The U.S. FTC will order Avast to pay $16.5 million and ban the company from selling the users' web browsing data or licensing it for advertising purposes. From a report: The complaint says Avast violated millions of consumers' rights by collecting, storing, and selling their browsing data without their knowledge and consent while misleading them that the products used to harvest their data would block online tracking. "While the FTC's privacy lawsuits routinely take on firms that misrepresent their data practices, Avast's decision to expressly market its products as safeguarding people's browsing records and protecting data from tracking only to then sell those records is especially galling," said FTC Chair Lina M. Khan.

"Moreover, the volume of data Avast released is staggering: the complaint alleges that by 2020 Jumpshot had amassed "more than eight petabytes of browsing information dating back to 2014." More specifically, the FTC says UK-based company Avast Limited harvested consumers' web browsing information without their knowledge or consent using Avast browser extensions and antivirus software since at least 2014.

U.S. healthcare technology giant Change Healthcare has confirmed a cyberattack on its systems. In a brief statement, the company said it was "experiencing a network interruption related to a cyber security issue." From a report: "Once we became aware of the outside threat, in the interest of protecting our partners and patients, we took immediate action to disconnect our systems to prevent further impact," Change Healthcare wrote on its status page. "The disruption is expected to last at least through the day."

The incident began early on Tuesday morning on the U.S. East Coast, according to the incident tracker. The specific nature of the cybersecurity incident was not disclosed. Most of the login pages for Change Healthcare were inaccessible or offline when TechCrunch checked at the time of writing. Michigan local newspaper the Huron Daily Tribune is reporting that local pharmacies are experiencing outages due to the Change Healthcare cyberattack.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from PBS: Chinese police are investigating an unauthorized and highly unusual online dump of documents from a private security contractor linked to the nation's top policing agency and other parts of its government -- a trove that catalogs apparent hacking activity and tools to spy on both Chinese and foreigners. Among the apparent targets of tools provided by the impacted company, I-Soon: ethnicities and dissidents in parts of China that have seen significant anti-government protests, such as Hong Kong or the heavily Muslim region of Xinjiang in China's far west. The dump of scores of documents late last week and subsequent investigation were confirmed by two employees of I-Soon, known as Anxun in Mandarin, which has ties to the powerful Ministry of Public Security. The dump, which analysts consider highly significant even if it does not reveal any especially novel or potent tools, includes hundreds of pages of contracts, marketing presentations, product manuals, and client and employee lists. They reveal, in detail, methods used by Chinese authorities used to surveil dissidents overseas, hack other nations and promote pro-Beijing narratives on social media.

The documents show apparent I-Soon hacking of networks across Central and Southeast Asia, as well as Hong Kong and the self-ruled island of Taiwan, which Beijing claims as its territory. The hacking tools are used by Chinese state agents to unmask users of social media platforms outside China such as X, formerly known as Twitter, break into email and hide the online activity of overseas agents. Also described are devices disguised as power strips and batteries that can be used to compromise Wi-Fi networks. I-Soon and Chinese police are investigating how the files were leaked, the two I-Soon employees told the AP. One of the employees said I-Soon held a meeting Wednesday about the leak and were told it wouldn't affect business too much and to "continue working as normal." The AP is not naming the employees -- who did provide their surnames, per common Chinese practice -- out of concern about possible retribution. The source of the leak is not known. Jon Condra, an analyst with Recorded Future, a cybersecurity company, called it the most significant leak ever linked to a company "suspected of providing cyber espionage and targeted intrusion services for the Chinese security services." According to Condra, citing the leaked material, I-Soon's targets include governments, telecommunications firms abroad and online gambling companies within China.

A day after the U.S., UK and EU said they had disrupted the ransomware group LockBit, the State Department said the U.S. is offering a reward of up to $15 million for information leading to the identification or location of the leaders of the ransomware group.

