Episode #273: Edwin Kwan: OpenAI Suffered DDOS Attack Resulting in Intermittent Outage; Katy Craig: Citrix Bleed; Hillary Coover: Holiday Shopper Alert: Protect Your Finances from Cyber Grinches!; Marcel Brown: This Day in Tech History

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The stories we’re covering today.

Marcel Brown: November 15, 1996. The first version of ICQ, the Internet's first popular instant messaging program, is released by four high school students from Israel. By the end of 1997, ICQ had more than 5 million users, and in mid-1998, AOL purchased the company for $407 million.

Edwin Kwan: Users of OpenAI's API, ChatGPT, and Dall-E services were experiencing intermittent outages. They would see messages from their queries saying that " something seems to have gone wrong or we're experiencing exceptionally high demand. Please hang tight as we work on scaling our systems."

Hillary Coover: As the festive season approaches, the thrill of holiday shopping is palpable, but so is the excitement for cybercriminals aiming to capitalize on the online shopping surge through scams and data theft. One rising concern demanding attention is the surge in credit card skimming, a threat likely to intensify in the coming weeks.

Katy Craig: The Citrix Bleed vulnerability has become the focal point of threat actors' attention, with active exploitation campaigns targeting government, technical, and legal organizations across the Americas, Europe, Africa, and the Asia Pacific region. The attackers employed a clever technique involving specially crafted HTTP GET requests.