The UK Home Office is spending up to £100 million on intelligence tech in part to tackle the so-called "small boats" issue of refugees and irregular immigrants coming across the English Channel.…
The WorldLeaks cybercrime group claims to have stolen information from the footwear and apparel giant’s systems.
The post Nike Probing Potential Security Incident as Hackers Threaten to Leak Data appeared first on SecurityWeek.
We're taking part in Copyright Week, a series of actions and discussions supporting key principles that should guide copyright policy. Every day this week, various groups are taking on different elements of copyright law and policy, and addressing what's at stake, and what we need to do to make sure that copyright promotes creativity and innovation.
Long before generative AI, copyright holders warned that new technologies for reading and analyzing information would destroy creativity. Internet search engines, they argued, were infringement machines—tools that copied copyrighted works at scale without permission. As they had with earlier information technologies like the photocopier and the VCR, copyright owners sued.
Courts disagreed. They recognized that copying works in order to understand, index, and locate information is a classic fair use—and a necessary condition for a free and open internet.
Today, the same argument is being recycled against AI. It’s whether copyright owners should be allowed to control how others analyze, reuse, and build on existing works.
U.S. courts have long recognized that copying for purposes of analysis, indexing, and learning is a classic fair use. That principle didn’t originate with artificial intelligence. It doesn’t disappear just because the processes are performed by a machine.
Copying works in order to understand them, extract information from them, or make them searchable is transformative and lawful. That’s why search engines can index the web, libraries can make digital indexes, and researchers can analyze large collections of text and data without negotiating licenses from millions of rightsholders. These uses don’t substitute for the original works; they enable new forms of knowledge and expression.
Training AI models fits squarely within that tradition. An AI system learns by analyzing patterns across many works. The purpose of that copying is not to reproduce or replace the original texts, but to extract statistical relationships that allow the AI system to generate new outputs. That is the hallmark of a transformative use.
Attacking AI training on copyright grounds misunderstands what’s at stake. If copyright law is expanded to require permission for analyzing or learning from existing works, the damage won’t be limited to generative AI tools. It could threaten long-standing practices in machine learning and text-and-data mining that underpin research in science, medicine, and technology.
Researchers already rely on fair use to analyze massive datasets such as scientific literature. Requiring licenses for these uses would often be impractical or impossible, and it would advantage only the largest companies with the money to negotiate blanket deals. Fair use exists to prevent copyright from becoming a barrier to understanding the world. The law has protected learning before. It should continue to do so now, even when that learning is automated.
One court has already shown how these cases should be analyzed. In Bartz v. Anthropic, the court found that using copyrighted works to train an AI model is a highly transformative use. Training is a kind of studying how language works—not about reproducing or supplanting the original books. Any harm to the market for the original works was speculative.
The court in Bartz rejected the idea that an AI model might infringe because, in some abstract sense, its output competes with existing works. While EFF disagrees with other parts of the decision, the court’s ruling on AI training and fair use offers a good approach. Courts should focus on whether training is transformative and non-substitutive, not on fear-based speculation about how a new tool could affect someone’s market share.
Workers’ concerns about automation and displacement are real and should not be ignored. But copyright is the wrong tool to address them. Managing economic transitions and protecting workers during turbulent times are core functions of government. Copyright law doesn’t help with those tasks in the slightest. Expanding copyright control over learning and analysis won’t stop new forms of worker automation—it never has. But it will distort copyright law and undermine free expression.
Broad licensing mandates may also do harm by entrenching the current biggest incumbent companies. Only the largest tech firms can afford to negotiate massive licensing deals covering millions of works. Smaller developers, research teams, nonprofits, and open-source projects will all get locked out. Copyright expansion won’t restrain Big Tech—it will give it a new advantage.
Learning from prior work is foundational to free expression. Rightsholders cannot be allowed to control it. Courts have rejected that move before, and they should do so again.
