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Researchers have unearthed Linux malware that circulated in the wild for at least two years before being identified as a credential stealer that’s installed by the exploitation of recently patched vulnerabilities.

The newly identified malware is a Linux variant of NerbianRAT, a remote access Trojan first described in 2022 by researchers at security firm Proofpoint. Last Friday, Checkpoint Research revealed that the Linux version has existed since at least the same year, when it was uploaded to the VirusTotal malware identification site. Checkpoint went on to conclude that Magnet Goblin—the name the security firm uses to track the financially motivated threat actor using the malware—has installed it by exploiting “1-days,” which are recently patched vulnerabilities. Attackers in this scenario reverse engineer security updates, or copy associated proof-of-concept exploits, for use against devices that have yet to install the patches.

Checkpoint also identified MiniNerbian, a smaller version of NerbianRAT for Linux that’s used to backdoor servers running the Magento ecommerce server, primarily for use as command and control servers that devices infected by NerbianRAT connect to. Researchers elsewhere have reported encountering servers that appear to have been compromised with MiniNerbian, but Checkpoint Research appears to have been the first to identify the underlying binary.

Enlarge / A burglar with a flashlight and papers in a business office—exactly like scraping files from Discord. (credit: Getty Images)

On Wednesday, Midjourney banned all employees from image synthesis rival Stability AI from its service indefinitely after it detected “botnet-like” activity suspected to be a Stability employee attempting to scrape prompt and image pairs in bulk. Midjourney advocate Nick St. Pierre tweeted about the announcement, which came via Midjourney’s official Discord channel.

Prompts are the written instructions (like “a cat in a car holding a can of a beer”) used by generative AI models such as Midjourney and Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion 3 (SD3) to synthesize images. Having prompt and image pairs could potentially help the training or fine-tuning of a rival AI image generator model.

Bot activity that took place around midnight on March 2 caused a 24-hour outage for the commercial image generator service. Midjourney linked several paid accounts with a Stability AI data team employee trying to “grab prompt and image pairs.” Midjourney then made a decision to ban all Stability AI employees from the service indefinitely. It also indicated a new policy: “aggressive automation or taking down the service results in banning all employees of the responsible company.”

Enlarge / OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks during the OpenAI DevDay event on November 6, 2023, in San Francisco. (credit: Getty Images)

On Friday afternoon Pacific Time, OpenAI announced the appointment of three new members to the company’s board of directors and released the results of an independent review of the events surrounding CEO Sam Altman’s surprise firing last November. The current board expressed its confidence in the leadership of Altman and President Greg Brockman, and Altman is rejoining the board.

The newly appointed board members are Dr. Sue Desmond-Hellmann, former CEO of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; Nicole Seligman, former EVP and global general counsel of Sony; and Fidji Simo, CEO and chair of Instacart. These additions notably bring three women to the board after OpenAI met criticism about its restructured board composition last year. In addition, Sam Altman has rejoined the board.

The independent review, conducted by law firm WilmerHale, investigated the circumstances that led to Altman’s abrupt removal from the board and his termination as CEO on November 17, 2023. Despite rumors to the contrary, the board did not fire Altman because they got a peek at scary new AI technology and flinched. “WilmerHale… found that the prior Board’s decision did not arise out of concerns regarding product safety or security, the pace of development, OpenAI’s finances, or its statements to investors, customers, or business partners.”

Enlarge / When you do math on a computer, you fly through a numerical tunnel like this—figuratively, of course. (credit: Getty Images)

Computer scientists have discovered a new way to multiply large matrices faster than ever before by eliminating a previously unknown inefficiency, reports Quanta Magazine. This could eventually accelerate AI models like ChatGPT, which rely heavily on matrix multiplication to function. The findings, presented in two recent papers, have led to what is reported to be the biggest improvement in matrix multiplication efficiency in over a decade.

Multiplying two rectangular number arrays, known as matrix multiplication, plays a crucial role in today’s AI models, including speech and image recognition, chatbots from every major vendor, AI image generators, and video synthesis models like Sora. Beyond AI, matrix math is so important to modern computing (think image processing and data compression) that even slight gains in efficiency could lead to computational and power savings.

Graphics processing units (GPUs) excel in handling matrix multiplication tasks because of their ability to process many calculations at once. They break down large matrix problems into smaller segments and solve them concurrently using an algorithm.

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Microsoft said that Kremlin-backed hackers who breached its corporate network in January have expanded their access since then in follow-on attacks that are targeting customers and have compromised the company’s source code and internal systems.

The intrusion, which the software company disclosed in January, was carried out by Midnight Blizzard, the name used to track a hacking group widely attributed to the Federal Security Service, a Russian intelligence agency. Microsoft said at the time that Midnight Blizzard gained access to senior executives’ email accounts for months after first exploiting a weak password in a test device connected to the company’s network. Microsoft went on to say it had no indication any of its source code or production systems had been compromised.

