Source: securityboulevard.com – Author: Jeffrey Burt It took two brothers who went to MIT months to plan how they were going to steal, launder and hide millions of dollars in cryptocurrency — and only 12 seconds to actually pull off the heist. The brothers, Anton Peraire-Bueno and James Pepaire-Bueno, were indicted by federal prosecutors this […]

La entrada Brothers Indicted for Stealing $25 Million of Ethereum in 12 Seconds – Source: securityboulevard.com se publicó primero en CISO2CISO.COM & CYBER SECURITY GROUP.

Source: securityboulevard.com – Author: Richi Jennings Pictured: Several successful American IT professionals. The U.S. Justice Department says N. Korean hackers are getting remote IT jobs, posing as Americans. They’re funneling their pay into Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program and likely leaving behind remote-access Trojans. Two have been arrested so far, with more suspects sought. In today’s SB Blogwatch, […]

La entrada North Korea IT Worker Scam Brings Malware and Funds Nukes – Source: securityboulevard.com se publicó primero en CISO2CISO.COM & CYBER SECURITY GROUP.

Enlarge (credit: SEAN GLADWELL)

Unraveling how consciousness arises out of particular configurations of organic matter is a quest that has absorbed scientists and philosophers for ages. Now, with AI systems behaving in strikingly conscious-looking ways, it is more important than ever to get a handle on who and what is capable of experiencing life on a conscious level. As Christof Koch writes in Then I Am Myself the World, "That you are intimately acquainted with the way life feels is a brute fact about the world that cries out for an explanation." His explanation—bounded by the limits of current research and framed through Koch’s preferred theory of consciousness—is what he eloquently attempts to deliver.

Koch, a physicist, neuroscientist, and former president of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, has spent his career hunting for the seat of consciousness, scouring the brain for physical footprints of subjective experience. It turns out that the posterior hot zone, a region in the back of the neocortex, is intricately connected to self-awareness and experiences of sound, sight, and touch. Dense networks of neocortical neurons in this area connect in a looped configuration; output signals feedback into input neurons, allowing the posterior hot zone to influence its own behavior. And herein, Koch claims, lies the key to consciousness.

In the hot zone

According to integrated information theory (IIT)—which Koch strongly favors over a multitude of contending theories of consciousness—the Rosetta Stone of subjective experience is the ability of a system to influence itself: to use its past state to affect its present state and its present state to influence its future state.

Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Source: www.cybertalk.org – Author: slandau EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Cyber security experts have recently uncovered a sophisticated cyber attack campaign targeting U.S-based organizations that are involved in artificial intelligence (AI) projects. Targets have included organizations in academia, private industry and government service. Known as UNK_SweetSpecter, this campaign utilizes the SugarGh0st remote access trojan (RAT) to infiltrate networks. […]

La entrada SugarGh0st RAT variant, targeted AI attacks – Source: www.cybertalk.org se publicó primero en CISO2CISO.COM & CYBER SECURITY GROUP.

It took two brothers who went to MIT months to plan how they were going to steal, launder and hide millions of dollars in cryptocurrency -- and only 12 seconds to actually pull off the heist.

The post Brothers Indicted for Stealing $25 Million of Ethereum in 12 Seconds appeared first on Security Boulevard.

WTH? DPRK IT WFH: Justice Department says N. Korean hackers are getting remote IT jobs, posing as Americans.

The post North Korea IT Worker Scam Brings Malware and Funds Nukes appeared first on Security Boulevard.

Source: securityboulevard.com – Author: Nathan Eddy Ransomware claims surged by 64% year-over-year, particularly among mid-market and emerging businesses. There was a sharp rise in “indirect” ransomware incidents, which grew by more than 415% compared to 2022. These were among the key findings from At-Bay’s investigation into the anatomy of ransomware attacks in the U.S. in […]

La entrada Ransomware Attacks Evolve as Average Ransom Demand Tops $1.26 Million – Source: securityboulevard.com se publicó primero en CISO2CISO.COM & CYBER SECURITY GROUP.

Slack reveals it has been training AI/ML models on customer data, including messages, files and usage information. It's opt-in by default.

