possible RCE attacks last week, right?

A critical security hole in Apache Struts 2 – patched last week – is currently being exploited using publicly available proof-of-concept (PoC) code.…

€251 million? Zuck can find that in his couch cushions, but Meta still vows to appeal

It's been six years since miscreants abused some sloppy Facebook code to steal access tokens belonging to 30 million users, and the slow-turning wheels of Irish justice have finally caught up with a €251 million ($264 million) fine for the social media biz. …

Fresh attempt to mix the perfect cocktail of IoT and Infosec

BlackBerry's ambition to mix infosec and the Internet of Things has been squeezed, after the Canadian firm announced it is offloading Cylance's endpoint security products.…

The likes of SHA-256, RSA, ECDSA and ECDH won't be welcome in just five years

Australia's chief cyber security agency has decided local orgs should stop using the tech that forms the current cryptographic foundation of the internet by the year 2030 – years before other nations plan to do so – over fears that advances in quantum computing could render it insecure.…