Afternoon Cyber Tea—The State of Cybersecurity: How did we get here? What does it mean?

Every year the number and scale of cyberattacks grows. Marc Goodman, a global security strategist, futurist, and author of the book, Future Crimes: Everything is Connected, Everyone is Vulnerable, and What We Can Do About It, thinks a lot about how we got here and what it means, which is why he w...

Artificial Personas and Public Discourse

Presidential campaign season is officially, officially, upon us now, which means it's time to confront the weird and insidious ways in which technology is warping politics. One of the biggest threats on the horizon: artificial personas are coming, and they're poised to take over political debate...

Facebook Cracks Down on Deepfake Videos

Facebook is banning deepfake videos, which stem from a technique of human-image synthesis based on artificial intelligence AI to create fake content. Over the past year, security experts and lawmakers have voiced concerns about malicious deepfake applications, particularly as a vessel for...

The Pentagon's AI Chief Prepares for Battle

Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan doesn't want killer robots—but he does want artificial intelligence to occupy a central role in warfighting...

CVE-2019-16736

A stack-based buffer overflow in processCommandUploadSnapshot in libcommon.so in Petwant PF-103 firmware 4.22.2.42 and Petalk AI 3.2.2.30 allows remote attackers to cause denial of service or run arbitrary code as the root user...

The little-known ways mobile device sensors can be exploited by cybercriminals

The bevy of mobile device sensors in modern smartphones and tablets make them more akin to pocket-sized laboratories and media studios than mere communication devices. Cameras, microphones, accelerometers, and gyroscopes give incredible flexibility to app developers and utility to mobile device...

Technology and Policymakers

Technologists and policymakers largely inhabit two separate worlds. It's an old problem, one that the British scientist CP Snow identified in a 1959 essay entitled The Two Cultures. He called them sciences and humanities, and pointed to the split as a major hindrance to solving the world's...

Google's Plan to Crunch Health Data on Millions of Patients Draws Fire

Tech behemoth Google is using artificial intelligence to reportedly slice and dice personal healthcare details on millions of Americans. That has some researchers diagnosing the company with HIPAA violations and prescribing regulatory controls as a remedy. And, at least one federal regulator is...

Friday Squid Blogging: 80-Foot Steel Kraken Deliberately Sunk

The headline gives the story: "An 80-Foot Steel Kraken Will Create an Artificial Coral Reef Near the British Virgin Islands." As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered. Read my blog posting guidelines here...

How Machine Learning is Changing the Face of Financial Services

Artificial intelligence AI has become integrated into our everyday lives. It powers what we see in our social media newsfeeds, activates facial recognition to unlock our smartphones, and even suggests music for us to listen to. Machine learning, a subset of AI, is progressively integrating into o...

Ransomware, Mobile Malware Attacks to Surge in 2020

Cyber threats like targeted ransomware, mobile malware and sophisticated phishing attacks will escalate in 2020, researchers warn. However, defenses like artificial intelligence AI, cyber insurance and faster security response will also increase, helping defend companies against imminent threats,...

WordPress Artificial Intelligence theme cross-site scripting vulnerability

WordPress is a blogging platform developed by the WordPress Foundation using the PHP language. The platform supports personal blog sites on PHP and MySQL servers.Artificial Intelligence theme is an artificial intelligence website theme plugin. A cross-site scripting vulnerability exists in...

CVE-2015-9501

CVE-2015-9501 affects the WordPress Artificial Intelligence theme up to version 1.2.3 (before 1.2.4). The root cause is Genericons HTML files being placed under the web root, enabling cross-site scripting (XSS). The vulnerability is a DOM/XSS class issue in the theme that can allow an attacker to...

CVE-2015-9501

The Artificial Intelligence theme before 1.2.4 for WordPress has XSS because Genericons HTML files are unnecessarily placed under the web root...

A Deepfake Deep Dive into the Murky World of Digital Imitation

About a year ago, top deepfake artist Hao Li came to a disturbing realization: Deepfakes, i.e. the technique of human-image synthesis based on artificial intelligence AI to create fake content, is rapidly evolving. In fact, Li believes that in as soon as six months, deepfake videos will be...

Delivering Intrinsic, Intelligent and Informed Security: VMware Completes Acquisition of Carbon Black

Editor's Note: This blog also appears on VMware's Newsroom. We are delighted to announce that VMware has completed its acquisition of endpoint security leader Carbon Black. With this move, VMware is launching a new Security Business Unit under the leadership of Patrick Morley, who has led Carbon...

Azure Sentinel—the cloud-native SIEM that empowers defenders is now generally available

Machine learning enhanced with artificial intelligence AI holds great promise in addressing many of the global cyber challenges we see today. They give our cyber defenders the ability to identify, detect, and block malware, almost instantaneously. And together they give security admins the abilit...

Malicious Ad Blockers for Chrome Caught in Ad Fraud Scheme

Google has removed two malicious ad blockers from its Chrome Web Store after a researcher discovered they were carrying out ad fraud and deceived Chrome users by using names of legitimate and popular blockers. Researcher Andrey Meshkov from rival ad blocker maker AdGuard discovered that the...

Mattress Company Leaks Data Records of 387K Customers

A Wisconsin mattress company leaked the records of 387,000 customers online in a database that lacked password protection, a security researcher has found. The incident once again demonstrates the potential security consequences of failing to take even the simplest security measures to protect...

Microsoft Silent Update Torpedoes Windows Defender

A broken Microsoft Windows Defender signature file that was causing system file checks to fail got a patch this week – but the patch caused an even bigger issue, making Defender user-triggered antivirus scans fail altogether. The issue was in place for about a day before Microsoft re-patched the...