The post User Outcry as Slack Scrapes Customer Data for AI Model Training appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Overall ransomware frequency grew by 64% in 2023, with increases in both direct and indirect ransomware. Victims paid $282,000 in ransom on average, a 77% drop in price, and half the companies avoided paying a ransom completely.

The post Ransomware Attacks Evolve as Average Ransom Demand Tops $1.26 Million appeared first on Security Boulevard.

The Black Basta group abuses remote connection tool Quick Assist in vishing attacks leading to ransomware deployment.

The post Microsoft Quick Assist Tool Abused for Ransomware Delivery appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Hackers can find templates for DocuSign and other companies for their phishing campaigns on dark web marketplaces for as little as $10.

The post Hackers Use Fake DocuSign Templates to Scam Organizations appeared first on Security Boulevard.

VFCFinder analyzes commit histories to pinpoint the most likely commits associated with vulnerability fixes.

The post VFCFinder Highlights Security Patches in Open Source Software appeared first on Security Boulevard.

Generative AI is poised to unlock trillions in annual economic value across industries. This rapidly evolving field is changing the way we approach everything from content creation to software development, promising never-before-seen efficiency and productivity gains.

In this session, experts from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey, discuss the drivers fueling the massive potential impact of generative AI. Plus, they look at key industries set to capture the largest share of this value and practical strategies for effectively upskilling their workforces to take advantage of these productivity gains. 

Watch this session to:

• Explore generative AI’s economic impact
• Understand workforce upskilling needs
• Integrate generative AI responsibly
• Establish an AI-ready business model

Learn how to seamlessly integrate generative AI into your organization’s workflows while fostering a skilled and adaptable workforce. Register now to learn how to unlock the trillion-dollar potential of generative AI.

Register here for free.

Source: securityboulevard.com – Author: Jeffrey Burt The operators behind the Ebury server-side malware botnet have been doing business since at least 2009 and, according to the threat researchers who have been tracking it for the last decade, are stronger and more active than ever. The malware has compromised at least 400,000 Linux servers over the […]

La entrada 15-Year-Old Ebury Botnet Compromised 400,000 Linux Servers – Source: securityboulevard.com se publicó primero en CISO2CISO.COM & CYBER SECURITY GROUP.

Palo Alto Networks is acquiring the QRadar SaaS offerings from IBM, and then will migrate users to its Cortex XSIAM SOC delivered as a cloud service.

The post Palo Alto Networks and IBM Align Cybersecurity Strategies appeared first on Security Boulevard.

Palo Alto Networks and IBM announced a significant partnership to jointly provide cybersecurity solutions.

The post Palo Alto Networks Announces Major Cybersecurity Partnership With IBM, Acquires QRadar SaaS Assets  appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Source: news.sophos.com – Author: Angela Gunn The deluge of patches in April dried up substantially in May, as Microsoft on Tuesday released 59 patches touching 11 product families. Windows as usual takes the lion’s share of patches with 48, with the rest spread among .NET, 365 Apps for Enterprise, Azure, Bing Search for iOS, Dynamics […]

La entrada No mayday call necessary for the year’s fifth Patch Tuesday – Source: news.sophos.com se publicó primero en CISO2CISO.COM & CYBER SECURITY GROUP.

The operators behind the Ebury server-side malware botnet have been doing business since at least 2009 and, according to the threat researchers who have been tracking it for the last decade, are stronger and more active than ever. The malware has compromised at least 400,000 Linux servers over the past 15 years, with about 100,000..

The post 15-Year-Old Ebury Botnet Compromised 400,000 Linux Servers appeared first on Security Boulevard.

Phish Ahoy! Hacker took advantage of Dell’s lack of anti-scraping defense.

The post Dell Hell Redux — More Personal Info Stolen by ‘Menelik’ appeared first on Security Boulevard.

Intel has published 41 new May 2024 Patch Tuesday advisories covering a total of more than 90 vulnerabilities. 

The post Intel Publishes 41 Security Advisories for Over 90 Vulnerabilities  appeared first on SecurityWeek.

