The Science of Security (SoS) Virtual Institutes (VIs) held their Mid-Year meeting at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) on July 9-10, 2024. This was the second meeting of the VIs since they were formed in late 2023.  The meeting was attended by Principal Investigators (PIs) and/or Co-PIs from all seven VI universities who briefed the status of the eleven VI projects.

According to the FBI and CISA, malicious actors are spreading false claims that US voter registration databases have been breached.  The agencies said that the claims are designed to manipulate public opinion and undermine confidence in US democratic institutions in the run up to the US Presidential Elections in November.  The malicious actors are using obtained voter registration information as evidence to support their claims that a cyber operation compromised election infrastructure.

Threat actors have been infecting Internet-exposed Selenium Grid servers to use victims' Internet bandwidth for cryptomining, proxyjacking, and more. Wiz reports that 30 percent of cloud environments use Selenium, an open source suite of tools for browser automation. Millions of developers and thousands of organizations use Selenium Grid, an open source tool for automatically testing web applications across multiple platforms and browsers in parallel. Some hackers have launched automated malware to hijack Selenium Grid servers for malicious purposes.

Digitally manipulated "deepfake" photos and videos are getting increasingly harder to spot as Artificial Intelligence (AI) networks improve and become more accessible. New research led by Binghamton University breaks down images using frequency domain analysis techniques and identifies anomalies indicating that AI generated them. The study compared real and fake images. The researchers created thousands of images with Adobe Firefly, PIXLR, DALL-E, and other generative AI tools, then analyzed them using signal processing to understand their frequency domain features.

European Union regulators are investigating one of Google's Artificial Intelligence (AI) models due to concerns about its compliance with data privacy rules. Ireland's Data Protection Commission is looking into Google's Pathways Language Model 2 (PaLM2). It is part of a larger effort, including other national watchdogs across the 27-nation bloc, to delve into how AI systems handle personal data. This article continues to discuss Ireland's Data Protection Commission opening an inquiry into Google's PaLM2.

A new malware named "Vo1d" has infected about 1.3 million Android-based TV boxes running outdated operating systems and owned by users in 197 countries. The antivirus vendor Doctor Web described it as a backdoor that hides its components in the system storage area and, when commanded by attackers, secretly downloads and installs third-party software. Most infections are in Brazil, Morocco, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Argentina, Russia, Tunisia, Ecuador, Malaysia, Algeria, and Indonesia.