A Russian man pleaded guilty on Thursday to involvement in developing the Trickbot malware used to extort businesses, including hospitals during the COVID pandemic, the US Justice Department said.

During the past year, large language models (LLMs) have become incredibly adept at generating synthesizing information and producing humanlike outputs. LLMs are likened to digital librarians, as they have been trained on vast datasets sourced directly from the internet and can therefore generate or summarize text on nearly any topic. As a result, these LLMs have become ubiquitous in such fields as copywriting, software engineering, and entertainment.

Hackers are targeting industrial control systems widely used by water and sewage-treatment utilities, potentially threatening water supplies, the top U.S. cyberdefense agency said after a Pennsylvania water authority was hacked.

Ransomware attacks can paralyze organizations or entire countries by hacking into a network and encrypting critical data. The attackers then demand a ransom; if their demands aren't met, the data will not be decrypted and may be lost forever. Depending on the given situation, the financial and logistical damage can be enormous.