All posts tagged: cyber attacks

Australian banks warned frontier AI could create larger, faster cyber attacks | Technology News

Australian banks warned frontier AI could create larger, faster cyber attacks | Technology News

Published by Parlour News

3 min readApr 30, 2026 10:00 AM IST Australia’s financial system regulator said on Thursday the country’s banks were not keeping pace with AI industry developments, warning frontier AI systems such as Anthropic’s Mythos had the potential to lead to larger and faster cyber attacks. In a letter to banks, the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) said most of the ⁠industry’s ​information security practices were struggling to match the rate of change in AI. The regulator said the speed of AI development could pose a growing threat to Australia’s financial services. “It also warns frontier AI models such as Anthropic’s Claude Mythos, which could enhance the discovery of vulnerabilities by bad ​actors, ​are expected to further increase the probability, speed and ⁠scale of cyber attacks,” APRA said in a statement referencing a review that it had conducted. Anthropic did not immediately respond to a ‌Reuters request for comment. Potential risks posed by Mythos, which has high-level coding capabilities, have given it a potentially unprecedented ability to identify cybersecurity vulnerabilities, experts have warned. Anthropic has launched …

Cyber Attack Severity Rating System Established in U.K.

Cyber Attack Severity Rating System Established in U.K.

Published by Webster

A new rating system in the U.K. will classify the severity of cyberattacks on a scale from one to five, aiming to provide businesses and policymakers with more precise insights into the impact of cyber threats. The Cyber Monitoring Centre, an independent nonprofit organisation of industry experts, will assess incidents in real time and publish results for free. The system is designed to be easily understood, similar to the Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale, which categorises hurricanes based on sustained wind speed. A score of one on the CMC scale represents the least severe incidents, while a five indicates the most serious cyberattacks. Only events that impact multiple organisations and result in financial losses exceeding £100 million will receive a rating. The U.K. has experienced a surge in high-profile hacking events over the past year, including ransomware incidents targeting the British Library, supermarkets Sainsbury’s and Morrisons, and pathology company Synnovis, which disrupted the NHS operations. In December, the head of the U.K.’s National Cyber Security Centre warned that the country’s cyber risks are “widely underestimated.” SEE: 99% …

Are Long-Lived Credentials the New Achilles’ Heel for Cloud Security?

Are Long-Lived Credentials the New Achilles’ Heel for Cloud Security?

Published by Webster

The head of security advocacy at Datadog, a cloud-based monitoring and analytics platform, has urged enterprises in Australia and the APAC region to accelerate phasing out long-lived credentials for popular hyperscale cloud services, warning that they remain a serious data breach risk. Speaking with TechRepublic, Andrew Krug highlighted findings from Datadog’s State of Cloud Security 2024 report, which identified long-lived credentials as a persistent security risk factor. While credential management practices are improving, Krug noted they are not advancing as quickly or effectively as needed to mitigate risks. Long-lived credentials are still a big threat to cloud security The report revealed that nearly half (46%) of organisations using AWS rely on IAM users for human access to cloud environments — a practice Datadog called a form of long-lived credential. This was true even for organisations using centralised identity management to grant access across multiple systems. Moreover, nearly one in four relied solely on IAM users without implementing centralised federated authentication. According to Datadog, this highlights a persistent issue: while centralised identity management is becoming more …

Number of Active Ransomware Groups Highest on Record

Number of Active Ransomware Groups Highest on Record

Published by Webster

This year has seen the highest number of active ransomware groups on record, with 58 attacking global businesses in the second quarter. Threat intelligence platform provider Cyberint has reported only a slight dip in the third quarter, with 57 active groups. Furthermore, in Q3, the top 10 ransomware groups were responsible for only 58.3% of all detected attacks. This reflects both the increase in the number of active groups in general and a decline in activity from the larger players thanks to successful law enforcement takedowns, such as those of ALPHV and Dispossessor. Adi Bleih, security researcher at Cyberint, told TechRepublic in an email: “The number of active ransomware groups having reached an all-time high means that businesses face an increased risk of attacks as each of these competing gangs must now vie for targets. The competition between different ransomware groups has fuelled increasingly frequent attacks, leaving very little room for error on the part of enterprise cybersecurity teams. “Whereas security gaps and vulnerabilities may have previously gone unnoticed, the proliferation of ransomware groups, with …

Global Cyber Attacks to Double from 2020 to 2024, Report Finds

Published by Webster

On the first day of Cybersecurity Awareness Month in the U.S., research has revealed that the number of significant global cyber attacks in 2024 will be double that of 2020. A new report from insurer QBE, Connected Business: digital dependency fuelling risk, predicts that organisations will be hit by 211 disruptive and destructive cyber attacks this year. Disruptive incidents are reversible and only impact data availability, integrity, or access — such as distributed denial-of-service attacks. Conversely, destructive attacks are irreversible and aim to have a physical impact on people, like the Triton malware, which disabled safety systems at petrochemical plants. The number of disruptive and destructive cyber attacks in 2020 was 103, indicating a potential 105% increase in just four years. Number of recorded disruptive and destructive cyber attacks since 2020. Image: QBE The data for the report was collected by the consultancy Control Risks. They indexed a selection of “strategically important” open-source and incident response cases rather than data loss or simple device compromise type incidents. Examples of these significant attacks from the last …