Author: HackWatchit

As the calendar flips to March, college basketball fans are gearing up for another exhilarating NCAA tournament. In the future, artificial intelligence and cutting-edge technology could change March Madness as we know it. Let’s break down how the digital revolution could transform the Big Dance. AI Bracketology: The New Sixth Man AI is already being used to predict brackets. Gone are the days of agonizing over your picks based on team mascots or your alma mater’s colors. In 2025, AI-powered bracketology is the name of the game. Fans can use algorithms that crunch data points, from player statistics to historical…

As a tester, I do all my work inside a Virtual Machine (VM). Recently, I found myself in a situation where I needed to get a VM on a Windows PC. The problem is, I did not want to create an account with Broadcom or work with VirtualBox. I needed to get QEMU (https://www.qemu.org/), the Quick Emulator, up and running. QEMU is open-sourced (always a win in my book!) and allows for running virtual machines from a qcow2 image.    That started the quest to find a decent QEMU walkthrough to get started and one did not exist, so I decided…

Cloud environments are dynamic by nature; they frequently change and update configurations. Unless these changes are carefully tracked, they could lead to configuration drift, a situation in which the runtime state of a resource deviates from its intended baseline configuration. Configuration drift can have severe consequences, potentially introducing security vulnerabilities, degrading system performance, and violating compliance requirements.  Manual configuration drift management in large, multi-cloud environments is inefficient and prone to human error. AI helps to offer a more intelligent, automated, and scalable solution for the detection of drift and hence lets an organization take preventive measures against such challenges.  What…

Ransomware attacks remain a significant threat to organizations worldwide, with cybercriminals continuously evolving tactics. Despite long-standing advice from cybersecurity experts against paying ransoms, many businesses still opt to pay, hoping for the safe return of their data. However, this approach often fails and perpetuates the cybercrime cycle, increasing calls for making ransom payments illegal. Recent data indicates a positive shift: only 34% of organizations now pay ransoms, marking an all-time low. This suggests that nearly two-thirds of targeted businesses refuse to succumb to attackers’ demands. While this decline is encouraging, the goal is to reduce ransom payments further. However, when…

The cybersecurity landscape is a complex and ever-evolving ecosystem. At its core lies a fundamental paradox: the more tools we deploy to protect our digital assets, the more complex and vulnerable our security posture becomes. This is a challenge faced by security teams worldwide, but it’s particularly acute for Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs). The average CISO juggles a staggering array of security tools – often more than 75 – sourced from a multitude of vendors. Each tool comes with its own unique management interface, update schedule, and potential vulnerabilities. This creates a patchwork quilt of security, where gaps can…

Image: Shutterstock, ArtHead. In an effort to blend in and make their malicious traffic tougher to block, hosting firms catering to cybercriminals in China and Russia increasingly are funneling their operations through major U.S. cloud providers. Research published this week on one such outfit — a sprawling network tied to Chinese organized crime gangs and aptly named “Funnull” — highlights a persistent whac-a-mole problem facing cloud services. In October 2024, the security firm Silent Push published a lengthy analysis of how Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure were providing services to Funnull, a two-year-old Chinese content delivery network that hosts a…

Authored By Sakshi Jaiswal, Anuradha M In Q3 2024, McAfee Labs identified a sharp rise in the Remcos RAT threat. It has emerged as a significant threat in the world of cybersecurity, gaining traction with its ability to infiltrate systems and compromise sensitive data. This malware, often delivered through phishing emails and malicious attachments, allows cybercriminals to remotely control infected machines, making it a powerful tool for espionage, data theft, and system manipulation. As cyberattacks become more sophisticated, understanding the mechanisms behind RemcosRAT and adopting effective security measures are crucial to protecting your systems from this growing threat. This blog…

Working in Data Science, it can be hard to share insights from complex datasets using only static figures. All the facets that describe the shape and meaning of interesting data are not always captured in a handful of pre-generated figures. While we have powerful technologies available for presenting interactive figures — where a viewer can rotate, filter, zoom, and generally explore complex data  —  they always come with tradeoffs. Here I present my experience using a recently released Python library — marimo — which opens up exciting new opportunities for publishing interactive visualizations across the entire field of data science. Interactive Data Visualization The tradeoffs to…

As Dogecoin makes a comeback off the back of Bitcoin’s surge, some may be pondering: Where did the asset come from? What’s it for? And what’s Tesla CEO Elon Musk got to do with it? The original meme coin’s boom largely has the world’s richest man to thank. Musk’s obsession with shitposting helped boost the coin to a top 10 cryptocurrency.It’s been a wacky ride over the past few years, culminating in Musk’s appointment to lead a government agency called DOGE—yes, really. But we’ll explain it all.2018: What the DOGE?Dogecoin is the biggest and oldest meme coin and the second-biggest proof-of-work…