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#1: Fidelity National Financial Takes Down Systems Following Cyberattack: Title insurance giant Fidelity National Financial (FNF) is experiencing service disruptions after it has taken down multiple systems to contain a cyberattack. FNF is one of the largest title insurance entities and underwriters groups in the US. It also offers settlement services to the real estate and mortgage industries. FNF says that an investigation was immediately launched into the incident and that law enforcement was also notified. To date, the investigation has determined that the attackers gained unauthorized access to certain systems and that some credentials were stolen.
#2: The U.S. Cracked a $3.4 Billion Crypto Heist—And Bitcoin’s Anonymity: James Zhong appeared to have pulled off the perfect crime. In December 2012, he stumbled upon a software bug while withdrawing money from his account on Silk Road, an online marketplace used to hide criminal dealings behind the seemingly bulletproof anonymity of blockchain transactions and the dark web. Mr. Zhong, a 22-year-old University of Georgia computer-science student at the time, used the site to buy cocaine. “I accidentally double-clicked the withdraw button and was shocked to discover that it resulted in allowing me to withdraw double the amount of bitcoin I had deposited,” he later said in federal court. After the first fraudulent withdrawal, Mr. Zhong created new accounts and with a few hours of work stole 50,000 bitcoins worth around $600,000, court papers from federal prosecutors show.
#3: Intel Habana Gaudi Beats Nvidia’s H100 in Visual-Language AI Models: Hugging Face: A new fine-tuning performance benchmark for BridgeTower, a Vision-Language (VL) AI model, has shown that there’s life to the AI acceleration camp other than Nvidia’s green. While Nvidia does dominate the AI acceleration market (through exceptional foresight, a well-thought-out and documented software stack, and pure processing performance), other players are keen to take a piece of the AI market for themselves. And at least for BridgeTower, Intel’s own Gaudi 2 silicon (designed and fabricated through Intel’s $2 billion, 2019 acquisition of Habana) has been shown by Hugging Face to outperform Nvidia’s A100 80 GB by a staggering 2.5x – and it even beats Nvidia’s prodigy-child H100 by 1.4x.
#4: Turkish Airline Exposes Flight and Crew Info in 6.5TB Leak: Low-cost Turkish airline Pegasus Airlines has accidentally leaded the personal information of its flight crew, source code, and flight data due to a misconfigured AWS bucket. SafetyDetectives, a research team, discovered the unsecured database on February 28 and was able to trace the leaked information to the Electronic Flight Bag software developed by the airline and designed to optimize the productivity of airline crew. The software also provides essential reference materials for flights. Security researchers found almost 23 million files in the bucket, resulting in 6.5TB of leaked data. Researchers reported that over three million of the files contained sensitive information such as flight charts, insurance documents, pre-flight checks and issues detected during the checks, and information on crew shifts.
#5:Taiwan warns China’s military may make ‘sudden entry’: Taiwan is on alert this year for a sudden entry by China’s military. Tensions are continuing to rise and areas close to Chinese territory may be at risk for sudden entry. China has increased its military activities around Taiwan, including almost daily air force incursions into the island’s air defense identification zone. Taiwan has not yet reported any incident of Chinese forces entering its contiguous zone, 24 nautical miles from its coast. Taiwan did shoot down a civilian drone that entered its airspace near an islet off the Chinese coast last year. The self-governing island has warned that the Chinese People’s LIberation Army may find reasons to enter the territorial air around Taiwan after Taiwan has increased military exchanges with the United States. China has responded to these warnings with a statement saying it will defend its territory and sovereignty. Taiwan has said it will exercise self-defense and will counterattack should Chinese forces enter its territory.
#6: OpenAI Plans ChatGPT ‘Personal Assistant for Work,’ Setting Up Microsoft Rivalry: In the span of half a year, ChatGPT has become one of the world’s best-known internet brands. Now its creator, OpenAI, has bigger plans for the chatbot: CEO Sam Altman privately told some developers OpenAI wants to turn it into a “supersmart personal assistant for work.” With built-in knowledge about an individual and their workplace, such an assistant could carry out tasks such as drafting emails or documents in that person’s style and with up-to-date information about their business. The assistant features could put OpenAI on a collision course with Microsoft, its primary business partner, investor and cloud provider, as well as with other OpenAI software customers such as Salesforce. Those firms also want to use OpenAI’s software to build AI “copilots” for people to use at work. But for OpenAI, building new ChatGPT capabilities will be the focus of its commercial efforts, according to Altman’s comments and two other people with knowledge of the company’s plans.
