Cyber Defense Advisors

Year: 2025

Malicious ML Models on Hugging Face Leverage Broken Pickle Format to Evade Detection

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered two malicious machine learning (ML) models on Hugging Face that leveraged an unusual technique of “broken” pickle files to evade detection. “The pickle files extracted from the mentioned PyTorch archives revealed the malicious Python content at the beginning of the file,” ReversingLabs researcher Karlo Zanki said in a report shared with […]

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Teen on Musk’s DOGE Team Graduated from ‘The Com’

Wired reported this week that a 19-year-old working for Elon Musk‘s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was given access to sensitive US government systems even though his past association with cybercrime communities should have precluded him from gaining the necessary security clearances to do so. As today’s story explores, the DOGE teen is a […]

Cyber News

Friday Squid Blogging: The Colossal Squid

Long article on the colossal squid. Blog moderation policy.  

Cyber News

Secret Taliban records published online after hackers breach computer systems

Graham CLULEY February 07, 2025 Promo Protect all your devices, without slowing them down. Free 30-day trial The Taliban government of Afghanistan is reeling after unidentified hackers successfully carried out a massive cyber attack against its computer systems and published over 50GB of stolen documents and files online. A group calling itself TabiLeaks publicised on […]

Cyber News

Screenshot-Reading Malware

Kaspersky is reporting on a new type of smartphone malware. The malware in question uses optical character recognition (OCR) to review a device’s photo library, seeking screenshots of recovery phrases for crypto wallets. Based on their assessment, infected Google Play apps have been downloaded more than 242,000 times. Kaspersky says: “This is the first known […]

Cyber News

DeepSeek App Transmits Sensitive User and Device Data Without Encryption

A new audit of DeepSeek’s mobile app for the Apple iOS operating system has found glaring security issues, the foremost being that it sends sensitive data over the internet sans any encryption, exposing it to interception and manipulation attacks. The assessment comes from NowSecure, which also found that the app fails to adhere to best […]

Cyber News

CISA Warns of Active Exploits Targeting Trimble Cityworks Vulnerability

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has warned that a security flaw impacting Trimble Cityworks GIS-centric asset management software has come under active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2025-0994 (CVSS v4 score: 8.6), a deserialization of untrusted data bug that could permit an attacker to conduct remote code execution. […]

Cyber News

AI-Powered Social Engineering: Reinvented Threats

The foundations for social engineering attacks – manipulating humans – might not have changed much over the years. It’s the vectors – how these techniques are deployed – that are evolving. And like most industries these days, AI is accelerating its evolution. This article explores how these changes are impacting business, and how cybersecurity leaders […]

Cyber News

Data breaches at UK law firms are on the rise, research reveals

British legal professionals have seen a “significant surge” in data breaches, according to new research from NetDocuments, a firm that provides a cloud-based content management platform for the legal sector. The firm has described how it analysed data from the UK regulator the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), and discovered that the number of data breaches […]

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