Secrets sent in email

In an update published Friday, Microsoft said it has uncovered evidence that Midnight Blizzard has used the information it gained initially to further push into its network and compromise both source code and internal systems. The hacking group—which is tracked under multiple other names including APT29, Cozy Bear, CozyDuke, The Dukes, Dark Halo, and Nobelium—has been using the proprietary information in follow-on attacks, not only against Microsoft but also its customers.

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Attackers have transformed hundreds of hacked sites running WordPress software into command-and-control servers that force visitors’ browsers to perform password-cracking attacks.

A web search for the JavaScript that performs the attack showed it was hosted on 708 sites at the time this post went live on Ars, up from 500 two days ago. Denis Sinegubko, the researcher who spotted the campaign, said at the time that he had seen thousands of visitor computers running the script, which caused them to reach out to thousands of domains in an attempt to guess the passwords of usernames with accounts on them.

Visitors unwittingly recruited

“This is how thousands of visitors across hundreds of infected websites unknowingly and simultaneously try to bruteforce thousands of other third-party WordPress sites,” Sinegubko wrote. “And since the requests come from the browsers of real visitors, you can imagine this is a challenge to filter and block such requests.”

Enlarge / A Google sign stands in front of the building on the sidelines of the opening of the new Google Cloud data center in Hesse, Hanau, opened in October 2023. (credit: Getty Images)

On Wednesday, authorities arrested former Google software engineer Linwei Ding in Newark, California, on charges of stealing AI trade secrets from the company. The US Department of Justice alleges that Ding, a Chinese national, committed the theft while secretly working with two China-based companies.

According to the indictment, Ding, who was hired by Google in 2019 and had access to confidential information about the company’s data centers, began uploading hundreds of files into a personal Google Cloud account two years ago.

The trade secrets Ding allegedly copied contained “detailed information about the architecture and functionality of GPU and TPU chips and systems, the software that allows the chips to communicate and execute tasks, and the software that orchestrates thousands of chips into a supercomputer capable of executing at the cutting edge of machine learning and AI technology,” according to the indictment.

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In a notable shift toward sanctioned use of AI in schools, some educators in grades 3–12 are now using a ChatGPT-powered grading tool called Writable, reports Axios. The tool, acquired last summer by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, is designed to streamline the grading process, potentially offering time-saving benefits for teachers. But is it a good idea to outsource critical feedback to a machine?

Writable lets teachers submit student essays for analysis by ChatGPT, which then provides commentary and observations on the work. The AI-generated feedback goes to teacher review before being passed on to students so that a human remains in the loop.

“Make feedback more actionable with AI suggestions delivered to teachers as the writing happens,” Writable promises on its AI website. “Target specific areas for improvement with powerful, rubric-aligned comments, and save grading time with AI-generated draft scores.” The service also provides AI-written writing prompt suggestions: “Input any topic and instantly receive unique prompts that engage students and are tailored to your classroom needs.”

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VMware is urging customers to patch critical vulnerabilities that make it possible for hackers to break out of sandbox and hypervisor protections in all versions, including out-of-support ones, of VMware ESXi, Workstation, Fusion, and Cloud Foundation products.

A constellation of four vulnerabilities—two carrying severity ratings of 9.3 out of a possible 10—are serious because they undermine the fundamental purpose of the VMware products, which is to run sensitive operations inside a virtual machine that’s segmented from the host machine. VMware officials said that the prospect of a hypervisor escape warranted an immediate response under the company’s IT Infrastructure Library, a process usually abbreviated as ITIL.

“Emergency change”

“In ITIL terms, this situation qualifies as an emergency change, necessitating prompt action from your organization,” the officials wrote in a post. “However, the appropriate security response varies depending on specific circumstances.”

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On Tuesday, OpenAI published a blog post titled “OpenAI and Elon Musk” in response to a lawsuit Musk filed last week. The ChatGPT maker shared several archived emails from Musk that suggest he once supported a pivot away from open source practices in the company’s quest to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI). The selected emails also imply that the “open” in “OpenAI” means that the ultimate result of its research into AGI should be open to everyone but not necessarily “open source” along the way.

In one telling exchange from January 2016 shared by the company, OpenAI Chief Scientist Illya Sutskever wrote, “As we get closer to building AI, it will make sense to start being less open. The Open in openAI means that everyone should benefit from the fruits of AI after it’s built, but it’s totally OK to not share the science (even though sharing everything is definitely the right strategy in the short and possibly medium term for recruitment purposes).”

In response, Musk replied simply, “Yup.”