Security

In what may be a first, the US Department of Justice this week charged a hacker with attempting to cause injury and death by launching distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against hospitals. Ahmed Omer and his brother Alaa are accused of carrying out a cyberattack spree that targeted hundreds of victims under the hacktivist banner Anonymous Sudan. The group’s DDoS victims included Microsoft’s Azure cloud services, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and Israel’s missile alert system, according to prosecutors. It was the brothers’ alleged attacks on hospitals, however, that drew the most serious accusations from the Justice Department, which singled out Ahmed for allegedly seeking to kill people with the crude cyberattacks that overwhelm systems, knocking them offline.

On a brisk afternoon in early August of 1959, the United States Army debuted what the service billed as its “ultimate weapon”—not a new bomb, not a specialized tank or fighting vehicle, but a single soldier outfitted in combat gear worthy of the Atomic Age.

That soldier was Sergeant First Class Ben Sawicki and, for a few fleeting hours, he represented the Army’s vision of the “soldier of tomorrow”—a future warrior that “will look so weird he may scare the enemy to death without firing a shot,” as military planners told Life magazine at the time.

When talking with a chatbot, you might inevitably give up your personal information—your name, for instance, and maybe details about where you live and work, or your interests. The more you share with a large language model, the greater the risk of it being abused if there’s a security flaw.

A group of security researchers from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore are now revealing a new attack that secretly commands an LLM to gather your personal information—including names, ID numbers, payment card details, email addresses, mailing addresses, and more—from chats and send it directly to a hacker.

For hackers seeking to maximize chaos, so-called denial-of-service attacks that knock targets offline with waves off junk traffic are typically more of a blunt cudgel than a weapon of mass destruction. But according to the US Department of Justice, a pair of Sudanese brothers allegedly behind the hacktivist group Anonymous Sudan launched a spree of those crude cyberattacks that was both powerful and cruel enough in its choice of victims—extending to dozens of hospitals in multiple countries, Israel’s missile alert system, and hundreds of other digital services—that one of them is now being charged not only with criminal hacking but also with the rare added allegation of seeking to cause physical injury and death.

The password-killing tech known as “passkeys” have proliferated over the past two years, developed by the tech industry association known as the FIDO Alliance as an easier and more secure authentication alternative. And although superseding any technology as entrenched as passwords is difficult, new features and resources launching this week are pushing passkeys toward a tipping point.

At the FIDO Alliance’s Authenticate Conference in Carlsbad, California, on Monday, researchers are announcing two projects that will make passkeys easier for organizations to offer—and easier for everyone to use. One is a new technical specification called Credential Exchange Protocol (CXP) that will make passkeys portable between digital ecosystems, a feature that users have increasingly demanded. The other is a website, called Passkey Central, where developers and system administrators can find resources like metrics and implementation guides that make it easier to add support for passkeys on existing digital platforms.

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Anything you’ve ever posted online—a cringey tweet, an ancient blog post, an enthusiastic restaurant review, or a blurry Instagram selfie—has almost assuredly been gobbled up and used as part of the training materials for the current bombardment of generative AI.

Large language model tools, like ChatGPT, and image creators are powered by vast reams of our data. And even if it’s not powering a chatbot or some other generative tool, the data you have fed into the internet’s many servers may be used for machine-learning features.

The Internet Archive is under attack. On top of multiple extinction-threatening lawsuits against the organization that created and maintains the Wayback Machine, hackers this week breached the Internet Archive, stole 31 million user account details, and defaced its website—all while archive.org struggled to stay online thanks to a barrage of distributed denial-of-service attacks. As of Friday, the site remained “temporarily offline.”

In a dark twist of fate, a judge this week cleared the way for the US Treasury Department to take possession of 69,000 bitcoins stolen from the Silk Road dark web market; meanwhile, the former IRS investigator who personally seized the bitcoins, Tigran Gambaryan, remains in a Nigerian jail cell on charges related to the actions of his current employer, embattled crypto exchange Binance. Members of Congress and other officials have called for the US government to do more to ensure Gambaryan’s release given his direct role in a series of major criminal cases and in pioneering crypto-investigation techniques. As for those seized Silk Road bitcoins, they are now worth $4.4 billion and will likely be auctioned off.

As digital scamming explodes in Southeast Asia, including so called “pig butchering” investment scams, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) issued a comprehensive report this week with a dire warning about the rapid growth of this criminal ecosystem. Many digital scams have traditionally relied on social engineering, or tricking victims into giving away their money willingly, rather than leaning on malware or other highly technical methods. But researchers have increasingly sounded the alarm that scammers are incorporating generative AI content and deepfakes to expand the scale and effectiveness of their operations. And the UN report offers the clearest evidence yet that these high tech tools are turning an already urgent situation into a crisis.

Researchers have unearthed two sophisticated tool sets that a nation-state hacking group—possibly from Russia—used to steal sensitive data stored on air-gapped devices, meaning those that are deliberately isolated from the internet or other networks to safeguard them from malware.

One of the custom tool collections was used starting in 2019 against a South Asian embassy in Belarus. A largely different tool set created by the same threat group infected a European Union government organization three years later. Researchers from ESET, the security firm that discovered the toolkits, said some of the components in both were identical to those fellow security firm Kaspersky described in research published last year and attributed to an unknown group, tracked as GoldenJackal, working for a nation-state. Based on the overlap, ESET has concluded that the same group is behind all the attacks observed by both firms.

An illicit JavaScript pop-up on the Internet Archive proclaimed on Wednesday afternoon that the site had suffered a major data breach. Hours later, the organization confirmed the incident.

Longtime security researcher Troy Hunt, who runs the data-breach-notification website Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) also confirmed that the breach is legitimate. He said it occurred in September and that the stolen trove contains 31 million unique email addresses along with usernames, bcrypt password hashes, and other system data. Bleeping Computer, which first reported the breach, also confirmed the validity of the data.