Cyber Defense Advisors

Year: 2024

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  • July 2, 2024

The AI Fix #5: An angry AI girlfriend, and artificial intelligence is stupid

If you can answer this question, you’re smarter than 99% of AIs: “Alice has 4 brothers, and she also has 1 sister. How many sisters do Alice’s brothers have?” Find out why AI is stupid, what Toys “R” Us has done that’s even more annoying than putting that “R” in its name, why Graham Cluley […]

Cyber News
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  • July 2, 2024

Public Surveillance of Bars

This article about an app that lets people remotely view bars to see if they’re crowded or not is filled with commentary—on both sides—about privacy and openness. Tags: privacy, surveillance Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.  

Cyber News
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  • July 2, 2024

How MFA Failures are Fueling a 500% Surge in Ransomware Losses

The cybersecurity threat landscape has witnessed a dramatic and alarming rise in the average ransomware payment, an increase exceeding 500%. Sophos, a global leader in cybersecurity, revealed in its annual “State of Ransomware 2024” report that the average ransom payment has increased 500% in the last year with organizations that paid a ransom reporting an […]

Cyber News
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  • July 2, 2024

New Intel CPU Vulnerability ‘Indirector’ Exposes Sensitive Data

Modern CPUs from Intel, including Raptor Lake and Alder Lake, have been found vulnerable to a new side-channel attack that could be exploited to leak sensitive information from the processors. The attack, codenamed Indirector by security researchers Luyi Li, Hosein Yavarzadeh, and Dean Tullsen, leverages shortcomings identified in Indirect Branch Predictor (IBP) and the Branch […]

Cyber News
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  • July 2, 2024

Meta’s ‘Pay or Consent’ Approach Faces E.U. Competition Rules Scrutiny

Meta’s decision to offer an ad-free subscription in the European Union (E.U.) has faced a new setback after regulators accused the social media behemoth of breaching the bloc’s competition rules by forcing users to choose between seeing ads or paying to avoid them. The European Commission said the company’s “pay or consent” advertising model is […]

Cyber News
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  • July 2, 2024

Chinese Hackers Exploiting Cisco Switches Zero-Day to Deliver Malware

A China-nexus cyber espionage group named Velvet Ant has been observed exploiting a zero-day flaw in Cisco NX-OS Software used in its switches to deliver malware. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-20399 (CVSS score: 6.0), concerns a case of command injection that allows an authenticated, local attacker to execute arbitrary commands as root on the underlying […]

Cyber News
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  • July 2, 2024

Australian Man Charged for Fake Wi-Fi Scam on Domestic Flights

An Australian man has been charged with running a fake Wi-Fi access point during a domestic flight with an aim to steal user credentials and data. The unnamed 42-year-old “allegedly established fake free Wi-Fi access points, which mimicked legitimate networks, to capture personal data from unsuspecting victims who mistakenly connected to them,” the Australian Federal […]

Cyber News
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  • July 1, 2024

Critical Flaws in CocoaPods Expose iOS and macOS Apps to Supply Chain Attacks

A trio of security flaws has been uncovered in the CocoaPods dependency manager for Swift and Objective-C Cocoa projects that could be exploited to stage software supply chain attacks, putting downstream customers at severe risks. The vulnerabilities allow “any malicious actor to claim ownership over thousands of unclaimed pods and insert malicious code into many […]

Cyber News
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  • July 1, 2024

CapraRAT Spyware Disguised as Popular Apps Threatens Android Users

The threat actor known as Transparent Tribe has continued to unleash malware-laced Android apps as part of a social engineering campaign to target individuals of interest. “These APKs continue the group’s trend of embedding spyware into curated video browsing applications, with a new expansion targeting mobile gamers, weapons enthusiasts, and TikTok fans,” SentinelOne security researcher […]

Cyber News