Lifeboat Foundation

V/ Sebastian Raschka.

For weekend reading:

Chapter 6 (Finetuning LLMs for Classification) of Build an LLM from Scratch book is now finally available on the Manning website:

Continue reading “6 Finetuning for Classification” »

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Thursday added a security flaw impacting the Linux kernel to the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation.

Tracked as CVE-2024–1086 (CVSS score: 7.8), the high-severity issue relates to a use-after-free bug in the netfilter component that permits a local attacker to elevate privileges from a regular user to root and possibly execute arbitrary code.

“Linux kernel contains a use-after-free vulnerability in the netfilter: nf_tables component that allows an attacker to achieve local privilege escalation,” CISA said.

One of the largest banks in the world says a data breach has exposed customer and employee information.

In a statement, Santander says it’s aware of “unauthorized access” to a third-party database containing information on an undisclosed number of customers and employees.

The bank, which has $1.8 trillion in total assets and operates in ten markets across Europe and the Americas, says customers of Santander Chile, Spain and Uruguay are affected.

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In a statement May 22, the Space Force said this specialized environment will be crucial for training service personnel, known as guardians, to defend critical satellites and other spacecraft from electronic attacks. Satellites rely on electromagnetic signals for communication, navigation, and data transmission, making them vulnerable to jamming and cyberattacks.

The MITRE Corporation has revealed that the cyber attack targeting the not-for-profit company towards late December 2023 by exploiting zero-day flaws in Ivanti Connect Secure (ICS) involved the actor creating rogue virtual machines (VMs) within its VMware environment.

“The adversary created their own rogue VMs within the VMware environment, leveraging compromised vCenter Server access,” MITRE researchers Lex Crumpton and Charles Clancy said.

“They wrote and deployed a JSP web shell (BEEFLUSH) under the vCenter Server’s Tomcat server to execute a Python-based tunneling tool, facilitating SSH connections between adversary-created VMs and the ESXi hypervisor infrastructure.”

It’s currently not clear how these bogus websites are distributed, but similar campaigns in the past have employed techniques such as malvertising and search engine optimization (SEO) poisoning.

Stealer malware have increasingly become a common threat, with cybercriminals advertising numerous custom variants with varying levels of complexity. This includes new stealers like Acrid, SamsStealer, ScarletStealer, and Waltuhium Grabber, as well as updates to existing ones such as SYS01stealer (aka Album Stealer or S1deload Stealer).

With IT systems down, staff at Ascension have to use manual processes they left behind some 20 years ago. It’s the latest in a string of attacks on health care systems that house private patient data.

If you’re worried about your data, here’s what you can do, including how to reset your AT&T account passcode.

In February, ransomware attackers targeted Chain Healthcare, the payment management arm of healthcare giant UnitedHealth Group, causing backlogs in prescription insurance claims.

Ransomware can be introduced to a company’s databases through even the smallest slip by an employee, like clicking a link in a phishing email. But as companies have gotten better at keeping criminals out, the crooks have gotten more creative, Mandiant CTO Charles Carmakal says.