BlackCat is back, CSAM in AI data, ESO breach
BlackCat came back
A coordinated law enforcement action earlier this month took the Tor site and some infrastructure for this ransomware group, also known as ALPHV, offline. Initially the group claimed a hardware failure caused the outage. Now the group claimed it “unseized” the site, although it only appears that they assigned their .onion address to a new server. BlackCat also set up a new leak site, as well as announced it would broaden its scope of potential victims. In an attempt to slow any affiliate exodus, the group also announced a higher ransom percentage payout and isolated data centers for “VIP” affiliates.?
Child abuse images found in AI datasets
The Stanford Internet Observatory published findings that the popular open source image dataset LAION-5B contains over a thousand instances of child sexual abuse material, or CSAM. The maintainers of the dataset took them down while investigating the findings, saying they hold a “zero tolerance” policy for illegal content. Stability AI and many other AI startups used that dataset for training models. It’s hard to know how widespread this issue goes, as many LLM models use private datasets.?
(Axios )
ESO solutions breach impacts million
ESO provides software used by healthcare and emergency services. In late October it discovered a ransomware attack occurred on September 28th, resulting in data exfiltration impacting 2.7 million patients. Data exposed included treatments, names, birth dates, diagnosis, and Social Security Numbers. ESO notified the FBI and all impacted customers on December 12th. The attack impacted at least 15 hospitals and medical centers. The company found no evidence of data misuse, and offered impacted patients 12 months of credit monitoring. No ransomware organization listed ESO on their leak site,?
NSA releases 2023 Cybersecurity Year in Review
Forget Spotify Wrapped, the NSA’s report details its efforts to better secure government agencies and the defense industrial base. The NSA blocked over 10 billion user connections to known suspicious domains in the year and flagged over 1.3 million security defects in its vulnerability scanning program. It also saw a 400% increase in adoption of its no-cost security services to DoD contractors, with enrolled orgs now over 600.? The agency also disclosed it tracks roughly 70 unique state-sponsored activity clusters.??
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UK Court rules on AI as inventors?
Back in 2019, the UK’s Intellectual Property Office previously denied attempts by AI investor Stephen Thaler to have his AI system DABUS listed as the inventor on two patents. Now the UK’s Supreme Court unanimously denied Thaler’s appeal, saying “an inventor must be a natural person.” Thaler tried a similar approach in the US, where the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office denied similar patents. The US Supreme Court declined to hear that case.?
(Reuters )
NIST starts the ball rolling on AI guidance?
Back in October, US President Joe Biden issued an executive order on AI to develop “industry standards around AI safety, security, and trust.” To meet this order, NIST opened a public comment period on methods for testing safety of these new systems. In the comment period, NIST specified its looking for where red-teaming would be beneficial to AI risk assessment, and a way to establish best practices on it. The comment period will run through February 2nd.?
(Reuters )
Kingdom Market shutdown?
German law enforcement announced it seized servers belonging to the darknet market, used to traffic in illicit drugs, malware, and identity documents. Authorities will now analyze the server infrastructure to identity the operators. Its not clear if the action is linked to charges filed in the US against an alleged Kingdom Market operator in the uS last week. Kingdom Market came online in March 2021, with tens of thousands of registered customer accounts.?
(The Record )
Shadow IT causing security incidents
A new study from Kaspersky found that over the last two years, 85% of companies globally experienced a cybersecurity incident. Of this Shadow IT, or unauthorized technology use, accounted for 11%. The study noted many of these issues come from employees using services from trusted providers, assuming that this provided proper security protections. However when not using enterprise-grade services, many of these services operate under a “shared responsibility model” that goes unaccounted for.?