Deloitte’s new blueprint looks to bridge the gap between the massive push for AI adoption and a lack of preparedness among leaders and employees.
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Deloitte’s new blueprint looks to bridge the gap between the massive push for AI adoption and a lack of preparedness among leaders and employees.
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Multiple critical infrastructure sectors were hit last year during an attack spree in France via a trio of zero-day vulnerabilities affecting Ivanti Cloud Service Appliance devices, the country’s cybersecurity agency said in a report released Tuesday.
Government agencies and organizations in the telecommunications, media, finance and transportation industries were impacted by widespread zero-day exploits of CVE-2024-8190, CVE-2024-8963 and CVE-2024-9380 from early September to late November 2024, according to the French National Agency for the Security of Information Systems.
French authorities attribute the attacks to UNC5174, a former member of Chinese hacktivist collectives likely working as a contractor for China’s Ministry of State Security, according to Mandiant. The attacker, believed to use the persona “Uteus,” previously exploited edge device vulnerabilities in ConnectWise ScreenConnect, F5 BIG-IP, Atlassian Confluence, the Linus kernel and Zyxel firewalls.
Authorities in France concluded UNC5174 used a unique intrusion set it dubbed “Houken,” which used zero-day vulnerabilities, a sophisticated rootkit, various open-source tools, commercial VPNs and dedicated servers. Officials said Houken and UNC5174 are likely operated by the same threat actor, an initial access broker that also steals credentials and deploys mechanisms to achieve persistent access to victim networks.
“Though already documented for its opportunistic exploitation of vulnerabilities on edge devices, the use of zero-days by a threat actor linked to UNC5174 is new,” France’s cybersecurity agency said in the report. “The operators behind the UNC5174 and Houken intrusion sets are likely primarily looking for valuable initial accesses to sell to a state-linked actor seeking insightful intelligence.”
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued an advisory in January warning that threat actors chained the three Ivanti zero-days to gain initial access, conduct remote code execution, obtain credentials and implant webshells on victim networks.
Sysdig researchers in April said they observed the China state-sponsored hacking group, UNC5174, using open-source offensive security tools, such as VShell and WebSockets, to blend in with more common cybercriminal activity.
Multiple attackers, including China-linked espionage groups, have repeatedly exploited a long run of vulnerabilities in Ivanti products. Ivanti is a repeat offender, shipping software with a high number of vulnerabilities — more than any other vendor in this space since the start of last year — across at least 10 different product lines since 2021.
CISA’s known exploited vulnerabilities catalog contains 30 Ivanti defects in the past four years, and attackers have exploited seven vulnerabilities in Ivanti products so far this year, according to cyber authorities.
Ivanti wasn’t immediately available to comment on the French authorities’ report.
The post China-linked attacker hit France’s critical infrastructure via trio of Ivanti zero-days last year appeared first on CyberScoop.
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Analyzing binary code helps vendors and organizations detect security threats and zero-day vulnerabilities in the software supply chain, but it doesn’t come without challenges. It looks like AI has come to the rescue.
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The French cybersecurity agency on Tuesday revealed that a number of entities spanning governmental, telecommunications, media, finance, and transport sectors in the country were impacted by a malicious campaign undertaken by a Chinese hacking group by weaponizing several zero-day vulnerabilities in Ivanti Cloud Services Appliance (CSA) devices.
The campaign, detected at the beginning of
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Have you ever wished you could quickly visualize how a new outfit might look on you before making a purchase? Or how a piece of furniture would look in your living room? Today, we’re excited to introduce a new virtual try-on capability in Amazon Nova Canvas that makes this possible. In addition, we are adding eight new style options for improved style consistency for text-to-image based style prompting. These features expand Nova Canvas AI-powered image generation capabilities making it easier than ever to create realistic product visualizations and stylized images that can enhance the experience of your customers.
Let’s take a quick look at how you can start using these today.
Getting started
The first thing is to make sure that you have access to the Nova Canvas model through the usual means. Head to the Amazon Bedrock console, choose Model access and enable Amazon Nova Canvas for your account making sure that you select the appropriate regions for your workloads. If you already have access and have been using Nova Canvas, you can start using the new features immediately as they’re automatically available to you.
