October 2023

Excel recruitment time bomb makes top trainee doctors ‘unappointable’ 12/10/2023 at 12:33 By Lindsay Clark Mangled mismatch of formats, macros, and VLOOKUP practice hits wannabe anesthetists Exclusive  Computer errors, bad technology choices, and flawed processes have disrupted the recruitment of trainee anesthetists in England and Wales.… This article is an excerpt from The Register View

Researchers Uncover Malware Posing as WordPress Caching Plugin 12/10/2023 at 12:16 By Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on a new sophisticated strain of malware that masquerades a WordPress plugin to stealthily create administrator accounts and remotely control a compromised site. “Complete with a professional looking opening comment implying it is a caching plugin, this rogue

Brit competition regulator will make or break Vodafone and Three union 12/10/2023 at 11:32 By Paul Kunert Interested parties invited to speak now or forever hold your peace Britain’s Competition and Markets Authority is asking the mobile industry for feedback on Vodafone’s local merger with Three to determine if the agreement could negatively impact rivals,

AI safety guardrails easily thwarted, security study finds 12/10/2023 at 10:32 By Thomas Claburn OpenAI GPT-3.5 Turbo chatbot defenses dissolve with ’20 cents’ of API tickling The “guardrails” created to prevent large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 Turbo from spewing toxic content have been shown to be very fragile.… This article is an

Google’s third-party cookie culling to begin in Q1 2024 … for 1% of Chrome users 12/10/2023 at 09:47 By Brandon Vigliarolo And in full swing by next October Google has decided to kick third-party cookies out of its Chrome browser for one percent of users in early 2024, and to banish the web trackers entirely

Researchers Uncover Ongoing Attacks Targeting Asian Governments and Telecom Giants 12/10/2023 at 09:31 By High-profile government and telecom entities in Asia have been targeted as part of an ongoing campaign since 2021 that’s designed to deploy basic backdoors and loaders for delivering next-stage malware. Cybersecurity company Check Point is tracking the activity under the name Stayin’

EU consultation on future telecoms cools on having big tech pay for network builds 12/10/2023 at 08:47 By Simon Sharwood €1.5 trillion needed in the next five years – some to turf Huawei – and nobody’s quite sure where to find it The European Commission’s consultation on the future of the bloc’s telecoms sector has

Two High-Risk Security Flaws Discovered in Curl Library – New Patches Released 12/10/2023 at 08:01 By Patches have been released for two security flaws impacting the Curl data transfer library, the most severe of which could potentially result in code execution. The list of vulnerabilities is as follows – CVE-2023-38545 (CVSS score: 7.5) – SOCKS5 heap-based buffer overflow