Qilin and INC ransomware actors continue exploiting a patched Palo Alto Networks flaw to gain network access, bypass MFA, and establish VPN sessions.
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Pegasus Spyware Infection Confirmed on Serbian University Rector’s iPhone Days Before Election
The Security Information Agency (BIA), Serbia’s civilian security service, dismissed the September allegations that students and opposition politicians had been spied on as “purely trivial sensationalism” in a statement on September 3, as translated by the broadcaster N1, and said it operates strictly within Serbian law.
The two cases extend a wave that SHARE reported on September 2, when it said at least 14 people in Serbia, including student activists, an opposition MP and a local councilor, had been targeted with spyware since the start of the year. Twelve of them had received Apple Threat Notifications in August, the month Apple warned users in 110 countries.
One was Jelena Kontić, a student whose Pegasus infection the Citizen Lab confirmed. The other two had a new version of NoviSpy, an Android spyware, installed on their phones.
PHP warns admins of two critical flaws, emergency patches coming tomorrow
The PHP security team is warning administrators to prepare for emergency security updates tomorrow to address two critical vulnerabilities, as information about the flaws has reportedly leaked ahead of their scheduled disclosure.
PHP powers many websites and web applications, including content management systems, e-commerce platforms, and custom web services.
In an advisory published Tuesday, the PHP development team announced that it plans to release security updates on Wednesday, October 21, at 14:00 UTC (10:00 AM Eastern), to address two vulnerabilities, each rated 9.2 under CVSS v4.0.
Mozilla, Google, Apple block compromised eMudhra CA certificates
Certificate authority eMudhra revoked eight compromised intermediate certificates after researchers found their private keys were so weak that anyone could recover them almost instantly and use them to forge trusted certificates for legitimate websites.
Major browsers and operating systems trusted the compromised certificates, potentially allowing attackers to impersonate legitimate websites and intercept encrypted communications.
A security researcher known as Wayne discovered the weakness on October 17 while scanning publicly available certificate data.
Brain-inspired randomness makes artificial vision more reliable
Humans are usually remarkably good at recognizing objects, even under poor conditions. Artificial vision systems, by contrast, reach their limits more quickly. Researchers at the Hertie Institute for Clinical Brain Research have now investigated what artificial vision systems can learn from the brain. They found that combining two brain-inspired features can make image recognition considerably more reliable. The research findings are published in the journal Patterns.
The study focused on two questions: What makes human vision so robust, and what can artificial vision systems learn from it? Such systems use artificial neural networks, for example, to recognize objects in images. The more reliably they can do so even when visual information is degraded or incomplete, the better suited they are for use under challenging conditions.
One possible explanation for the robustness of biological vision lies in how the brain works. When we see, information does not simply travel from the eyes to the brain. Higher brain areas also send signals back to earlier processing stages, influencing how incoming sensory information is processed. Researchers refer to this as top-down feedback. Such connections are a fundamental feature of biological visual systems but are not incorporated into many artificial vision systems.
