Lifeboat Foundation

Managing Director of Cyber Security Consulting at Verizon.

It’s no surprise firewalls and encryption are instrumental to help defend against cyberattacks, but those tools can’t defend against one of the largest cybersecurity threats: people.

Social engineering—manipulating individuals to divulge sensitive information—is on the rise, even as organizations increasingly implement cybersecurity education and training. While social engineering already poses a challenge for organizations, AI might make it even more of a threat.

Have you ever been compelled to enter sensitive payment data on the website of an unknown merchant? Would you be willing to consign your credit card data or passwords to untrustworthy hands? Scientists from the University of Vienna have now designed an unconditionally secure system for shopping in such settings, combining modern cryptographic techniques with the fundamental properties of quantum light. The demonstration of such “quantum-digital payments” in a realistic environment has been published in Nature Communications.

Digital payments have replaced physical banknotes in many aspects of our daily lives. Similar to banknotes, they should be easy to use, unique, tamper-resistant and untraceable, but additionally withstand digital attackers and data breaches.

In today’s payment ecosystem, customers’ sensitive data is substituted by sequences of random numbers, and the uniqueness of each transaction is secured by a classical cryptographic method or code. However, adversaries and merchants with powerful computational resources can crack these codes and recover the customers’ private data, and for example, make payments in their name.

PORTSMOUTH, Va. (WAVY) – Artificial intelligence is already revolutionizing society – from healthcare and education to cybersecurity and even our courts. Despite all of its benefits, it has also given criminals an edge when it comes to deceiving us.

Financial sextortion is a crime in which a bad actor attempts to leverage personal material (think: naked pictures or videos) to force a victim into giving into their demands — usually money or other compromising material.

You may have stumbled across the Flipper Zero hacking device that’s been doing the rounds. The company, which started in Russia in 2020, left the country at the start of the war and moved on since then. It claims it no longer has ties to Russia and that it is on track to sell $80 million worth of its products this year after selling almost $5 million worth as Kickstarter preorders — and it claims it sold $25 million worth of the devices last year.

So what are they selling? Flipper Zero is a “portable gamified multi-tool” aimed at everyone with an interest in cybersecurity, whether as a penetration tester, curious nerd or student — or with more nefarious purposes. The tool includes a bunch of ways to manipulate the world around you, including wireless devices (think garage openers), RFID card systems, remote keyless systems, key fobs, entry to barriers, etc. Basically, you can program it to emulate a bunch of different lock systems.

Continue reading “Flipper hacking device on track to make $80M worth of sales” »

Shouldn’t Facebook have alerted us and not CBS News?

The fake notice went on to say that a photo uploaded to the account’s page violated Facebook’s copyright infringement policy and that the decision could be appealed within 24 hours.

Continue reading “Facebook users targeted in copyright infringement scam” »

AI is quickly becoming an essential part of daily work. It’s already being used to help improve operational processes, strengthen customer service, measure employee experience, and bolster cybersecurity efforts, among other applications. And with AI deepening its presence in daily life, as more people turn to AI bot services, such as ChatGPT, to answer questions and get help with tasks, its presence in the workplace will only accelerate.

Much of the discussion around AI in the workplace has been about the jobs it could replace. It’s also sparked conversations around ethics, compliance, and governance issues, with many companies taking a cautious approach to adopting AI technologies and IT leaders debating the best path forward.

While the full promise of AI is still uncertain, it’s early impact on the workplace can’t be ignored. It’s clear that AI will make its mark on every industry in the coming years, and it’s already creating a shift in demand for skills employers are looking for. AI has also sparked renewed interest in long-held IT skills, while creating entirely new roles and skills companies will need to adopt to successfully embrace AI.

It turns out that reports of its death were greatly exaggerated. NASA says it’s figured out a way to extend the mission of its interstellar Voyager 2 probe by another three years.

And that’s no easy feat, considering the probe has been screaming through the cosmos since 1977 and is currently more than 12 billion miles from Earth.

The probe recently switched to its backup power reserves, which were originally set aside as part of an onboard safety mechanism, according to an update by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The theft of the ChatGPT login credentials was orchestrated using the Raccoon Infostealer malware, said cybersecurity firm Group-IB.

Attackers are increasingly targeting vulnerable developer laptops to infiltrate production systems without directly attacking them, warned cloud security expert Lee Atchison.

Instead of waiting for an application to become fully functional, hackers target the development process used to bring an application to a state of operation, Atchison said, speaking at a recent Uptycs-sponsored Cybersecurity Standup, “Castles in the Sky – Secure Your App Dev Pipeline From Laptop to Cloud.”

“We focus so much attention on keeping data and cloud data centers secure. But we haven’t realized that all of this technology feeds into the data centers and that one of the primary drivers of that is developers, the source code they develop, and the machines that they develop the source code on,” Atchison said. “Those DevOps machines feed into the production systems but have nowhere near the level of protection behind them that the production data centers do.”