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.

Cloudflare's firewall and Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack prevention mechanisms can be circumvented by exploiting gaps in cross-tenant security controls. Certitude researcher Stefan Proksch noted that attackers could use their own Cloudflare accounts to exploit the per-design trust relationship between Cloudflare and customer's websites, causing the protection mechanism to be ineffective.

According to a new report from IANS Research and Artico Search, there was a 65 percent drop in cybersecurity spending growth during the 2022-23 budget cycle. Over a third of the 550 CISOs surveyed experienced budget cuts or spending freezes due to widespread economic stressors, up from 21 percent compared to last year's study. The 2023 Security Budget Benchmark Summary Report revealed that cybersecurity spending in the US and Canada increased by only 6 percent on average in 2022-23, a decrease of nearly two-thirds compared to the 17 percent growth in 2021-22.

Security experts at Sonatype have warned of surging cyber risk in open-source ecosystems, having detected three times more malicious packages in 2023 than last year.  The vendor detected 245,032 malicious packages in 2023, which amounts to twice as many software supply chain attacks as during the period 2019-2022.  Sonatype noted that it is not just deliberate malicious activity that is posing a threat to organizations that download these components to accelerate time-to-value.