When a commercial ship travels from the port of Ras Tanura in Saudi Arabia to Tokyo Bay, it’s not only carrying cargo; it’s also transporting millions of data points across a wide array of partners and complex technology systems.

Consider, for example, Maersk. The global shipping container and logistics company has more than 100,000 employees, offices in 120 countries, and operates about 800 container ships that can each hold 18,000 tractor-trailer containers. From manufacture to delivery, the items within these containers carry hundreds or thousands of data points, highlighting the amount of supply chain data organizations manage on a daily basis.

Until recently, access to the bulk of an organizations’ supply chain data has been limited to specialists, distributed across myriad data systems. Constrained by traditional data warehouse limitations, maintaining the data requires considerable engineering effort; heavy oversight, and substantial financial commitment. Today, a huge amount of data—generated by an increasingly digital supply chain—languishes in data lakes without ever being made available to the business.

A 2023 Boston Consulting Group survey notes that 56% of managers say although investment in modernizing data architectures continues, managing data operating costs remains a major pain point. The consultancy also expects data deluge issues are likely to worsen as the volume of data generated grows at a rate of 21% from 2021 to 2024, to 149 zettabytes globally.

“Data is everywhere,” says Mark Sear, director of AI, data, and integration at Maersk. “Just consider the life of a product and what goes into transporting a computer mouse from China to the United Kingdom. You have to work out how you get it from the factory to the port, the port to the next port, the port to the warehouse, and the warehouse to the consumer. There are vast amounts of data points throughout that journey.”

Sear says organizations that manage to integrate these rich sets of data are poised to reap valuable business benefits. “Every single data point is an opportunity for improvement—to improve profitability, knowledge, our ability to price correctly, our ability to staff correctly, and to satisfy the customer,” he says.

Organizations like Maersk are increasingly turning to a data lakehouse architecture. By combining the cost-effective scale of a data lake with the capability and performance of a data warehouse, a data lakehouse promises to help companies unify disparate supply chain data and provide a larger group of users with access to data, including structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. Building analytics on top of the lakehouse not only allows this new architectural approach to advance supply chain efficiency with better performance and governance, but it can also support easy and immediate data analysis and help reduce operational costs.

This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff.

Source: www.darkreading.com – Author: Nate Nelson, Contributing Writer Source: Design Pics Inc via Alamy Stock Photo Scattered Spider hackers have been tearing through the finance and insurance sectors, all while authorities are preparing legal actions to stop them. A game of cops and robbers is playing out between the FBI and Scattered Spider (aka UNC3944, […]

La entrada As the FBI Closes In, Scattered Spider Attacks Finance, Insurance Orgs – Source: www.darkreading.com se publicó primero en CISO2CISO.COM & CYBER SECURITY GROUP.

Source: news.sophos.com – Author: Sally Adam Click above to read this as a PDF instead In the early years of ransomware, many (if not, most) victims were reluctant to admit publicly that they had been hit for fear of exacerbating the business impact of the attack. Concerns about negative press and customer attrition led many […]

La entrada The role of law enforcement in remediating ransomware attacks – Source: news.sophos.com se publicó primero en CISO2CISO.COM & CYBER SECURITY GROUP.

Source: news.sophos.com – Author: Sally Adam PRODUCTS & SERVICES I am delighted to announce that the Sophos Incident Response service has been awarded U.K.’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) Cyber Incident Response (CIR) Level 2 status by CREST. This assurance confirms that amid the sophisticated cybersecurity threat landscape, Sophos has the experience and capabilities to […]

La entrada Sophos Incident Response achieves NCSC Certified Incident Response (CIR) Level 2 status – Source: news.sophos.com se publicó primero en CISO2CISO.COM & CYBER SECURITY GROUP.

Patch Tuesday: Microsoft documents 60 security flaws in multiple software products and flags an actively exploited Windows zero-day for urgent attention.

The post Microsoft Warns of Active Zero-Day Exploitation, Patches 60 Windows Vulnerabilities appeared first on SecurityWeek.

The Biden Administration is moving to cybersecurity standards for hospitals, but the AHA is pushing back, saying voluntary models are enough.

