According to new guidelines published by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), using a mixture of character types in your passwords and regularly changing passwords are officially no longer best password management practices.  NIST’s latest version of its Password Guidelines suggests credential service providers (CSPs) stop recommending passwords using several character types and to stop mandating periodic password changes unless the authenticator has been compromised.

Security researchers at Cybernews have recently uncovered a massive data leak exposing the personal information of over 100 million US citizens.  The breach is attributed to a misconfigured database at background check firm MC2 Data, which allegedly left 2.2TB of sensitive data accessible online without password protection.

U.K. transport officials and police recently announced they are investigating a “cybersecurity incident” that hit the public Wi-Fi networks at the country’s biggest railway stations.  Passengers trying to log onto the Wi-Fi at stations including Manchester Piccadilly, Birmingham New Street, and 11 London terminuses on Wednesday evening were met by a page reading “We love you, Europe,” followed by an anti-Islam message listing a series of terror attacks.  Network Rail, which manages the stations, said the Wi-Fi had been switched off and no passenger data was taken.

Google recently announced that its secure-by-design approach to code development has significantly reduced memory safety vulnerabilities in Android.  Google has been battling memory safety issues in both Android and Chrome for years, including by migrating them to memory-safe programming languages, such as Rust, and the effort has paid off.

Researchers from ETH Zurich have discovered a way to beat CAPTCHA puzzles through the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI), which has sparked further concern regarding online security. CAPTCHA, which stands for "Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart," has been a well-established method for distinguishing humans from bots. However, the researchers' new AI system could solve image-based puzzles as effectively as humans, if not better. This article continues to discuss the study "Breaking reCAPTCHAv2."

By grigby1

Xiaoli Zhou of the School of Information Engineering at Sichuan Top IT Vocational Institute in Chengdu, China, conducted a study on integrating data augmentation and ensemble learning methods to improve the accuracy of Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS). Zhou focused on a Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Network with Gradient Penalty (WGAN-GP), an advanced version of the standard Machine Learning (ML) model capable of creating realistic data through a competition between two neural networks.

By grigby1 

By krahal

With a nod to Charles Dickens, this Cyber Scene will take us to the tale of two grounded US cities—Washington DC and New York City, even as debates, be they financial or foreign affairs, are fully in best or possibly worst ethereal times.

According to Zimperium's "2024 zLabs Global Mobile Threat Report," 82 percent of all phishing sites now target mobile devices. The report also shows that 76 percent of these sites use HTTPS, leading users to believe they are secure. Healthcare remains the most vulnerable industry, with 39 percent of mobile threats coming from phishing attacks. In order to gain access to enterprise systems, cybercriminals are increasingly applying mobile-first strategies involving the exploitation of weak mobile endpoints, smaller screens, and limited security indicators.