Geek-Guy.com

Month: November 2024

Smashing Security podcast #395: Gym hacking, disappearing DNA, and a social lockout

A Kansas City man is accused of hacking into local businesses, not to steal money, but to… get a cheaper gym membership? A DNA-testing firm has vanished, leaving customers in the dark about what’s happened to their sensitive genetic data. And Australia mulls a social media ban for youngsters. All this and much much more…

Hacker in Snowflake Extortions May Be a U.S. Soldier

Two men have been arrested for allegedly stealing data from and extorting dozens of companies that used the cloud data storage company Snowflake, but a third suspect — a prolific hacker known as Kiberphant0m — remains at large and continues to publicly extort victims. However, this person’s identity may not remain a secret for long:…

The AI Fix #26: Would AI kill sentient robots, and is water wet?

In episode 26 of The AI Fix, an AI does surgery on pork chops, holographic Jesus wants your consent to use cookies, Mark opens the pod bay doors, our hosts discover OpenAI’s couch potato health coach, and Graham finds a robot made of drain pipes. Graham pits Mark against an AI in a morality quiz…

Weekly Update 427

I was going to write about how much I’ve enjoyed “tinkering” with the HIBP API, but somehow, that term doesn’t really seem appropriate any more for a service of this scale. On the contrary, we’re putting in huge amounts of effort to get this thing fast, stable, and sustainable. We could do the first two…

Meta-Powered Military Chatbot Advertised Giving “Worthless” Advice on Airstrikes

Meta’s in-house ChatGPT competitor is being marketed unlike anything that’s ever come out of the social media giant before: a convenient tool for planning airstrikes. As it has invested billions into developing machine learning technology it hopes can outpace OpenAI and other competitors, Meta has pitched its flagship large language model, Llama, as a handy…

Meta-Powered Military Chatbot Advertised Giving “Worthless” Advice on Airstrikes

Meta’s in-house ChatGPT competitor is being marketed unlike anything that’s ever come out of the social media giant before: a convenient tool for planning airstrikes. As it has invested billions into developing machine learning technology it hopes can outpace OpenAI and other competitors, Meta has pitched its flagship large language model, Llama, as a handy…

Meta-Powered Military Chatbot Advertised Giving “Worthless” Advice on Airstrikes

Meta’s in-house ChatGPT competitor is being marketed unlike anything that’s ever come out of the social media giant before: a convenient tool for planning airstrikes. As it has invested billions into developing machine learning technology it hopes can outpace OpenAI and other competitors, Meta has pitched its flagship large language model, Llama, as a handy…

The Intercept’s Lawsuit Against OpenAI Advances on Claim It Removed Reporters’ Bylines

In an order on Friday, a federal court rejected OpenAI’s effort to toss a lawsuit filed by The Intercept over using its journalists’ work to train ChatGPT without permission or credit. One of The Intercept’s claims under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act will move forward against OpenAI, although another claim was dismissed, along with all…

The Intercept’s Lawsuit Against OpenAI Advances on Claim It Removed Reporters’ Bylines

In an order on Friday, a federal court rejected OpenAI’s effort to toss a lawsuit filed by The Intercept over using its journalists’ work to train ChatGPT without permission or credit. One of The Intercept’s claims under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act will move forward against OpenAI, although another claim was dismissed, along with all…

The Intercept’s Lawsuit Against OpenAI Advances on Claim It Removed Reporters’ Bylines

In an order on Friday, a federal court rejected OpenAI’s effort to toss a lawsuit filed by The Intercept over using its journalists’ work to train ChatGPT without permission or credit. One of The Intercept’s claims under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act will move forward against OpenAI, although another claim was dismissed, along with all…

Feds Charge Five Men in ‘Scattered Spider’ Roundup

Federal prosecutors in Los Angeles this week unsealed criminal charges against five men alleged to be members of a hacking group responsible for dozens of cyber intrusions at major U.S. technology companies between 2021 and 2023, including LastPass, MailChimp, Okta, T-Mobile and Twilio. A visual depiction of the attacks by the SMS phishing group known…

Closer to the Edge: Hyperscaling Have I Been Pwned with Cloudflare Workers and Caching

I’ve spent more than a decade now writing about how to make Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) fast. Really fast. Fast to the extent that sometimes, it was even too fast: The response from each search was coming back so quickly that the user wasn’t sure if it was legitimately checking subsequent addresses they entered…

Fintech Giant Finastra Investigating Data Breach

The financial technology firm Finastra is investigating the alleged large-scale theft of information from its internal file transfer platform, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. Finastra, which provides software and services to 45 of the world’s top 50 banks, notified customers of the security incident after a cybercriminal began selling more than 400 gigabytes of data purportedly stolen…

Trump’s Election Is Also a Win for Tech’s Right-Wing “Warrior Class”

Donald Trump pitched himself to voters as a supposed anti-interventionist candidate of peace. But when he reenters the White House in January, at his side will be a phalanx of pro-military Silicon Valley investors, inventors, and executives eager to build the most sophisticated weapons the world has ever known. During his last term, the U.S.…

