Studies provide evidence on cyber threats, vulnerabilities, defensive controls, and user behavior, helping assess security risks and protections.
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Background for this topic.
Study in this tag covers systematic research, measurement, evaluation, or analysis of information-security technologies, threats, and practices. It may include experiments on attack techniques, assessments of defensive controls, surveys of security behavior, analysis of incidents, or research into vulnerabilities and privacy risks. The relevant question is usually what evidence the work provides, how broadly its findings apply, and whether its methods support reproducible conclusions.
For practitioners, studies can reveal exploitable conditions, estimate how often a weakness occurs, or test whether a control detects and contains attacks under realistic conditions. Interpret results cautiously when samples are small, environments are artificial, or a claimed vulnerability has not been independently validated. Research involving telemetry, users, or personal data also raises privacy and ethical requirements. Useful findings should translate into specific actions, such as prioritizing vulnerability remediation, changing configurations, improving detection logic, or revising secure-development and risk-assessment practices.
Weekly headline count for the current query.
Cams statistically more likely to ID Black people, says new research A UK police force has suspended its deployment of live facial recognition (LFR) technology after a study revealed it was statistically more likely to identify Black people on a watchlist database.…
Research shows productivity and judgment peak decades after graduation A growing body of research continues to show that older workers are generally more productive than younger employees.…
Study finds built-in browsers across gadgets often ship years out of date Web browsers for desktop and mobile devices tend to receive regular security updates, but that often isn't the case for those that reside within game consoles, televisions, e-readers, cars, and other devices. These outdated, embedded browsers can leave you open to phishing and other security vulnerabilities.…
Only a select few continue into later life, mainly for the love of the game Young threat actors may be rebels without a cause. These cybercriminals typically grow out of their offending ways by the time they turn 20, according to data published by the Dutch government.…
Most of you still can't do better than 123456? 123456. admin. password. For years, the IT world has been reminding users not to rely on such predictable passwords. And yet here we are with another study finding that those sorts of quickly-guessable, universally-held-to-be-bad passwords are still the most popular ones.…
Even AI has doubts about the claim that '80% of ransomware attacks are AI-driven' Do 80 percent of ransomware attacks really come from AI? MIT Sloan has now withdrawn a working paper that made that eyebrow-raising claim after criticism from security researcher Kevin Beaumont.…
Just 250 malicious training documents can poison a 13B parameter model - that's 0.00016% of a whole dataset Poisoning AI models might be way easier than previously thought if an Anthropic study is anything to go on. …
Microsoft Copilot, not so much Employees could be opening up to OpenAI in ways that put sensitive data at risk. According to a study by security biz LayerX, a large number of corporate users paste Personally Identifiable Information (PII) or Payment Card Industry (PCI) numbers right into ChatGPT, even if they're using the bot without permission.…
We’re blind to malicious AI until it hits. We can still open our eyes to stopping it Opinion Last year, The Register reported on AI sleeper agents. A major academic study explored how to train an LLM to hide destructive behavior from its users, and how to find it before it triggered. The answers were unambiguously asymmetric — the first is easy, the second very difficult. Not what anyone wanted to hear.…
Privacy campaigner Max Schrem's NOYB is back on Zuck's back Meta's enthusiasm for training its AI on user data is not shared by the users themselves – at least for some Europeans – according a study commissioned by Facebook legal nemesis Max Schrems and his privacy advocacy group Noyb.…
Some pinpointed software nasties but were suspicious of printer drivers too Researchers from the Universities of Guelph and Waterloo have discovered exactly how users decide whether an application is legitimate or malware before installing it – and the good news is they're better than you might expect, at least when primed to expect malware.…
A bottomless appetite for tracking people as "objects" A new study shows academic computer vision papers feeding surveillance-enabling patents jumped more than fivefold from the 1990s to the 2010s.…
6-in-10 success rate for single-step tasks A new benchmark developed by academics shows that LLM-based AI agents perform below par on standard CRM tests and fail to understand the need for customer confidentiality.…
It involves a number close to three or six depending on the fiend Ransomware operators jack up their ransom demands by a factor of 2.8x if they detect a victim has cyber-insurance, a study highlighted by the Netherlands government has confirmed.…
Study finds 4 out of 6 providers don't do enough to stop impersonation Four out of six companies offering AI voice cloning software fail to provide meaningful safeguards against the misuse of their products, according to research conducted by Consumer Reports.…
More than 100 million rely on systems rife with vulnerabilities, says EPA OIG Nearly a third of US residents are served by drinking water systems with cybersecurity shortcomings, the Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Inspector General found in a recent study – and the agency lacks its own system to track potential attacks. …
Only 2 out of 5 tested products were equitable across demographics A study by the US General Services Administration (GSA) has revealed that five remote identity verification (RiDV) technologies are unreliable, inconsistent, and marred by bias across different demographic groups.…
If this really was that useful, they wouldn't be telling us According to a Chinese state-sanctioned study, signals from SpaceX Starlink broadband internet satellites could be used to track US stealth fighters, such as the F-22.…
Australian study finds GPS trackers – and sometimes AirTags – are in demand for the wrong reasons Tracking devices are in demand from organized crime groups and known perpetrators of domestic violence, according to an Australian study.…
All depends on how you count it – Chocolate Factory claims 1% fail rate Google this week offered reassurance that its vetting of Chrome extensions catches most malicious code, even as it acknowledged that "as with any software, extensions can also introduce risk."…