Meet the Brains Behind the Malware-Friendly AI Chat Service ‘WormGPT’

Credit to Author: BrianKrebs| Date: Tue, 08 Aug 2023 17:37:23 +0000

WormGPT, a private new chatbot service advertised as a way to use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help write malicious software without all the pesky prohibitions on such activity enforced by ChatGPT and Google Bard, has started adding restrictions on how the service can be used. Faced with customers trying to use WormGPT to create ransomware and phishing scams, the 23-year-old Portuguese programmer who created the project now says his service is slowly morphing into “a more controlled environment.” The large language models (LLMs) made by ChatGPT parent OpenAI or Google or Microsoft all have various safety measures designed to prevent people from abusing them for nefarious purposes — such as creating malware or hate speech. In contrast, WormGPT has promoted itself as a new LLM that was created specifically for cybercrime activities.

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Teach a Man to Phish and He’s Set for Life

Credit to Author: BrianKrebs| Date: Fri, 04 Aug 2023 13:49:15 +0000

One frustrating aspect of email phishing is the frequency with which scammers fall back on tried-and-true methods that really have no business working these days. Like attaching a phishing email to a traditional, clean email message, or leveraging link redirects on LinkedIn, or abusing an encoding method that makes it easy to disguise booby-trapped Microsoft Windows files as relatively harmless documents.

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How Malicious Android Apps Slip Into Disguise

Credit to Author: BrianKrebs| Date: Thu, 03 Aug 2023 11:22:55 +0000

Researchers say mobile malware purveyors have been abusing a bug in the Google Android platform that lets them sneak malicious code into benign mobile apps and evade security scanning tools. Google says it has updated its app malware detection mechanisms in response to the new research.

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Who and What is Behind the Malware Proxy Service SocksEscort?

Credit to Author: BrianKrebs| Date: Tue, 25 Jul 2023 21:20:55 +0000

Researchers this month uncovered a two-year-old Linux-based remote access trojan dubbed AVrecon that enslaves Internet routers into botnet that bilks online advertisers and performs password-spraying attacks. Now new findings reveal that AVrecon is the malware engine behind a 12-year-old service called SocksEscort, which rents hacked residential and small business devices to cybercriminals looking to hide their true location online.

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Few Fortune 100 Firms List Security Pros in Their Executive Ranks

Credit to Author: BrianKrebs| Date: Fri, 21 Jul 2023 19:11:16 +0000

Many things have changed since 2018, such as the names of the companies in the Fortune 100 list. But one aspect of that vaunted list that hasn’t shifted much since is that very few of these companies list any security professionals within their top executive ranks. The next time you receive a breach notification letter that invariably says a company you trusted places a top priority on customer security and privacy, consider this: Only four of the Fortune 100 companies currently list a security professional in the executive leadership pages of their websites. This is actually down from five of the Fortune 100 in 2018, the last time KrebsOnSecurity performed this analysis.

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LeakedSource Owner Quit Ashley Madison a Month Before 2015 Hack

Credit to Author: BrianKrebs| Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2023 14:57:04 +0000

[This is Part III in a series on research conducted for a recent Hulu documentary on the 2015 hack of marital infidelity website AshleyMadison.com.] In 2019, a Canadian company called Defiant Tech Inc. pleaded guilty to running LeakedSource[.]com, a service that sold access to billions of passwords and other data exposed in countless data breaches. KrebsOnSecurity has learned that the owner of Defiant Tech, a 32-year-old Ontario man named Jordan Evan Bloom, was hired in late 2014 as a developer for the marital infidelity site AshleyMadison.com. Bloom resigned from AshleyMadison citing health reasons in June 2015 — less than one month before unidentified hackers stole data on 37 million users — and launched LeakedSource three months later.

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SEO Expert Hired and Fired By Ashley Madison Turned on Company, Promising Revenge

Credit to Author: BrianKrebs| Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2023 21:45:02 +0000

[This is Part II of a story published here last week on reporting that went into a new Hulu documentary series on the 2015 Ashley Madison hack.] It was around 9 p.m. on Sunday, July 19, when I received a message through the contact form on KrebsOnSecurity.com that the marital infidelity website AshleyMadison.com had been hacked. The message contained links to confidential Ashley Madison documents, and included a manifesto that said a hacker group calling itself the Impact Team was prepared to leak data on all 37 million users unless Ashley Madison and a sister property voluntarily closed down within 30 days.

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Top Suspect in 2015 Ashley Madison Hack Committed Suicide in 2014

Credit to Author: BrianKrebs| Date: Fri, 07 Jul 2023 19:55:45 +0000

When the marital infidelity website AshleyMadison.com learned in July 2015 that hackers were threatening to publish data stolen from 37 million users, the company’s then-CEO Noel Biderman was quick to point the finger at an unnamed former contractor. But as a new documentary series on Hulu reveals [SPOILER ALERT!], there was just one problem with that theory: Their top suspect had killed himself more than a year before the hackers began publishing stolen user data.

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