Cybersecurity Awareness Month turns 20
October, as you might have noticed, is Cybersecurity Awareness Month. Now in its 20th year, this aims to bring the public and private sectors to work together to raise awareness about the importance of cybersecurity.
As always industry experts are keen to use the event to offer views on the security landscape, here we round up some of their comments.
Meeting the challenges of API security [Q&A]
In today's increasingly digitally-centered organizations, the development of products, services, and solutions increasingly depends on the implementation of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).
APIs have become the building blocks of modern business applications and are critical to digital transformation -- so much so that API security has become a boardroom issue.
UK regulator to investigate hyperscalers' dominance of the cloud market
The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is launching a market investigation into the supply of public cloud infrastructure services in the UK. Between them, Amazon and Microsoft enjoy a combined market share of 60-70 percent of Britain's cloud computing industry.
This follows a referral by telecoms regulator Ofcom which has expressed concerns around egress fees, discounts -- which may incentivize customers to use only one cloud provider, and technical barriers to switching.
New platform aims to enhance AI research accuracy
AI is making its way into more and more areas of life and work. In some areas though, particularly scientific research, it's vitally important to ensure the accuracy of results.
Norwegian company Iris.ai has developed a method to measure the factual accuracy of AI-generated content -- testing precision and recall, fact tracing, and extraction.
Ransomware is deployed faster as cybercriminals seek to avoid detection
Ransomware is being deployed within one day of initial access in more than 50 percent of engagements, according to research from Secureworks Counter Threat Unit.
In the last 12 months the median dwell time identified in the annual Secureworks State of the Threat Report has fallen from 4.5 days to less than one day. In 10 percent of cases, ransomware was even deployed within five hours of initial access.
Exploring how AI-powered chatbots are changing the business world [Q&A]
Thanks to high-profile tools like ChatGPT, we've witnessed AI appearing in more and more areas and projects this year. Next week sees the launch of the latest Chatbot Summit, held at ExCel London on October 11-12, bringing together industry experts to share practical skills, knowledge, and insights.
We spoke with Chatbot Summit 2024 founder and executive chairman, Yoav Barel, to discuss the impact of AI technology and how businesses can prepare, as well as what summit attendees can expect from the event.
Stream-jacking targets popular YouTube channels
New research from Bitdefender reveals a rise in 'stream-jacking' attacks against high-profile accounts in order to spread fraudulent messages.
The attacks may involve a full account takeover or simply luring followers to a mimicked channel with the promise of rewards using various techniques including livestream pop-ups, QR codes, and malicious links.
Why digital transformation is key to managing supplier relationships [Q&A]
Digital transformation doesn't just affect your own business, it has a major influence on your relationships with suppliers and partners too.
We talked to Dan Amzallag, COO at Ivalua, to discuss the impact of digital transformation on the supplier ecosystem and procurement processes.
Gen Z twice as likely to think cybersecurity isn't worth the effort
In a study that echoes the findings we reported earlier today on employee security habits, research from the National Cybersecurity Alliance (NCA) and CybSafe finds that Gen Z is twice as likely as older generations to think cybersecurity isn't worth the effort.
The poll of over 6,000 individuals across the US, UK, Canada, Germany, France and New Zealand, examined key cybersecurity behaviours, attitudes and trends ahead of October's Cybersecurity Awareness Month.
One in eight open source downloads have known and avoidable risks
This year has seen twice as many software supply chain attacks as 2019-2022 combined and one in eight open source downloads today pose known and avoidable risks.
The latest State of the Software Supply Chain Report from Sonatype, which logged 245,032 malicious packages in 2023, also shows that 96 percent of vulnerabilities are still avoidable.
Younger employees more likely to have unsafe cybersecurity habits
A new report into hidden threats from Ivanti finds that one in three employees believe their actions do not impact their organization's security.
The research also shows that Millennial and Gen Z office workers are more likely to have unsafe cybersecurity habits when compared to Gen X and older (those above 40 years of age).
UK businesses struggle with security budgets as cyber incidents increase
UK businesses have experienced on average 30 cyber incidents over the last twelve months, marking a 25 percent increase compared to last year.
But a new report from iomart and Oxford Economics finds that 27 percent of organizations think their cyber security budget is inadequate to fully protect them from growing threats. This is despite spending more than £40,000 ($48,000) a year on cyber protection such as vulnerability assessments, penetration testing, and red team engagements.
Most AI detectors can't tell if a phishing email was written by a bot
The latest Phishing Threat Trends Report from Egress, based on data from its Egress Defend email security tool, reveals that nearly three-quarters of AI detectors can't tell if a phishing email has been written by a chatbot.
Because they utilize large language models (LLMs), the accuracy of most detector tools increases with longer sample sizes, often requiring a minimum of 250 characters to work. With 44.9 percent of phishing emails not meeting the 250-character limit, and a further 26.5 percent falling below 500, currently AI detectors either won't work reliably or won't work at all on 71.4 percent of attacks.
Collaboration tools open up businesses to added digital risk
Thanks to remote working, businesses have become reliant on tools like Slack and Teams for workplace communication. But this new, unstructured data set introduces risk caused by the everyday conversations in which proprietary, harmful, or sensitive information is shared or deleted.
AI data platform Aware has released a new report based on proprietary research conducted using the AI-powered platform AwareIQ. It finds collaboration platforms are moving beyond chat and are now at the center of a new enterprise workflow, with 15.4 percent of messages originating from integrated third-party applications.
The impact of evolving AI in cybercrime [Q&A]
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been an evolving trend at the very center of cybersecurity in recent years. However, the release of a wave of new tools such as ChatGPT and Microsoft's Jasper chatbot have sparked fresh concerns about the potential for cybercriminals to leverage increasingly sophisticated technologies for nefarious purposes.
We spoke to Zach Fleming, principal architect at Integrity360, to explore whether AI can be used to create sophisticated malware and hacking tools capable of bringing down entire networks. We'll consider which concerns are valid by highlighting the current state of AI, and we'll explore how security teams can best combat the use of AI in cybercrime.
Ian's Bio
Ian spent almost 20 years working with computers before he discovered that writing about them was easier than fixing them. Since then he's written for a number of computer magazines and is a former editor of PC Utilities. Follow him on Mastodon
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