Tighten Edge Patching, Contracts, and AI Integration for Risk Control

cyber-crime Crooks claim 40 GB haul as breach database pegs number of exposed email addresses at 455K The University of Nottingham has confirmed a cyberattack on its student record system after the ShinyHunters crew claimed to have stolen tens of gigabytes of data from the Russell Group institution. "The University of Nottingham has been the victim of a cyber incident and a significant amount of data in our student record system has been accessed by a well-known cybercriminal group," a spokesperson told The Regi

" ShinyHunters claimed responsibility for the attack on Tuesday, saying they had stolen around 40 GB of the institution's data

On Wednesday evening, breach notification service Have I Been Pwned added the 10 GB dataset leaked by ShinyHunters to its database, saying around 454,600 university-related email addresses were included. "Tens of gigabytes of data were subsequently published online and included 455k unique email addresses along with extensive personal information, including names, addresses, phone numbers, ethnicities, disabilities, passport numbers, and information relating to academic enrolments and fee payments," HIBP stated

"We are working with the third party that maintains the platform to lead a forensic investigation

The University of Nottingham confirmed on Wednesday that a hacking group gained access to its student records system in a breach affecting both current students and alums. Nottingham University is a public research university with 7,000 staff and over 46,000 students, ranking in the Top 20 in the United Kingdom and the Top 100 worldwide

"The University of Nottingham has been the victim of a cyber incident and a significant amount of data in our student record system has been accessed by a well-known cybercriminal group", the university said. "We are working with the third party that maintains the platform to lead a forensic investigation

The security firm notes that JDY has grown from roughly 650 active bots in January 2024 to over 1,500 compromised SOHO and IoT devices today. While the numbers seem low, it's important to note that JDY isn't an exploitation framework or a DDoS botnet that requires large swarms to accumulate firepower, but is instead a distributed scanning and fingerprinting network that helps its operators locate targets vulnerable to newly disclosed flaws

" Code snippet handling the raw SYN scanningSource: Black Lotus Labs As JDY botnet activity increases, organizations should ensure routers, firewalls, and IoT devices are running the latest security updates and patches to prevent them from being recruited into reconnaissance networks. Defenders should also reduce their external attack surface by disabling unnecessary internet-exposed administrative interfaces, restricting remote management access, replacing default credentials, and monitoring for unusual outbou

Defenders should also reduce their external attack surface by disabling unnecessary internet-exposed administrative interfaces, restricting remote management access, replacing default credentials, and monitoring for unusual outbound scanning activity originating from edge devices. Test every layer before attackers do Security teams log 54% of successful attacks and alert on just 14%

So says a report by the Work AI Institute, a research arm of AI biz Glean Technologies. It claims there are productivity gains to be had from introducing AI-based tools, yet much of this is being negated by the amount of time employees waste making them work – a phenomenon it has christened "botsitting

When workers spot a problem with the output, they may have to re-prompt, add more context, swap models, and re-prompt again until something usable comes back, the researchers claim

The time freed up isn't flowing into productive work, it's being absorbed by the unglamorous human labour required to keep those systems running, according to the Work AI Institute