AIs Discovering Vulnerabilities I’ve been writing about the possibility of AIs automatically discovering code vulnerabilities since at least 2018. This is an ongoing area of research: AIs doing source code scanning, AIs finding zero-days in the wild, and everything in between. The AIs aren’t very good at it yet, but they’re getting better. Here’s some … Read more
Subverting LLM Coders Really interesting research: “An LLM-Assisted Easy-to-Trigger Backdoor Attack on Code Completion Models: Injecting Disguised Vulnerabilities against Strong Detection“: Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed code com-pletion tasks, providing context-based suggestions to boost developer productivity in software engineering. As users often fine-tune these models for specific applications, poisoning and backdoor attacks can … Read more
Perfectl Malware Perfectl in an impressive piece of malware: The malware has been circulating since at least 2021. It gets installed by exploiting more than 20,000 common misconfigurations, a capability that may make millions of machines connected to the Internet potential targets, researchers from Aqua Security said. It can also exploit CVE-2023-33246, a vulnerability with … Read more
IronNet Has Shut Down After retiring in 2014 from an uncharacteristically long tenure running the NSA (and US CyberCommand), Keith Alexander founded a cybersecurity company called IronNet. At the time, he claimed that it was based on IP he developed on his own time while still in the military. That always troubled me. Whatever ideas … Read more
Weird Zimbra Vulnerability Hackers can execute commands on a remote computer by sending malformed emails to a Zimbra mail server. It’s critical, but difficult to exploit. In an email sent Wednesday afternoon, Proofpoint researcher Greg Lesnewich seemed to largely concur that the attacks weren’t likely to lead to mass infections that could install ransomware or … Read more
