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A year after our initial research on threat actors’ attitudes to generative AI, we revisit some underground forums and find that many cybercriminals are still skeptical – although there has been a slight shift

Open-source intelligence reveals the server-side code of this pernicious SEO-driven malware – without needing a lawyer afterward

Sophos MDR identifies a new threat cluster riffing on the playbook of Storm-1811, and amped-up activity from the original connected to Black Basta ransomware.

Sophos was also ranked the #1 solution in 36 individual reports spanning the Antivirus, EDR, Endpoint Protection Suites, XDR, Firewall, and MDR markets.

A sudden disruption of a major phishing-as-a-service provider leads to the rise of another…that looks very familiar 

In the second of a two-part series on tools and frameworks designed to help with remediation prioritization, we explore some alternatives to CVSS

In the first of a two-part series exploring tools and frameworks which can help organizations with remediation prioritization, Sophos X-Ops takes a look at the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS)

Last month, Henry Farrell and I convened the Third Interdisciplinary Workshop on Reimagining Democracy (IWORD 2024) at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg Center in Washington DC. This is a small, invitational workshop on the future of democracy. As with the previous two workshops, the goal was to bring together a diverse set of political scientists, law professors, philosophers, AI researchers and other industry practitioners, political activists, and creative types (including science fiction writers) to discuss how democracy might be reimagined in the current century.

The goal of the workshop is to think very broadly. Modern democracy was invented in the mid-eighteenth century, using mid-eighteenth-century technology. If democracy were to be invented today, it would look very different. Elections would look different. The balance between representation and direct democracy would look different. Adjudication and enforcement would look different. Everything would look different, because our conceptions of fairness, justice, equality, and rights are different, and we have much more powerful technology to bring to bear on the problems. Also, we could start from scratch without having to worry about evolving our current democracy into this imagined future system.

We can’t do that, of course, but it’s still still valuable to speculate. Of course we need to figure out how to reform our current systems, but we shouldn’t limit our thinking to incremental steps. We also need to think about discontinuous changes as well. I wrote about the philosophy more in this essay about IWORD 2022.

IWORD 2024 was easily the most intellectually stimulating two days of my year. It’s also intellectually exhausting; the speed and intensity of ideas is almost too much. I wrote the format in my blog post on IWORD 2023.

Summaries of all the IWORD 2024 talks are in the first set of comments below. And here are links to the previous IWORDs:

• IWORD 2022: home page, essay and talk summaries
• IWORD 2023: home page and talk summaries.

IWORD 2025 will be held either in New York or New Haven; still to be determined.

A Travers’ beaked whale (Mesoplodon traversii) washed ashore in New Zealand, and scientists conlcuded that “the prevalence of squid remains [in its stomachs] suggests that these deep-sea cephalopods form a significant part of the whale’s diet, similar to other beaked whale species.”

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A newly discovered VPN backdoor uses some interesting tactics to avoid detection:

When threat actors use backdoor malware to gain access to a network, they want to make sure all their hard work can’t be leveraged by competing groups or detected by defenders. One countermeasure is to equip the backdoor with a passive agent that remains dormant until it receives what’s known in the business as a “magic packet.” On Thursday, researchers revealed that a never-before-seen backdoor that quietly took hold of dozens of enterprise VPNs running Juniper Network’s Junos OS has been doing just that.

J-Magic, the tracking name for the backdoor, goes one step further to prevent unauthorized access. After receiving a magic packet hidden in the normal flow of TCP traffic, it relays a challenge to the device that sent it. The challenge comes in the form of a string of text that’s encrypted using the public portion of an RSA key. The initiating party must then respond with the corresponding plaintext, proving it has access to the secret key.

The lightweight backdoor is also notable because it resided only in memory, a trait that makes detection harder for defenders. The combination prompted researchers at Lumin Technology’s Black Lotus Lab to sit up and take notice.

[…]

The researchers found J-Magic on VirusTotal and determined that it had run inside the networks of 36 organizations. They still don’t know how the backdoor got installed.

Slashdot thread.