Industry News

North Korea's hacking groups have broken into at least two South Korean manufacturers of chipmaking equipment, as the country looks to evade sanctions and turn out its own semiconductors for weapons programmes, South Korea's spy agency said on Monday.

The news comes after South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol warned North Korea could stage provocations, such as cyber attacks or spreading fake news, to interfere in April's parliamentary elections.

The ransomware attack targeting medical firm Change Healthcare has been one of the most disruptive in years, crippling pharmacies across the US—including those in hospitals—and leading to serious snags in the delivery of prescription drugs nationwide for 10 days and counting. Now, a dispute within the criminal underground has revealed a new development in that unfolding debacle: One of the partners of the hackers behind the attack points out that those hackers, a group known as AlphV or BlackCat, received a $22 million transaction that looks very much like a large ransom payment.

Jack Teixeira, the National Guard airman who leaked confidential military documents on Discord, agreed Monday to plead guilty, promising to cooperate with officials attempting to trace the full extent of government secrets leaked.

Under the plea deal, Teixeira will serve a much-reduced sentence, The Boston Globe reported, recommended between 11 years and 16 years and eight months.

The thought of quantum computing may elicit a shrug from many a CISO who has enough on their plate already and has decided that’s an issue for the future. My take: get into the conversation, as it is your entity that will be affected sooner or later when post-quantum cryptography becomes a possibly concerning reality.

Elon Musk has sued OpenAI and its chief executive Sam Altman for breach of contract, alleging they have compromised the start-up’s original mission of building artificial intelligence systems for the benefit of humanity.

In the lawsuit, filed to a San Francisco court on Thursday, Musk’s lawyers wrote that OpenAI’s multibillion-dollar alliance with Microsoft had broken an agreement to make a major breakthrough in AI “freely available to the public.”

Code uploaded to AI developer platform Hugging Face covertly installed backdoors and other types of malware on end-user machines, researchers from security firm JFrog said Thursday in a report that’s a likely harbinger of what’s to come.

WhatsApp will soon be granted access to explore the "full functionality" of the NSO Group's Pegasus spyware—sophisticated malware the Israeli Ministry of Defense has long guarded as a "highly sought" state secret, The Guardian reported.

Wikipedia has downgraded tech website CNET's reliability rating following extensive discussions among its editors regarding the impact of AI-generated content on the site's trustworthiness, as noted in a detailed report from Futurism. The decision reflects concerns over the reliability of articles found on the tech news outlet after it began publishing AI-generated stories in 2022.

This week, the notorious ransomware gang known as LockBit threatened a kind of disruption that would have been a first even for a criminal industry that has crippled hospitals and triggered the shutdown of a gas pipeline: leaking documents from the criminal prosecution of a former president and presidential candidate. 

Then, without explanation, that threat evaporated, leaving plenty of unanswered questions behind. 

Internet-of-things (IoT) devices that use Microsoft’s uAMQP C library for communication with Azure Cloud Services may be vulnerable to remote code execution (RCE) due to a critical vulnerability disclosed on Tuesday.