Author: admin

A slip-up by a malware author has allowed researchers to taxonomize three ransomware variations going by different names.

The Google Project Zero researcher found a bug in XML parsing on the Zoom client and server.

2022’s DBIR also highlighted the far-reaching impact of supply-chain breaches and how organizations and their employees are the reasons why incidents occur.

Yet another adversarial ML attack:

Most deep neural networks are trained by stochastic gradient descent. Now “stochastic” is a fancy Greek word for “random”; it means that the training data are fed into the model in random order.

So what happens if the bad guys can cause the order to be not random? You guessed it—all bets are off. Suppose for example a company or a country wanted to have a credit-scoring system that’s secretly sexist, but still be able to pretend that its training was actually fair. Well, they could assemble a set of financial data that was representative of the whole population, but start the model’s training on ten rich men and ten poor women drawn from that set ­ then let initialisation bias do the rest of the work.

Does this generalise? Indeed it does. Previously, people had assumed that in order to poison a model or introduce backdoors, you needed to add adversarial samples to the training data. Our latest paper shows that’s not necessary at all. If an adversary can manipulate the order in which batches of training data are presented to the model, they can undermine both its integrity (by poisoning it) and its availability (by causing training to be less effective, or take longer). This is quite general across models that use stochastic gradient descent.

Research paper.

On the internet, the Domain Name System (DNS) is the way regular people access websites such as ESPN.com or BBC.com. However, the internet uses a unique series of Internet Protocol (IP) addresses to access websites which are tricky for humans to remember.  Web browsers typically interact with websites through IP addresses, and DNS translates websites into IP addresses so browsers can access Internet resources. Historically, this has been done in the form of unencrypted clear text that ISPs and security providers such as McAfee can read and act upon to sort through risky websites or to improve network performance and intelligence.

However, this also opens up vulnerabilities of security and privacy.  As an industry, (Apple, Microsoft, Google, and others) participants are moving toward encrypting this traffic to and from DNS servers with protocols such as DNS over TLS (DoT) and DNS over HTTPS (DoH). Unless the ISP offers DoT/DoH decryption (translation) capabilities, traffic could go directly to outside DNS providers such as Google DNS and Cloudflare who do. Without this visibility, unsafe websites cannot be seen and blocked using DNS filtering technology. Customers can visit sites created by criminals that can trick them to steal their account credentials, download ransomware, or show inappropriate content to their kids.

We’re advancing our Secure Home Platform (SHP) technology to future proof the ability for our partners to protect their customers, their families, and their connected home devices. McAfee is the first in the market to build and introduce this technology. McAfee and OpenXchange have partnered to provide an integration of a forwarder/translator (PowerDNS) with the home router-based SHP product that will make it possible to keep the traffic within the ISP network, as shown in the diagram below – allowing DNS filtering even in encrypted DNS environments.

The ISP can continue to read the traffic and stands to benefit in several ways:

• Continued ability to offer security protections such as anti-virus, malware filtering, blocking phishing attempts, distinguishing legitimate services, content caching, and parental controls. McAfee Secure Home Platform protects customers/homes from potential harm from an average of 70 potential threats per week
• Helps defend against DDoS, man-in-the-middle, and botnet attacks
• More streamlined DoH connections – more private and secure, especially important to sophisticated consumers
• Locate content based on user demand, and hence improve performance
• The ISP is not burdened by support issues caused by traffic going outside their network and purview, e.g., to a third-party DNS provider – fewer unhappy customers and support calls due to fewer security incidents.
• Help comply with Government regulations – block bad actors, terrorist websites, illegal file-sharing, child abuse, national security, court-ordered regulatory blocklists, ban foreign gambling, etc.

Consumers in turn benefit from these additional capabilities that ISPs can provide in security, privacy, and performance.

If you are interested in McAfee’s exciting new DoT-DoH technology for the Secure Home Platform, please contact your McAfee Account Representative for further details.

The post Advancing our Secure Home Platform with DNS over HTTPS appeared first on McAfee Blog.

The report said the federal government should prioritize data collection on ransomware attacks

Ransomware breaches have increased by 13% – more than last five years combined – according to new report

The figures have raised concerns about sensitive government data falling into hands of nefarious actors

The stuffing attack exposed customer information and allowed hackers to redeem rewards points

Clearview AI has also ordered to delete existing data of UK residents from its systems