News

'Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst,' one tells The Reg

Feature  Bill Gates, an Arizona election official and former Maricopa County supervisor, says that the death threats started shortly after the 2020 presidential election.…

Is that a JuicyPotato on your network?

A suspected Chinese-government-backed cyber crew recently broke into a Taiwanese web hosting provider to steal credentials and plant backdoors for long-term access, using a mix of open-source and custom software tools, Cisco Talos reports.…

Switchzilla's summer of perfect 10s

Cisco has issued a patch for a maximum-severity bug in its Secure Firewall Management Center (FMC) software that could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to inject arbitrary shell commands on vulnerable systems.…

Who knew zero-days could be so useful to highway speedsters?

The lingering effects of a cyberattack on the Public Prosecution Service of the Netherlands are preventing it from reactivating speed cameras across the country.…

London-based multinational takes customer portal and Voice API platform offline as 'protective measure' following breach

Multinational telco Colt Technology Services says a "cyber incident" is to blame for its customer portal and other services being down for a number of days.…

System prompt engineering turns benign AI assistants into 'investigator' and 'detective' roles that bypass privacy guardrails

A team of boffins is warning that AI chatbots built on large language models (LLM) can be tuned into malicious agents to autonomously harvest users’ personal data, even by attackers with "minimal technical expertise”, thanks to "system prompt" customization tools from OpenAI and others.…

As £9 billion MoU sparks debate about value for money, it's time to have your say

Register debate series  It's a lot of money, £9 billion ($12 billion). Especially for a government which finds itself — for whatever reason — in a fiscal dead end.…