Apple is rolling out an upgrade to its iMessage texting platform to defend against future encryption-breaking technologies. From a report: The new protocol, known as PQ3, is another sign that U.S. tech firms are bracing for a potential future breakthrough in quantum computing that could make current methods of protecting users' communications obsolete. "More than simply replacing an existing algorithm with a new one, we rebuilt the iMessage cryptographic protocol from the ground up," an Apple blog post published on Wednesday reads. "It will fully replace the existing protocol within all supported conversations this year."

The Cupertino, California-based iPhone maker says its encryption algorithms are state-of-the-art and that it has found no evidence so far of a successful attack on them. Still, government officials and scientists are concerned that the advent of quantum computers, advanced machines that tap in to the properties of subatomic particles, could suddenly and dramatically weaken those protections. Late last year, a Reuters investigation explored how the United States and China are racing to prepare for that moment, dubbed "Q-Day," both by pouring money into quantum research and by investing in new encryption standards known as post-quantum cryptography. Washington and Beijing have traded allegations of intercepting massive amounts of encrypted data in preparation for Q-Day, an approach sometimes dubbed "catch now, crack later." More on Apple's security blog.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom's Hardware: An interesting new attack on biometric security has been outlined by a group of researchers from China and the US. PrintListener: Uncovering the Vulnerability of Fingerprint Authentication via the Finger Friction Sound [PDF] proposes a side-channel attack on the sophisticated Automatic Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS). The attack leverages the sound characteristics of a user's finger swiping on a touchscreen to extract fingerprint pattern features. Following tests, the researchers assert that they can successfully attack "up to 27.9% of partial fingerprints and 9.3% of complete fingerprints within five attempts at the highest security FAR [False Acceptance Rate] setting of 0.01%." This is claimed to be the first work that leverages swiping sounds to infer fingerprint information.

Without contact prints or finger detail photos, how can an attacker hope to get any fingerprint data to enhance MasterPrint and DeepMasterPrint dictionary attack results on user fingerprints? One answer is as follows: the PrintListener paper says that "finger-swiping friction sounds can be captured by attackers online with a high possibility." The source of the finger-swiping sounds can be popular apps like Discord, Skype, WeChat, FaceTime, etc. Any chatty app where users carelessly perform swiping actions on the screen while the device mic is live. Hence the side-channel attack name -- PrintListener. [...]

To prove the theory, the scientists practically developed their attack research as PrintListener. In brief, PrintListener uses a series of algorithms for pre-processing the raw audio signals which are then used to generate targeted synthetics for PatternMasterPrint (the MasterPrint generated by fingerprints with a specific pattern). Importantly, PrintListener went through extensive experiments "in real-world scenarios," and, as mentioned in the intro, can facilitate successful partial fingerprint attacks in better than one in four cases, and complete fingerprint attacks in nearly one in ten cases. These results far exceed unaided MasterPrint fingerprint dictionary attacks.

Starting in July, the Vietnamese government will begin collecting biometric information from its citizens when issuing new identification cards. The Register reports: Prime minister Pham Minh Chinh instructed the nation's Ministry of Public Security to collect the data in the form of iris scans, voice samples and actual DNA, in accordance with amendments to Vietnam's Law on Citizen Identification. The ID cards are issued to anyone over the age of 14 in Vietnam, and are optional for citizens between the ages of 6 and 14, according to a government news report. Amendments to the Law on Citizen Identification that allow collection of biometrics passed on November 27 of last year.

The law allows recording of blood type among the DNA-related information that will be contained in a national database to be shared across agencies "to perform their functions and tasks." The ministry will work with other parts of the government to integrate the identification system into the national database. [...] Vietnam's future identity cards will incorporate the functions of health insurance cards, social insurance books, driver's licenses, birth certificates, and marriage certificates, as defined by the amendment.

