Tea

Last year, we published an article about SideWinder, a highly prolific APT group whose primary targets have been military and government entities in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, China, and Nepal. In it, we described activities that had mostly happened in the first half of the year. We tried to draw attention to the group, which was aggressively extending its activities beyond their typical targets, infecting government entities, logistics companies and maritime infrastructures in South and Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. We also shared further information about SideWinder’s post-exploitation activities and described a new sophisticated implant designed specifically for espionage.

We continued to monitor the group throughout the rest of the year, observing intense activity that included updates to SideWinder’s toolset and the creation of a massive new infrastructure to spread malware and control compromised systems. The targeted sectors were consistent with those we had seen in the first part of 2024, but we noticed a new and significant increase in attacks against maritime infrastructures and logistics companies.

In 2024, we initially observed a significant number of attacks in Djibouti. Subsequently, the attackers shifted their focus to other entities in Asia and showed a strong interest in targets within Egypt.

Moreover, we observed other attacks that indicated a specific interest in nuclear power plants and nuclear energy in South Asia and further expansion of activities into new countries, especially in Africa.

• X, the former Twitter, has experienced a worldwide outage as of 12PM on Monday CAT.
• This is likely the first major outage of the company since Musk took ownership in 2022.
• The outage seems to have only lasted for about half an hour.

• X, the former Twitter, has experienced a worldwide outage as of 12PM on Monday CAT.
• This is likely the first major outage of the company since Musk took ownership in 2022.
• The outage seems to have only lasted for about half an hour.

Companies are turning to tech solutions to screen candidates. Critics and job seekers have concerns.

Companies are turning to tech solutions to screen candidates. Critics and job seekers have concerns.

• CR researchers were able to easily create a voice clone based on publicly available audio in four of the six products in the test set:

1. These products did not employ any technical mechanisms to ensure researchers had the speaker’s consent to generate a clone or to limit the cloning to the user’s own voice. These companies—ElevenLabs, Speechify, PlayHT, and Lovo—required only that researchers check a box confirming that they had the legal right to clone the voice or make a similar self-attestation.
2. Descript and Resemble AI took steps to make it more difficult for customers to misuse their products by creating a non-consensual voice clone.

• Four of the six companies (Speechify, Lovo, PlayHT, and Descript) required only a customer’s name and/or email address to make an account.

• CR researchers were able to easily create a voice clone based on publicly available audio in four of the six products in the test set:

1. These products did not employ any technical mechanisms to ensure researchers had the speaker’s consent to generate a clone or to limit the cloning to the user’s own voice. These companies—ElevenLabs, Speechify, PlayHT, and Lovo—required only that researchers check a box confirming that they had the legal right to clone the voice or make a similar self-attestation.
2. Descript and Resemble AI took steps to make it more difficult for customers to misuse their products by creating a non-consensual voice clone.

• Four of the six companies (Speechify, Lovo, PlayHT, and Descript) required only a customer’s name and/or email address to make an account.

It's just one of 6,000 apps that New Zealand thinks might be best tamed with ERP

It's just one of 6,000 apps that New Zealand thinks might be best tamed with ERP

The world's largest contract electronics maker, Foxconn, said Monday it has built its own large language model with reasoning capabilities, developed in-house and trained in just four weeks.