Virtual try-on
The first exciting new feature is virtual try-on. With this, you can upload two pictures and ask Amazon Nova Canvas to put them together with realistic results. These could be pictures of apparel, accessories, home furnishings, and any other products including clothing. For example, you can provide the picture of a human as the source image and the picture of a garment as the reference image, and Amazon Nova Canvas will create a new image with that same person wearing the garment. Let’s try this out!
My starting point is to select two images. I picked one of myself in a pose that I think would work well for a clothes swap and a picture of an AWS-branded hoodie.
Note that Nova Canvas accepts images containing a maximum of 4.1M pixels – the equivalent of 2,048 x 2,048 – so be sure to scale your images to fit these constraints if necessary. Also, if you’d like to run the Python code featured in this article, ensure you have Python 3.9 or later installed as well as the Python packages boto3 and pillow.
To apply the hoodie to my photo, I use the Amazon Bedrock Runtime invoke API. You can find full details on the request and response structures for this API in the Amazon Nova User Guide. The code is straightforward, requiring only a few inference parameters. I use the new taskType of "VIRTUAL_TRY_ON". I then specify the desired settings, including both the source image and reference image, using the virtualTryOnParams object to set a few required parameters. Note that both images must be converted to Base64 strings.
import base64
def load_image_as_base64(image_path):
"""Helper function for preparing image data."""
with open(image_path, "rb") as image_file:
return base64.b64encode(image_file.read()).decode("utf-8")
inference_params = {
"taskType": "VIRTUAL_TRY_ON",
"virtualTryOnParams": {
"sourceImage": load_image_as_base64("person.png"),
"referenceImage": load_image_as_base64("aws-hoodie.jpg"),
"maskType": "GARMENT",
"garmentBasedMask": {"garmentClass": "UPPER_BODY"}
}
}
Nova Canvas uses masking to manipulate images. This is a technique that allows AI image generation to focus on specific areas or regions of an image while preserving others, similar to using painter’s tape to protect areas you don’t want to paint.
You can use three different masking modes, which you can choose by setting maskType to the correct value. In this case, I’m using "GARMENT", which requires me to specify which part of the body I want to be masked. I’m using "UPPER_BODY" , but you can use others such as "LOWER_BODY", "FULL_BODY", or "FOOTWEAR" if you want to specifically target the feet. Refer to the documentation for a full list of options.
I then call the invoke API, passing in these inference arguments and saving the generated image to disk.
# Note: The inference_params variable from above is referenced below.
import base64
import io
import json
import boto3
from PIL import Image
# Create the Bedrock Runtime client.
bedrock = boto3.client(service_name="bedrock-runtime", region_name="us-east-1")
# Prepare the invocation payload.
body_json = json.dumps(inference_params, indent=2)
# Invoke Nova Canvas.
response = bedrock.invoke_model(
body=body_json,
modelId="amazon.nova-canvas-v1:0",
accept="application/json",
contentType="application/json"
)
# Extract the images from the response.
response_body_json = json.loads(response.get("body").read())
images = response_body_json.get("images", [])
# Check for errors.
if response_body_json.get("error"):
print(response_body_json.get("error"))
# Decode each image from Base64 and save as a PNG file.
for index, image_base64 in enumerate(images):
image_bytes = base64.b64decode(image_base64)
image_buffer = io.BytesIO(image_bytes)
image = Image.open(image_buffer)
image.save(f"image_{index}.png")
I get a very exciting result!
And just like that, I’m the proud wearer of an AWS-branded hoodie!
In addition to the "GARMENT" mask type, you can also use the "PROMPT" or "IMAGE" masks. With "PROMPT", you also provide the source and reference images, however, you provide a natural language prompt to specify which part of the source image you’d like to be replaced. This is similar to how the "INPAINTING" and "OUTPAINTING" tasks work in Nova Canvas. If you want to use your own image mask, then you choose the "IMAGE" mask type and provide a black-and-white image to be used as mask, where black indicates the pixels that you want to be replaced on the source image, and white the ones you want to preserve.
This capability is specifically useful for retailers. They can use it to help their customers make better purchasing decisions by seeing how products look before buying.
