All news with #research tag

⚖️ More than seven in 10 IT leaders list regulatory compliance as a top-three challenge when deploying generative AI, according to a recent Gartner survey. Fewer than 25% are very confident in managing security, governance, and compliance risks. With the EU AI Act already in effect and new state laws in Colorado, Texas, and California on the way, CIOs worry about conflicting rules and rising legal exposure. Experts advise centralized governance, rigorous model testing, and external audits for high-risk use cases.

🔒 Phishing remains a pervasive threat—IBM attributes roughly 15% of data breaches to these attacks—yet standard training approaches are delivering limited protection. Recent studies cited in the article show annual awareness modules and embedded simulated-phish interventions often fail to change user behavior or secure genuine engagement, with many users closing training pages outright. Security leaders are advised to treat training as one element of a broader risk-reduction strategy that pairs behavioral design, clear escalation steps, measurable metrics, incentives, and technical controls such as two-factor authentication and improved phishing detection.

🔍 Janice Richardson, researcher and Council of Europe expert, reflects on Google’s Future Report, based on more than 7,000 teens from seven EU countries. She highlights young people’s use of the internet for learning, cultural exploration and creative problem solving, noting strong critical thinking and pragmatic attitudes toward algorithms. Richardson stresses closing the digital literacy gap and equipping teachers and parents to support safe, balanced online engagement.

🔒 Two independent research teams demonstrated practical physical attacks that extract encrypted data from server trusted execution environments by intercepting DDR4 memory traffic. The U.S. WireTap proof-of-concept slowed memory clocks and used an inexpensive legacy logic analyzer to recover keys from Intel SGX. The Battering RAM team employed a tiny interposer and a Raspberry Pi Pico to mirror writes and target both Intel SGX and AMD SEV-SNP covertly. Both efforts drastically lower cost and complexity compared with prior work, though vendors note that physical attacks sit outside their threat model.

🔍 Researchers at GreyNoise have identified a large-scale, multi-country botnet that began targeting Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) services in the United States on October 8. The campaign uses over 100,000 IP addresses and employs two RDP-specific techniques: RD Web Access timing attacks to infer valid usernames and RDP Web Client login enumeration to observe differing server behaviors. Nearly all sources share a common TCP fingerprint, indicating coordinated clusters. Administrators should block attacking IPs, review RDP logs, and avoid exposing remote desktop services to the public internet—use VPNs and enable multi-factor authentication.

🔒 DarkAtlas researchers warn that APT groups are leveraging legitimate RMM platforms to gain initial access, increasingly favoring ScreenConnect as it evades basic detection. Attackers abuse features like unattended access, VPN, REST API and file transfer, deploy in-memory installers that leave little disk artefacts, and register persistent services such as ScreenConnect.WindowsClient.exe. Defenders should monitor invite links, config files, in-memory activity and specific event IDs for effective DFIR.

🔐 Apple has increased the top award in its Apple Security Bounty program to $2m for exploit chains that emulate sophisticated mercenary spyware. Bonuses for Lockdown Mode bypasses and vulnerabilities found in beta software can more than double that payout, potentially exceeding $5m. Apple also raised many category rewards — including $100,000 for a Gatekeeper bypass and $1m for broad unauthorized iCloud access — and introduced a Target Flags initiative to speed and standardize exploitability demonstrations.

🤖 As organizations scale and threats increase in sophistication and velocity, SOCs are integrating AI to augment detection, investigation, and response. The market ranges from prompt-dependent copilots to autonomous, mesh agentic systems that coordinate specialized AI agents across triage, correlation, and remediation. Leading solutions prioritize contextual intelligence, non-disruptive integration, staged trust, and measurable ROI rather than promising hands-off autonomy.

⚠️ Researchers have identified 175 malicious packages on the npm registry used as infrastructure for a widespread phishing campaign called Beamglea. The packages, collectively downloaded about 26,000 times, host redirect scripts served via unpkg.com that route victims to credential-harvesting pages. Attackers automated package publication and embedded victim-specific emails into generated HTML, pre-filling login fields to increase the likelihood of successful credential capture.

🖱️ Researchers at the University of California, Irvine demonstrated a proof-of-concept called Mic-E-Mouse, showing that high-end optical mice can pick up desk-transmitted voice vibrations and be used to reconstruct nearby conversations. The attack can be executed on PC, Mac and Linux by non-privileged user-space programs, and Wiener and neural-network filtering was used to enhance muffled signals into intelligible speech. Practical limits include a quiet environment, thin desks (≈3 cm or less), mostly stationary mice and very high-DPI hardware; placing a rubber pad or mouse mat under the mouse prevents the leakage.

