Connect with us

Technology

Google’s upgraded AI image generator is now available

Published

on

Google’s upgraded AI image generator is now available

Like other AI image generators, Imagen 3 can create detailed images based on your prompt. You can also edit the image by highlighting a certain part and describing what you want to change.

It was relatively easy to get Imagen to generate images resembling Sonic.
Image: Emma Roth / Imagen 3

There seem to be some guardrails in place, as the tool will decline to generate images of public figures, like Taylor Swift, and also won’t produce images of weapons. And while it will stop short of generating named copyrighted characters, you can get around this pretty easily by describing the character you want to create.

I got the tool to generate images that look very much like Sonic the Hedgehog and Mario, while my colleague was able to create characters resembling Mickey Mouse. I also found that it will generate logos belonging to companies like Apple, Macy’s, Hershey’s, and even Google, which you can see in the image at the top of this article.

Despite these somewhat flexible guardrails, Imagen 3 still stands in stark contrast to Grok, the AI image generator that lives on Elon Musk’s X platform. Grok has been used to generate all sorts of wild content, including images with drugs, violence, and public figures doing questionable things.

Advertisement
Continue Reading
Advertisement
Click to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Technology

Watch out: Biggest data breaches of 2024, so far

Published

on

Watch out: Biggest data breaches of 2024, so far

From big banks to car dealerships, 2024 has been a banner year for data breaches. Yes, I mean that in the worst way possible. I’d be shocked if there’s any American left unexposed at this point. Here are some companies that may have exposed your data.

New! For the first time ever, the award-winning Kim Komando Show is available as a podcast. Find it now in your favorite podcast player.

National Public Data breach: 2.9 billion people exposed

Hard to imagine much worse than a background-check company being hacked. Their entire job is to dig up and collect non-public data. A lawsuit claims it was National Public Data’s negligence that exposed 2.9 billion people. Details include Social Security numbers, full names and addresses. Hacking group ASDoD put the database of the stolen information up for sale for $3.5 million. No word yet on any ransom payment.

2.7 BILLION RECORDS LEAKED IN MASSIVE US DATA BREACH

Advertisement

Through a process called scraping, NPD collects and stores personal data from “non-public sources” to perform background checks. In other words, the company gathers information that wasn’t willingly (or knowingly) handed over. 

Depending on what happens in court, NPD could be required to purge personal data of impacted individuals and to encrypt all collected data going forward.

Ascension ransomware attack: Up to 140 hospitals

In May, an employee at one of the country’s biggest healthcare systems accidentally downloaded malware. What happened next was a cyberattack avalanche.

Ascension runs 140 hospitals in 19 states and Washington, D.C. On May 8, they detected unusual activity within their network. The disruption quickly became so bad that Ascension had to shut down emergency rooms and reroute patients.

Advertisement

Emergency sign outside hospital

Hackers got their hands on 7 of Ascension’s 25,000 servers; who was impacted is still under investigation. Ascension recently said around 500 individuals were affected, but I’m willing to bet the final number will be a lot higher.

CDK global attack: 15,000 car dealerships

One of the biggest car dealership software companies got hit with a double whammy in June. CDK, used by 15,000 dealerships for payroll and finance tasks, shut down its systems after back to back cyberattacks on the 18th and 19th. Rumor has it the ransom payment was worth tens of millions of dollars.

The shutdown majorly disrupted dealership operations and sales. One Lexus dealership in New Jersey reported new car sales down 50% in June.

Advertisement

Change Healthcare attacks

20 TECH TRICKS TO MAKE LIFE BETTER, SAFER OR EASIER

Change Healthcare, a tech firm owned by UnitedHealth, is used by thousands of pharmacies, hospitals and healthcare facilities to receive payments and process claims.

One attack discovered in late February caused massive disruptions for weeks throughout the U.S. healthcare system. UnitedHealth paid a whopping $22 million  ransom to Russian cybercriminal group BlackCat to stop them from sharing the data they stole.

Then another gang of crooks, RansomHub, claimed they stole data, too. In April, UnitedHealth said a “substantial proportion” of Americans’ data was exposed. Estimates say as much as a third of all Americans were impacted. That includes sensitive medical data, including test results, diagnoses and images. 

Advertisement

AT&T breach: 73 million customers

In March, AT&T disclosed that hackers stole data from “nearly all” current and former customers. The data goes back as far as 2019 and includes some really personal information, including Social Security numbers. They reportedly paid hackers a $370,000 ransom to delete the information. 