As for how the information will be collected, the amendments state: "Biometric information on DNA and voice is collected when voluntarily provided by the people or the agency conducting criminal proceedings or the agency managing the person to whom administrative measures are applied in the process of settling the case according to their functions and duties whether to solicit assessment or collect biometric information on DNA, people's voices are shared with identity management agencies for updating and adjusting to the identity database."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The European Union will investigate whether ByteDance's TikTok breached online content rules aimed at protecting children and ensuring transparent advertising, an official said on Monday, putting the social media platform at risk of a hefty fine. EU industry chief Thierry Breton said he took the decision after analyzing the short video app's risk assessment report and its replies to requests for information, confirming a Reuters story. "Today we open an investigation into TikTok over suspected breach of transparency & obligations to protect minors: addictive design & screen time limits, rabbit hole effect, age verification, default privacy settings," Breton said on X.

The European Union's Digital Services Act (DSA), which applies to all online platforms since Feb. 17, requires in particular very large online platforms and search engines to do more to tackle illegal online content and risks to public security. TikTok's owner, China-based ByteDance, could face fines of up to 6% of its global turnover if TikTok is found guilty of breaching DSA rules. TikTok said it would continue to work with experts and the industry to keep young people on its platform safe and that it looked forward to explaining this work in detail to the European Commission.

The European Commission said the investigation will focus on the design of TikTok's system, including algorithmic systems which may stimulate behavioral addictions and/or create so-called 'rabbit hole effects'. It will also probe whether TikTok has put in place appropriate and proportionate measures to ensure a high level of privacy, safety and security for minors. As well as the issue of protecting minors, the Commission is looking at whether TikTok provides a reliable database on advertisements on its platform so that researchers can scrutinize potential online risks.

Adobe is adding a new generative AI experience to its Acrobat PDF management software, which aims to "completely transform the digital document experience" by making information in long documents easier to find and understand. From a report: Announced in Adobe's press release as "AI Assistant in Acrobat," the new tool is described as a "conversational engine" that can summarize files, answer questions, and recommend more based on the content, allowing users to "easily chat with documents" to get the information they need. It's available in beta starting today for paying Acrobat users.

The idea is that the chatbot will reduce the time-consuming tasks related to working with massive text documents -- such as helping students quickly find information for research projects or summarizing large reports into snappy highlights for emails, meetings, and presentations. AI Assistant in Acrobat can be used with all document formats supported by the app, including Word and PowerPoint. The chatbot abides by Adobe's data security protocols, so it won't store data from customer documents or use it to train AI Assistant. The new AI Assistant experience is available for Acrobat customers on Standard ($12.99 per month) and Pro ($19.99 per month) plans.

A coalition of global law enforcement agencies including the FBI and UK National Crime Agency have taken control of the LockBit ransomware gang's dark web site, replacing it with a notice saying their services had been disrupted by joint international action. The "Operation Cronos" task force includes Europol and enforcement agencies from a dozen countries across Europe, Asia and North America. LockBit is a prolific ransomware group that hacks corporate networks then threatens to leak stolen data unless ransom demands are paid. The notice said the operation against them was "ongoing and developing."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Wyze's problems with letting its security camera customers briefly see into other customer homes is a lot worse than we thought. Last week, co-founder David Crosby said that "so far" the company had identified 14 people who were able to briefly see into a stranger's property because they were shown an image from someone else's Wyze camera. Now we're being told that number of affected customers has ballooned to 13,000.

The revelation came from an email sent to customers entitled "An Important Security Message from Wyze," in which the company copped to the breach and apologized, while also attempting to lay some of the blame on its web hosting provider AWS. [...] The breach, however, occurred as Wyze was attempting to bring its cameras back online. Customers were reporting seeing mysterious images and video footage in their own Events tab. Wyze disabled access to the tab and launched its own investigation.

The FBI is "laser focused" on Chinese efforts to insert malicious software code into computer networks in ways that could disrupt critical US infrastructure, according to the agency's director Christopher Wray. From a report: Wray said he was acutely concerned about "pre-positioning" of malware. He said the US recently disrupted a Chinese hacking network known as Volt Typhoon that targeted American infrastructure including the electricity grid and water supply, and other targets around the world. "We're laser focused on this as a real threat and we're working with a lot of partners to try to identify it, anticipate it and disrupt it," Wray said on Sunday after attending the Munich Security Conference.

