According to security researchers at WithSecure, the ALPHV/BlackCat ransomware group’s operations seem to have halted amid allegations of defrauding an affiliate involved in the Optum attack, which targeted the Change Healthcare platform, resulting in a loss of $22m.  The researchers noted that over the weekend, negotiation sites linked to the ransomware activities were confirmed to have been shut down, indicating a possibly deliberate dismantling of the gang’s infrastructure.

Georgia’s largest county, Fulton County, is still repairing the damage inflicted on its government a month ago by hackers who shut down office phone lines, left clerks unable to issue vehicle registrations or marriage licenses, and threatened to publicly release sensitive data they claimed to have stolen unless officials paid the ransom.  The ransomware syndicate LockBit took credit for the cyberattack in late January that temporarily crippled government services in Fulton County, which includes most of Atlanta.

American Express recently started warning customers that credit cards were exposed in a third-party data breach after one of its service providers was hacked.  In a data breach notification filed with the state of Massachusetts, American Express said that the breach occurred at one of its service providers used by their travel services division, American Express Travel Related Services Company.  The company said that the account information of some of their Card Members, including account information, may have been involved.

Chinese video surveillance equipment manufacturer Hikvision has recently announced patches for two vulnerabilities in its security management system, HikCentral Professional.  The most important of these flaws is CVE-2024-25063, a high-severity bug that could lead to unauthorized access to certain URLs.  The bug affects HikCentral Professional version 2.5.1 and below.

Energinet, the Danish national transmission system operator for electricity and natural gas, together with researchers from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), demonstrated how quantum key encryption can protect society from the threat posed by quantum computers. Quantum computers have the potential to penetrate current Information Technology (IT) security systems and be used to gain control of the critical infrastructure that supports the supply of electricity, gas, and water.

A team of researchers developed one of the first generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) worms, which can spread from one system to another. Ben Nassi, a Cornell Tech researcher, together with fellow researchers Stav Cohen and Ron Bitton, developed the AI worm dubbed "Morris II." They demonstrated how the AI worm can attack a generative AI email assistant, stealing data from emails and sending spam messages. The team was able to break some security protections in ChatGPT and Gemini.

A new research project led by David Lo, a computer science professor at Singapore Management University (SMU), aims to develop a method for finding cybersecurity vulnerabilities in a software application's source code. Professor Lo and his team propose developing a localized and specialized Large Language Model (LLM) solution, specifically a large data model tuned for vulnerability discovery and contextualized to the government code base.

New research proposes a novel approach to addressing the challenges posed by deepfake technology, which creates manipulated media content resembling authentic footage. The researchers' method combines the miniXception and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) models to better analyze suspicious content and identify deepfake images with greater than 99 percent accuracy. The continued development of deepfakes may reduce the effectiveness of security systems put in place for authentication.

Gretchen Matthews, mathematics professor and director of the Commonwealth Cyber Initiative in Southwest Virginia, discusses new hard problems that can support cryptography for today's computing devices but could also survive an attack by an adversary through a quantum computer. Cybersecurity that protects sensitive online data heavily relies on the difficulty of solving a hard math problem. However, quantum computers are highly effective at solving the problems currently being used.

CyLab's picoCTF seeks to close the cybersecurity workforce gap by introducing cybersecurity to the next generation through its annual online hacking competition. The competition, aimed at college, high school, and middle school students, provides a gamified environment for practicing and demonstrating cyber skills. Megan Kearns, picoCTF program director, emphasizes that the picoCTF hacking competition provides an environment for students to apply theoretical knowledge and demonstrate their developing skills.