AT&T logo

Honorable mention

  • Advance Auto Parts (July): Personal information of over 2.3 million individuals was stolen.
  • Roku (April): Through “credential stuffing” aka using logins leaked in other breaches, hackers accessed around 591,000 accounts. No financial info was accessed.
  • Truist Bank (June): Hacking group Sp1d3r stole information about 65,000 employees and posted it for sale online.
  • Tile (June): Life360, the company behind Tile tracker devices, reported a breach that included names, addresses, email addresses, phone numbers and device identification numbers.
  • Ticketmaster (June): This one impacted 560 million customers; data included names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, order history and partial payment info.
  • Dropbox (May): Attackers accessed Dropbox Sign’s development environment, compromising customer information.
  • TeamViewer (July): Employee directory data, including names and encrypted passwords, was exposed.

Locked down

You can’t stop a hacker from breaching a major company, but you can protect yourself from the fallout. 

HOW TO SCORE CHEAP STUFF (TO KEEP OR RESELL)

Advertisement

Double-check all healthcare communications. If you receive an explanation of benefits (EOB) or a bill for services you didn’t receive, contact your health care provider and insurance company ASAP. It likely means someone is using your benefits for their own healthcare.

Treat email requests with caution. Be skeptical of anything that seems super urgent. It’s OK to slow down for safety. My rule of thumb: If it’s a strange written request, like a text or email, I make a phone call.

Be wary of “old friends” who appear out of nowhere. It could be a hacker who happens to have a little (stolen) info. Take time to confirm they are who they say they are.

Make a list of exposed data. Keep this digitally or just on a Post-it. Be suspicious of anyone who references it in an email or phone call. Say the company you financed your car through was hacked. Alarm bells should raise if you get a call out of the blue that there’s a major issue with your loan.

A laptop

(ISSOUF SANOGO/AFP via Getty Images)

Update your PIN and banking login credentials. Even if they weren’t involved directly in the breach, hackers can use your personal info to access it. Keep an eye on your bank and credit card statements for anything out of the ordinary. Set up banking alerts on your phone while you’re at it.

Advertisement

Freeze your credit. This will keep scammers from opening a credit card or loan in your name. Like setting up a fraud alert, you’ll need to contact each of the three credit bureaus.

Get tech-smarter on your schedule

Award-winning host Kim Komando is your secret weapon for navigating tech.

Copyright 2024, WestStar Multimedia Entertainment. All rights reserved. 

Advertisement

Continue Reading

Technology

Groyper war, dark elves, bugmen: how the GOP ticket is reviving far-right beef

Published

on

Groyper war, dark elves, bugmen: how the GOP ticket is reviving far-right beef

Antisemitic streamer, Holocaust denier, Charlottesville rally attendee, and January 6th instigator Nick Fuentes disavowed Donald Trump’s presidential campaign last week, claiming the America First movement had been “hijacked” by “consultants, lobbyists, & donors.” 

The news that Fuentes had declared a “groyper war” on his preferred presidential candidate has sparked some claims that Trump is losing support among a core part of his constituency: white supremacists. But Fuentes has long been at odds with another subset of the far-right — one that has ascended within the mainstream Republican Party in recent years, culminating in Trump’s selection of JD Vance as his running mate.

In a video posted on Rumble, Fuentes said Trump had made “an endless string of unforced errors” in his campaign, beginning with Trump’s suggestion that former candidate Nikki Haley could have a place in his administration. Fuentes also took issue with Trump’s appearance on the All-In podcast, in which he said all foreign students who graduate from US colleges should get a green card along with their diploma. Among Fuentes’ other complaints was the fact that Trump has publicly distanced himself from Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s playbook for a second Trump term.

Unmentioned in Fuentes’ video is his longstanding beef with far-right thinkers who have gained prominence within conservative circles, including Curtis Yarvin, a “neo-reactionary” philosopher who is close with Vance and megadonor Peter Thiel. Fuentes, a vocal antisemite, has accused Yarvin of believing that “non-Jews are incapable of governing themselves and therefore must always be ruled by Jews.” He has also claimed that Yarvin and Costin Alamariu — the once-pseudonymous writer better known as Bronze Age Pervert — are “at the forefront of a rising Thiel-funded faction of the Right.” 

