Author: HackWatchit

first in a series on language models and covers the advances leading up to the release of Chat-GPT. 0) Prologue: The Turing test In October 1950, Alan Turing proposed a test. Was it possible to have a conversation with a machine and not be able to tell it apart from a human. He called this “the imitation game”. It was introduced in the paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”. He was intending to use this test as a proxy to the deeper and vaguer question, “can a machine think”. Seventy years later, in 2020, several large language models like ChatGPT from…

The European Commission has signed a €36 million agreement with the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) to establish and administer the EU Cybersecurity Reserve. Funded through the Digital Europe Programme (DEP) under the Cyber Solidarity Act, the initiative aims to strengthen the cyber resilience of the EU, its Member States, and, under certain conditions, third countries associated with DEP.  Announced on Tuesday, the EU Cybersecurity Reserve will support the response to and recovery from significant and large-scale cyber incidents. It will consist of incident response services from trusted service providers that can be deployed to help address such cybersecurity…

A critical vulnerability (CVE-2025-9074) in Docker Desktop for Windows and macOS was fixed. The flaw allowed a malicious container to escape and gain administrator access to the host computer. A security flaw in Docker Desktop, a popular application for developers, has been fixed after it was found to allow attackers to break out of isolated containers and take full control of a computer. This vulnerability, officially known as CVE-2025-9074 with a critical score of 9.3 out of 10, impacts both Windows and macOS versions of the software. The flaw, which was patched in Docker Desktop version 4.44.3 on August 20,…

The top data official from the Social Security Administration is warning that the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency has put the Social Security information of more than 300 million Americans at risk of exposure to malicious actors. A new whistleblower disclosure from SSA Chief Data Officer Charles Borges reported that DOGE officials, while working at SSA, authorized themselves to create a live, cloud-based version of SSA’s entire dataset, containing personal information of millions of Americans. DOGE officials uploaded the dataset to a vulnerable system, without including measures for security or oversight, according to a whistleblower disclosure that the Government…

As students head back to school, Contrast Security customers are getting ready for more sophisticated cyberattacks. Dark Reading published a feature on the growing risks facing K-12 schools.  The post Cyber Threat Protection for K-12 Schools | Protecting Students and Teachers from Rising Cyberattack appeared first on Security Boulevard.

What is happening?  On January 6th, 2025, the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) published a new set of cybersecurity requirements as part of the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) in the Federal Register. The proposal mandates that healthcare organizations strengthen their cybersecurity defenses, transitioning from a reactive approach to a risk-based focus. Once finalized, it will result in an update to the Security Rule of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).  What is the HIPAA Security Rule and the Proposed Update?  The HIPAA Security Rule established national standards to protect individuals’ electronic personal health information (ePHI) that is…

Disney+ is available in many countries worldwide, making it easy to access the streaming platform when traveling abroad. Yet, if you’re traveling to a country where it’s not yet offered, such as China or Russia, or you simply want to access your home country’s library, then a VPN, or Virtual Private Network, is necessary. Total VPN successfully unblocked multiple Disney+ regions in our latest tests, but hiccups can happen even with the best VPNs. If you’ve found Total VPN isn’t working with Disney+, then you’ve come to the right place. Here, we’ll take you through some of the most common reasons…

In brief Legal experts say prosecutors face uphill battle appealing “unusually lenient” sentence for Estonians who ran a $577 million crypto Ponzi scheme. Judge Lasnik sentenced defendants to time served, rejecting prosecutors’ 10-year prison request due to concerns about foreign defendants’ treatment. HashFlare fraud hit 440,000 victims worldwide through fake mining contracts, with $400 million seized for compensation. Federal prosecutors have moved to overturn what one legal expert called an “unusually lenient” outcome in one of the largest crypto frauds ever tried in the region.The government on Tuesday appealed with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals the “time served” sentences…

Over 300,000 internet-facing Plex Media Server instances are still vulnerable to attack via CVE-2025-34158, a critical vulnerability for which Plex has issued a fix for earlier this month, Censys has warned. About CVE-2025-34158 Plex Media Server (PMS) is software that allows users to turn their Windows/Linux/macOS computer or their network-attached storage devices into a personal media server. It organizes their movies, music, photos, and other media and enables them to stream the content on nearly any device. CVE-2025-34158 is an improper input validation vulnerability that affects PMS versions 1.41.7.x to 1.42.0.x, and has been fixed in version 1.42.1. The flaw’s…