Search, indexing, and analysis didn’t destroy creativity. Nor did the photocopier, nor the VCR. They expanded speech, access to knowledge, and participation in culture. Artificial intelligence raises hard new questions, but fair use remains the right starting point for thinking about training.
updated The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency won't attend the annual RSA Conference in March, an agency spokesperson confirmed to The Register. Sessions involving speakers from the FBI and National Security Agency (NSA) have also disappeared from the agenda.…
You've got to keep your software updated. Some unknown miscreants are exploiting a critical VMware vCenter Server bug more than a year after Broadcom patched the flaw.…
Spock befriends a giant space squid in the comic Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: The Seeds of Salvation #5.
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.
updated If you think using Microsoft's BitLocker encryption will keep your data 100 percent safe, think again. Last year, Redmond reportedly provided the FBI with encryption keys to unlock the laptops of Windows users charged in a fraud indictment.…
ShinyHunters has claimed responsibility for an Okta voice-phishing campaign during which the extortionist crew allegedly gained access to Crunchbase and Betterment.…
CISOs must prepare for "a really different world" where cybercriminals can reliably automate cyberattacks at scale, according to a senior Googler.…
Short answer: we have no idea.
People are actively complaining that their mailboxes and queues are being flooded by emails coming from the Zendesk instances of trusted companies like Discord, Riot Games, Dropbox, and many others.
Zendesk is a customer service and support software platform that helps companies manage customer communication. It supports tickets, live chat, email, phone, and communication through social media.
Some people complained about receiving over 1,000 such emails. The strange thing ais that so far there are no reports of malicious links, tech support scam numbers, or any type of phishing in these emails.
The abusers are able to send waves of emails from these systems because Zendesk allows them to create fake support tickets with email addresses that do not belong to them. The system sends a confirmation mail to the provided email address if the affected company has not restricted ticket submission to verified users.
In a December advisory, Zendesk warned about this method, which they called relay spam. In essence it’s an example of attackers abusing a legitimate automated part of a process. We have seen similar attacks before, but they always served a clear purpose for the attacker, whereas this one doesn’t.
Even though some of the titles in use definitely are of a clickbait nature. Some examples:
So, this could be someone testing the system, but it just as well might be someone who enjoys disrupting the system and creating disruption. Maybe they have an axe to grind with Zendesk. Or they’re looking for a way to send attachments with the emails.
Either way, Zendesk told BleepingComputer that they introduced new safety features on their end to detect and stop this type of spam in the future. But companies are advised to restrict the users that can submit tickets and the titles submitters can give to the tickets.
In the emails we have seen the links in the tickets are legitimate and point to the affected company’s ticket system. And the only part of the emails the attackers should be able to manipulate is the title and subject of the ticket.
But although everyone involved tells us just to ignore the emails, it is never wrong to handle them with an appropriate amount of distrust.
We don’t just report on threats – we help protect your social media
Cybersecurity risks should never spread beyond a headline. Protect your social media accounts by using Malwarebytes Identity Theft Protection.
Similar to recent FortiCloud single sign-on (SSO) login vulnerabilities, the attacks bypass authentication.
The post Fortinet Confirms FortiCloud SSO Exploitation Against Patched Devices appeared first on SecurityWeek.
Other noteworthy stories that might have slipped under the radar: Cloudflare WAF bypass, Canonical Snap Store abused for malware delivery, Curl terminating bug bounty program
The post In Other News: €1.2B GDPR Fines, Net-NTLMv1 Rainbow Tables, Rockwell Security Notice appeared first on SecurityWeek.
Threat actors are leveraging the file-sharing service for payload delivery in AitM phishing and BEC attacks.
The post Phishers Abuse SharePoint in New Campaign Targeting Energy Sector appeared first on SecurityWeek.
Fortinet has confirmed that attackers are actively bypassing a December patch for a critical FortiCloud single sign-on (SSO) authentication flaw after customers reported suspicious logins on devices supposedly fully up to date.…
Login