"I'm sober and clear minded about what we're up against...We're always going to have to be kind of on the balls of our feet." Wray said Volt Typhoon was just the tip of the iceberg and was one of many such efforts by the Chinese government. The US has been tracking Chinese pre-positioning operations for well over a decade, but Wray told the security conference that they had reached "fever pitch." He said China was increasingly inserting "offensive weapons within our critical infrastructure poised to attack whenever Beijing decides the time is right."

His comments are the latest FBI effort to raise awareness about Chinese espionage that ranges from traditional spying and intellectual property theft to hacking designed to prepare for possible future conflict. Last October, Wray and his counterparts from the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing network that includes the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand held their first public meeting in an effort to focus the spotlight on Chinese espionage. Wray said the US campaign was having an impact and that people were increasingly attuned to the threat, particularly compared with several years ago when he sometimes met scepticism.

A few years ago, MIT researchers invented a cryptographic ID tag — but like traditional RFID tags, "a counterfeiter could peel the tag off a genuine item and reattach it to a fake," writes MIT News.

"The researchers have now surmounted this security vulnerability by leveraging terahertz waves to develop an antitampering ID tag that still offers the benefits of being tiny, cheap, and secure." They mix microscopic metal particles into the glue that sticks the tag to an object, and then use terahertz waves to detect the unique pattern those particles form on the item's surface. Akin to a fingerprint, this random glue pattern is used to authenticate the item, explains Eunseok Lee, an electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) graduate student and lead author of a paper on the antitampering tag. "These metal particles are essentially like mirrors for terahertz waves. If I spread a bunch of mirror pieces onto a surface and then shine light on that, depending on the orientation, size, and location of those mirrors, I would get a different reflected pattern. But if you peel the chip off and reattach it, you destroy that pattern," adds Ruonan Han, an associate professor in EECS, who leads the Terahertz Integrated Electronics Group in the Research Laboratory of Electronics.

The researchers produced a light-powered antitampering tag that is about 4 square millimeters in size. They also demonstrated a machine-learning model that helps detect tampering by identifying similar glue pattern fingerprints with more than 99 percent accuracy. Because the terahertz tag is so cheap to produce, it could be implemented throughout a massive supply chain. And its tiny size enables the tag to attach to items too small for traditional RFIDs, such as certain medical devices...

"These responses are impossible to duplicate, as long as the glue interface is destroyed by a counterfeiter," Han says. A vendor would take an initial reading of the antitampering tag once it was stuck onto an item, and then store those data in the cloud, using them later for verification."
Seems like the only way to thwart that would be carving out the part of the surface where the tag was affixed — and then pasting the tag, glue, and what it adheres to all together onto some other surface. But more importantly, Han says they'd wanted to demonstrate "that the application of the terahertz spectrum can go well beyond broadband wireless."

In this case, you can use terahertz for ID, security, and authentication. There are a lot of possibilities out there."

High-capacity DNA data storage "is closer than you think," Slashdot wrote in 2019.

Now IEEE Spectrum brings an update on where we're at — and where we're headed — by a participant in the DNA storage collaboration between Microsoft and the Molecular Information Systems Lab of the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. "Organizations around the world are already taking the first steps toward building a DNA drive that can both write and read DNA data," while "funding agencies in the United States, Europe, and Asia are investing in the technology stack required to field commercially relevant devices." The challenging part is learning how to get the information into, and back out of, the molecule in an economically viable way... For a DNA drive to compete with today's archival tape drives, it must be able to write about 2 gigabits per second, which at demonstrated DNA data storage densities is about 2 billion bases per second. To put that in context, I estimate that the total global market for synthetic DNA today is no more than about 10 terabases per year, which is the equivalent of about 300,000 bases per second over a year. The entire DNA synthesis industry would need to grow by approximately 4 orders of magnitude just to compete with a single tape drive. Keeping up with the total global demand for storage would require another 8 orders of magnitude of improvement by 2030. But humans have done this kind of scaling up before. Exponential growth in silicon-based technology is how we wound up producing so much data. Similar exponential growth will be fundamental in the transition to DNA storage...

