Expert panel report examines security risk and resilience in Canada’s research enterprise

Posted in Commentary with tags , on October 21, 2025 by itnerd

In a moment defined by shifting geopolitics, intense global competition for talent and technology, and rapid investments in national infrastructure critical to sovereignty, Canada must protect sensitive research and the benefits it creates—without closing the doors on the relationships that make Canadian science thrive. A new report from the Council of Canadian Academies (CCA), Balancing Research Security and Open Science, offers an independent assessment of national and foreign efforts to promote research security, highlighting potential strategies to safeguard national interests while preserving the openness that drives discovery, innovation, and prosperity.

Balancing Research Security and Open Science was commissioned by Defence Research and Development Canada and the Public Health Agency of Canada, with support from other government departments and agencies. The report explores measures for identifying and safeguarding sensitive research of concern and highlights the need for their continuous application and reassessment throughout the research process, fostering a modern research mindset. It also describes the importance of:

  • Increased training and capacity-building, especially for smaller universities, colleges, and polytechnics with limited research-security resources;
  • Greater integration of the private sector, which plays a critical role in Canada’s research ecosystem but frequently lacks oversight; and
  • Recognition of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis Peoples’ right to govern research about them and their lands.

Balancing Research Security and Open Science recognizes the critical importance of coordinated, collaborative research security efforts. The consequences for misuse of sensitive research can be severe, imperiling national and economic security, health, and well-being. With adequate training, resources, and capacity, Canada can encourage a modern research mindset, strengthening the research community and encouraging ethical and open science against an uncertain future.

Balancing Research Security and Open Science is available at cca-reports.ca.

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Guest Post: AWS Outage Creates “Perfect Storm” for Social Engineering Attacks 

Posted in Commentary with tags on October 21, 2025 by itnerd

By Stefanie Schappert

Yesterday Amazon Web Services (AWS) went down in the US causing a ripple effect, from governments and local municipalities, to enterprises, small businesses and the individuals who rely on these services daily. 

AWS is a cloud-based service thousands of major companies use to not only store their data, but run their apps and software for many critical business services.  

Whether basic communications using apps such as Snapchat, Signal and Reddit to airlines such as Delta and United reporting disruptions to their customer facing operations, when these services go down it highlights the reliance on just a few cloud services companies (AWS, Microsoft Azure, ANd Google Cloud) to run the country so to speak. 

The AWS outage has further impacted shopping websites, banking apps, and even streaming and smart homes devices.

And while organizations scramble to ensure business operations continue to run, it’s also an opportunity for individuals to do a quick check-in on their own cyber hygiene. 

Cybercriminals and hackers can easily take advantage of these types of outages to deploy an array of social engineering attacks. 

Whether in the office or at home, nothing is more frustrating than losing the ability to access files and documents, and communicate with business associates or loved ones, especially in an emergency or crisis.  

Hackers who rely on mass urgency and panic will see this as an opportunity to take advantage of people’s heightened emotions with phishing emails offering to “fix” the issue and get you back online and into your accounts or apps.  

But in reality, these scammers are looking to steal your personal information, such as login credentials by tricking you into updating your software or resetting your password.   

During major outages, users should avoid clicking on any links in emails, texts and pop-ups claiming to be able to fix the outage. 

Additionally, double check that any alerts or update messages from organizations, such as your bank or payment apps, are verified from the official website or app.   

This is the time to make sure you are using a strong password and multifactor authentication to prevent any unauthorized access to your accounts. 

However, individuals should also delay making sensitive transactions, such as major financial transactions, resetting your password, or installing critical software updates, until the service in question has been announced as officially restored. 

Furthermore, when the service disruption has ended, users should also monitor any affected accounts for unusual activity, discrepancies, and duplicate or fraudulent transactions. 

Finally, this is an excellent reminder for individuals to make sure they have a back-up system in place to access important documents and for communications.  

This can be as easy as keeping a secondary email account or even a back-up mobile phone.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stefanie Schappert, MSCY, CC, Senior Journalist at Cybernews, is an accomplished writer with an M.S. in cybersecurity, immersed in the security world since 2019.  She has a decade-plus experience in America’s #1 news market working for Fox News, Gannett, Blaze Media, Verizon Fios1, and NY1 News.  With a strong focus on national security, data breaches, trending threats, hacker groups, global issues, and women in tech, she is also a commentator for live panels, podcasts, radio, and TV. Earned the ISC2 Certified in Cybersecurity (CC) certification as part of the initial CC pilot program, participated in numerous Capture-the-Flag (CTF) competitions, and took 3rd place in Temple University’s International Social Engineering Pen Testing Competition, sponsored by Google.  Member of Women’s Society of Cyberjutsu (WSC), Upsilon Pi Epsilon (UPE) International Honor Society for Computing and Information Disciplines. 

