#data exfiltration

#data exfiltration

Eight days before his employment was to end, Luo allegedly hooked up an external hard drive to his Intel laptop, but when he tried to download a file, the company's internal controls blocked the transfer, the lawsuit claimed. Five days later, the lawsuit alleged, Luo deployed a different technology, a more sophisticated gadget that resembles a small computer server, called a network storage device.

Nation-state goons and cybercrime rings are experimenting with Gemini to develop a "Thinking Robot" malware module that can rewrite its own code to avoid detection, and build an AI agent that tracks enemies' behavior. Attackers are no longer just using Gemini for productivity gains - things like translating and tailoring phishing lures, looking up information about surveillance targets, using AI for tech support, and writing some software scripts.

A new type of malware called RedTiger has been popping up more and more in recent months. While the tool was originally intended for security testing and red teaming, it is now being actively exploited by cybercriminals to attack gamers and Discord users. The open-source tool, developed in Python and released in 2024, includes modules for network research, phishing, OSINT, and data collection.

As a proof of concept, Logue asked M365 Copilot to summarize a specially crafted financial report document with an indirect prompt injection payload hidden in the seeming innocuous "summarize this document" prompt. The payload uses M365 Copilot's search_enterprise_emails tool to fetch the user's recent emails, and instructs the AI assistant to generate a bulleted list of the fetched contents, hex encode the output, and split up the string of hex-encoded output into multiple lines containing up to 30 characters per line.

Webhooks on Discord are a way to post messages to channels in the platform without requiring a bot user or authentication, making them an attractive mechanism for attackers to exfiltrate data to a channel under their control. "Importantly, webhook URLs are effectively write-only," Socket researcher Olivia Brown said in an analysis. "They do not expose channel history, and defenders cannot read back prior posts just by knowing the URL."

For years, security leaders have treated artificial intelligence as an "emerging" technology, something to keep an eye on but not yet mission-critical. A new Enterprise AI and SaaS Data Security Report by AI & Browser Security company LayerX proves just how outdated that mindset has become. Far from a future concern, AI is already the single largest uncontrolled channel for corporate data exfiltration-bigger than shadow SaaS or unmanaged file sharing.

"Attackers are no longer simply experimenting with open source. The numbers are telling us that threat actors have identified data as the most profitable target, and developers as the easiest way in."