Companies like DNA Script and Molecular Assemblies are commercializing automated systems that use enzymes to synthesize DNA. These techniques are replacing traditional chemical DNA synthesis for some applications in the biotechnology industry... [I]t won't be long before we can combine the two technologies into one functional device: a semiconductor chip that converts digital signals into chemical states (for example, changes in pH), and an enzymatic system that responds to those chemical states by adding specific, individual bases to build a strand of synthetic DNA. The University of Washington and Microsoft team, collaborating with the enzymatic synthesis company Ansa Biotechnologies, recently took the first step toward this device... The path is relatively clear; building a commercially relevant DNA drive is simply a matter of time and money...

At the same time, advances in DNA synthesis for DNA storage will increase access to DNA for other uses, notably in the biotechnology industry, and will thereby expand capabilities to reprogram life. Somewhere down the road, when a DNA drive achieves a throughput of 2 gigabases per second (or 120 gigabases per minute), this box could synthesize the equivalent of about 20 complete human genomes per minute. And when humans combine our improving knowledge of how to construct a genome with access to effectively free synthetic DNA, we will enter a very different world... We'll be able to design microbes to produce chemicals and drugs, as well as plants that can fend off pests or sequester minerals from the environment, such as arsenic, carbon, or gold. At 2 gigabases per second, constructing biological countermeasures against novel pathogens will take a matter of minutes. But so too will constructing the genomes of novel pathogens. Indeed, this flow of information back and forth between the digital and the biological will mean that every security concern from the world of IT will also be introduced into the world of biology...

The future will be built not from DNA as we find it, but from DNA as we will write it.
The article makes an interesting point — that biology labs around the world already order chemically-synthesized ssDNA, "delivered in lengths of up to several hundred bases," and sequence DNA molecules up to thousands of bases in length.

"In other words, we already convert digital information to and from DNA, but generally using only sequences that make sense in terms of biology."

From a blog post by Greg Kroah-Hartman: As was recently announced, the Linux kernel project has been accepted as a CVE Numbering Authority (CNA) for vulnerabilities found in Linux.

This is a trend, of more open source projects taking over the haphazard assignments of CVEs against their project by becoming a CNA so that no other group can assign CVEs without their involvment. Here's the curl project doing much the same thing for the same reasons. I'd like to point out the great work that the Python project has done in supporting this effort, and the OpenSSF project also encouraging it and providing documentation and help for open source projects to accomplish this. I'd also like to thank the cve.org group and board as they all made the application process very smooth for us and provided loads of help in making this all possible.

As many of you all know, I have talked a lot about CVEs in the past, and yes, I think the system overall is broken in many ways, but this change is a way for us to take more responsibility for this, and hopefully make the process better over time. It's also work that it looks like all open source projects might be mandated to do with the recent rules and laws being enacted in different parts of the world, so having this in place with the kernel will allow us to notify all sorts of different CNA-like organizations if needed in the future.
Kroah-Hartman links to his post on the kernel mailing list for "more details about how this is all going to work for the kernel." [D]ue to the layer at which the Linux kernel is in a system, almost any bug might be exploitable to compromise the security of the kernel, but the possibility of exploitation is often not evident when the bug is fixed. Because of this, the CVE assignment team are overly cautious and assign CVE numbers to any bugfix that they identify. This explains the seemingly large number of CVEs that are issued by the Linux kernel team...

No CVEs will be assigned for unfixed security issues in the Linux kernel, assignment will only happen after a fix is available as it can be properly tracked that way by the git commit id of the original fix. No CVEs will be assigned for any issue found in a version of the kernel that is not currently being actively supported by the Stable/LTS kernel team.
alanw (Slashdot reader #1,822) worries this could overwhelm the CVE infrastructure, pointing to an ongoing discussion at LWN.net.

