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Headlines

In late May, reports emerged about an attack on Snowflake cloud storage that led to massive data breaches at Ticketmaster and Santander Bank. Now, researchers at Mandiant, who’ve been working alongside Snowflake, say they know who is responsible.

Mandiant says the threat actor, called UNC5537, is “systemically compromising” Snowflake customers via stolen login credentials. These credentials were stolen using historical infostealer malware infections — some going back to credentials used in 2020. In the end, the 165 companies that were compromised due to the attack likely could have avoided their fate with simple security practices in place. Multi-factor authentication and network allow lists would have been sufficient.

Dutch military intelligence (MIVD) now says Chinese cyber espionage is far more extensive than previously believed. They claim to have identified a Chinese-backed hacking group as the perpetrators of a 2023 attack on the Dutch defense ministry.

In a statement on Monday, the MIVD elaborated on what it considers China’s cyber operations, saying, “Targets included dozens of Western governments, international organizations, and numerous companies operating in the defense industry.” China has yet to respond.

A new Apple update patches dozens of visionOS vulnerabilities. The operating system, which runs the company’s Vision Pro virtual reality headset, was fixed alongside new patches for macOS and iOS. The patches protect customers from arbitrary code execution, information disclosure, privilege escalation, and denial of service (DoS).

Ryan Pickren, the researcher credited with discovering the biggest vulnerability tackled in the latest update, said it was Vision Pro-specific and that “it is the first-ever spatial computing hack.”

Interesting Read

In the world of AI, hallucinations remain one of the nagging issues that continue to hamper its ability to be trusted on many tasks — perhaps most especially in cybersecurity. But what causes hallucinations? And, maybe more importantly, will they ever be fixed?

In this article for Scientific American, Lauren Leffer talks with several researchers about the causes and possible solutions to LLM hallucinations. According to many experts, it seems that hallucinations might never be fixed.

Employment Tip: Taking Risks

In the world of cybersecurity, it can be hard to predict what the next few years will bring. Even the next few months are murky. If you want to prepare skills that are in high demand, it requires a certain level of risk taking. Choosing to learn a new specialty won’t always pay off, but once in a while, it will.

For the latest openings in cybersecurity careers, check CybersecurityHQ.

Stay Safe, Stay Secure.

The CybersecurityHQ Team