In 2023 alone, there were over 3,200 reported cyberattacks, with over 350 million victims in the United States. That’s not to mention the undetected or failed attacks by these cybercriminals, both external and internal, to get access to sensitive data and customers’ Personal Identifiable Information (PII).

The threat of phishing attacks looms larger than ever. The LA County Department of Public Health recently announced that 50 employees fell victim to phishing attacks, compromising sensitive patient data. These deceptive schemes have become a staple in the cyberthreat landscape, targeting individuals and businesses of all sizes. For every employee, understanding the signs and consequences of a phishing attack is crucial to safeguarding their organization.

In a recent development that has raised concerns across the education sector, Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) has confirmed a significant data breach involving student information. The breach, linked to a hack of the district’s Snowflake account, has exposed sensitive data pertaining to students and employees enrolled in the sprawling district. Snowflake is a cloud database platform used by companies worldwide to store their data.

France’s cybersecurity agency ANSSI has issued an alert outlining a Russian spear phishing campaign targeting French diplomats, the Record reports. The agency attributes the campaign to “Nobelium,” a threat actor tied to Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (the SVR).

Accessing passkeys from multiple devices can be a hassle if you don’t use a passkey manager since they’re tied to the device on which they’re generated. This means you’d have to create a passkey on multiple devices or scan a QR code to access a passkey from devices that use different Operating Systems (OS). This is inconvenient, which is why you should consider investing in a password manager to store and manage your passkeys.

In 2023, identity theft and fraud reached significant levels, with various reports highlighting the extensive impact on consumers and businesses. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) reported that consumers lost more than $10 billion to fraud, marking a 14% increase from the previous year. Identity theft remained a pervasive issue, with nearly 560,000 cases reported in the first half of 2023 alone.

Do you remember the last time you didn’t have water? Reliable water delivery is something many of us take for granted. Our local water treatment plant sits at the edge of our neighborhood, and I pass it every day on my way to take the kids to school. Not a lot seems to go on there, so it never occurred to me that I should be concerned about an attack on this critical infrastructure. What does occur to me is the possibility of a cyberattack on our water system.

CDK Global, a company that provides software for thousands of auto dealers, was hit by back-to-back cyberattacks on June 19. These attacks led to an outage that continued to impact many of their sales operations on Friday, according to the Associated Press. CDK told multiple news outlets that it is "actively investigating a cyber incident," and the company shut down all of its systems out of an abundance of caution.

From chatbots like ChatGPT to the large language models (LLMs) that power them, managing and mitigating potential AI vulnerabilities is an increasingly important aspect of effective cybersecurity. Kroll’s new AI insights hub explores some of the key AI security challenges informed by our expertise in helping businesses of all sizes, in a wide range of sectors. Some of the topics covered on the Kroll AI insights hub are outlined below.

In the rapidly evolving fields of large language models (LLMs) and machine learning, new frameworks and applications emerge daily, pushing the boundaries of these technologies. While exploring libraries and frameworks that leverage LLMs for user-facing applications, we came across the Vanna.AI library – which offers a text-to-SQL interface for users – where we discovered CVE-2024-5565, a remote code execution vulnerability via prompt injection techniques.