According to a survey of 450,000 Python projects conducted by the security company GitGuardian, publicly accessible programming code still often contains credentials that can expose access to underlying databases or cloud services. Source code has often been found to house cryptographic keys, passwords, and more, which can lead to major security incidents. GitGuardian's analysis of 450,000 Python projects in the official Python code repository Python Package Index (PyPI) found a total of 4,000 built-in secrets. Around 3,000 projects had at least one embedded secret.

Police in Ukraine and Czechia recently claimed to have disrupted a multimillion-dollar fraud gang that called victims impersonating bank staff, using classic voice phishing (vishing) techniques.  Europol claimed that the group may have made tens of millions of euros by defrauding victims across the region.  It said the cost to Czech victims alone is estimated to be $9m.  Europol noted that ten suspects were arrested in April this year, six in Ukraine and four in Czechia.

According to Sophos, telemetry logs are missing in about 42 percent of the attack cases studied. In order to hide their tracks, cybercriminals have disabled or wiped out the telemetry in 82 percent of these cases. Telemetry gaps lessen essential visibility into organizations' networks and systems, especially as attacker dwell time, which is the time from initial access to detection, continues to decrease, reducing the time defenders have to respond to an incident effectively.

According to financial disclosures filed over the past year, Rackspace Technology has continued to face expenses and losses in the aftermath of last year's December ransomware attack on one of its hosted Microsoft Exchange servers. Rackspace is a cloud computing services provider based in Texas that primarily serves small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). A ransomware attack disrupted email services for thousands of its SMB customers on December 2, 2022, through the ProxyLogOn zero-day vulnerability, which it had not patched because of operational concerns with the update.

According to security researchers at WithSecure almost half (29) of the 60 ransomware groups tracked by them in 2023 began operations this year.  The researchers found that although more established groups (8Base, Alphv/BlackCat, Clop, LockBit and Play) accounted for over half of data leaks in the first nine months of 2023, the new wave of ransomware variants is having an impact on the market.  The researchers claimed that the groups that began operating in 2023 accounted for 25% of data leaks in the period, helping to drive a 50% year-on-year (YoY) increase in data leaks.

In an ongoing campaign on X, formerly called Twitter, multiple fake accounts impersonating cryptocurrency scam investigators and blockchain security companies promote phishing pages to drain cryptocurrency wallets. The scammers use a breach on major cryptocurrency exchange platforms to lure victims as the scenario causes users to act quickly to protect their digital assets from theft.

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the FBI, and the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center (MS-ISAC) issued an advisory on the threat actors behind the Rhysida ransomware conducting attacks on organizations in various industries. Rhysida actors have compromised organizations in the education, manufacturing, Information Technology (IT), and government sectors, and any ransom paid is divided between the group and affiliates, according to the agencies.

A notorious ransomware group has recently filed a complaint with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) over the failure of a victim to disclose an alleged data breach resulting from an attack conducted by the cybercrime gang itself.  The ransomware group known as Alphv/BlackCat has claimed to have breached the systems of MeridianLink, a California-based company that provides digital lending solutions for financial institutions and data verification solutions for consumers.

Researchers from the University of Chicago's Department of Computer Science were recently honored by Samsung for identifying previously unknown vulnerabilities in smart TVs, earning them a place in the Samsung Hall of Fame. The team demonstrated how an attacker could use the audio on Samsung and Apple TVs to guess when a user is typing, the length of the entered information, and the number of cursor movements between selections. Their side-channel attack shows how easily hackers could guess a user's passwords and credit card numbers. One of the researchers, Ph.D.

A research team in China is using quantum physics, mature cryptography, and storage techniques to create a cost-effective cloud storage solution. Shamir's Secret Sharing (SSS) is a known key distribution algorithm involving distributing private information to a group so that the secret can only be revealed when a majority pools their knowledge. Combining Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) and the SSS algorithm is common for secure storage at the highest security level. However, the most secure solutions tend to be costly, especially regarding cloud storage space requirements.