Winson Digital Techniques

  The Italian data protection watchdog, Garante per la Protezione dei Dati Personali (aka Garante), has imposed a temporary ban on OpenAI's ChatGPT service in the country, citing data protection concerns. To that end, it has ordered the company to stop processing users' data with immediate effect, stating it intends to investigate the company over whether it's unlawfully processing such data in violation of the E.U. General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) laws. "No information is provided to users and data subjects whose data are collected by Open AI," the Garante noted. "More importantly, there appears to be no legal basis underpinning the massive collection and processing of personal data in order to 'train' the algorithms on which the platform relies." ChatGPT, which is estimated to have reached over 100 million monthly active users since its release late last year, has not disclosed what it used to train its latest large language model (LLM...

  Data storage devices maker Western Digital on Monday disclosed a "network security incident" that involved unauthorized access to its systems. The breach is said to have occurred on March 26, 2023, enabling an unnamed third party to gain access to a "number of the company's systems." Following the discovery of the hack, Western Digital said it has initiated incident response efforts and enlisted the help of cybersecurity and forensic experts to conduct an investigation. It also said it's coordinating with law enforcement agencies on the matter, adding the probe is in its initial stages. The company has taken several of its services offline, noting that the threat actor may have obtained "certain data from its systems" and that it's working on estimating the nature and scope of the data accessed.

  A Chinese state-sponsored threat activity group tracked as   RedGolf   has been   attributed   to the use of a custom Windows and Linux backdoor called KEYPLUG. "RedGolf is a particularly prolific Chinese state-sponsored threat actor group that has likely been active for many years against a wide range of industries globally. "The group has shown the ability to rapidly weaponize newly reported vulnerabilities (e.g. Log4Shell and ProxyLogon) and has a history of developing and using a large range of custom malware families." The use of KEYPLUG by Chinese threat actors was first disclosed by Google-owned Manidant in March 2022 in attacks targeting multiple U.S. state government networks between May 2021 and February 2022. Then in October 2022, Malwarebytes detailed a separate set of attacks targeting government entities in Sri Lanka in early August that leveraged a novel implant dubbed DBoxAgent to deploy KEYPLUG. Bot...

  Unknown threat actors are actively exploiting a recently patched security vulnerability in the Elementor Pro website builder plugin for WordPress. The flaw, described as a case of broken access control, impacts versions 3.11.6 and earlier. It was addressed by the plugin maintainers in version 3.11.7 released on March 22. "Improved code security enforcement in WooCommerce components," the Tel Aviv-based company said in its release notes. The premium plugin is estimated to be used on over 12 million sites. Successful exploitation of the high-severity flaw allows an authenticated attacker to complete a takeover of a WordPress site that has WooCommerce enabled. "This makes it possible for a malicious user to turn on the registration page (if disabled) and set the default user role to the administrator so they can create an account that instantly has the administrator privileges," Patchstack said in an alert of March 30, 2023. "After this, they are likely...

  Microsoft has patched a misconfiguration issue impacting the Azure Active Directory ( AAD ) identity and access management service that exposed several "high-impact" applications to unauthorized access. "One of these apps is a content management system (CMS) that powers Bing.com and allowed us to not only modify search results but also launch high-impact XSS attacks on Bing users," cloud security firm Wiz said in a report. "Those attacks could compromise users' personal data, including Outlook emails and SharePoint documents." The issues were reported to Microsoft in January and February 2022, following which the tech giant applied fixes and awarded Wiz a $40,000 bug bounty. Redmond said it found no evidence that the misconfigurations were exploited in the wild. The crux of the vulnerability stems from what's called "Shared Responsibility confusion," wherein an Azure app can be incorrectly configured to allow users from any Microsoft te...

  The Cyber Police of Ukraine, in collaboration with law enforcement officials from Czechia, has arrested several members of a cybercriminal gang that set up phishing sites to target European users. Two of the apprehended affiliates are believed to be organizers, with 10 others detained in other territories across the European Union. The suspects are alleged to have created more than 100 phishing portals aimed at users in France, Spain, Poland, Czechia, Portugal, and other nations in the region. These websites masqueraded as online portals offering heavily discounted products below market prices to lure unsuspecting users into placing fake "orders." In reality, the financial information entered on those websites to complete the payments was used to siphon money from the victims' accounts. "For the fraudulent scheme, the participants also created two call centers, in Vinnytsia and in Lviv, and involved operators in their work," the Cyber Police  said . "Thei...

  As the digital age evolves and continues to shape the business landscape, corporate networks have become increasingly complex and distributed. The amount of data a company collects to detect malicious behavior constantly increases, making it challenging to detect deceptive and unknown attack patterns and the so-called "needle in the haystack". With a growing number of cybersecurity threats, such as data breaches, ransomware attacks, and malicious insiders, organizations are facing significant challenges in successfully monitoring and securing their networks. Furthermore, the talent shortage in the field of cybersecurity makes manual threat hunting and log correlation a cumbersome and difficult task. To address these challenges, organizations are turning to predictive analytics and Machine Learning (ML) driven network security solutions as essential tools for securing their networks against cyber threats and the unknown bad. The Role of ML-Driven Network Security Solutions #...