A school principal in Volusia County, Florida has resigned after sending $100,000 to a scammer posing as Elon Musk, WESH 2 News reports. Dr. Jan McGee from the Burns Science and Technology Charter School had been in communication with the individual for four months, even though her colleagues warned her that it was a scam. “McGee told a packed audience she was taken in by a fake Elon Musk, someone posing online as the space pioneer,” WESH 2 says.
The FBI’s newly-released report shows just how ransomware continues to plague critical infrastructure sectors, despite the U.S. government’s recent efforts to stop these attacks. You’ll probably recall the news about ransomware attacking the Colonial Pipeline and other U.S. critical infrastructure (CI) to the point that the government was stepping up their efforts to stop these attacks and even conducting congressional hearings on what to do about the problem.
This MIT Technology Review headline caught my eye, and I think you understand why. They described a new type of exploit called prompt injection. Melissa Heikkilä wrote: "I just published a story that sets out some of the ways AI language models can be misused. I have some bad news: It’s stupidly easy, it requires no programming skills, and there are no known fixes.
In a groundbreaking move, Italy has imposed a ban on the widely popular AI tool ChatGPT. This decision comes in the wake of concerns over possible misinformation, biases and the ethical challenges AI-powered technology presents. The ban has sparked a global conversation, with many speculating whether other countries will follow suit.
BleepingComputer reports that a cybercriminal gang is sending phony ransomware threats to prior victims of ransomware attacks. The gang, which calls itself “Midnight,” claims to have stolen hundreds of gigabytes of data and threatens to leak it if the victim doesn’t pay a ransom. Security firm Kroll said the gang’s ransom notes use the names of more prolific ransomware actors.
New insights from cybersecurity artificial intelligence (AI) company Darktrace shows a 135% increase in novel social engineering attacks from Generative AI. This new form of social engineering that contributed to this increase is much more sophisticated in nature, using linguistics techniques with increased text volume, punctuation, and sentence length to trick their victim. We've recently covered ChatGPT scams and other various AI scams, but this attack proves to be very different.
Using the lure of ChatGPT’s AI as a means to find new ways to make money, scammers trick victims using a phishing-turned-vishing attack that eventually takes victim’s money. It’s probably safe to guess that anyone reading this article has either played with ChatGPT directly or has seen examples of its use on social media. The idea of being able to ask simple questions and get world-class expert answers in just about any area of knowledge is staggering.
The Cyber Police of Ukraine have arrested twelve alleged members of an organized cybercrime group that’s stolen approximately $4.3 million from users across Europe, the Hacker News reports.
Looks like Latitude Finance is trying to give consumers more "latitude" in their exposure to cyber risks. The Australian finance company admittedly fell victim to an attack that has exposed customer data and Latitude Financial has been forced to stop adding new customers from clients such as Apple, Harvey Norman and JB Hi-Fi as it tries to contain the damage from criminals, who still appear to be active in its computer systems.
Mid-sized businesses – those with 250 to 2000 employees – don’t appear to have what they need to fend off attacks in a number of critical ways. Cybersecurity vendor Huntress’ latest report, The State of Cybersecurity for Mid-Sized Businesses in 2023, shows that mid-sized businesses are in a heap of trouble and simply aren’t prepared for an attack: In short, organizations have no internal resources to ensure the organization is improving its state of cybersecurity daily.
