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Japan's space agency, JAXA, has acknowledged a cyberattack that happened earlier this year. The incident, disclosed by Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno at a press conference, occurred over the summer. JAXA detected illegal access, raising concerns about the exposure of sensitive data related to Japan's space program. The police reported the breach to JAXA, which was initially unaware of the intrusion.

Formed in 2003 from a merger of three space agencies, JAXA supports Japan's space initiatives, including numerous satellite launches. The perpetrator of the attack remains unidentified.

Google has introduced RETVec, a new text vectorizer for Gmail, designed to enhance its defense against spam and malicious emails. RETVec is resilient against various character-level manipulations like insertion, deletion, typos, and LEET substitution — or so its GitHub description says. Thanks to its training and novel character encoder, you can use it to efficiently encode all UTF-8 characters and words.

In the past, phishing scams and other bad actors have used tactics to evade simple text-reading defenses. For example, a common strategy is using homoglyphs — characters that look similar or nearly identical to standard letters despite typically having a different meaning. But RETVec provides a solution, and it supports over 100 languages and requires no text preprocessing. That makes it ideal for large-scale text classification. According to Google, its integration into Gmail has improved spam detection by 38%, reduced false positives by 19.4%, and decreased computational load by 83%​​.

The American office supply retailer Staples discovered a cyberattack on November 27, connected to significant service disruptions. The company, with 994 stores and 40 fulfillment centers in the US and Canada, had to disable some systems to contain the breach and protect customer data. Believe it or not, the decision came in response to issues reported on Reddit — including difficulties accessing internal systems, emails, and phone lines.

According to the company’s own public statement, “[they] took proactive steps in an effort to mitigate the impact and protect customer data. [Their] prompt efforts caused temporary disruption to the staples.com processing and delivering capabilities, as well as to [their] communications channels and customer service lines.” This incident follows a similar disruption at Staples-owned Essendant in March 2023 and a data breach in September 2020.

Interesting Read

A new Malwarebytes report highlights how top websites like the Associated Press, ESPN, and CBS have been unknowingly serving fake virus alerts. These alerts, linked to a notorious threat actor known as ScamClub, redirect users to fraudulent security scan pages.

This sophisticated malvertising campaign targets mobile users, exploiting ad exchanges and real-time bidding systems. The depth and impact of these deceptive practices on well-known sites raise significant concerns about online advertising security. Discover in-depth details about this cyber threat and its far-reaching implications in the full article on Malwarebytes' blog.

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Stay Safe, Stay Secure.

The CybersecurityHQ Team