The post UnitedHealth, Ascension Attacks Feed Debate Over Health Care Security appeared first on Security Boulevard.

New account passwords, often used during onboarding, are vulnerable to sophisticated attacks from malicious actors.

Good idea to check: What’s your company using?

The post Easily Guessed Passwords for New Accounts Include “User”, “Temp”, “Welcome” appeared first on Security Boulevard.

Dubai, United Arab Emirates, May 14th, 2024 - DigiGlass by Redington, Managed Security Services Distributor (MSSD), and Sectrio, a global leader in OT/ICS and IoT cybersecurity solutions, cyber threat intelligence, and managed security services today inaugurated the first Industrial Control System/Operational Technology Security Operations Center (SOC) with a device testing lab in Dubai. View All Solutions […]

The post Sectrio and DigiGlass inaugurate State-of-the-Art OT/ICS SOC with Device Testing Lab in the UAE appeared first on Security Boulevard.

Zscaler has completed its investigation into the recent hacking claims and found that only an isolated test environment was compromised.

The post Zscaler Confirms Only Isolated Test Server Was Hacked appeared first on SecurityWeek.

It was probably inevitable. Threat researchers detected bad actors using stolen credentials to target LLMs, with the eventual goal of selling the access to other hackers.

The post Novel LLMjacking Attacks Target Cloud-Based AI Models appeared first on Security Boulevard.

Будет! Russian ransomware rascals riled a Roman Catholic healthcare organization.

The post FBI/CISA Warning: ‘Black Basta’ Ransomware Gang vs. Ascension Health appeared first on Security Boulevard.

Weakening liberal democracies and weakening the NATO alliance are conjoined in the hybrid war that Russia is conducting against Ukraine.

The post NATO Draws a Cyber Red Line in Tensions With Russia appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Modern CISOs have a new task cut out for them: determining how to navigate AI as both challenge and opportunity.

The post CISOs Reconsider Their Roles in Response to GenAI Integration appeared first on Security Boulevard.

The Chinese hacking contest Matrix Cup is offering big rewards for exploits targeting OSs, smartphones, enterprise software, browsers, and security products.

The post $2.5 Million Offered at Upcoming ‘Matrix Cup’ Chinese Hacking Contest  appeared first on SecurityWeek.

British Columbia Cyberattacks' Timeline

Another cyberattack was identified on May 6, with Salter saying the same threat actor was responsible for all three incidents.

The cyberattacks were not disclosed to the public until Wednesday late evening when people were busy watching an ice hockey game, prompting accusations from B.C. United MLAs that the government was attempting to conceal the attack.

Farnworth said that the CCCS believes a state-sponsored actor is behind the attack based on the sophistication of the attempted breaches.

"Being able to do what we are seeing, and covering up their tracks, is the hallmarks of a state actor or a state-sponsored actor." - Farnworth

Bad actors are always ready to exploit political strife to their own ends. Right now, they’re doing so with the conflict in the Middle East. A holistic defense against influence networks requires collaboration between government, technology companies and security research organizations.

The post Emerald Divide Uses GenAI to Exploit Social, Political Divisions in Israel Using Disinformation appeared first on Security Boulevard.

The tech giant says the information stolen doesn't represent a significant risk to users, but cybersecurity experts disagree.

The post Dell Data Breach Could Affect 49 Million Customers appeared first on Security Boulevard.

DUDE! You’re Getting Phished.

Dell customer data from the past six (or more?) years was stolen. It looks like someone sold scads of personal information to the highest bidder.

The post Dell Hell: 49 Million Customers’ Information Leaked appeared first on Security Boulevard.

A Chrome 124 update patches the second Chrome zero-day that has been found to be exploited in malicious attacks in 2024.

The post Exploited Chrome Zero-Day Patched by Google appeared first on SecurityWeek.

A GAO review of NASA projects found that, while some cybersecurity challenges have been addressed, many security policies and standards remain optional.

The post NASA Must Improve Spacecraft Cybersecurity, GAO Report Finds appeared first on Security Boulevard.

Chinese crooks are running a global network of more than 75,000 fake online shops to steal credit card data and process fraudulent payments.