🔍 Cloudflare engineers describe discovering a rare race condition in the Go arm64 compiler that caused goroutine stack-unwinding crashes in production. They traced sporadic fatal panics and segfaults to async preemption interrupting a split stack-pointer adjustment, leaving an invalid stack frame. A minimal reproducer showed the assembler could split a large ADD into multiple instructions, creating a one-instruction window where preemption caused unwinder corruption. The issue was fixed upstream in go1.23.12, go1.24.6, and go1.25.0.

🔍 A leaked Geekbench entry allegedly from an unreleased iPad shows an Apple M5 chip delivering a 4,133 single‑core score and 15,437 multi‑core score, with the processor reported at 4.42 GHz and paired with 12GB of RAM and likely 256/512GB storage. In early comparisons, Apple's per‑core performance edges out Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite 2 in single‑thread tests, while the Snapdragon's higher core count gives it a clear multi‑core lead. The results highlight Apple's continued CPU design strength but should be treated as an unverified leak until independently confirmed.

🔍An alleged Apple M5 benchmark for an iPad Pro has surfaced on Geekbench, reporting a single-core score of 4,133 and a multi-core score of 15,437 for a variant clocked at about 4.42 GHz. The listing shows 12 GB of RAM, likely paired with 256 GB or 512 GB of storage. Early comparisons place the M5 narrowly ahead in single-thread tests versus Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite 2 but behind in multi-core throughput, underscoring Apple's strong per-core design.

🔓 Researchers disclosed two physical interposer attacks—Battering RAM and Wiretrap—that bypass Trusted Execution Enclaves on Intel (SGX) and AMD (SEV‑SNP) platforms. Both attacks exploit deterministic memory encryption by inserting an interposer between CPU and DRAM to capture ciphertext in transit. Battering RAM can replay ciphertext and create memory aliases to expose plaintext and implant backdoors, while Wiretrap enables ciphertext-based key recovery. Practical mitigation today is limited to preventing physical access and strengthening supply‑chain and data‑center controls such as those in ISO/IEC 27001.

🔬 Researchers from Georgia Institute of Technology and Purdue University describe WireTap, a physical memory-bus interposer attack that passively inspects DDR4 traffic to recover secrets from Intel SGX enclaves. By exploiting deterministic memory encryption, the team built an oracle enabling a full key-recovery of an SGX ECDSA attestation key from the Quoting Enclave. The prototype uses inexpensive, off-the-shelf equipment (roughly $1,000) and can be introduced via supply-chain compromise or local physical access. Intel says the scenario requires physical access and falls outside its memory-encryption threat model.

⚡Cloudflare reports it remains the fastest network for the largest number of last‑mile ISPs in its Birthday Week 2025 update. Using Real User Measurements (RUM) from Cloudflare‑branded error pages, the company compares TCP connection time trimeans against CloudFront, Google, Fastly and Akamai for the top 1,000 networks. Measured from August 6 to September 4, Cloudflare is #1 in 40% of measured ISPs and is prioritizing targeted fixes where gaps remain.

🔐Quantum computing is moving from theoretical possibility to an actionable concern for cybersecurity professionals. The article highlights the immediate risk of "harvest now, decrypt later," where adversaries capture encrypted traffic today to decrypt it when quantum-capable machines arrive. It notes that in 2024 NIST finalized initial post-quantum standards, including FIPS 203 for ML-KEM key establishment, and emphasizes the need for organizations to begin migration planning. The piece outlines current quantum-safe tools, migration challenges, and practical steps to improve readiness.

🔒 The Forrester Total Economic Impact™ study commissioned by Microsoft found that Microsoft Purview reduced the likelihood of data breaches by 30% for a composite organization, yielding more than $225,000 in annual savings from avoided incidents and fines. The report credits unified governance, automated classification, and fine‑tuned DLP policies with a 75% reduction in investigation time and 75% time savings for users searching and classifying data. Over three years the study shows $3.0M in benefits versus $633,000 in costs (NPV $2.3M; ROI 355%).

🤖 The 2025 DORA Report synthesizes survey responses from nearly 5,000 technology professionals and over 100 hours of qualitative data to examine how AI is reshaping software development. It finds AI amplifies existing team strengths and weaknesses: strong teams accelerate productivity and product performance, while weaker teams see magnified problems and increased instability. The report highlights near-universal AI adoption (90%), widespread productivity gains (>80%), a continuing trust gap in AI-generated code (~30% distrust), and recommends investment in platform engineering, user-centric workflows, and the DORA AI Capabilities Model to unlock AI’s value.

🛡️ A Gartner survey finds 62% of organisations experienced a deepfake attack in the past 12 months, with common techniques including social-engineering impersonation and attacks on biometric verification. The report also shows 32% of firms faced attacks on AI applications via prompt manipulation. Gartner’s Akif Khan urges integrating deepfake detection into collaboration tools and strengthening controls through awareness training, simulations and application-level authorisation with phishing-resistant MFA. Vendor solutions are emerging but remain early-stage, so operational effectiveness is not yet proven.