US sanctions North Korean firm, nationals behind IT worker schemes
The U.S. Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) has sanctioned three North Korean nationals and a company for supporting fraudulent IT worker schemes that generated illicit revenue for the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) government.
Arizona woman sentenced to 8.5 years for running North Korean laptop farm
Prosecutors said Chapman helped the North Korean IT workers obtain jobs at 309 companies, including a major television network, a car maker, a media company, a Silicon Valley technology company and more.
Today’s freaky LLM behavior: We study subliminal learning, a surprising phenomenon where language models learn traits from model-generated data that is semantically unrelated to those traits. For example, a “student” model learns to prefer owls when trained on sequences of numbers generated by a “teacher” model that prefers owls. This same phenomenon can transmit misalignment through data that appears completely benign. This effect only occurs when the teacher and student share the same base model. Interesting security implications. I am more convinced than ever that we need serious research into ...
Prolonged Chinese Cyber Espionage Campaign Targets VMware Appliances
Sygnia observed Chinese cyber campaign dubbed Fire Ant deploying sophisticated techniques to gain full compromise of victim environments, discovering isolated assets
Woman gets 8 years for aiding North Koreans infiltrate 300 US firms
Christina Marie Chapman, a 50-year-old woman from Arizona, was sentenced to 102 months in prison after pleading guilty to her involvement in a scheme that enabled North Korean IT workers to infiltrate 309 U.S. companies.
BlackSuit ransomware gang’s darknet websites seized by police
The BlackSuit gang, which is believed to have been operational since April/May 2023, was a private ransomware group that did not license its tooling to other criminals like ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) schemes.
Microsoft lifts Windows 11 update block for Easy Anti-Cheat users
Microsoft has removed a compatibility hold that prevented some Easy Anti-Cheat users from installing the Windows 11 2024 Update because of a known issue that triggers restarts with blue screen of death (BSOD) errors.
New Chaos Ransomware Emerges, Launches Wave of Attacks
Cisco Talos warned that the Chaos group, thought to be formed of former BlackSuit members, has launched a wave of attacks targeted a variety of sectors
ToolShell: a story of five vulnerabilities in Microsoft SharePoint
Explaining the ToolShell vulnerabilities in SharePoint: how the POST request exploit works, why initial patches can be easily bypassed, and how to stay protected.
US hits senior North Korean officials with sanctions, $3 million bounties
Kim Se Un, Jo Kyong Hun and Myong Chol Min are accused of helping North Korea evade U.S. and United Nations sanctions through an IT worker plot that involved tricking companies into hiring North Koreans using stolen identities.
BlackSuit ransomware leak sites seized in Operation Checkmate
Law enforcement has seized the dark web leak sites of the BlackSuit ransomware operation, which has targeted and breached the networks of hundreds of organizations worldwide over the past several years.
New Koske Linux malware hides in cute panda images
A new Linux malware named Koske may have been developed with artificial intelligence and is using seemingly benign JPEG images of panda bears to deploy malware directly into system memory.
Get to know the real people behind cybersecurity’s front lines. In this week’s newsletter, sci-fi meets reality, humanity powers technology and a few surprises are waiting to be discovered.
KrebsOnSecurity recently heard from a reader whose boss's email account got phished and was used to trick one of the company's customers into sending a large payment to scammers. An investigation into the attacker's infrastructure points to a long-running Nigerian…