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Fortra Tracks Fivefold Increase in Brokerage Account Attacks

Posted in Commentary with tags on October 21, 2025 by itnerd

Fortra Intelligence and Research Experts (FIRE) have uncovered a fivefold increase in attacks targeting brokerage accounts year-over-year, with activity accelerating sharply in mid-2025. The campaigns demonstrate content patterns resembling the Chinese Phishing-as-a-Service group known as the “Smishing Triad,” use deceptive text messages to steal credentials, and intercept authentication codes. Once inside, attackers execute “ramp-and-dump” stock manipulation schemes while leaving almost no digital trace. 

You can read the report here: https://www.fortra.com/blog/fortra-tracks-fivefold-increase-brokerage-attacks-yoy

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Chipmind launches from stealth with $2.5m for its AI agents to speed chip making

Posted in Commentary with tags on October 21, 2025 by itnerd

Today Chipmind, the first European startup building AI agents to accelerate the development of microchips, launches Chipmind Agents, optimized to empower engineering teams in semiconductor companies to speed-up the path from specification to chip manufacturing. 

Chipmind Agents are a new class of AI agents designed to automate and optimize the most complex chip design and verification tasks. Uniquely built upon each customer’s own proprietary, design-specific data, these agents seamlessly integrate into existing workflows, intelligently self-adapting to the specific design context, auto-customizing for proprietary EDA tools, and understanding the entire chip design hierarchy. Functioning as a fully aware and collaborative co-worker, Chipmind Agents enhance engineering productivity by autonomously executing complex, multi-step tasks while ensuring the human engineer always remains in full control. This holistic and purpose-built approach is designed to dramatically reduce time-to-solve cycles within any custom chip design environment, empowering teams to achieve results faster.

The evolution of chip design has created powerful, deeply embedded EDA tool flows that were not designed for interaction with modern AI agents. Recognizing that these critical systems can’t be discarded, we developed Chipmind’s agent-building technology. This foundational platform is the key to unlocking AI’s potential, as it prepares a company’s current designs and development environment for agentic automation. Instead of replacing legacy systems, our technology makes them ready for the future of chip design.

Chipmind is the first European startup focusing on AI agents for chip design and verification, its origin story is built on the strong, trusting relationship between its founders, Harald Kröll and Sandro Belfanti, who met during their PhD studies at ETH Zurich. Both have extensive experience in AI and chip design, and have developed more than 20 chips, ranging from modems for mobile phones to system-on-chip solutions.

The semiconductor industry is at a critical inflection point. As the demand for more powerful chips continues to skyrocket, the complexity of designing them has grown exponentially, pushing traditional methodologies to their limits. This is no longer a problem that can be solved by simply hiring more engineers. Concurrently, a new generation of engineers is becoming increasingly accustomed to working with AI tools and agents, creating fertile ground for a new market of intelligent, collaborative design solutions. This confluence of need and acceptance sets the stage for a new paradigm: the integration of sophisticated AI agents into the core of chip design. This human-AI collaboration is the key to managing immense complexity, unlocking engineering creativity, and ultimately enabling the next generation of technology that will define our future.

Chipmind has successfully raised $2.5M in its pre-seed round, led by Founderful with participation of prominent angel investors from the semiconductor industry. This investment allows Chipmind to expand its world-class engineering team, accelerate product development, and deepen its engagements with key industry players.

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MIND Announces Endpoint DLP Innovations to Better Protect Data in the AI Era

Posted in Commentary with tags on October 21, 2025 by itnerd

MIND today announced new innovations to endpoint data protection. These AI-native DLP capabilities redefine how enterprises prevent data loss, on every user device, across every environment, with unmatched content- and context-awareness. As GenAI usage continues to expand, it’s every organization’s imperative to stop data leaks on endpoints without disrupting productivity and innovation.

As the most immediate and active touchpoint for sensitive data, the endpoint plays a pivotal role in the data security lifecycle. Endpoint DLP has historically been one of the most challenging areas of data protection, prone to noise, complexity, blind spots and user friction. But it’s also where some of the most critical risks originate. From accidental file uploads to intentional data exfiltration, the endpoint is where sensitive data is most often handled, manipulated and moved. MIND addresses these risks head-on with a platform that detects risk in real time and responds automatically with dynamic, policy-based remediation and prevention. MIND gives security teams a more accurate, proactive way to stop data leaks before they happen.

MIND’s new endpoint innovations deliver enhanced controls to its award-winning platform, one built for the future of data protection in the AI era, where visibility, context and automation are seamlessly connected. Built on MIND’s unified platform that spans discovery, classification, detection, remediation, policy management and prevention, this expansion brings the same level of simplicity and automation to the protection of endpoints and the data they process. With this announcement, MIND becomes the first in the industry to combine built-in advanced AI data classification, risk remediation and now modern enterprise endpoint protection.