Using style options
I’ve always wondered what I would look like as an anime superhero. Previously, I could use Nova Canvas to manipulate an image of myself, but I would have to rely on my good prompt engineering skills to get it right. Now, Nova Canvas comes with pre-trained styles that you can apply to your images to get high-quality results that follow the artistic style of your choice. There are eight available styles including 3D animated family film, design sketch, flat vector illustration, graphic novel, maximalism, midcentury retro, photorealism, and soft digital painting.
Applying them is as straightforward as passing in an extra parameter to the Nova Canvas API. Let’s try an example.
I want to generate an image of an AWS superhero using the 3D animated family film style. To do this, I specify a taskType of "TEXT_IMAGE" and a textToImageParams object containing two parameters: text and style. The text parameter contains the prompt describing the image I want to create which in this case is “a superhero in a yellow outfit with a big AWS logo and a cape.” The style parameter specifies one of the predefined style values. I’m using "3D_ANIMATED_FAMILY_FILM" here, but you can find the full list in the Nova Canvas User Guide.
inference_params = {
"taskType": "TEXT_IMAGE",
"textToImageParams": {
"text": "a superhero in a yellow outfit with a big AWS logo and a cape.",
"style": "3D_ANIMATED_FAMILY_FILM",
},
"imageGenerationConfig": {
"width": 1280,
"height": 720,
"seed": 321
}
}
Then, I call the invoke API just as I did in the previous example. (The code has been omitted here for brevity.) And the result? Well, I’ll let you judge for yourself, but I have to say I’m quite pleased with the AWS superhero wearing my favorite color following the 3D animated family film style exactly as I envisioned.
What’s really cool is that I can keep my code and prompt exactly the same and only change the value of the style attribute to generate an image in a completely different style. Let’s try this out. I set style to PHOTOREALISM.
inference_params = {
"taskType": "TEXT_IMAGE",
"textToImageParams": {
"text": "a superhero in a yellow outfit with a big AWS logo and a cape.",
"style": "PHOTOREALISM",
},
"imageGenerationConfig": {
"width": 1280,
"height": 720,
"seed": 7
}
}
And the result is impressive! A photorealistic superhero exactly as I described, which is a far departure from the previous generated cartoon and all it took was changing one line of code.
Things to know
Availability – Virtual try-on and style options are available in Amazon Nova Canvas in the US East (N. Virginia), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and Europe (Ireland). Current users of Amazon Nova Canvas can immediately use these capabilities without migrating to a new model.
Pricing – See the Amazon Bedrock pricing page for details on costs.
For a preview of virtual try-on of garments, you can visit nova.amazon.com where you can upload an image of a person and a garment to visualize different clothing combinations.
If you are ready to get started, please check out the Nova Canvas User Guide or visit the AWS Console.
Matheus Guimaraes | @codingmatheus
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Federal authorities levied sanctions Tuesday on Aeza Group, a bulletproof hosting service provider based in Russia, for allegedly supporting a broad swath of ransomware, malware and infostealer operators.
Aeza Group has provided servers and specialized infrastructure to the Meduza, RedLine and Lumma infostealer operators, BianLian ransomware and BlackSprut, a Russian marketplace for illicit drugs, according to the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control. Lumma infected about 10 million systems before it was dismantled through a coordinated global takedown in May.
The Treasury Department’s action against Aeza Group follows a wave of cybercrime crackdowns across the globe. Prolific cybercriminals have been arrested, and infostealers, malware loaders, counter antivirus and crypting services, cybercrime marketplaces, ransomware infrastructure and DDoS-for-hire operations have all been seized, taken offline or severely disrupted by global coordinated campaigns since May.
Officials accused Aeza Group of helping cybercriminals target U.S. defense companies and technology vendors.
“Cybercriminals continue to rely heavily on bulletproof hosting service providers like Aeza Group to facilitate disruptive ransomware attacks, steal U.S. technology and sell black-market drugs,” Bradley T. Smith, the Treasury Department’s acting under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, said in a statement.
