Police in Northern Ireland have recently warned organizations in the province to be on their guard after issuing a new Crime Prevention Notice on “quishing,” or phishing via QR code.  QR phishing, or quishing, has a similar end goal to regular scam emails, which are designed to trick the victim into handing over their credentials/personal information or unwittingly installing malware.  The police noted that the victim typically receives an unsolicited email, but this time containing a PDF or PNG image of a QR code.

International mobile virtual network operator Lyca Mobile has recently confirmed that its services were significantly disrupted due to a cyberattack that may have also resulted in a data breach.   The company noted that the attack, which started late last week, prevented customers and retailers from accessing top-ups and also impacted national and international calling. Lyca Mobile, which claims to have more than 16 million customers, is based in the UK and operates across 60 countries.

We are pleased to announce the transitioning of the CPS VO to a more current version of the open-source content management system, Drupal 9. 

The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) has awarded $9.5 million to researchers at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine as part of the DIGIHEALS initiative, which supports innovative research aimed at protecting the US healthcare system from malicious cyber threats. The new award, the first ARPA-H contract award for any campus of the University of California, will help the researchers develop better methods to prevent and mitigate ransomware attacks. Ransomware attacks impacting healthcare delivery have increased in frequency and sophistication.

According to cybersecurity experts at RMIT University, young people are more vulnerable to online scams than other generations. The ACCC 2022 Targeting Scams report suggests that young people are more susceptible to online scams despite being more Internet savvy. Young people have been found to be more vulnerable to employment scams on social media, their primary source of information. Many young adults attempt to make ends meet or save money by securing additional income through task-based, work-from-home jobs, such as data entry or content creation.

The wave of MOVEit Transfer attacks launched by the Cl0p ransomware gang will likely be among the largest of 2023. The zero-day exploit used by Cl0p has thus far affected over 2,100 organizations and 62 million individuals. However, researchers at Palo Alto's Unit 42 discovered that large-scale attacks present the perpetrators with unanticipated challenges, such as how to anonymously leak stolen data to coax victims into paying. Due to slow download speeds, sharing terabytes of data via a TOR leak site is nearly impossible. Cl0p addressed the issue by torrenting the files.

According to Soheil Feizi, a University of Maryland computer science professor, there is currently no reliable Artificial Intelligence (AI) watermarking. Watermarking has become a promising strategy for identifying AI-generated images and text. One of the two varieties of AI watermarking he tested for a new study, "low perturbation" watermarks, which are invisible to the naked eye, are hopeless, according to his findings. Feizi and his co-authors examined how easy it is for malicious actors to circumvent watermarking attempts. He refers to this as "washing out" the watermark.

NATO is currently investigating claims by a politically motivated hacktivist group that it breached the defense alliance’s computer systems.  If confirmed, it would mark the second time in the last three months that the group known as SiegedSec has broken into NATO systems.  On Saturday, SiegedSec claimed on its Telegram channel that it had stolen roughly 3,000 NATO documents and posted six screenshots allegedly showing access to various NATO web pages.

According to security researchers at Oligo, a series of critical vulnerabilities impacting a tool called TorchServe could allow threat actors to take complete control of servers that are part of the artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure of some of the world’s largest companies.  TorchServe is an open source package in PyTorch, a machine learning framework used for applications such as computer vision and natural language processing.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded Rice University computer scientists two grants to explore new information processing technologies and applications. One of the grants supports the development of a formal specification-based, programmable data stream processor that can analyze input from physical, biological, and other systems, enabling real-time monitoring and informed decision-making in various contexts, including cybersecurity applications.