Latest cybersecurity reporting from selected sources.

Extortion group Lovely claims to have stolen 40 million pieces of info from publisher Conde Nast A criminal group is beating Conde Nast over the head for not responding sooner to its extortion attempt by posting stolen subscribers' email and home addresses and warning the publisher of Wired, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and Teen Vogue that it has 40 million more entries.…

System prompt engineering turns benign AI assistants into 'investigator' and 'detective' roles that bypass privacy guardrails A team of boffins is warning that AI chatbots built on large language models (LLM) can be tuned into malicious agents to autonomously harvest users’ personal data, even by attackers with "minimal technical expertise”, thanks to "system prompt" customization tools from OpenAI and others.…

Car hire biz takes your privacy seriously, though Car hire giant Hertz has confirmed that customer information was stolen during the zero-day data raids on Cleo file transfer products last year.…

244M purloined passwords added to Have I Been Pwned thanks to govt tip-off A tip-off from a government agency has resulted in 284 million unique email addresses and plenty of passwords snarfed by credential-stealing malware being added to privacy-breach-notification service Have I Been Pwned (HIBP).…

And it only took four months, tut WhatsApp has fixed a problem with its View Once feature, designed to protect people's privacy with automatically disappearing pictures and videos.…

Plus Australia launches an investigation into insurer's data privacy practices Australian health insurer Medibank's prognosis following an October data breach keeps getting worse as criminals dumped another batch of stolen customer data on the dark web. …

Also, Albania almost called in NATO over cyber attacks, and Facebook warns of account-stealing mobile apps In brief An executive order signed by President Biden on Friday to setting out fresh rules on how the US and Europe share people's private personal info may still fall short of the EU's wishes, says the privacy advocate who defeated the previous regulations in court.…

Six years on web devs finally settle on sensor privacy defenses Six years after web security and privacy concerns surfaced about ambient light sensors in mobile phones and notebooks, browser boffins have finally implemented defenses.…

Ethical hackers, but for privacy programs Black Hat Miscreants aren't only working to exploit flaws in an enterprise's security posture, they're also looking for holes in organizations' privacy programs to steal user data, according to Meta's Scott Tenaglia.…