Trump’s Election Is Also a Win for Tech’s Right-Wing “Warrior Class”

Donald Trump pitched himself to voters as a supposed anti-interventionist candidate of peace. But when he reenters the White House in January, at his side will be a phalanx of pro-military Silicon Valley investors, inventors, and executives eager to build the most sophisticated weapons the world has ever known. During his last term, the U.S.…

Trump’s Election Is Also a Win for Tech’s Right-Wing “Warrior Class”

Donald Trump pitched himself to voters as a supposed anti-interventionist candidate of peace. But when he reenters the White House in January, at his side will be a phalanx of pro-military Silicon Valley investors, inventors, and executives eager to build the most sophisticated weapons the world has ever known. During his last term, the U.S.…

Weekly Update 426

I have absolutely no problem at all talking about the code I’ve screwed up. Perhaps that’s partly because after 3 decades of writing software (and doing some meaningful stuff along the way), I’m not particularly concerned about showing my weaknesses. And this week, I screwed up a bunch of stuff; database queries that weren’t resilient…

An Interview With the Target & Home Depot Hacker

In December 2023, KrebsOnSecurity revealed the real-life identity of Rescator, the nickname used by a Russian cybercriminal who sold more than 100 million payment cards stolen from Target and Home Depot between 2013 and 2014. Moscow resident Mikhail Shefel, who confirmed using the Rescator identity in a recent interview, also admitted reaching out because he…

Microsoft Patch Tuesday, November 2024 Edition

Microsoft today released updates to plug at least 89 security holes in its Windows operating systems and other software. November’s patch batch includes fixes for two zero-day vulnerabilities that are already being exploited by attackers, as well as two other flaws that were publicly disclosed prior to today. The zero-day flaw tracked as CVE-2024-49039 is…

FBI: Spike in Hacked Police Emails, Fake Subpoenas

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is urging police departments and governments worldwide to beef up security around their email systems, citing a recent increase in cybercriminal services that use hacked police email accounts to send unauthorized subpoenas and customer data requests to U.S.-based technology companies. In an alert (PDF) published this week, the FBI…

Weekly Update 425

This was a much longer than usual update, largely due to the amount of time spent discussing the Earth 2 incident. As I said in the video (many times!), the amount of attention this has garnered from both Earth 2 users and the company itself is incommensurate with the impact of the incident itself. It’s…

2023 Top Routinely Exploited Vulnerabilities

Summary The following cybersecurity agencies coauthored this joint Cybersecurity Advisory (hereafter collectively referred to as the authoring agencies): United States: The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and National Security Agency (NSA) Australia: Australian Signals Directorate’s Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) Canada: Canadian Centre for Cyber Security (CCCS) New…

Crypto Sweep Puts Congress on Notice: Vote With Us or We’ll Come After You With Millions

The cryptocurrency industry took a victory lap Wednesday. Devotees of digital currencies had cause to celebrate: An ally in Donald Trump had taken the White House and a slew of pro-crypto congressional candidates won races that included at least two Senate seats. Only two years after the spectacular collapse of frauds like Sam Bankman-Fried ushered…

Crypto Sweep Puts Congress on Notice: Vote With Us or We’ll Come After You With Millions

The cryptocurrency industry took a victory lap Wednesday. Devotees of digital currencies had cause to celebrate: An ally in Donald Trump had taken the White House and a slew of pro-crypto congressional candidates won races that included at least two Senate seats. Only two years after the spectacular collapse of frauds like Sam Bankman-Fried ushered…

Crypto Sweep Puts Congress on Notice: Vote With Us or We’ll Come After You With Millions

The cryptocurrency industry took a victory lap Wednesday. Devotees of digital currencies had cause to celebrate: An ally in Donald Trump had taken the White House and a slew of pro-crypto congressional candidates won races that included at least two Senate seats. Only two years after the spectacular collapse of frauds like Sam Bankman-Fried ushered…

Trump Might Get Unfettered Surveillance Powers. How Did We Get Here?

If Donald Trump wins on Tuesday, he will regain the keys to a global surveillance apparatus with few limits. Privacy advocates have warned since Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013 that the government’s surveillance tools could be misused by presidents of any stripe. In the intervening decade, however, Congress has failed to rein in those powers.…

Trump Might Get Unfettered Surveillance Powers. How Did We Get Here?

If Donald Trump wins on Tuesday, he will regain the keys to a global surveillance apparatus with few limits. Privacy advocates have warned since Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013 that the government’s surveillance tools could be misused by presidents of any stripe. In the intervening decade, however, Congress has failed to rein in those powers.…

Weekly Update 424

I have really clear memories of listening to the Stack Overflow podcast in the late 2000’s and hearing Jeff and Joel talk about the various challenges they were facing and the things they did to overcome them. I just suddenly thought of that when realising how long this week’s video went for with no real…

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