Author: Staff Writer

COMMENTARYIn the battle against cyber threats, we’re losing our most vital asset: our people. While the industry fixates on the latest tools and technologies, security analysts are burning out, crushed under the weight of an impossible mission. This isn’t just a talent shortage, but an existential crisis threatening the future of cybersecurity defense. Until we prioritize supporting the humans at the heart of cyber operations, no tool or technology will be enough to keep us secure.Security operations centers (SOCs), the heart of cybersecurity, have become pressure cookers of burnout and frustration. The numbers tell a dire story: More than half…

Sophisticated “LLMjacking” operations have obtained stolen access to DeepSeek models, just weeks after their public release.LLMjacking, like proxyjacking and cryptojacking, involves the illicit use of someone else’s computing resources for one’s own purposes. In this case, it’s individuals using popular and otherwise expensive large language models (LLMs) from OpenAI, Anthropic, etc., to generate images, circumvent national bans, and more, while passing the bill along to someone else.Most recently, researchers from Sysdig observed hyperactive LLMjacking operations integrating access to models developed by DeepSeek. After the company released its DeepSeek-V3 model on Dec. 26, it only took LLMjackers a few days to…

NEWS BRIEFSolarWinds, the software and IT company that faced a major supply chain cyberattack in 2020, today announced that it will be acquired by Turn/River Capital for $4.4 billion, or $18.50 per share.Along with unanimous approval from its board of directors, the transaction also received written approval from Thoma Bravo and Silver Lake, SolarWinds’ majority shareholders with a combined 65% of the outstanding voting securities.SolarWinds will become a privately held company, no longer listed on the New York Stock Exchange, though it will continue to operate under the name SolarWinds and stay headquartered in Austin, Texas.”This successful transaction and exciting…

NEWS BRIEFWebsite developers are unwittingly putting their companies at risk by incorporating publicly disclosed ASP.NET machine keys from code documentation and repositories into their applications, Microsoft is warning.The tech giant has issued an alert on the insecure practice, after observing threat actors in December using a static, known ASP.NET machine key to deploy the Godzilla post-exploitation cyberattack framework, known for stomping all over corporate environments.The attack vector involves manipulating ViewState, which represents the state of a webpage when it was last processed on the server. If threat actors can get ahold of ASP.NET keys, they can craft a malicious ViewState,…

PRESS RELEASEA five-count criminal indictment was unsealed today in federal court in New York charging a Canadian man with exploiting vulnerabilities in two decentralized finance protocols to fraudulently obtain about $65 million from the protocols’ investors.According to court documents, from 2021 to 2023, Andean Medjedovic, 22, allegedly exploited vulnerabilities in the automated smart contracts used by the KyberSwap and Indexed Finance decentralized finance protocols. Medjedovic borrowed hundreds of millions of dollars in digital tokens, which he used to engage in deceptive trading that he knew would cause the protocols’ smart contracts to falsely calculate key variables. Through his deceptive trades,…

PRESS RELEASEWith a staggering 5263 attacks, 2024 saw the highest volume of ransomware attacks observed since 2021, according to a new report from cybersecurity consulting firm, NCC Group.In a turbulent year for the cyber landscape, with high-impact attacks on sophisticated nation-state espionage campaigns, attack volume continued to rise. LockBit remains top threat actor despite takedownThe infamous threat group LockBit was the top actor of 2024, accounting for 10% (526) of all attacks. However, it’s overall activity declined compared to 2023, with LockBit’s takedown earlier in 2024.RansomHub followed closely behind. Accountable for 501 attacks, it became the most dominant threat actor in the second half…

PRESS RELEASEDatabarracks has announced the launch of Air Gap Recover, a new service that provides enhanced protection against cyber threats, including ransomware attacks.Designed specifically for cloud-native environments, Air Gap Recover provides isolated, air-gapped data protection and automated failover to guarantee rapid recovery from any cyber attack.“Traditional data protection solutions don’t work for cloud-native systems and businesses,” said James Watts, Managing Director of Databarracks.“Native cloud tools are designed more for simplicity than resilience and lack the functionality you need to fully protect your data. Enterprise backup solutions, on the other hand, struggle to scale and can’t handle the volume of data stored in modern cloud systems.…

A year after Google and Yahoo forced bulk email senders to implement the Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC) standard, the rate of the adoption of DMARC among domains has doubled, although many of the same email threats continue to successfully deliver payloads or redirect unwary users to phishing sites.The increase in adoption started in February 2024, when Google and Yahoo started requiring bulk email senders — defined as any company sending more than 5,000 email messages daily — to use DMARC. The email authentication standard uses two authentication specifications — Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and DomainsKeys Identified Mail (DKIM)…

COMMENTARYLast year, the cost of a data breach rose 10%, from $4.4 million to $4.8 million, as stated by IBM’s annual “Cost of a Data Breach Report.” According to cybersecurity firm Vectra AI, more than 70% of security operations center (SOC) leaders fear that a real attack will be hidden under an overwhelming flood of false-positive alerts and other security noise. The resulting burnout may be contributing to the labor shortage plaguing the industry. As the cost of data breaches continues to climb along with the deluge of meaningless alerts on an increasingly stressed workforce, the role of behavioral analytics in cybersecurity, or user…

Last November, an Idaho man was sentenced to 10 years in prison for hacking into the computer servers of 19 victims across the United States, stealing personally identifiable information (PII) belonging to more than 132,000 people, and attempting to extort a Florida orthodontist for payment in Bitcoin cryptocurrency.The perpetrator, Robert Purbeck, had also purchased access to the computer server belonging to a medical clinic in Griffin, Ga., from a cybersecurity forum and used stolen credentials to remove records containing sensitive PII, such as birth dates and Social Security numbers for 43,000 individuals, according to the US Department of Justice. In…