Author: HackWatchit

Christina Marie Chapman, a 50-year-old woman from Arizona, was sentenced to 102 months in prison after pleading guilty to her involvement in a scheme that enabled North Korean IT workers to infiltrate 309 U.S. companies. Chapman was charged in May 2024, together with Ukrainian citizen Oleksandr Didenko, with aggravated identity theft, conspiracy to defraud the United States, and conspiracy to commit money laundering, wire fraud, identity fraud, and bank fraud. Didenko also ran an online platform known as UpWorkSell (which was seized by the DOJ) that provided services allowing North Koreans to use false identities while hunting for remote IT…

The demand for skilled tech professionals shows no signs of slowing down in 2025. You may be running a startup with a tight runway or a large enterprise juggling multiple projects. It doesn’t matter. Getting the right tech talent is critical. IT staff augmentation comes to the rescue. It allows companies to scale their teams fast, fill skills gaps, and stay agile without the lengthy process of hiring full-time employees. It is like having a remote bench of seasoned developers, designers, and engineers. The number of vendors is so huge. Then, who can you trust? Shall we go deeper and…

to uncover causal relationships, stop trying to invent a time machine and run an experiment instead! Understanding causal relationships offers the knowledge needed to produce desired results through action. In this article, I’m going to illustrate the power of experimental design by using a time-machine-based conceptual exercise. My goal is to convince you that more can be learned about causality through experimentation than using a time machine. Why are time machines useful in a causal thought experiment? Using a time machine for a thought experiment feels ridiculous, and in many ways it is. But it also has a characteristic that…

Here’s an overview of some of last week’s most interesting news, articles, interviews and videos: Microsoft pins on-prem SharePoint attacks on Chinese threat actorsAs Microsoft continues to update its customer guidance for protecting on-prem SharePoint servers against the latest in-the-wild attacks, more security firms have begun sharing details about the ones they have detected. How to land your first job in cybersecurityAccording to LinkedIn, job applications have surged over 45% in the past year, with 11,000 applications submitted every minute. This flood of applications is making it harder than ever for qualified candidates to stand out. Storm-2603 spotted deploying ransomware…

Move over, white-gloved conservators. Artificial intelligence has entered the gallery, armed not with paintbrushes and solvents but with neural networks, gigapixels, and a stubborn refusal to take coffee breaks. No, we’re not talking about an MIT student’s innovative face mask for paintings (although, yes, that’s still trending in our analytics). AI is now behind the velvet rope at major museums, digitally filling in cracks, reconstructing lost edges and determining the original colors of famous artworks. Some Show Stoppers Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch” Restored by AI: The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam led a daring experiment. It taught AI to mimic Rembrandt’s brushwork…

Security Affairs Malware newsletter includes a collection of the best articles and research on malware in the international landscape Malware Newsletter Lookout Discovers Iranian APT MuddyWater Leveraging DCHSpy During Israel-Iran Conflict Uncovering a Stealthy WordPress Backdoor in mu-plugins NPM package ‘is’ with 2.8M weekly downloads infected devs with malware Coyote in the Wild: First-Ever Malware That Abuses UI Automation Understanding Current CastleLoader Campaigns AI-Generated Malware in Panda Image Hides Persistent Linux Threat Toptal’s GitHub Organization Hijacked: 10 Malicious Packages Published Soco404: Multiplatform Cryptomining Campaign Uses Fake Error Pages to Hide Payload Hacker sneaks infostealer malware into early access…

In brief A new report from TRM Labs found that Kyrgyzstan appears to be serving as a front for crypto platforms linked to shuttered Russian exchange Garantex. Russia-linked activity accounts for almost all of Kyrgyzstan’s crypto industry, which was “virtually nonexistent” prior to the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Experts told Decrypt that Kyrgyzstan’s political environment creates “vulnerabilities” that can be exploited for illicit financial flows. Russian individuals and groups are using Kyrgyzstan’s cryptocurrency ecosystem to evade international sanctions, according to research from UK-based blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs.Publishing its findings in a blog, TRM Labs reported that Kyrgyzstan appears…

More than 200,000 WordPress websites are using a vulnerable version of the Post SMTP plugin that allows hackers to take control of the administrator account. Post SMTP is a popular email delivery plugin for WordPress that counts more than 400,000 active installations. It’s marketed as a replacement of the default ‘wp_mail()’ function that is more reliable and feature-rich. On May 23, a security researcher reported the vulnerability to WordPress security firm PatchStack. The flaw is now identified as CVE-2025-24000 and received a medium severity score of 8.8. The security issue affects all versions of Post SMTP up to 3.2.0 and is…

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