Bailey Bickley, this season’s host of NSA’s Cybersecurity Speaker Series, speaks with Adrian Stanger and Bill Layton on preparing for Post-Quantum. For more on cybersecurity at NSA, and to find out when our next Speaker Series video is posted, follow us on Twitter @NSACyber.
Three new malicious packages that can deploy a cryptocurrency miner on Linux devices have been discovered in the Python Package Index (PyPI) open-source repository. The three malicious packages, named "modularseven," "driftme," and "catme," were downloaded a total of 431 times in the past month before being removed. According to Fortinet FortiGuard Labs researcher Gabby Xiong, the packages deploy a CoinMiner executable on Linux devices. The campaign appears to overlap with a previous campaign that used a package called "culturestreak" to launch a cryptocurrency miner.
The research projects of the AI and Cybersecurity Virtual Institute are at the intersection of cybersecurity and Artificial Intelligence (AI). These projects are in broad areas of AI for Cybersecurity, Cybersecurity for AI and Countering AI. The research for AI for Cybersecurity advances the secure application AI and Machine Learning to cybersecurity challenges. In the challenge of Cybersecurity for AI, research develops methods to protect critical AI algorithms and systems from accidental and intentional degradation and failure. The area of counter AI is concerning the special cyber defenses needed to protect against cyberattacks that are aided by the use of AI.
PROJECTS
The research projects of Trusted Systems Virtual Institute further the foundations and applications of trust and trustworthiness of devices and systems. The challenge of trust is examined at each stage of the development life cycle: design, development, use and retirement. Integral to advancing trust are research projects which advance understanding and accounting for human behavior on trust.
PROJECTS
The research projects of the Defensive Mechanisms Virtual Institute advance resiliency by investigating the foundations needed to detect, respond and mitigate cyber attacks. This requires theory, models and tools at each stage of the cyber attack timeline. In addition, this field includes the necessary research to balance performance and security in responding to threats.
PROJECTS
A team of computer scientists led by the University of Massachusetts (UMass) Amherst announced a new method to automatically generate whole proofs that can be used to prevent software bugs and verify the correctness of the underlying code. Baldur is the new method involving Large Language Models' (LLMs) Artificial Intelligence (AI) power. Combined with the Thor tool, an efficacy of nearly 66 percent is reached.
According to Vercara, businesses faced about 800,000 cyberattacks in 2023, with over 60,000 of them being Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks and 4,000 falling victim to ransomware. Consumers have nuanced perceptions of cybersecurity incidents and are oftentimes unaware of their role in maintaining cyber hygiene within a business. These findings highlight the importance of brand trust in the digital landscape, with 75 percent of consumers expressing their willingness to cut ties with a brand after any cybersecurity incident.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has recently started accepting submissions for its Voice Cloning Challenge, a public competition with a $25,000 top prize for ideas that protect consumers from the danger of AI-enabled voice cloning for fraudulent activity. The Challenge was announced in mid-November in an effort to find ways to counter the misuse of voice cloning technology as it becomes more sophisticated due to the improvement of text-to-speech with the help of artificial intelligence.
A threat actor named "RET" claims to have sold the source code and a cracked version of the Zeppelin ransomware builder for $500. The threat intelligence company KELA discovered the claim on a cybercrime forum. Although the offer's legitimacy has yet to be confirmed, screenshots from the seller suggest that the package is real. The buyer could use the malware to launch a new Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) operation or create a new Zeppelin-based locker. Zeppelin stems from the Delphi-based Vega/VegaLocker malware family, which was active between 2019 and 2022.
Since mid-November, an Iran-linked hacktivist group called Cyber Toufan has breached over 100 organizations in and around Israel. The group has wiped servers, leaked sensitive data, and conducted follow-on attacks down the supply chain. Cyber Toufan compromised Signature-IT, an Israeli company specializing in hosting international websites for businesses, on November 16. The hacktivists were able to reach dozens of major Israeli companies and government organizations, as well as international companies.