The Treasury Department sanctioned four people for their involvement in Aeza Group, including two part owners — Asenii Aleksandrovich Penzev and Yurii Meruzhanovich Bozoyan — who were previously arrested by Russian law enforcement for their alleged involvement in BlackSprut, authorities said. Igor Anatolyevich Knyazev, another part owner of Aeza Group, and Vladimir Vyacheslavovich Gast were also sanctioned for their leadership positions in the criminal enterprise.
Authorities also imposed sanctions on Aeza Group-affiliated companies, including United Kingdom-based Aeza International and Russia-based subsidiaries Aeza Logistic and Cloud Solutions.
The sanctions imposed on Aeza Group and its leaders were a follow-on effort, marking a continuation of February’s globally coordinated sanctions against Zservers, a Russia-based bulletproof hosting provider that allegedly supported the LockBit ransomware-as-a-service group.
“Treasury, in close coordination with the U.K. and our other international partners, remains resolved to expose the critical nodes, infrastructure, and individuals that underpin this criminal ecosystem,” Smith said.
The post US sanctions bulletproof hosting provider for supporting ransomware, infostealer operations appeared first on CyberScoop.
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While tens of thousands of customers are successfully using Amazon DynamoDB global tables with eventual consistency, we’re seeing emerging needs for even stronger resilience. Many organizations find that the DynamoDB multi-Availability Zone architecture and eventually consistent global tables meet their requirements, but critical applications like payment processing systems and financial services demand more.
For these applications, customers require a zero Recovery Point Objective (RPO) during rare Region-wide events, meaning you can direct your app to read the latest data from any Region. Your multi-Region applications always need to access the same data regardless of location.
Starting today, you can use a new Amazon DynamoDB global tables capability that provides multi-Region strong consistency (MRSC), enabling zero RPO. This capability, first announced as a preview at AWS re:Invent 2024, simplifies building highly resilient global applications.
Here’s how you can enable MRSC starting with an existing empty DynamoDB table:

With MRSC, DynamoDB now offers you the highest level of resilience for your applications. If application processing is interrupted in a Region, you can redirect traffic to another Region containing a MRSC replica and know that you’ll be processing the latest data.
Getting started
Let me walk you through how you can use this new capability.
To start using MRSC, I need to create a global table from an existing DynamoDB table that doesn’t contain any data. I navigate to my existing table, select the Global tables tab and select Create replica.

The MRSC availability architecture requires three AWS Regions. I can configure MRSC with either three full replicas or with two replicas and a witness. A witness contains only replicated change data to provide the required availability without maintaining a full copy of my table data.
The following screenshot shows how I configure MRSC with two replicas and a witness. To configure MRSC with three full replicas instead, I can clear Configure Region 2 as Witness.

If I need to update my existing table programmatically, I can use the Amazon Q CLI to generate the required command with the following prompt:
> Hey Q! Update my existing DynamoDB table called "demo-mrsc" in us-east-1 with multi-Region strong consistency across us-east-2 with witness in us-west-2 Regions
Shortly after, Q CLI will respond back with following command:
> To update your DynamoDB table with multi-Region strong consistency, you'll need to use the update-table command with the appropriate parameters. Here's how you would do it:
aws dynamodb update-table \
--table-name demo-mrsc \
--replica-updates '[{"Create": {"RegionName": "us-east-2"}}]' \
--global-table-witness-updates '[{"Create": {"RegionName": "us-west-2"}}]' \
--multi-region-consistency STRONG \
--region us-east-1
After it’s finished processing, I can check the status of my MRSC global table. I can see I have a witness configured for my DynamoDB global table. A witness reduces costs while still providing the resilience benefits of multi-Region strong consistency.

Then, in my application, I can use ConsistentRead to read data with strong consistency. Here’s a Python example:
import boto3
# Configure the DynamoDB client for your region
dynamodb = boto3.resource('dynamodb', region_name='us-east-2')
table = dynamodb.Table('demo-mrsc')
pk_id = "demo#test123"
# Read with strong consistency across regions
response = table.get_item(
Key={
'PK': pk_id
},
ConsistentRead=True
)
print(response)
For operations that require the strongest resilience, I can use ConsistentRead=True. For less critical operations where eventual consistency is acceptable, I can omit this parameter to improve performance and reduce costs.
