Author: HackWatchit
Hackers are stashing malware in a place that’s largely out of the reach of most defenses—inside domain name system (DNS) records that map domain names to their corresponding numerical IP addresses.The practice allows malicious scripts and early-stage malware to fetch binary files without having to download them from suspicious sites or attach them to emails, where they frequently get quarantined by antivirus software. That’s because traffic for DNS lookups often goes largely unmonitored by many security tools. Whereas web and email traffic is often closely scrutinized, DNS traffic largely represents a blind spot for such defenses.A Strange and Enchanting PlaceResearchers…
In episode 426 of the “Smashing Security” podcast, Graham reveals how you can hijack a train’s brakes from 150 miles away using kit cheaper than a second-hand PlayStation. Meanwhile, Carole investigates how Grok went berserk, which didn’t stop the Department of Defense signing a contract with Elon’s AI chatbot. So who is responsible when your chatbot becomes a bigot? Plus: Email headaches, SPF rage, and a glowing review for… Taskmaster SuperMax Plus? All this and more is discussed in the latest edition of the “Smashing Security” podcast by cybersecurity veterans Graham Cluley and Carole Theriault. Warning: This podcast may contain…
Global Attacks Continued to Rise, But the Details Tell a Bigger Story Every quarter, Check Point Research publishes the threats of the past three months, gathering intelligence from our ThreatCloud AI platform, which analyzes millions of indicators of compromise (IoCs) daily. Powered by over 50 AI-driven engines and sourced from more than 150,000 networks and millions of endpoints, this data provides a real-time view into the threats organizations face globally. In Q2 2025, that view revealed an accelerating wave of cyber attacks targeting almost every sector and region around the world. In Q2 2025, the global average number of weekly…
Over the years, the number of services we use has exploded, and so has the need to protect our credentials. Back in what I like to call “the age of innocence,” we scribbled passwords on paper or reused “password123” across five different accounts. Let’s be honest: those days are over. Whether we like it or not, password managers have become essential to good cybersecurity hygiene and one of the first lines of defense against unauthorized access. Meet Passwork 7.0: Self-hosted and enterprise-ready Passwork recently launched version 7.0 of its self-hosted password manager, designed for everything from small teams to large…
Envisioning the Future of Endpoint Protection Gartner has positioned CrowdStrike furthest right in Completeness of Vision for the sixth consecutive time. We believe this placement reflects our bold vision for the future of endpoint security and our ongoing innovation to help our customers stay ahead of today’s adversaries. Adversaries are leveraging AI to conduct attacks with greater speed, stealth, and precision. To stop modern threats, organizations require AI-driven security that acts as a force multiplier by delivering automation, faster decisions, and real outcomes that reduce risk and stop breaches. As the threat landscape grows more sophisticated and security teams are…
“While scanning the web for exposed databases, cybersecurity researcher Jeremiah Fowler discovered a massive set of unprotected records linked to the Gladney Center for Adoption, left online without a password, without encryption, and accessible to anyone.” The database, containing 2.49 gigabytes and holding more than 1.1 million records, included deeply sensitive information about children, adoptive parents, birth families, and internal staff. Everything from names and contact details to case notes and private assessments was accessible to anyone with an internet connection, especially to those who know how to find exposed cloud servers, something cybercriminals are very familiar with. Fowler quickly…
Cryptocurrency exchange BigONE disclosed that hackers stole various digital assets valued at $27 million in an attack yesterday. The platform announced that private keys and user data remain unaffected by the intrusion and any customers that incurred losses will be reimbursed from available reserves. “In the early hours of July 16, BigONE detected abnormal movements involving a portion of the platform’s assets,” reads the announcement. “Upon investigation, it was confirmed to be the result of a third-party attack targeting our hot wallet.” The company assured users that the attack method was identified and fully contained. BigONE partnered with security firm SlowMist…
With large-scale threats like ransomware outbreaks and cloud service disruptions becoming more frequent and complex, the cyber insurance industry faces a growing dilemma of how to model catastrophic risks without reliable historical data. In response, German multinational insurance company CyberCube and Munich Re collaborated to survey cybersecurity experts to advance the insurance industry’s understanding of systemic cyber risks, focusing primarily on widespread malware and cloud outage events. The move aims to tap expert judgment to fill gaps in accumulation modeling, challenge assumptions in cyber catastrophe models, and explore the real-world limits of resilience and mitigation. Drawing on insights from 93…
algorithms assume you’re working with completely unlabeled data. But if you’ve actually worked on these problems, you know the reality is often different. In practice, anomaly detection tasks often come with at least a few labeled examples, maybe from past investigations, or your subject matter expert flagged a couple of anomalies to help you define the problem more clearly. In these situations, if we ignore these valuable labeled examples and stick with those purely unsupervised methods, we are leaving money on the table. So the question is, how can we actually make use of those few labeled anomalies? If you…