In 1968, a killer supercomputer named HAL 9000 gripped imaginations in the sci-fi thriller “2001: A Space Odyssey.” The dark side of artificial intelligence (AI) was intriguing, entertaining and completely far-fetched. Audiences were hooked, and numerous blockbusters followed, from “The Terminator” in 1984 to “The Matrix” in 1999, each exploring AI’s extreme possibilities and potential consequences.

Welcome back to our Evolution of Scalper Bots series. In part one, the Origins of Scalping, we started our journey through scalping’s long history. We saw that it is far from a new concept: people have been reselling high-demand items for centuries, from as far back as 325 BCE! We’ll continue our journey at the turn of the 21st Century. With the advent of online ticketing, a new frontier had just been opened for scalpers, and things would never be the same again.

Let’s catch up on the more interesting vulnerability disclosures and cyber security news gathered from articles across the web this week. This is what we have been reading about on our coffee break! A badly coded WordPress plugin again. Luckily it has been caught: Sneaky! DNS is such a great lure for using as a control channel. I’m really surprised its not used more: Oh dear. At least they found it in the end…

The buzz around artificial intelligence (AI) is showing no sign of slowing down any time soon. The introduction of Large Language Models (LLMs) has brought about unprecedented advancements and utility across various industries. However, with this progress comes a set of well-known but often overlooked security risks for the organizations who are deploying these public, consumer-facing LLM applications.

Recognizing the indicators of insider risk before they turn into threats requires a paradigm shift in the way we operate. It necessitates moving from a reactive mode of operation to proactive. And it requires data that is continuously captured and analyzed to enable security teams to easily see patterns and anomalies and gauge the level of risk of specific behaviors.

Read also: a Russian ransomware actor was extradited to the US, Germany cracks down on illegal crypto ATMs, and more.

Building software continues to look like an assembly line, with developers pulling resources from across the web to create applications. Although third-party resources have played an essential role in developing software for many years, the way that development teams use these external components looks different today.

At DEF CON 32's AppSec Village, we explored secrets security challenges, answered common questions, and shared how to detect and handle hidden credentials effectively.

On August 21, 2024, SolarWinds released a second hotfix for SolarWinds Web Help Desk (WHD) version 12.8.3. This hotfix addresses a newly disclosed hardcoded credential vulnerability (CVE-2024-28987) that allows a remote, unauthenticated attacker to access internal functionality and modify data. Additionally, the hotfix resolves the Java deserialization remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability (CVE-2024-28986) disclosed the previous week and fixes functionality issues introduced by the first hotfix.

Out-of-bounds memory access, also known as buffer overflow, occurs when a program tries to read from or write to a memory location outside the bounds of the memory buffer that has been allocated for it. This type of vulnerability is particularly dangerous because it can lead to various issues, including crashes, data corruption, sensitive data leaks, and even the execution of malicious code.