Tag Archive for: box’

Hack The Box Redefines Cybersecurity Performance, Setting New Standards in the Cyber Readiness of Organizations

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The innovative Cyber Performance Center approach helps businesses present a united front against cybercrime by aligning cybersecurity and corporate goals.

NEW YORK, NY, LONDON, UK and SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA / ACCESSWIRE / April 10, 2024 / Companies can level up their cybersecurity defenses – eliminating the skills and knowledge gaps that criminals regularly exploit thanks to Hack The Box’s Cyber Performance Center.

Hack The Box’s Cyber Performance Center unites individual ability, business management practices, and the human factor in the cybersecurity industry and it is designed to help organizations take a coordinated approach to their cyber readiness, reducing the vulnerabilities created when cybersecurity is siloed or treated as a tick-box requirement.

Its innovative model transcends the limits of traditional cyber training, taking a 360º overview that considers a business’s processes and technology investments along with the requirements of its cybersecurity teams. By matching processes and exercises to organizational outcomes it helps to align cybersecurity and business objectives.

Hack The Box’s disruptive approach also directly addresses the key human element within corporate cybersecurity, focusing on the upskilling and development cyber professionals need to perform to their best while providing clear career paths to encourage retention and combat the increased burnout and fatigue within the sector. This is critical as the global cybersecurity industry currently faces a skills shortage of four million people.

It is estimated that, by next year over half of significant cyber incidents will be caused by human error or skill shortages1. The Cyber Performance Center approach helps organizations tackle their security as a company-wide goal, considering the needs of its cybersecurity team, business processes, and respective technology investments to promote a healthy security culture.

Hack The Box combines these three organizational pillars with a continuous learning journey based on the latest technologies, vulnerabilities, and solutions for all cybersecurity domains. The approach enables customers to create and maintain a robust cyber strategy, unlocking the skills of each member of…

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Hashtag Trending Nov.24- AI brings massive internet traffic; Big Box retailers give up on self checkout; Altman dismissed because AI could do math?

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AI has resulted in a massive traffic surge on the internet. Big Box retailers are backing away from self check-out. And did Sam Altman get fired because AI could do simple math?

 

These and more top tech stories on Hashtag Trending

I’m your host Jim Love, CIO of IT World Canada and Tech News Day in the US.

Dozens of news outlets have reported that OpenAI was reportedly working on an advanced artificial intelligence model, called Q* or “Q-Star in OpenAI documents,” which raised significant safety concerns among its researchers. This model, capable of solving relatively simple math problems, represents a notable advancement in AI development. 

Why? It sounds ridiculous. After all, computers can do math. Yes they can, but we forget that every instruction that makes that work is programmed in by a human.  

We’re talking about a computer intelligence that can reason through mathematical problems where the methods are not pre-programmed. This is, for many, early evidence of a machine intelligence that can learn by itself without the need for human intervention. 

Andrew Rogoyski of the University of Surrey’s Institute for People-Centred AI commented on the significance of a large language model (LLM) capable of solving mathematical problems, calling it a major step forward in AI’s analytical capabilities.

Altman himself has hinted at this in a Wall Street Journal interview where he said that it was possible that in the future, AI wouldn’t require massive amounts of data from the internet and other sources. Some have taken this to mean that OpenAI had developed a way for AI to not only learn, but to actually teach other models by creating virtual data. 

This would be a massive breakthrough.  

Which is why there are stories about researchers at OpenAI being alarmed by Q*’s capabilities that they wrote to the board of directors, warning that it could pose a threat to humanity.

Some are speculating that it was these developments that led to the general panic and the dismissal of CEO Sam Altman. 

All this has reignited discussions on the pace at which companies like OpenAI are advancing toward Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), a level of AI that can perform…

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Hack the Bank: how cybersecurity startup Hack the Box raised £45m in a recession

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Pylarinos attributes this to the company’s humble, bootstrapped beginnings. Despite having now successfully completed three funding rounds (raising a total of $70m) starting out with just a small amount of savings has meant the founders have prioritised profitability since the firm first began operating three years ago.

“We’ve always been very cost-efficient,” he reveals. “Even after our first two financing rounds, we didn’t spend any of the capital. In the current market, this gives you more points than it used to.”

The last profitable tech company

After a string of high-profile startup failures like Pakistan’s top startup Airlift last year, which previously boasted a huge valuation of $270m, it only holds that investors will recoup their losses by prioritising ‘money in the bank’ over expansion. Pylarinos concurs with this theory.

“[This year] was much harder than previous fundraisers that we did in the past,” he admits. “But there was interest because we were never this traditional startup that burns massive amounts of capital or relies on the next fundraiser to endure.”

So, when crafting a business plan, think cautiously before you emphasise growth over survival. For those of us who are used to reading about tech startups like Uber – which, despite being worth over $50bn, didn’t turn a profit until 2021 – that might be a foreign idea.

“Only a few years back, if you were a company that was not spending capital, that translated as [proof] you are not growing fast enough,” acknowledges Pylarinos. “Yet, we were growing fast enough, and spending less capital.

“With the current market conditions, I think we’re in a perfect spot. The risk of going bust in such conditions where capital is not granted, is much larger.”

Hack the Box team photo

That theory has been proved this week with a string of high-profile tech layoffs including Spotify. The Swedish music-streaming giant announced it would cut 6% of its 10,000 employees on Monday. The company has never turned a full-year net profit.

It sounds like the company could learn a thing or two from Hack the Box. Writing on the company’s blog, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek said, “in hindsight, I was too ambitious in investing ahead of…

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Malware Comes Standard With This Android TV Box on Amazon

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At $39.99 with a $3 coupon option for Amazon Prime members, the T95 Android 10.0 TV box might seem like a good value. But when an unsuspecting but cybersecurity-savvy customer ordered one up, he said it came “festooned” with malware — no extra charge.

Daniel Milisic warned consumers in Reddit and GitHub posts that he just happened to have bought the box to run Pi-hole tracker blocking — and that he immediately made a startling discovery. His first clue something was funky with the device’s security was that it was signed with Android 10 test keys.

“If test keys weren’t enough of a bad omen, I also found ADB wide open over the Ethernet port — right out of the box,” Milisic added.

Then he let Pi-hole go to work.

“After running the Pi-hole install I set the box’s DNS1 and DNS2 to 127.0.0.1 and got a hell of a surprise,” Milisic wrote. “The box was reaching out to many known, active malware addresses.”

Milisic explained he discovered traffic-monitoring malware, and an additional type of malware he said operates similarly to Android mobile malware CopyCat, but he wasn’t able to identify it as a known variant. 

To boot, the malicious code is unremovable: Ultimately, Milisic was unable to strip the malware from the device, so it’s currently unplugged, he said.

Preinstalled Malware Isn’t New

Hardware being sold with preinstalled and often unremovable malware is an ongoing issue for consumers. Researchers at Check Point, for instance, warned consumers back in 2017 that a telecom company was distributing more than 36 different Android devices preloaded with adware.

In 2018 Chinese PC maker Lenovo was ordered to pay millions in a class-action lawsuit over its laptops coming with preinstalled adware, in the well-publicized “Superfish” incident. More recently, in April 2022, security researchers with ESET reported they had found and disclosed firmware-level vulnerabilities in millions of Lenovo consumer laptops that could allow attackers to escalate device privileges and drop malware undetected.

And in July 2020, researchers at Malwarebytes raised the alarm that government-funded Android phones for low-income households came out of the box with preinstalled Chinese malware that was…

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