The post Massive Online Shopping Scam Racks Up 850,000 Victims appeared first on Security Boulevard.

Stagnating security budgets and mounting job pressures are weighing on CISOs, a quarter of whom expressed discontent with their salary and overall compensation.

Show me the money: The average total compensation for tech CISOs stands at $710,000.

The post One in Four Tech CISOs Unhappy with Compensation appeared first on Security Boulevard.

Zscaler says its customer, production and corporate environments are not impacted after a notorious hacker offers to sell access.

The post Zscaler Investigates Hacking Claims After Data Offered for Sale appeared first on SecurityWeek.

In the ever-evolving world of ransomware, it’s getting easier for threat groups to launch attacks – as evidence by the growing number of incidents – but more difficult to make a profit. Organizations’ cyber-defenses are getting more resilient, decryptors that enable victims to regain control of their data, and law enforcement crackdowns on high-profile cybercrime..

The post Ransomware Attacks are Up, but Profits are Down: Chainalysis appeared first on Security Boulevard.

Least privilege. It’s like a love-hate relationship. Everyone knows it’s a best practice, but no one is achieving it at scale.  Why? Because it’s hard to do. The market is constantly trying to sell you least privilege, but no solution is making it easier, attainable, or sustainable. TL;DR: We’re going to tell you about a […]

The post There’s a New Way To Do Least Privilege appeared first on Security Boulevard.

Though generative AI is still a nascent technology, it is already being adopted by teams across companies to unleash new levels of productivity and creativity. Marketers are deploying generative AI to create personalized customer journeys. Designers are using the technology to boost brainstorming and iterate between different content layouts more quickly. The future of technology is exciting, but there can be implications if these innovations are not built responsibly.

As Adobe’s CIO, I get questions from both our internal teams and other technology leaders: how can generative AI add real value for knowledge workers—at an enterprise level? Adobe is a producer and consumer of generative AI technologies, and this question is urgent for us in both capacities. It’s also a question that CIOs of large companies are uniquely positioned to answer. We have a distinct view into different teams across our organizations, and working with customers gives us more opportunities to enhance business functions.

Our approach

When it comes to AI at Adobe, my team has taken a comprehensive approach that includes investment in foundational AI, strategic adoption, an AI ethics framework, legal considerations, security, and content authentication. ​The rollout follows a phased approach, starting with pilot groups and building communities around AI. ​

This approach includes experimenting with and documenting use cases like writing and editing, data analysis, presentations and employee onboarding, corporate training, employee portals, and improved personalization across HR channels. The rollouts are accompanied by training podcasts and other resources to educate and empower employees to use AI in ways that improve their work and keep them more engaged. ​

Unlocking productivity with documents

While there are innumerable ways that CIOs can leverage generative AI to help surface value at scale for knowledge workers, I’d like to focus on digital documents—a space in which Adobe has been a leader for over 30 years. Whether they are sales associates who spend hours responding to requests for proposals (RFPs) or customizing presentations, marketers who need competitive intel for their next campaign, or legal and finance teams who need to consume, analyze, and summarize massive amounts of complex information—documents are a core part of knowledge workers’ daily work life. Despite their ubiquity and the fact that critical information lives inside companies’ documents (from research reports to contracts to white papers to confidential strategies and even intellectual property), most knowledge workers are experiencing information overload. The impact on both employee productivity and engagement is real.  

Lessons from customer zero

Adobe invented the PDF and we’ve been innovating new ways for knowledge workers to get more productive with their digital documents for decades. Earlier this year, the Acrobat team approached my team about launching an all-employee beta for the new generative AI-powered AI Assistant. The tool is designed to help people consume the information in documents faster and enable them to consolidate and format information into business content.

I faced all the same questions every CIO is asking about deploying generative AI across their business— from security and governance to use cases and value. We discovered the following three specific ways where generative AI helped (and is still helping) our employees work smarter and improve productivity.