#7: Huawei Teardown Shows Chip Breakthrough in Blow to US Sanctions: Huawei Technologies Co. and China’s top chipmaker have built an advanced 7-nanometer processor to power its latest smartphone, a sign Beijing is making early progress in a nationwide push to circumvent US efforts to contain its ascent. Huawei’s Mate 60 Pro is powered by a new Kirin 9000s chip that was fabricated in China by Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp., according to a teardown of the handset that TechInsights conducted for Bloomberg News. The processor is the first to utilize SMIC’s most advanced 7nm technology and suggests the Chinese government is making some headway in attempts to build a domestic chip ecosystem, according to the research firm. Much remains unknown about SMIC and Huawei’s progress, including whether they can make chips in volume or at reasonable cost. But the Mate 60 silicon raises questions about the efficacy of a US-led global campaign to prevent China’s access to cutting-edge technology, driven by fears it could be used to boost Chinese military capabilities. With its export controls last year, the US administration tried to draw a line at preventing China from getting access to 14nm chips, or about eight years behind the most advanced technology.
#8: The Pentagon is moving toward letting AI weapons autonomously decide to kill humans: The deployment of AI-controlled drones that can make autonomous decisions about whether to kill human targets is moving closer to reality. Lethal autonomous weapons, that can select targets using AI, are being developed by countries including the US, China, and Israel. The use of the so-called “killer robots” would mark a disturbing development, say critics, handing life and death battlefield decisions to machines with no human input. Several governments are lobbying the UN for a binding resolution restricting the use of AI killer drones, but the US is among a group of nations — which also includes Russia, Australia, and Israel — who are resisting any such move, favoring a non-binding resolution instead, The Times reported. “This is really one of the most significant inflection points for humanity,” Alexander Kmentt, Austria’s chief negotiator on the issue, told The Times.
#9: CIA Builds Its Own Artificial Intelligence Tool in Rivalry With China: US intelligence agencies are getting their own ChatGPT-style tool to sift through an avalanche of public information for clues. The Central Intelligence Agency is preparing to roll out a feature akin to OpenAI Inc.’s now-famous program that will use artificial intelligence to give analysts better access to open-source intelligence, according to agency officials. The CIA’s Open-Source Enterprise division plans to provide intelligence agencies with its AI tool soon. “We’ve gone from newspapers and radio, to newspapers and television, to newspapers and cable television, to basic internet, to big data, and it just keeps going,” Randy Nixon, director of the division, said in an interview. “We have to find the needles in the needle field.” It’s part of a broader government campaign to harness the power of AI and compete with China, which is seeking to become the global leader in the field by 2030.
#10: AI-generated child sex images spawn new nightmare for the web: The Pentagon is moving toward letting AI weapons autonomously decide to kill humans: The deployment of AI-controlled drones that can make autonomous decisions about whether to kill human targets is moving closer to reality. Lethal autonomous weapons, that can select targets using AI, are being developed by countries including the US, China, and Israel. The use of the so-called “killer robots” would mark a disturbing development, say critics, handing life and death battlefield decisions to machines with no human input. Several governments are lobbying the UN for a binding resolution restricting the use of AI killer drones, but the US is among a group of nations — which also includes Russia, Australia, and Israel — who are resisting any such move, favoring a non-binding resolution instead, The Times reported. “This is really one of the most significant inflection points for humanity,” Alexander Kmentt, Austria’s chief negotiator on the issue, told The Times.
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About the Author
Daniel Pereira is research director at OODA. He is a foresight strategist, creative technologist, and an information communication technology (ICT) and digital media researcher with 20+ years of experience directing public/private partnerships and strategic innovation initiatives.
Informing your decisions with actionable intelligence
Informing your decisions with actionable intelligence