Author: HackWatchit

Following Pope Francis’ death, as is common with global events of this nature, cyber criminals have launched a variety of malicious campaigns. This tactic isn’t new—cyber attackers have long exploited major world events, from the passing of Queen Elizabeth II to natural disasters and global crises like COVID-19, to drive scams, disinformation, and malware infections. Public curiosity and emotional reactions make these moments prime opportunities for attackers to strike. They typically begin with disinformation campaigns on social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, or Facebook, uploading fake images generated by AI. These campaigns are designed to capture user attention, prompting them…

​A ransomware attack in January at Frederick Health Medical Group, a major healthcare provider in Maryland, has led to a data breach affecting nearly one million patients. With almost 4,000 employees and over 25 locations, Frederick Health is one of Frederick County’s largest employers. As the health system revealed in a late March notification to patients, the ransomware attack was detected on January 27, which prompted Frederick Health to notify law enforcement and hire a third-party forensic firm to investigate the incident’s impact. “On January 27, 2025, we experienced a ransomware event affecting our IT systems,” the health system said.…

In brief The artwork from Nike-owned RTFKT NFT collections wasn’t showing earlier Thursday. The issue allegedly arose as a result of an error by cloud service provider Cloudflare, as the artwork is stored off-chain. The images began reappearing amid a move to host the artwork via decentralized storage. The images associated with multiple Ethereum NFT collections from the Nike-acquired RTFKT—which was shuttered late last year—stopped displaying early Thursday due to an alleged issue with cloud hosting service Cloudflare.The company’s flagship Clone X profile picture collection—created in collaboration with noted artist Takashi Murakami—and its Animus collections stopped showing their respective, colorful…

Dakota Nelson // Unknown Unknowns: So you’ve been pentested. Congrats! It might not feel like it, but this will eventually leave you more confident about your security, not less. The real question is – why might it not feel like it? Pentest findings can be broken down many ways, of course – the obvious one being by severity – but I would like to propose another category: information value, or, a more straightforward term, surprise. When you first read your pentest report, there’s a good chance there will be things on there you didn’t expect – vulnerabilities or misconfigurations that…

Harness today unfurled a cloud web application and application programming interface (API) protection (WAAP) platform that makes it simpler for security operation (SecOps) teams to defend application environments.Based on the Traceable API security platform that Harness acquired earlier this year, the Traceable WAAP platform also provides bot mitigation tools and an ability to thwart distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.Sudhir Patamsetti, senior director of product management for cybersecurity at Harness, said the Traceable WAAP makes it simpler for SecOps teams to address cybersecurity issues after applications and their associated APIs have been deployed. That’s especially critical at a time when…

Cisco is honored to be a partner of the Black Hat NOC (Network Operations Center), as the Official Security Cloud Provider. This was our 9th year supporting Black Hat Asia. We work with other official providers to bring the hardware, software and engineers to build and secure the Black Hat network: Arista, Corelight, MyRepublic and Palo Alto Networks. The primary mission in the NOC is network resilience. The partners also provide integrated security, visibility and automation, a SOC (Security Operations Center) inside the NOC. Fig. 1: Presenting the Black Hat Asia Dashboards On screens outside the NOC, partner dashboards gave…

of the DeepSeek-R1 model sent ripples across the global AI community. It delivered breakthroughs on par with the reasoning models from Meta and OpenAI, achieving this in a fraction of the time and at a significantly lower cost. Beyond the headlines and online buzz, how can we assess the model’s reasoning abilities using recognized benchmarks?  Deepseek’s user interface makes it easy to explore its capabilities, but using it programmatically offers deeper insights and more seamless integration into real-world applications. Understanding how to run such models locally also provides enhanced control and offline access. In this article, we explore how to…

U.S. cybersecurity agencies hosted last week Louisiana State University (LSU) and several energy industry and critical infrastructure partners to train against simulated, high-impact cyberattacks on operational technology (OT) and traditional IT infrastructure at CISA’s Control Environment Laboratory Resource (CELR) in Idaho Falls, Idaho. LSU is the first university in the U.S. invited to participate in the CELR exercise, as part of CISA and INL’s efforts to strengthen cyber talent development and research partnerships. The initiative by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T), and the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) comes…

WhatsApp introduces Advanced Chat Privacy to protect sensitive communications Pierluigi Paganini April 24, 2025 WhatsApp adds Advanced Chat Privacy feature that allows users to block others from sharing chat content outside the app. WhatsApp announced the availability of a new feature called “Advanced Chat Privacy” for both individual and group chats that enhances content protection. The feature blocks chat exports, auto-media downloads, and the use of messages in AI features, ensuring conversations stay private and within the app. “Today we’re introducing our latest layer for privacy called “Advanced Chat Privacy.” This new setting available in both chats and groups helps…