1. Faster time to knowledge
   Our employees used AI Assistant to close the gap between understanding and action for large, complicated documents. The generative AI-powered tool’s summary feature automatically generates an overview to give readers a quick understanding of the content. A conversational interface allows employees to “chat” with their documents and provides a list of suggested questions to help them get started. To get more details, employees can ask the assistant to generate top takeaways or surface only the information on a specific topic. At Adobe, our R&D teams used to spend more than 10 hours a week reading and analyzing technical white papers and industry reports. With generative AI, they’ve been able to nearly halve that time by asking questions and getting answers about exactly what they need to know and instantly identifying trends or surfacing inconsistencies across multiple documents.
   
   
2. Easy navigation and verification
   AI-powered chat is gaining ground on traditional search when it comes to navigating the internet. However, there are still challenges when it comes to accuracy and connecting responses to the source. Acrobat AI Assistant takes a more focused approach, applying generative AI to the set of documents employees select and providing hot links and clickable citations along with responses. So instead of using the search function to locate random words or trying to scan through dozens of pages for the information they need, AI Assistant generates both responses and clickable citations and links, allowing employees to navigate quickly to the source where they can quickly verify the information and move on, or spend time deep diving to learn more. One example of where generative AI is having a huge productivity impact is with our sales teams who spend hours researching prospects by reading materials like annual reports as well as responding to RFPs. Consuming that information and finding just the right details for RPFs can cost each salesperson more than eight hours a week. Armed with AI Assistant, sales associates quickly navigate pages of documents and identify critical intelligence to personalize pitch decks and instantly find and verify technical details for RFPs, cutting the time they spend down to about four hours.
   
   
3. Creating business content
   One of the most interesting use cases we helped validate is taking information in documents and formatting and repurposing that information into business content. With nearly 30,000 employees dispersed across regions, we have a lot of employees who work asynchronously and depend on technology and colleagues to keep them up to date. Using generative AI, employees can now summarize meeting transcripts, surface action items, and instantly format the information into an email for sharing with their teams or a report for their manager. Before starting the beta, our communications teams reported spending a full workday (seven to 10 hours) per week transforming documents like white papers and research reports into derivative content like media briefing decks, social media posts, blogs, and other thought leadership content. Today they’re saving more than five hours a week by instantly generating first drafts with the help of generative AI.
   
   

Simple, safe, and responsible

CIOs love learning about and testing new technologies, but at times they can require lengthy evaluations and implementation processes. Acrobat AI Assistant can be deployed in minutes on the desktop, web, or mobile apps employees already know and use every day. Acrobat AI Assistant leverages a variety of processes, protocols, and technologies so our customers’ data remains their data and they can deploy the features with confidence. No document content is stored or used to train AI Assistant without customers’ consent, and the features only deliver insights from documents users provide. For more information about Adobe is deploying generative AI safely, visit here.

Generative AI is an incredibly exciting technology with incredible potential to help every knowledge worker work smarter and more productively. By having the right guardrails in place, identifying high-value use cases, and providing ongoing training and education to encourage successful adoption, technology leaders can support their workforce and companies to be wildly successful in our AI-accelerated world.  

This content was produced by Adobe. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff.

Multimodality is a relatively new term for something extremely old: how people have learned about the world since humanity appeared. Individuals receive information from myriad sources via their senses, including sight, sound, and touch. Human brains combine these different modes of data into a highly nuanced, holistic picture of reality.

“Communication between humans is multimodal,” says Jina AI CEO Han Xiao. “They use text, voice, emotions, expressions, and sometimes photos.” That’s just a few obvious means of sharing information. Given this, he adds, “it is very safe to assume that future communication between human and machine will also be multimodal.”

A technology that sees the world from different angles

We are not there yet. The furthest advances in this direction have occurred in the fledgling field of multimodal AI. The problem is not a lack of vision. While a technology able to translate between modalities would clearly be valuable, Mirella Lapata, a professor at the University of Edinburgh and director of its Laboratory for Integrated Artificial Intelligence, says “it’s a lot more complicated” to execute than unimodal AI.

In practice, generative AI tools use different strategies for different types of data when building large data models—the complex neural networks that organize vast amounts of information. For example, those that draw on textual sources segregate individual tokens, usually words. Each token is assigned an “embedding” or “vector”: a numerical matrix representing how and where the token is used compared to others. Collectively, the vector creates a mathematical representation of the token’s meaning. An image model, on the other hand, might use pixels as its tokens for embedding, and an audio one sound frequencies.