Additional things to know
Here are a couple of things to note:
Learn more about how you can achieve the highest level of application resilience, enable your applications to be always available and always read the latest data regardless of the Region by visiting Amazon DynamoDB global tables.
Happy building!
— Donnie
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Today, we’re announcing the general availability of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) C8gn network optimized instances powered by AWS Graviton4 processors and the latest 6th generation AWS Nitro Card. EC2 C8gn instances deliver up to 600Gbps network bandwidth, the highest bandwidth among EC2 network optimized instances.
You can use C8gn instances to run the most demanding network intensive workloads, such as security and network virtual appliances (virtual firewalls, routers, load balancers, proxy servers, DDoS appliances), data analytics, and tightly-coupled cluster computing jobs.
EC2 C8gn instances specifications
C8gn instances provide up to 192 vCPUs and 384 GiB memory, and offer up to 30 percent higher compute performance compared Graviton3-based EC2 C7gn instances.
Here are the specs for C8gn instances:
| Instance Name | vCPUs | Memory (GiB) | Network Bandwidth (Gbps) | EBS Bandwidth (Gbps) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| c8gn.medium | 1 | 2 | Up to 25 | Up to 10 |
| c8gn.large | 2 | 4 | Up to 30 | Up to 10 |
| c8gn.xlarge | 4 | 8 | Up to 40 | Up to 10 |
| c8gn.2xlarge | 8 | 16 | Up to 50 | Up to 10 |
| c8gn.4xlarge | 16 | 32 | 50 | 10 |
| c8gn.8xlarge | 32 | 64 | 100 | 20 |
| c8gn.12xlarge | 48 | 96 | 150 | 30 |
| c8gn.16xlarge | 64 | 128 | 200 | 40 |
| c8gn.24xlarge | 96 | 192 | 300 | 60 |
| c8gn.metal-24xl | 96 | 192 | 300 | 60 |
| c8gn.48xlarge | 192 | 384 | 600 | 60 |
| c8gn.metal-48xl | 192 | 384 | 600 | 60 |
You can launch C8gn instances through the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), or AWS SDKs.
If you’re using C7gn instances now, you will have straightforward experience migrating network intensive workloads to C8gn instances because the new instances offer similar vCPU and memory ratios. To learn more, check out the collection of Graviton resources to help you start migrating your applications to Graviton instance types.
You can also visit the Level up your compute with AWS Graviton page to begin your Graviton adoption journey.
Now available
Amazon EC2 C8gn instances are available today in US East (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon) Regions. Two metal instance sizes are only available in US East (N. Virginia) Region. These instances can be purchased as On-Demand, Savings Plan, Spot instances, or as Dedicated instances and Dedicated hosts.
Give C8gn instances a try in the Amazon EC2 console. To learn more, refer to the Amazon EC2 C8g instance page and send feedback to AWS re:Post for EC2 or through your usual AWS Support contacts.
— Channy
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Every time I visit Seattle, the first thing that greets me at the airport is Mount Rainier. Did you know that the most innovative project at Amazon Web Services (AWS) is named after this mountain?

Project Rainier is a new project to create what is expected to be the world’s most powerful computer for training AI models across multiple data centers in the United Stages. Anthropic will develop the advanced versions of its Claude models with five times more computing power than its current largest training cluster.
The key technology powering Project Rainier is AWS custom-designed Trainium2 chips, which are specialized for the immense data processing required to train complex AI models. Thousands of these Trainium2 chips will be connected in a new type of Amazon EC2 UltraServer and EC2 UltraCluster architecture that allows ultra-fast communication and data sharing across the massive system.
Learn about the AWS vertical integration of Project Rainer, where it designs every component of the technology stack from chips to software, allows it to optimize the entire system for maximum efficiency and reliability.
Last week’s launches
Here are some launches that got my attention:
For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New with AWS? page.
Other AWS news
Various Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers for AWS services have been released. Here are some tutorials about MCP servers that you might find interesting:
Upcoming AWS events
Check your calendars and sign up for these upcoming AWS events:
You can browse all upcoming in-person and virtual events.
That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Weekly Roundup!
— Channy
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Malicious websites designed to rank high in Google search results for ChatGPT and Luma AI deliver the Lumma and Vidar infostealers and other malware.
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