But reached for a comment, Greg Kroah-Hartman thinks there's been a misunderstanding. He told Slashdot that the CVE group "explicitly asked for this as part of our application... so if they are comfortable with it, why is no one else?"

This week the non-profit Rust Foundation announced the release of a report on what their Security Initiative accomplished in the last six months of 2023. "There is already so much to show for this initiative," says the foundation's executive director, "from several new open source security projects to several completed and publicly available security threat models."

From the executive summary: When the user base of any programming language grows, it becomes more attractive to malicious actors. As any programming language ecosystem expands with more libraries, packages, and frameworks, the surface area for attacks increases. Rust is no different. As the steward of the Rust programming language, the Rust Foundation has a responsibility to provide a range of resources to the growing Rust community. This responsibility means we must work with the Rust Project to help empower contributors to participate in a secure and scalable manner, eliminate security burdens for Rust maintainers, and educate the public about security within the Rust ecosystem...

Recent Achievements of the Security Initiative Include:

- Completing and releasing Rust Infrastructure and Crates Ecosystem threat models

- Further developing Rust Foundation open source security project Painter [for building a graph database of dependencies/invocations between crates] and releasing new security project, Typomania [a toolbox to check for typosquatting in package registries].

- Utilizing new tools and best practices to identify and address malicious crates.

- Helping reduce technical debt within the Rust Project, producing/contributing to security-focused documentation, and elevating security priorities for discussion within the Rust Project.

... and more!

Over the Coming Months, Security Initiative Engineers Will Primarily Focus On:

- Completing all four Rust security threat models and taking action to address encompassed threats

- Standing up additional infrastructure to support redundancy, backups, and mirroring of critical Rust assets

- Collaborating with the Rust Project on the design and potential implementation of signing and PKI solutions for crates.io to achieve security parity with other popular ecosystems

- Continuing to create and further develop tools to support Rust ecosystem, including the crates.io admin functionality, Painter, Typomania, and Sandpit

Modern U.S. farming is being transformed by precision agriculture, writes Paul Roberts, the founder of securepairs.org and Editor in Chief at Security Ledger.

Theres autonomous tractors and "smart spraying" systems that use AI-powered cameras to identify weeds, just for starters. "Among the critical components of precision agriculture: Internet- and GPS connected agricultural equipment, highly accurate remote sensors, 'big data' analytics and cloud computing..." As with any technological revolution, however, there are both "winners" and "losers" in the emerging age of precision agriculture... Precision agriculture, once broadly adopted, promises to further reduce the need for human labor to run farms. (Autonomous equipment means you no longer even need drivers!) However, the risks it poses go well beyond a reduction in the agricultural work force. First, as the USDA notes on its website: the scale and high capital costs of precision agriculture technology tend to favor large, corporate producers over smaller farms. Then there are the systemic risks to U.S. agriculture of an increasingly connected and consolidated agriculture sector, with a few major OEMs having the ability to remotely control and manage vital equipment on millions of U.S. farms... (Listen to my podcast interview with the hacker Sick Codes, who reverse engineered a John Deere display to run the Doom video game for insights into the company's internal struggles with cybersecurity.)

Finally, there are the reams of valuable and proprietary environmental and operational data that farmers collect, store and leverage to squeeze the maximum productivity out of their land. For centuries, such information resided in farmers' heads, or on written or (more recently) digital records that they owned and controlled exclusively, typically passing that knowledge and data down to succeeding generation of farm owners. Precision agriculture technology greatly expands the scope, and granularity, of that data. But in doing so, it also wrests it from the farmer's control and shares it with equipment manufacturers and service providers — often without the explicit understanding of the farmers themselves, and almost always without monetary compensation to the farmer for the data itself. In fact, the Federal Government is so concerned about farm data they included a section (1619) on "information gathering" into the latest farm bill.

