Australia has banned all Kaspersky Lab products and web services from government systems due to security risks. 👉bleepingcomputer.com
A US judge says Meta must face a potential class action lawsuit claiming it prefers cheaper foreign workers over US citizen job applicants, citing Meta's stats. 👉reuters.com
Russia's National Coordination Center for Computer Incidents (NKTsKI) is warning organizations in the country's credit and financial sector about a breach at LANIT, a major Russian IT service and software provider. 👉bleepingcomputer.com
Cybercrime and Malware:
North Korean Lazarus Group has been linked to the theft of over $1.5 billion worth of cryptocurrency from one of Bybit's cold wallets. 👉thehackernews.com👉bleepingcomputer.com
A massive botnet of over 130,000 compromised devices is conducting password-spray attacks against Microsoft 365 (M365) accounts worldwide, attempting to confirm credentials. 👉bleepingcomputer.com
A new malware campaign, GitVenom, is stealing Bitcoin using fake GitHub projects to hijack wallets. 👉thehackernews.com
A new malware campaign is using cracked versions of software to spread information stealers like Lumma and ACR Stealer. 👉thehackernews.com
Orange Group, a French telecommunications operator, confirms a data breach after a hacker leaks company documents. 👉bleepingcomputer.com
Opposition activists in Belarus as well as Ukrainian military and government organizations are the target of a new campaign that employs malware-laced Microsoft Excel documents as lures to deliver a new variant of PicassoLoader. 👉thehackernews.com
A malware campaign dubbed GitVenom uses hundreds of GitHub repositories to trick users into downloading info-stealers, remote access trojans (RATs), and clipboard hijackers to steal crypto and credentials. 👉bleepingcomputer.com
Various industrial organizations in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region have been targeted as part of phishing attacks designed to deliver a known malware called FatalRAT. 👉thehackernews.com
DISA Global Solutions, a US background screening and drug and alcohol testing firm, has suffered a data breach impacting 3.3 million people. 👉bleepingcomputer.com
A large-scale malware campaign has been found leveraging a vulnerable Windows driver associated with Adlice's product suite to sidestep detection efforts and deliver the Gh0st RAT malware. 👉thehackernews.com
Have I Been Pwned adds 284M accounts stolen by infostealer malware. 👉bleepingcomputer.com
More than 20 civil service employees resigned Tuesday from billionaire Trump adviser Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency. 👉apnews.com
Vulnerabilities and Exploits:
Two different exploits for an unpatched Parallels Desktop privilege elevation vulnerability have been publicly disclosed, allowing users to gain root access on impacted Mac devices. 👉bleepingcomputer.com
CISA has added two security flaws impacting Adobe ColdFusion and Oracle Agile Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation. 👉thehackernews.com
Microsoft has fixed an issue that caused Entra ID DNS authentication failures when using the company's Seamless SSO and Microsoft Entra Connect Sync. 👉bleepingcomputer.com
Microsoft has released the optional KB5052077 preview cumulative update for Windows 10 22H2 with nine bug fixes and changes, including a fix for a longstanding known issue that breaks SSH connections. 👉bleepingcomputer.com
Artificial Intelligence:
OpenAI says it blocked several North Korean hacking groups from using its ChatGPT platform to research future targets and find ways to hack into their networks. 👉bleepingcomputer.com
Google has launched a free version of Gemini Code Assist, offering developers substantially higher usage limits than competing services. 👉blog.google👉theverge.com
A Twitch channel is streaming Claude 3.7 Sonnet using its reasoning capabilities to play a game of Pokémon Red. 👉techcrunch.com
Microsoft rolls out unlimited access to Voice and Think Deeper, powered by OpenAI's o1 model, to all Copilot users for free. 👉theverge.com
Chinese AI startup DeepSeek is speeding up the release of its R2 model following the success of January's R1. 👉reuters.com
xAI released a new Grok 3 voice mode featuring different personalities, including an 18+ “Unhinged” option and a “Sexy” one that role-plays sexual scenarios. 👉arstechnica.com
DeepSeek reopens API top-ups after suspending them on February 6 due to demand, as Alibaba previews its QwQ-Max model and the Chinese AI rivalry escalates. 👉bloomberg.com$
55% of American workers rarely or never use AI chatbots in their jobs, according to a Pew Research Center survey. 👉pewresearch.org
Activision confirms on Call of Duty: Black Ops 6's Steam page that it “uses generative AI tools to help develop some in game assets”. 👉dexerto.com
A "silent album" protesting the UK's proposal to let AI train on copyrighted work has been released by Kate Bush and 1,000+ other musicians. 👉theguardian.com
YC deletes a demo video from X and LinkedIn of a startup it backs that says it's building AI-powered performance monitoring for factory workers after backlash. 👉techcrunch.com
Business and Finance:
Apple investors reject outside shareholder proposals asking the company to cease its DEI efforts and write a report assessing the risks of its work on AI. 👉bloomberg.com$
IBM plans to acquire DataStax and its cloud database development platform to expand IBM's Watsonx AI portfolio. 👉crn.com
Online-education company Chegg said it is conducting a business review and exploring alternatives such as selling the company or taking it private as it continues to lose subscribers to artificial-intelligence-enabled rivals. 👉msn.com
Instacart reports Q4 revenue up 10% YoY to $883M, missing estimates, and forecasts Q1 adjusted EBITDA below estimates. 👉bloomberg.com$
Perfect, a startup from the founder of AnyVision that helps job recruiters write and publish job listings and triage responses, raised a $23M seed. 👉techcrunch.com
Filing: ON Semiconductor plans to cut 2,400 employees, or 9% of its workforce, with charges related to the layoffs expected to cost around $50M to $60M. 👉wsj.com$
Super Micro files its delayed financial results with the US SEC just in time to meet the Nasdaq's listing deadline; SMCI jumps 16%+ after hours. 👉cnbc.com
Sweden-based Lovable, an AI-powered app builder, raised a $15M pre-Series A led by Creandum following a €6.8M pre-seed, says it has 500K users and $17M in ARR. 👉techcrunch.com
Government and Regulation:
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) has sent a letter to Federal Trade Commission (FTC) chair Andrew Ferguson urging the FTC to require that companies admit when you're not really buying an ebook or video game. 👉theverge.com
All 50 U.S. states have now introduced some form of right to repair legislation. 👉404media.co
A New York law mandating low-cost broadband is inspiring similar legislation across multiple states, despite industry opposition. 👉arstechnica.com
The U.K. government is pushing forward with plans to allow AI developers to train AI models on artists' content on the internet without permission or payment unless creators proactively "opt out." 👉gov.uk
SCOTUS has again denied a challenge from the telecom industry of NY's $15 basic broadband law, as more states including CA, VT, and MA propose similar laws. 👉arstechnica.com
A US district judge rules Trump Media and Rumble do not need to remove US-based accounts of a top Jair Bolsonaro supporter, despite a Brazilian judge's order. 👉reuters.com
Utah, South Carolina, and at least seven other US states recently proposed bills to require app store operators to check user ages, a move supported by Meta. 👉wsj.com$
Uniswap Labs says the US SEC has closed its probe into the company and will not file enforcement actions, after the SEC dropped OpenSea and Robinhood probes. 👉coindesk.com
A settlement announced by the state of New York's Attorney General, Letitia James, DoorDash has agreed to pay $16.75 million to more than 60,000 Dashers who were supposed to receive that money in the form of tips but instead, the company used it to cover base pay and pocketed the rest. 👉gizmodo.com