A multimodal AI model typically relies on several unimodal ones. As Henry Ajder, founder of AI consultancy Latent Space, puts it, this involves “almost stringing together” the various contributing models. Doing so involves various techniques to align the elements of each unimodal model, in a process called fusion. For example, the word “tree”, an image of an oak tree, and audio in the form of rustling leaves might be fused in this way. This allows the model to create a multifaceted description of reality.

This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff.

PAFACA SueTok: U.S. Courts “likely” to rule whether new law is constitutional—or even practical.

The post TikTok Ban — ByteDance Sues US to Kill Bill appeared first on Security Boulevard.

Ticket scams are very common and apparently hard to stop. When there are not nearly enough tickets for some concerts to accommodate all the fans that desperately want to be there, it makes for ideal hunting grounds for scammers.

With a ticket scam, you pay for a ticket and you either don’t receive anything or what you get doesn’t get you into the venue.

As reported by the BBC, Lloyds Bank estimates that fans have lost an estimated £1m ($1.25 m) in ticket scams ahead of the UK leg of Taylor Swift’s Eras tour. Roughly 90% of these scams were said to have started on Facebook.

Many of these operations work with compromised Facebook accounts and make both the buyer and the owner of the abused account feel bad. These account owners are complaining about the response, or lack thereof, they are getting from Meta (Facebook’s parent company) about their attempts to report the account takeovers.

Victims feel powerless as they see some of their friends and family fall for the ticket scam.

“After I reported it, there were still scams going on for at least two or three weeks afterwards.”

We saw the same last year when “Swifties” from the US filed reports about scammers taking advantage of fans, some of whom lost as much as $2,500 after paying for tickets that didn’t exist or never arrived. The Better Business Bureau reportedly received almost 200 complaints nationally related to the Swift tour, with complaints ranging from refund struggles to outright scams.

Now that the tour has European cities on the schedule the same is happening all over again.

And mind you, it’s not just concerts. Any event that is sold out through the regular, legitimate channels and works with transferable tickets is an opportunity for scammers. Recently we saw a scam working from sponsored search results for the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. People that clicked on the ad were redirected to a fake phishing site where they were asked to fill out their credit card details.

Consider that to be a reminder that it’s easy for scammers to set up a fake website that looks genuine. Some even use a name or website url that is similar to the legitimate website. If you’re unsure or it sounds too good to be true, leave the website immediately.

Equally important to keep in mind is the power of AI which has taken the creation of a photograph of—fake—tickets to a level that it’s child’s play.

How to avoid ticket scams

No matter how desperate you are to visit a particular event, please be careful. When it’s sold out and someone offers you tickets, there are a few precautions you should take.

• Research the ticket seller. Anybody can set up a fake ticket website, and sponsored ads showing at the top of search engines can be rife with bogus sellers. You may also run into issues buying tickets from sites like eBay. Should you decide to use sites other than well-known entities like Ticketmaster, check for reviews of the seller.
• Are the tickets transferable? For some events the tickets are non-transferable which makes it, at least, unwise to try and buy tickets from someone who has decided they “don’t need or want them” after all. You may end up with tickets that you can’t use.
• Use a credit card if possible. You’ll almost certainly have more protection than if you pay using your debit card, or cash. We definitely recommend that you avoid using cash. If someone decides to rip you off, that money is gone forever.
• A “secure” website isn’t all it seems. While sites that use HTTPS (the padlock) ensure your communication is secure, this does not guarantee the site is legitimate. Anyone can set up a HTTPs website, including scammers.
• It’s ticket inspector time. One of the best ways to know for sure that your ticket is genuine is to actually look at it. Is the date and time correct? The location? Are the seat numbers what you were expecting to see? It may well be worth calling the event organizers or the event location and confirming that all is as it should be. Some events will give examples of what a genuine ticket should look like on the official website.
• Use a blocklist. Software like Malwarebytes Browser Guard will block known phishing and scam sites.