Endpoint data protection and more, upgraded

MIND is transforming endpoint DLP into a less stressful part of the data security lifecycle. Legacy tools have long been complex, noisy and disconnected, yet the endpoint remains one of the most critical control points in modern data security. It’s where AI tools interact with sensitive data and where it is most vulnerable. This expanded approach replaces friction with automation, noise with intelligence and complexity with a simple, stress-free approach. These platform enhancements are designed to simplify and fortify sensitive data protection at the edge.

MIND’s Endpoint DLP elevates the experience with:

  • Full Data Lineage: Track every sensitive file’s journey across users, devices, origins and destinations.
  • Native App Protection: Protect data used inside locally installed applications without agent sprawl or user disruption, including GenAI apps.
  • USB and Peripheral Controls: Automatically govern and stop data leaks to external devices connected to the endpoint with precision.
  • Evidence Collection: When triggered by policy violations, capture screenshots, file actions, user behavior and more for investigations and audits.

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Zoho Research: Canadian Organizations Balancing Privacy with AI Adoption

Posted in Commentary with tags on October 20, 2025 by itnerd

As AI adoption accelerates across Canada, new research from Zoho reveals that Canadian business professionals are successfully navigating the intersection of innovation and privacy. The findings, based on the infographic at the end of this email, provide insights about enterprise strategy, digital transformation, and the Canadian business advantage.

Key highlights:

  • Leaders aren’t leading the charge: only 26% of CEOs/presidents/owners are leading AI adoption. While the majority (52%) of the adoption is being initiated by their teams. 
  • AI momentum: 84.5% of Canadian organizations are actively exploring or implementing AI. However, 16% have yet to adopt it.
  • Privacy as strategy: Canadian organizations view privacy as an AI enabler, not a barrier. 71% rate their privacy investments as “adequate to excellent,” and nearly half dedicate 11–30% of their IT budget to privacy.
  • Canadian advantages: educated workers, innovation capability, global reputation, tech hubs, and social policies.
  • Versus the U.S.: 14% of U.S. respondents have advanced integrations vs. 7% for Canadians

UPDATE: The research can be found here.

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AWS Takes A Dive Taking Down Many Popular Apps And Websites With It

Posted in Commentary with tags on October 20, 2025 by itnerd

If you use anything from Snapchat to Reddit to Lloyds, you were likely affected by an outage over at Amazon Web Services or AWS. The fact is that two companies largely provide the computing resources that apps and websites need. The other one is Microsoft with their Azure platform. So when one of those companies has an outage, we are all going to have a bad day.

The cause of today’s outage according to Amazon was as follows:

We have identified a potential root cause for error rates for the DynamoDB APIs in the US-EAST-1 Region. Based on our investigation, the issue appears to be related to DNS resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoint in US-EAST-1. 

It’s always DNS at the end of the day when a network or an Amazon has an outage. As it stands, Amazon has largely gotten things back online. But the company is still dealing with issues as recently as a few minutes ago. So don’t be surprised if your favorite app or website might still have problems.

Aras Nazarovas, senior security researcher at Cybernews has this commentary: 

“Today’s outages for multiple services was the result internal DNS failures at Amazon Web Services in their US-EAST-1 region of AWS Cloud, similar failures have been common causes for major outages in the past, and usually stem from incorrect, updated configurations, or due to poor monitoring of expiration timelines for configurations, certificates, etc. 

From initial reporting there are no indications of any security breach, however failing to keep information or resources available for clients can be classified as a cyber incident, even if there was no malicious outsider or malicious intent. 

Similar outages occur almost every year, and they can be a reminder of how extensive software supply chains have become, showing how a simple issue on a handful of Amazon Data Centers caused thousands of issues to their clients.

Clients of affected services were impacted by failing to access their resources and data hosted by AWS for ~4hours impact of such a failure to ensure availability can vary greatly depending on the specific business and industry that used impacted AWS services, in worst case scenarios such an outage could have had serious consequences in critical infrastructure sectors.

In the event of such disruptions users should immediately seek alternative solutions for communication (different app, phone calls, SMS, radio) to be able to coordinate next steps towards recovering from such a disruption. It is a good practice to have a “Disaster Recovery Plan” where alternative communication channels and other critical steps have been planned in advance.”

I’ll be keeping an eye on this to see if there are any knock on effects. But it looks like things are trending towards normalcy…. Hopefully.

UPDATE: Sergiy Balynsky, VP of Engineering at cybersecurity company Spin.AI, provided the following comment:

“The AWS outage is a reminder that business continuity planning isn’t optional. Organizations should maintain independent backups and diversify across multiple cloud providers – so a disruption in one platform doesn’t bring operations to a halt.

