Author: HackWatchit

Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok had a strange fixation last week—it couldn’t stop talking about “white genocide” in South Africa, no matter what users asked it about.On May 14, users started posting instances of Grok inserting claims about South African farm attacks and racial violence into completely unrelated queries. Whether asked about sports, Medicaid cuts, or even a cute pig video, Grok somehow steered conversations toward alleged persecution of white South Africans.The timing raised concerns, coming shortly after Musk himself—who is actually a South Africa-born and raised white dude—posted about anti-white racism and white genocide on X. There are 140…

Classified research and academic institutions often aren’t mentioned in the same breadth. One is secretive, and the other thrives on openness and sharing. The Naval Postgraduate School is trying to become the conduit that connects these two often divergent efforts. Kevin Smith, the vice provost for research and innovation, said NPS is planning to address these sometimes opposite goals through its new Naval Innovation Center, which former Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro announced in December 2022. “It’s not NPS’s Innovation Center, and that’s very important to understand. The reason why it’s going to take place at NPS and be co-located…

Why is NHI Management Integral to Your Cybersecurity Strategy? If you’ve ever wondered, “How can I make my cybersecurity strategy more robust and reduce the risk of security breaches?” then Non-Human Identity (NHI) management could be the answer you’re looking for. NHIs are machine identities frequently used. They are birthed from a unique encrypted identifier or ‘Secret’, similar to a passport and the permissions granted to that Secret by a destination server. In effect, just as a tourist needs a passport and visa to travel, NHIs need their own credentials to navigate cybersecurity. Thus, securing these identities and their ‘passports’…

Paul Clark* // Feeling uncomfortably productive today? I’ve got a remedy for that, involving internet memes and signal processing. Come and waste a few minutes of your day with Laurel, Yanny, and GNURadio. It’s been going on for a couple of days, so you’re probably already wearying of the interpretive controversy centered around the audio clip. In short, some people listen to it and clearly hear the word “Laurel,” while others clearly hear the word “Yanni.” Although the academic brain trust hasn’t yet converged on a consensus explanation, there does appear to be some connection to the lower and higher…

I’ve science consultant for the past three years, and I’ve had the opportunity to work on multiple projects across various industries. Yet, I noticed one common denominator among most of the clients I worked with: They rarely have a clear idea of the project objective. This is one of the main obstacles data scientists face, especially now that Gen AI is taking over every domain. But let’s suppose that after some back and forth, the objective becomes clear. We managed to pin down a specific question to answer. For example: I want to classify my customers into two groups according…

During the second day of Pwn2Own Berlin 2025, competitors earned $435,000 after exploiting zero-day bugs in multiple products, including Microsoft SharePoint, VMware ESXi, Oracle VirtualBox, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Mozilla Firefox. The highlight was a successful attempt from Nguyen Hoang Thach of STARLabs SG against the VMware ESXi, which earned him $150,000 for an integer overflow exploit. Dinh Ho Anh Khoa of Viettel Cyber Security was awarded $100,000 for hacking Microsoft SharePoint by leveraging an exploit chain combining an auth bypass and an insecure deserialization flaw. Palo Alto Networks’ Edouard Bochin and Tao Yan also demoed an out-of-bounds write…

Do you know that the average cost of a data breach is expected to reach over USD 4 million by the end of 2025, having already reached around USD 4.86 million globally in 2024. Data leaks and cyberattacks have increased in frequency, affecting more than 342 million people in 2023. Here are a few recent data breach cases in prominent fields. Thus, in the modern world, data protection becomes crucial to protect individual rights, foster trust in digital interactions, and preserve personal integrity. According to Research Nester’s analysis, the market for data protection is expected to reach USD 1.12 trillion…

Paul Clark* // What is Software Defined Radio and why should you, the noble InfoSec professional, care about it? What kind of hardware and software do you need to start working with SDR? How do you set it all up? Join Paul Clark as he answers these questions and walks through a quick demo to whet your SDR appetite. Slides can be found here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/x00d7ugz81x4pmm/BHIS%20Webcast%20May%202018.pdf?dl=0 ______________ *Paul Clark owns Factoria Labs, an organization dedicated to the propagation of software defined radio. He’s teaching some classes at Black Hat in Vegas this year. Sign up for his Introductory or Intermediate classes…

Xona Systems, provider of secure access solutions for operational technology (OT) environments, announced its partnership with Solution Synergy, a trusted digital transformation partner for critical infrastructure industries. Together, the companies will empower organizations to modernize operations with secure, identity-based access management that protects critical systems without disrupting performance or reliability. At a time when operational networks are increasingly connected — and increasingly targeted — the need for robust, streamlined access control has never been greater. This partnership combines Xona’s award-winning secure access platform with Solution Synergy’s cybersecurity and OT expertise to deliver security-first remote access and privileged user management to…