Over time, this massive transfer of knowledge from individual farmers or collectives to multinational corporations risks beggaring farmers by robbing them of one of their most vital assets: data, and turning them into little more than passive caretakers of automated equipment managed, controlled and accountable to distant corporate masters.
Weighing in is Kevin Kenney, a vocal advocate for the "right to repair" agricultural equipment (and also an alternative fuel systems engineer at Grassroots Energy LLC). In the interview, he warns about the dangers of tying repairs to factory-installed firmware, and argues that its the long-time farmer's "trade secrets" that are really being harvested today. The ultimate beneficiary could end up being the current "cabal" of tractor manufacturers.

"While we can all agree that it's coming...the question is who will own these robots?" First, we need to acknowledge that there are existing laws on the books which for whatever reason, are not being enforced. The FTC should immediately start an investigation into John Deere and the rest of the 'Tractor Cabal' to see to what extent farmers' farm data security and privacy are being compromised. This directly affects national food security because if thousands- or tens of thousands of tractors' are hacked and disabled or their data is lost, crops left to rot in the fields would lead to bare shelves at the grocery store... I think our universities have also been delinquent in grasping and warning farmers about the data-theft being perpetrated on farmers' operations throughout the United States and other countries by makers of precision agricultural equipment.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader chicksdaddy for sharing the article.

Connor Jones reports via The Register: A Ukrainian cybercrime kingpin who ran some of the most pervasive malware operations faces 40 years in prison after spending nearly a decade on the FBI's Cyber Most Wanted List. Vyacheslav Igorevich Penchukov, 37, pleaded guilty this week in the US to two charges related to his leadership role in both the Zeus and IcedID malware operations that netted millions of dollars in the process. Penchukov's plea will be seen as the latest big win for US law enforcement in its continued fight against cybercrime and those that enable it. However, authorities took their time getting him in 'cuffs. [...]

"Malware like IcedID bleeds billions from the American economy and puts our critical infrastructure and national security at risk," said US attorney Michael Easley for the eastern district of North Carolina. "The Justice Department and FBI Cyber Squad won't stand by and watch it happen, and won't quit coming for the world's most wanted cybercriminals, no matter where they are in the world. This operation removed a key player from one of the world's most notorious cybercriminal rings. Extradition is real. Anyone who infects American computers had better be prepared to answer to an American judge."

This week, he admitted one count of conspiracy to commit a racketeer influenced and corrupt organizations (RICO) act offense relating to Zeus, and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud in relation to IcedID. Each count carries a maximum sentence of 20 years. His sentencing date is set for May 9, 2024. Zeus malware, a banking trojan that formed a botnet for financial theft, caused over $100 million in losses before its 2014 dismantlement. Its successor, SpyEye, incorporated enhanced features for financial fraud. Despite the 2014 takedown of Zeus, Penchukov moved on to lead IcedID, a similar malware first found in 2017. IcedID evolved from banking fraud to ransomware, severely affecting the University of Vermont Medical Center in 2020 with over $30 million in damages.

A paper (PDF) from researchers at the University of Cambridge, supported by voices from numerous academic institutions including OpenAI, proposes remote kill switches and lockouts as methods to mitigate risks associated with advanced AI technologies. It also recommends tracking AI chip sales globally. The Register reports: The paper highlights numerous ways policymakers might approach AI hardware regulation. Many of the suggestions -- including those designed to improve visibility and limit the sale of AI accelerators -- are already playing out at a national level. Last year US president Joe Biden put forward an executive order aimed at identifying companies developing large dual-use AI models as well as the infrastructure vendors capable of training them. If you're not familiar, "dual-use" refers to technologies that can serve double duty in civilian and military applications. More recently, the US Commerce Department proposed regulation that would require American cloud providers to implement more stringent "know-your-customer" policies to prevent persons or countries of concern from getting around export restrictions. This kind of visibility is valuable, researchers note, as it could help to avoid another arms race, like the one triggered by the missile gap controversy, where erroneous reports led to massive build up of ballistic missiles. While valuable, they warn that executing on these reporting requirements risks invading customer privacy and even lead to sensitive data being leaked.

