Earlier this week, a second ransomware group came after Nashville-based clearing house Change Healthcare, according to Becker’s Hospital Review. Hackers known as Ransom Hub claim to possess Change data and are asking for payment, or else they would sell the information on the dark web.
Change confirmed to Becker’s that it was “aware of the reports.”
The 2023 DEF CON hacker convention in Las Vegas was billed as the world’s largest hacker event, focused on areas of interest from lockpicking to hacking autos (where the entire brains of a vehicle were reimagined on one badge-sized board) to satellite hacking to artificial intelligence. My researcher, Barbara Schluetter, and I had come to see the Generative Red Team Challenge, which purported to be “the first instance of a live hacking event of a generative AI system at scale.”
It was perhaps the first public incarnation of the White House’s May 2023 wish to see large language models (LLMs) stress-tested by red teams. The line to participate was always longer than the time available, that is, there was more interest than capability. We spoke with one of the organizers of the challenge, Austin Carson of SeedAI, an organization founded to “create a more robust, responsive, and inclusive future for AI.”
Carson shared with us the “Hack the Future” theme of the challenge — to bring together “a large number of unrelated and diverse testers in one place at one time with varied backgrounds, some having no experience, while others have been deep in AI for years, and producing what is expected to be interesting and useful results.”
Participants were issued the rules of engagement, a “referral code,” and brought to one of the challenge’s terminals (provided by Google). The instructions included:
The challenges included a variety of goals, including prompt leaking, jailbreaking, roleplay, and domain switching. The organizers then handed the keys to us to take a shot at breaking the LLMs. We took our seats and became a part of the body of testers and quickly recognized ourselves as fitting firmly in the “slightly above zero knowledge” category.
We perused the various challenges and chose to attempt…
For 30 years, my New Year’s resolution has been the same thing every year — to be in the woods on each New Year’s Day, the last day of deer season. So, in the predawn hours of New Year’s Day in the year 2000, I left out from our house at the foot of Pinnacle Mountain and headed up to a place near the peak of the mountain that I call the “Pretty Place.”
It takes about an hour and 20 minutes to make the uphill trek, so I stopped for a breather about halfway up. I turned around and looked back toward Greenville and the sun was just cresting the horizon, a truly stunning site. It was, after all, the literal “dawn of a new millennium,” which only happens once every 1,000 years. Realizing that I probably would not be around to witness the monumental event next time around, I reached around to my fanny pack, pulled out my camera and snapped off a few photos, and then headed on toward my destination.
I spent a pleasant morning watching the daily dramas of wildlife (mostly squirrels) play out in front of me. A red fox came trotting through about mid-morning. Then several mature gobblers entered my little world for a few minutes, scratched around in the dry leaves and then drifted away out of my view. All in all, it was a perfect morning in the woods and a propitious beginning to the new year.
I headed back down the mountain and recalled that this New Year’s Day was special for another reason. It was something called Y2K, shorthand for the Year Two Thousand. The whole world was dialed in on Y2K back then. Some conjectured that it was going to be the end of the world as we knew it. Because computers had, up to this point, been programmed using only the last two digits of the year, they would not know how to deal with the four-digit numeral 2,000. The doomsayers predicted that planes would fall from the sky and the power grid would fail, plunging the world into anarchy and chaos. Preppers and conspiracy theorists were having a field day.
Since affordable cell phones were not widely available at that point, I had to wait until I got home to find out that the whole thing was a big fat nothingburger. It was not that the problem was not real. It was that…
Ukraine at D+127: Strikes against civilians along the Black Sea coast. (The CyberWire) Having withdrawn from Snake Island (as a humanitarian gesture, says the Kremlin; because the Ukrainians drove them out, says basically everyone else) Russian forces struck an apartment building along the Black Sea coast with Kh-22 Kitchen missiles, killing at least nineteen noncombatants, Norway recovers from what looks like a deniable Russian state DDoS attack, and NATO plans its rapid cyber response capability.
Russia-Ukraine war: what we know on day 128 of the invasion (the Guardian) At least 19 dead after Russian missile strikes multi-story apartment building in Odesa; Russian forces withdraw from Snake Island in Black Sea
Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 128 (Al Jazeera) As the Russia-Ukraine war enters its 128th day, we take a look at the main developments.
Russian missiles kill at least 19 in Ukraine’s Odesa region (AP NEWS) Russian missile attacks on residential areas in a coastal town near the Ukrainian port city of Odesa early Friday killed at least 19 people, authorities reported, a day after Russian forces withdrew from a strategic Black Sea island.
Russian forces withdraw from Ukraine’s Snake Island (Washington Post) Russian forces say they have withdrawn from Ukraine’s Snake Island, a highly contested speck of land in the Black Sea they captured shortly after the start of the war — presenting a small but strategic win for Ukraine on Thursday.
Ukraine “big victory” at Snake Island could be a turning point (Newsweek) Russian troops’ ejection from the Black Sea island is of major significance, Ukraine’s former defense minister told Newsweek.
Why Ukraine’s Snake Island victory could be a major blow for Putin (The Telegraph) In Ukrainian hands, the threat to Moscow’s Black Sea fleet will go up, and the risk of an amphibious assault on Odesa will go down
Snake Island: Why Ukraine just won’t let it go (The Telegraph) The rocky Black Sea outcrop where 13 Ukrainian border guards famously refused to surrender has taken on a new significance