Even the most reliable clouds can fail. A strong business continuity plan should include not only reliable backups, but also cross-platform and multi-cloud redundancy to minimize business disruption and maintain access to critical data when one provider experiences downtime.”

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Salesforce breach escalates: Qantas & Vietnam Airlines data leaked on dark web 

Posted in Commentary with tags on October 20, 2025 by itnerd

Outpost24 researchers have published an analysis on the recent developments surrounding the Salesforce data breach. The breach has continued to escalate, with Qantas and Vietnam Airlines data now being leaked on the dark web. 

The analysis dives into the exact timeline of events, the amount of data being leaked, the broader risk of these events, and how the threat actors behind this, Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters, typically run their attacks. The researchers determined that this incident highlights two critical realities. 

One, that an organization’s security perimeter is no longer just the firewall, but all third party platforms that have access to company data and software. And two, that threat actors are increasingly targeting individuals to bypass technical controls. By exploiting insider employees, Scattered Lapsus$ and many other groups, are leveraging major data leaks. All because of effective social engineering. 

For full details, the analysis can be read at this link: https://outpost24.com/blog/salesforce-breach-qantas-vietnam-airlines/

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Over 17 Million Consumers Impacted In Prosper Lending Platform Data Breach

Posted in Commentary with tags on October 17, 2025 by itnerd

Data breach tracking website Have I Been Pwned posted yesterday that US peer-to-peer lending platform Prosper was hit with a breach that affected 17.6 million customers.

Prosper initially announced last month that it had detected unauthorized access on their systems resulting in the exposure of an undisclosed number of customers and applicant information. The company shut down the activity promptly and confirmed that the unauthorized access was revoked as of September 2.

John Carberry, Solution Sleuth with cybersecurity services provider Xcape, Inc., offers perspective:

    “The Prosper data breach is a serious one, both in terms of the number of people affected and the sensitivity of the compromised information. With 17.6 million customers impacted, and data including Social Security numbers, credit scores, and income details exposed, this incident could lead to various types of fraud, such as identity theft, synthetic identity creation, and phishing attacks. Although Prosper says there’s no evidence of unauthorized account access or stolen funds, breaches involving financial data often have lasting consequences, with issues appearing months or even years later. This event highlights how crucial it is for financial platforms to have strong identity and access management, continuous monitoring, and robust data encryption. Those affected should immediately take steps like credit monitoring, fraud alerts, and closely monitoring their accounts. For organizations, this serves as a reminder to minimize data retention, enforce least-privilege access, and ensure quick breach detection and response to limit damage.

    “Simply put, companies that store this type of PII in the course of operating their businesses have a fiduciary responsibility to protect it.  It is no longer enough to have a “proper” response to such breaches.  Consumers must demand stronger data protections and accountability from these vendors at the outset.”

Companies need to take better steps to avoid a situation like this. I say that because the sort of information that has been leaked should be extremely difficult to get. In this case, that does not seem to be case.

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NATO’s Biggest Naval Exercise Proves Undetectable Ship-to-Ship Laser Communication

Posted in Commentary with tags on October 17, 2025 by itnerd

Lithuanian space and defense tech company Astrolight has successfully demonstrated undetectable, unjammable, and high-bandwidth laser-based ship-to-ship communication with its POLARIS terminal during REPMUS’25, NATO’s largest unmanned maritime exercise recently.

During the REPMUS (Robotic Experimentation and Prototyping using Maritime Uncrewed Systems)/Dynamic Messenger mission, hosted by the Portuguese Navy, POLARIS laser terminals maintained a stable, jam-proof horizon-limited laser-based link between two vessels: NRP Dom Francisco de Almeida and NRP Dom Carlos I. During testing, the link wasn’t detected by a single sensor of other participating ships, drones, and land assets.

Astrolight’s terminals also transmitted gigabytes of data at latencies and speeds that allow for more than 10 concurrent, real-time HD video streams, even through rain and fog, during the day and night.

Jamming is a serious problem at sea because it can distort satellite navigation, confuse radar and ship-tracking displays, and interrupt radio and satellite communications. In such cases, crews switch to less secure backup methods like noisy radio or signal lamps that increase a ship’s electromagnetic signature and make it easier to detect.

The demonstration of Astrolight’s POLARIS in Portugal builds on prior tests with the Lithuanian Navy.

NATO’s REPMUS/Dynamic Messenger exercise combines REPMUS, the top event for maritime robotics and unmanned tech, and Dynamic Messenger, a program for testing innovative naval systems. They bring together NATO Allies, partners, academia, and industry experts, and provide a realistic setting to evaluate new maritime capabilities and promote their integration into NATO operations.

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