Meanwhile, on the trade front, the Commerce Department has continued to step up restrictions, limiting the performance of accelerators sold to China. But, as we've previously reported, while these efforts have made it harder for countries like China to get their hands on American chips, they are far from perfect. To address these limitations, the researchers have proposed implementing a global registry for AI chip sales that would track them over the course of their lifecycle, even after they've left their country of origin. Such a registry, they suggest, could incorporate a unique identifier into each chip, which could help to combat smuggling of components.

At the more extreme end of the spectrum, researchers have suggested that kill switches could be baked into the silicon to prevent their use in malicious applications. [...] The academics are clearer elsewhere in their study, proposing that processor functionality could be switched off or dialed down by regulators remotely using digital licensing: "Specialized co-processors that sit on the chip could hold a cryptographically signed digital "certificate," and updates to the use-case policy could be delivered remotely via firmware updates. The authorization for the on-chip license could be periodically renewed by the regulator, while the chip producer could administer it. An expired or illegitimate license would cause the chip to not work, or reduce its performance." In theory, this could allow watchdogs to respond faster to abuses of sensitive technologies by cutting off access to chips remotely, but the authors warn that doing so isn't without risk. The implication being, if implemented incorrectly, that such a kill switch could become a target for cybercriminals to exploit.

Another proposal would require multiple parties to sign off on potentially risky AI training tasks before they can be deployed at scale. "Nuclear weapons use similar mechanisms called permissive action links," they wrote. For nuclear weapons, these security locks are designed to prevent one person from going rogue and launching a first strike. For AI however, the idea is that if an individual or company wanted to train a model over a certain threshold in the cloud, they'd first need to get authorization to do so. Though a potent tool, the researchers observe that this could backfire by preventing the development of desirable AI. The argument seems to be that while the use of nuclear weapons has a pretty clear-cut outcome, AI isn't always so black and white. But if this feels a little too dystopian for your tastes, the paper dedicates an entire section to reallocating AI resources for the betterment of society as a whole. The idea being that policymakers could come together to make AI compute more accessible to groups unlikely to use it for evil, a concept described as "allocation."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: A new iOS and Android trojan named 'GoldPickaxe' employs a social engineering scheme to trick victims into scanning their faces and ID documents, which are believed to be used to generate deepfakes for unauthorized banking access. The new malware, spotted by Group-IB, is part of a malware suite developed by the Chinese threat group known as 'GoldFactory,' which is responsible for other malware strains such as 'GoldDigger', 'GoldDiggerPlus,' and 'GoldKefu.' Group-IB says its analysts observed attacks primarily targeting the Asia-Pacific region, mainly Thailand and Vietnam. However, the techniques employed could be effective globally, and there's a danger of them getting adopted by other malware strains. [...]

For iOS (iPhone) users, the threat actors initially directed targets to a TestFlight URL to install the malicious app, allowing them to bypass the normal security review process. When Apple remove the TestFlight app, the attackers switched to luring targets into downloading a malicious Mobile Device Management (MDM) profile that allows the threat actors to take control over devices. Once the trojan has been installed onto a mobile device in the form of a fake government app, it operates semi-autonomously, manipulating functions in the background, capturing the victim's face, intercepting incoming SMS, requesting ID documents, and proxying network traffic through the infected device using 'MicroSocks.'

Group-IB says the Android version of the trojan performs more malicious activities than in iOS due to Apple's higher security restrictions. Also, on Android, the trojan uses over 20 different bogus apps as cover. For example, GoldPickaxe can also run commands on Android to access SMS, navigate the filesystem, perform clicks on the screen, upload the 100 most recent photos from the victim's album, download and install additional packages, and serve fake notifications. The use of the victims' faces for bank fraud is an assumption by Group-IB, also corroborated by the Thai police, based on the fact that many financial institutes added biometric checks last year for transactions above a certain amount.