Italy Bans ChatGPT: A Portent of the Future, Balancing the Pros and Cons

In a groundbreaking move, Italy has imposed a ban on the widely popular AI tool ChatGPT. This decision comes in the wake of concerns over possible misinformation, biases and the ethical challenges AI-powered technology presents. The ban has sparked a global conversation, with many speculating whether other countries will follow suit.

What is XDR? Is the security impact real or hyped?

With so many overlapping and self-serving definitions of XDR (Extended Detection and Response), embracing the innovations in technology first require that we parse the alphabet soup. We agree with several industry analysts covering the space that XDR is a vendor push with no real customer demand, but the problem spaces within XDR are of significant customer interest. Consensus has emerged on a few XDR elements such as: cloud-native/SaaS, improved detection, and improved response.

The Work-Life Mix-up: How to Stay Secure in the Hybrid Work Era

Remote work is no longer a trend — in 2022, remote workers represented 30% of the overall workforce. Cloud services and mobile devices have made the work environment more flexible, and organizations have implemented bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies to enable employees who are working from anywhere to get more done.

Scareware From a Phony Ransomware Group

BleepingComputer reports that a cybercriminal gang is sending phony ransomware threats to prior victims of ransomware attacks. The gang, which calls itself “Midnight,” claims to have stolen hundreds of gigabytes of data and threatens to leak it if the victim doesn’t pay a ransom. Security firm Kroll said the gang’s ransom notes use the names of more prolific ransomware actors.

Forescout Research - Vedere Labs Releases String Deobfuscation Tool for Analysis of Mirai IoT Botnet Variants

As part of our recently released 2022 Threat Roundup report, Forescout Vedere Labs described how the Mirai IoT botnet continues to evolve via new variants and adaptations, such as Gafgyt and RapperBot, more than six years after it started taking over IoT devices and had its source code leaked.

Social Engineering Attacks Utilizing Generative AI Increase by 135%

New insights from cybersecurity artificial intelligence (AI) company Darktrace shows a 135% increase in novel social engineering attacks from Generative AI. This new form of social engineering that contributed to this increase is much more sophisticated in nature, using linguistics techniques with increased text volume, punctuation, and sentence length to trick their victim. We've recently covered ChatGPT scams and other various AI scams, but this attack proves to be very different.

Trustwave Named 2023 Company of the Year and Innovation Leader for Managed and Professional Security in the Americas by Frost & Sullivan

The analyst firm Frost & Sullivan awarded Trustwave the dual honors of being named 2023 Company of the Year for Managed and Professional Security in the Americas, Excellence in Best Practices, and as the Leading Innovator in the 2023 Frost Radar™: Americas Managed & Professional Security Services Market. Trustwave was also recently named a Top 5 Innovator in the Global MDR Radar Report.

How a small team of volunteers is helping people break free of ransomware

It’s like a technological thriller come to life. Ransomware entered the global spotlight in 2021 after a number of high-profile cases caught the media’s attention. But long before the growing threat entered the public domain, a small group of individuals started quietly helping thousands of people and businesses get their information back – without paying the ransom.

Understanding OCR in Banking: Definition and Applications

OCR is the process of using technology to read characters from printed or handwritten text included inside digital images of actual documents, such scanned paper documents (optical character recognition). OCR’s primary function is to read a document’s text and convert the characters into code that may be used for data processing. Another name for optical character recognition is text recognition (OCR).