Tag Archive for: Language

How AI and large language models can help cybersecurity firms improve their services

/in


Just about every cybersecurity provider has an artificial intelligence-related story to tell these days.

There are many security products and services that now come with built-in AI features, offering better ways to seek out and neutralize malware. Or they have new “co-pilot” add-ons that allow human operators to work hand-in-mouse with an AI-driven assistant to screen security alerts. Or they use AI add-on tools for better phishing detection, new threat discovery or troubleshooting of network and application problems or misconfigurations.

SiliconANGLE analyzed both the good and bad sides of AI-based cybersecurity. Now, let’s examine some of the products that offer the most promise.

The spread of AI-infused security cuts across startup and established companies alike. For example, Palo Alto Networks Inc. is developing its own large language model or LLM that will use AI to improve its operational efficiencies. SentinelOne Inc. will have an LLM so that security analysts can query potential threats with a simple search box without the need to learn complex jargon or syntax. Cloudflare Inc. is using machine learning to help more quickly find and neutralize botnets. And both Blink Ops and Trend Micro Inc. will integrate AI into their tools with copilot-like features.

That’s not all. Darktrace Holdings Ltd. has already used AI to identify several cyberattacks, such as one targeting a power grid that its AI found within a few hours. BreachLock Inc.’s penetration testing as a service has been tapping AI to improve its efficiency in handling security audits and analysis services. Cybersixgill has its IQ service that amplifies its dark web scanning tools, as SiliconANGLE wrote about recently.

Then there’s Sentra Inc., which has a browser extension that will anonymize chatbot queries and block inadvertent private data transmissions. Guardz has enhanced its phishing protection with AI. Earlier this year, HiddenLayer Inc. won the RSA Conference Innovation Sandbox for best new product, a tool that can help defend against adversarial AI-based attacks. And those are by no means exhaustive.

Even companies not selling security services want to call attention to their AI…

Source…

Hacker language preferences change with the times • The Register

/in


Never mind what enterprise programmers are trained to do, a self-defined set of hackers has its own programming language zeitgeist, one that apparently changes with the wind, at least according to the relatively small set surveyed.

Members of Europe’s Chaos Computer Club, which calls itself “Europe’s largest association of hackers” were part of a pool for German researchers to poll. The goal of the study was to discover what tools and languages hackers prefer, a mission that sparked some unexpected results.

The researchers were interested in understanding what languages self-described hackers use, and also asked about OS and IDE choice, whether or not an individual considered their choice important for hacking and how much experience they had as a programmer and hacker.

How are CCC hackers hacking?

To be fair, the survey only had 43 respondents, so it’s too small to allow for representative conclusions, but even with a tiny sample, they note the results “add to the extremely scarce literature on the subject. The approach could serve as a model for future surveys, possibly at international level,” the paper said. 

The experience of respondents gives the survey more weight, though. Nearly three-quarters said they had five or more years of experience as a hacker, and 93 percent have five or more years of programming experience. 

As for which programming languages the hackers from CCC prefer (respondents could choose more than one answer), it appears that Bash/Shell/PowerShell are the most popular, with 72.5 percent saying they’ve used it to hack in the past year. The next most popular is Python, with 70 percent saying they used it for hacking in the past year. 

For those arguing that Bash isn’t a programming language, the researchers understand. However, “we have included them in the list anyway to avoid possible gaps in the study,” the paper said.

Beyond Python, language use drops off dramatically: C, the…

Source…

Zuckerberg offers an AI metaverse with no language barriers • The Register

/in


Meta has had a bad start to the year.

When it revealed its audience growth was at a standstill and it had already sunk more than $10bn into metaverse technologies, its share price plummeted 27 per cent. More than $230bn of Meta’s market cap evaporated. In social media, if you aren’t growing, you’re dying.

For Mark Zuckerberg, the metaverse can’t come soon enough. This CEO is all in on Facebook’s transformation from a dull website and app into a bright 3D world, where friends can hang out in virtual environments they create and bend at will. To turn his vision into reality, and make the metaverse a success, Meta is investing heavily in AI to power it.

“The kinds of experiences that you’ll have in the metaverse are beyond what is possible today,” Zuckerberg said on Monday during a very meta event showcasing a few of the AI systems that will drive the new Facebook 2.0.

“It’s an immersive version of the internet. Instead of just looking at something on a screen, you’re going to actually feel like you’re inside or right there present with another person. And that’s going to require advances across a whole range of areas, from new hardware devices to software for building and exploring worlds. And the key to unlocking a lot of these is advances in AI.”

The core challenge of building the metaverse is making the transition from the physical to the virtual world as seamless as possible. In the future, Meta denizens will don AR glasses and VR goggles to navigate these made-up environments, and use a range of artificially intelligence technologies to interact with one another.

One important entity in all of this, for example, is an all-seeing and all-knowing AI assistant. Meta announced Project CAIRoke, a model designed for developing smart chat bots that operate in the metaverse. Zuckerberg demonstrated directing a robot called Builder Bot…

Source…

This malware has been rewritten in the Rust programming language to make it harder to spot

/in


Phishing emails claiming to be from a delivery company are being used to deliver a new version of a form of malware which is used to deliver ransomware and other cyber attacks.

Buer malware first emerged in 2019 and is used by cyber criminals to gain a foothold on networks which they can exploit themselves, or to sell that access on to other attackers to deliver their own malware campaigns, most notably, ransomware attacks.

Now cybersecurity researchers at Proofpoint have uncovered a new variant of Buer which is written in an entirely different coding language to the original malware. It’s unusual for malware to be completely changed in this way, but it helps the new campaigns remain undetected in attacks against Windows systems.

The original Buer was written in C programming language, while the new variant is written in Rust programming language – leading researchers to name the new variant RustyBuer. “Rewriting the malware in Rust enables the threat actor to better evade existing Buer detection capabilities,” said Proofpoint.

RustyBuer is commonly delivered via phishing emails designed to look as if they come from delivery company DHL, asking the user to download a Microsoft Word or Excel document which supposedly details information about a scheduled delivery.

SEE: Network security policy (TechRepublic Premium)

The delivery is in fact fake, but cyber criminals know that the Covid-19 pandemic has resulted in more people ordering more items online, so messages claiming to be from delivery companies have become a common trick to lure people into opening malicious messages and downloading harmful files.

In this instance, the malicious document asks users to enable macros – by asking them to enable editing – in order to allow the malware to run. The fake delivery notice claims that the user needs to do this because the document is ‘protected’ – even using the logos of several anti-virus providers in an effort to look more legitimate to the victim.

If macros are enabled, the RustyBuer is delivered to the system, providing the attackers with a backdoor into the network and the ability to compromise victims with other…

Source…