This subset of the far-right has been quietly gaining ground for years. In 2019, Politico Magazine reported that several young staffers of the Trump White House had become taken with Bronze Age Mindset, Alamariu’s self-published, anti-egalitarian manifesto about how superior men suffer under the tyranny of the “Leviathan” (the government, elite cultural institutions, and so forth) and the hordes of “bugmen” (inferior beings who do the Leviathan’s bidding). Vance, incidentally, follows Bronze Age Pervert on X.

Advertisement

Michael Anton, a Trump-era national security official, has described Bronze Age Pervert as speaking “directly to a youthful dissatisfaction (especially among white males) with equality as propagandized and imposed in our day.” In his review of Bronze Age Mindset, Anton notes that Yarvin gave him the book as a gift.

Writer John Ganz has referred to the radicalization of young conservative staffers as a sort of “groyperfication,” and while there are certainly some influential Fuentes sympathizers within the Republican Party, Fuentes’ groypers are actually at war with BAP acolytes and Yarvin’s so-called Dark Elves. 

The Thiel-funded faction of the right, as Fuentes put it, is now in power. Vance owes much of his political career to Thiel. Elon Musk was among those who convinced Trump to select Vance as his running mate, and Vance’s addition to the ticket has brought in hundreds of millions in donations from other members of the Silicon Valley elite. 

Fuentes’ groyper war is really a war of optics. Trump’s disavowal of Project 2025 is largely superficial; many of its policy proposals were written by former Trump staffers and current allies. Vance has not only echoed some of the proposals laid out in Project 2025 but also wrote the foreword for Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts’ forthcoming book Dawn’s Early Light. But polling suggests that Project 2025 is becoming increasingly unpopular among voters — it’s only logical that Trump has tried to tell voters he has nothing to do with it. 

Trump has, in fact, also attempted to distance himself from Fuentes. Trump had dinner with Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago in 2022 and “seemed very taken” with the young white supremacist, Axios reported at the time. (Fuentes had been invited by Kanye West shortly after the rapper legally changed his name to Ye.) But after Republican leaders criticized Trump for dining with Fuentes, Trump claimed he had no idea who Fuentes was.

Advertisement

Vance, too, has recently been questioned about Trump’s ties to Fuentes. Vance was asked about Fuentes’ dinner with Trump during an interview with ABC News on Sunday. “The one — the one thing I like about Donald Trump, Jon, is that he actually will talk to anybody,” Vance told ABC News’ Jonathan Karl. “But just because you talk to somebody doesn’t mean you endorse their views. And look, I mean Donald Trump spent a lot of quality time with my wife. Every time he sees her, he gives her a hug, tells her she’s beautiful and jokes around with her a little bit.”

Fuentes, on the other hand, had said “terrible stuff” about Vance’s wife, Usha. After Trump announced Vance as his running mate, Fuentes said Vance’s interracial relationship was proof that he “doesn’t value his racial identity,” heritage, or religion. “I mean, he’s a white supremacist,” Vance said. But unlike the other white supremacists in Trump’s orbit, Fuentes doesn’t couch his beliefs in cryptic diatribes about bugmen and elves.

Continue Reading

Technology

2.7 billion records leaked in massive US data breach

Published

on

2.7 billion records leaked in massive US data breach

A massive database containing over 2.7 billion records has reportedly ended up on a criminal forum. These records belong to individuals in the U.S. and were allegedly stolen from National Public Data (NPD). While the accuracy of the leaked data could not be verified, the hackers reportedly obtained sensitive information such as names, mailing addresses and Social Security numbers. The scale of this breach is so vast that if you live in the U.S., it’s likely that some of your data is included.

GET SECURITY ALERTS, EXPERT TIPS – SIGN UP FOR KURT’S NEWSLETTER – THE CYBERGUY REPORT HERE

Illustration of hacker at work (Kurt “CyberGuy” Knutsson)

What you need to know

Bleeping Computer reported that the database was posted on the criminal forum Breachforums, where threat actors often post such leaks. What’s interesting is that the stolen database was up for free download. The user who posted it credited a hacker named “SXUL,” saying, “There’s a new player in town.” Usually, hackers sell leaked databases like this one for huge sums.

The database has been stolen from NPD, which collects data from public sources to compile individual user profiles for people in the U.S. and other countries. NPD then sells this private data to all kinds of organizations, such as background check websites, investigators, app developers and data resellers.

