A former quality assurance employee of National Computer Systems (NCS) was sentenced to two years and eight months in prison for reportedly deleting 180 virtual servers after being fired. Nagaraju Kandula, 39, pleaded guilty to deleting the virtual servers in an attempt to sabotage the firm’s systems out of spite for getting fired from NCS,…
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The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has added a high-severity Windows vulnerability abused in ransomware attacks as a zero-day to its catalog of actively exploited security bugs. Tracked as CVE-2024-26169, this security flaw is caused by an improper privilege management weakness in the Windows Error Reporting service. Successful exploitation lets local attackers gain…
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The U.S. cybersecurity agency also added a recently disclosed Google Pixel flaw to its list of exploited vulnerabilities. The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) confirmed that a Microsoft Windows privilege escalation vulnerability has seen exploitation in attacks. The vulnerability (tracked at CVE-2024-26169) this week was tied to attacks by the Black Basta ransomware…
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Chinese walls Representative Carlos Gimenez, a Florida Republican, questioned Microsoft’s operations in China, which Smith testified accounted for less than 1.5% of Microsoft’s sales. China’s 2017 National Intelligence Law obliges all organisations including foreign companies to cooperate with China’s intelligence agencies in matters of national security. Smith, an attorney and Microsoft’s general counsel for more…
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Microsoft is pitching Recall, which takes periodic screenshots of a computer’s screen to enable new search capabilities, as a key feature for Copilot+ PCs. Launching next week, these devices are what the company is calling ‘the fastest, most intelligent Windows PCs ever built.’ Microsoft said it’s delaying the public release of Recall, the controversial, AI-enabled…
Read MoreUpcoming Speaking Engagements This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m appearing on a panel on Society and Democracy at ACM Collective Intelligence in Boston, Massachusetts. The conference runs from June 26 through 29, 2024, and my panel is at 9:00 AM on Friday, June 28. I’m speaking…
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Microsoft says it removed a Copilot app that was “incorrectly” added to Windows 10 and Windows 11 systems in April due to buggy Microsoft Edge updates. The AI-powered Copilot digital assistant was also added to some Windows Server 2025 preview builds earlier this year, but the company removed it after backlash from Windows admins. However, after…
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From Microsoft Azure AI and Google Vertex AI to OpenAI GPT and IBM watsonx, here are the world’s top 10 cloud AI developer services ranked in Gartner’s new report. As the AI era gets underway, the largest and most innovative cloud companies in the world are investing heavily in developer services to deliver the promised…
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A former quality assurance employee of National Computer Systems (NCS) was sentenced to two years and eight months in prison for reportedly deleting 180 virtual servers after being fired. Nagaraju Kandula, 39, pleaded guilty to deleting the virtual servers in an attempt to sabotage the firm’s systems out of spite for getting fired from NCS,…
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The Scattered Spider gang has started to steal data from software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications and establish persistence through creating new virtual machines. Also tracked as a.k.a. Octo Tempest, 0ktapus, Scatter Swine, and UNC3944, the gang typically engages in social engineering attacks that use SMS phishing, SIM swapping, and account hijacking for on-premise access. Scattered Spider is the name given…
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