Bush Tabs Gonzalez for AG PostPresident Bush didn’t waste any time in finding a successor for John Ashcroft as the next attorney general. On Wednesday the president nominated Alberto R. Gonzales, White House counsel and longtime Bush friend, for the position. If confirmed, Gonzales would be the first Hispanic to serve in that post. Senate Republicans embraced the nomination, but Senate Democrats expressed concerns about Gonzales’s stances on civil liberties, the USA Patriot Act and the death penalty. For more details, read the full article in The New York Times.D.C. and N.Y. No Change Their Colors The Department of Homeland Security lowered the threat level Wednesday for sensitive areas of New York City, Washington D.C. and parts of New Jersey. James M. Loy, deputy secretary of homeland security, said the threat levels of the five financial institutions in these areas was lowered from orange (high risk) to yellow (elevated) because of security precautions taken during the last three months and tighter security measures in the financial sector overall. Loy said, “I don’t like the idea of a beginning and an end. We’re as concerned today as we wre a month ago. The whole notion of taking a deep breath and saying ‘Wow, we made it thorugh that’ is a dangerous train of thought.”For more details, read the full article in the Washington Post. No Easy Answer to Spam ProblemCanning spam will take more than e-mail authentication, according to panelists at a forum sponsored by the Federal Trade Commission. The Washington Post reports that e-mail authentication, a technique thought to be a cure for the spam epidemic, will not fully solve the problem because many spams are sent by infected PCs controlled by remote spammers. Some 30,000 computers a day were turned into these “zombies,” according to Symantec. None of the panelists, however, recommended abandoning e-mail authentication. For more details, read the full article in the Washington Post. Related content news Google Chrome zero-day jumps onto CISA's known vulnerability list A serious security flaw in Google Chrome, which was discovered under active exploitation in the wild, is a new addition to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency’s Known Exploited vulnerabilities catalog. By Jon Gold Oct 03, 2023 3 mins Zero-day vulnerability brandpost The advantages and risks of large language models in the cloud Understanding the pros and cons of LLMs in the cloud is a step closer to optimized efficiency—but be mindful of security concerns along the way. By Daniel Prizmant, Senior Principal Researcher at Palo Alto Networks Oct 03, 2023 5 mins Cloud Security news Arm patches bugs in Mali GPUs that affect Android phones and Chromebooks The vulnerability with active exploitations allows local non-privileged users to access freed-up memory for staging new attacks. By Shweta Sharma Oct 03, 2023 3 mins Android Security Vulnerabilities news UK businesses face tightening cybersecurity budgets as incidents spike More than a quarter of UK organisations think their cybersecurity budget is inadequate to protect them from growing threats. By Michael Hill Oct 03, 2023 3 mins CSO and CISO Risk Management Podcasts Videos Resources Events SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER From our editors straight to your inbox Get started by entering your email address below. Please enter a valid email address Subscribe