FISA

  Understanding the risks - and benefits - of using AI tools. Ignited by the release of ChatGPT in late 2022, artificial intelligence (AI) has captured the world's interest and has the potential to bring many benefits to society. However, for the opportunities of AI to be fully realised, it must be developed in a safe and responsible way, especially when the pace of development is high, and the potential risks are still unknown. As with any emerging technology, there's always concern around what this means for security.  This guidance is designed to help managers, board members and senior executives (with a non-technical background) to understand some of the risks - and benefits - of using AI tools . Managers don't need to be technical experts, but they should know enough about the potential risks from AI to be able to discuss issues with key staff. What is artificial intelligence? Artificial intelligence  (AI) can be described as  ‘Any computer system that can perfo...

Details have emerged about a now-patched high-severity security flaw in Apple's Shortcuts app that could permit a shortcut to access sensitive information on the device without users' consent. The vulnerability, tracked as  CVE-2024-23204  (CVSS score: 7.5), was addressed by Apple on January 22, 2024, with the release of  iOS 17.3, iPadOS 17.3 ,  macOS Sonoma 14.3 , and  watchOS 10.3 . "A shortcut may be able to use sensitive data with certain actions without prompting the user," the iPhone maker said in an advisory, stating it was fixed with "additional permissions checks." Apple Shortcuts is a  scripting application  that allows users to create personalized workflows (aka macros) for  executing   specific tasks  on their devices. It comes installed by default on iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and watchOS operating systems. Bitdefender security researcher Jubaer Alnazi Jabin, who discovered and reported the Shortcuts bug, said it could be weaponiz...

Microsoft has released an open access automation framework called  PyRIT  (short for Python Risk Identification Tool) to proactively identify risks in generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems. The red teaming tool is designed to "enable every organization across the globe to innovate responsibly with the latest artificial intelligence advances," Ram Shankar Siva Kumar, AI red team lead at Microsoft,  said . The company said PyRIT could be used to assess the robustness of large language model (LLM) endpoints against different harm categories such as fabrication (e.g., hallucination), misuse (e.g., bias), and prohibited content (e.g., harassment). It can also be used to identify security harms ranging from malware generation to jailbreaking, as well as privacy harms like identity theft.   PyRIT comes with five interfaces: target, datasets, scoring engine, the ability to support multiple attack strategies, and incorporating a memory component that can either take...

  A dormant package available on the Python Package Index (PyPI) repository was updated nearly after two years to propagate an information stealer malware called Nova Sentinel. The package, named  django-log-tracker , was first published to PyPI in April 2022, according to software supply chain security firm Phylum, which  detected  an anomalous update to the library on February 21, 2024. While the  linked GitHub repository  hasn't been updated since April 10, 2022, the introduction of a malicious update suggests a likely compromise of the PyPI account belonging to the developer. Django-log-tracker has been  downloaded 3,866 times  to date, with the rogue version (1.0.4) downloaded 107 times on the date it was published. The package is no longer available for download from PyPI. "In the malicious update, the attacker stripped the package of most of its original content, leaving only an __init__.py and example.py file behind," the company said. The...

  Created by John Tuckner and the team at workflow and automation platform  Tines , the  SOC Automation Capability Matrix (SOC ACM)  is a set of techniques designed to help security operations teams understand their automation capabilities and respond more effectively to incidents. A customizable, vendor-agnostic tool featuring lists of automation opportunities, it's been shared and recommended by members of the security community since its launch in January 2023, notably by Airbnb engineer Allyn Stott in his BSides and Black Hat talk,  How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Build a Modern Detection & Response Program . The SOC ACM has been compared to the MITRE ATT&CK and RE&CT frameworks, with one user saying, "it could be a standard for classification of SOAR automations, a bit like the RE&CT framework, but with more automation focus." It's been used by organizations in Fintech, Cloud Security, and beyond, as a basis for assessing and optimizing t...