Advertisement

While the database has 2.7 billion records, it’s important to note that this doesn’t necessarily mean 2.7 billion people were impacted. Many of these records are repetitive, and some are incorrect. Still, the breach affects a significant number of people in the States.

This isn’t the first time NPD data has ended up on criminal forums. Bleeping Computer noted that back in April, a hacker known as USDoD claimed to be selling 2.9 billion records with personal data from people in the U.S., U.K. and Canada, which was also stolen from NPD.

2.7 billion records leaked in massive US data breach

NPD data leaked on hacking forum (Bleeping Computer) (Kurt “CyberGuy” Knutsson)

WORLD’S LARGEST STOLEN PASSWORD DATABASE UPLOADED TO CRIMINAL FORUM

NPD is facing consequences

NPD, owned by Jerico Pictures, is facing multiple lawsuits for not protecting people’s data. One lawsuit, filed by California resident Christopher Hofmann, says NPD was negligent and breached its fiduciary duties and a third-party contract.

The plaintiff wants the court to order NPD to delete all the personal info it has collected and start encrypting data from now on. They’re also asking for more than just money, like having NPD set up data segmentation, run regular database scans, put in place a threat-management program and get a third party to check its cybersecurity every year for the next 10 years.

Advertisement

We reached out to NPD for a comment but did not hear back before our deadline.

2.7 billion records leaked in massive US data breach

A woman accessing data on computer (Kurt “CyberGuy” Knutsson)

MASSIVE DATA BREACH EXPOSES OVER 3 MILLION AMERICANS’ PERSONAL INFORMATION TO CYBERCRIMINALS

It’s time to invest in identity theft protection

Hofmann learned about the data breach through his identity theft protection service, which detected his data in the leaked database. The service notified Hofmann, prompting him to take action and file a lawsuit. Data breaches happen every day, and most never make the headlines, but with an identity theft protection service, you’ll be notified if and when you are affected. See my tips and best picks on how to protect yourself from identity theft.

4 ways to protect yourself from data breaches

In addition to opting for an identity theft protection service, you can follow these tips to protect yourself from data breaches.

1) Remove your personal information from the internet: While no service can guarantee the complete removal of your data from the internet, a data removal service is really a smart choice. They aren’t cheap and neither is your privacy. These services do all the work for you by actively monitoring and systematically erasing your personal information from hundreds of websites. It’s what gives me peace of mind and has proven to be the most effective way to erase your personal data from the internet. By limiting the information available, you reduce the risk of scammers cross-referencing data from breaches with information they might find on the dark web, making it harder for them to target you. Check out my top picks for data removal services here.

Advertisement

2) Be wary of mailbox communications: Bad actors may also try to scam you through snail mail. The data leak gives them access to your address. They may impersonate people or brands you know and use themes that require urgent attention, such as missed deliveries, account suspensions and security alerts.

3) Be cautious of phishing attempts: Be vigilant about emails, phone calls or messages from unknown sources asking for personal information. Avoid clicking on suspicious links or providing sensitive details unless you can verify the legitimacy of the request.

The best way to protect yourself from clicking malicious links that install malware is to have strong antivirus protection installed on all your devices. Get my picks for the best 2024 antivirus protection winners for your Windows, Mac, Android and iOS devices.

4) Monitor your accounts: Breaches of this magnitude will make it a necessity for you to start routinely reviewing your bank accounts, credit card statements and other financial accounts for any unauthorized activity. If you notice any suspicious transactions, report them immediately to your bank or credit card company.

HERE’S WHAT RUTHLESS HACKERS STOLE FROM 110 MILLION AT&T CUSTOMERS

Advertisement

Kurt’s key takeaway

If the database leak is legit, this is a big security fail on NPD’s part. Since their whole business is based on collecting and selling data, they should have strong encryption and security in place, especially if this isn’t the first time hackers have targeted them. If they’re putting people at risk, they should be held responsible and cover any financial losses people face because of the leak.

How do you feel about companies that collect and sell data? Do you think they should be held accountable for breaches? Let us know by writing us at Cyberguy.com/Contact.

For more of my tech tips and security alerts, subscribe to my free CyberGuy Report Newsletter by heading to Cyberguy.com/Newsletter.

Ask Kurt a question or let us know what stories you’d like us to cover.

Follow Kurt on his social channels:

Advertisement

Answers to the most asked CyberGuy questions:

Copyright 2024 CyberGuy.com. All rights reserved.

Advertisement
Continue Reading
Advertisement

Trending