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The Top 10 Security, Technology, and Business Books of the year is a list compiled by OODA CEO Matt Devost and is typically one of the most popular posts on the site every year. This year, an eclectic list that takes care to avoid pandemic related topics and features some deep cuts that you won’t…
We previously wrote that the Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) is perhaps the most important program in DoD today. The Air Force plays a particularly important role in developing the JADC2 concept. They have been designated as the Executive Agent. That means they will have major input into how the framework is shaped. Their…
This panel at OODAcon brought together pioneering experts with ideas we believe hold the potential to cause order of magnitude improvements in cybersecurity posture. We the ensuing discussion resulted in actionable insights you can put in place in your organization immediately to kickstart your journey in mitigating cyber risk. The panel included discussion on: -…
On 18 November 2020 members of the OODA loop community gathered in a virtual event to discuss strategic factors critical to informed decision-making in the current era. Our goal: generate insights that can help leaders better understand markets, tech trends and geopolitical dynamics in a way that enables appropriate action. OODAcon aligned well with the…
When our founding fathers created the first Army and Navy after the Revolution, they began a long tradition of inter-service rivalry which continues today. The Department of Defense (DoD) periodically makes a concerted effort to force service branches to play better – together. Usually that occurs after some great and unfortunate example of disconnected operations.…
This post is based on an interview with Blake Bartlett, the CEO at Janes. It is part of our series of interviews of OODA Network members. Our objective with these interviews is to provide actionable information of interest to the community, including insights that can help with your own career progression. We also really like…
The Navy is using “Digital Twins” to help them speed up afloat innovation. Read how this effort will transform how Navy updates the Fleet. Can a Digital Twin help Navy deploy new technology without pulling the ship into port? Can a Digital Twin reduce the chance of breaking important mission critical systems?
Jerry Davis has spent decades succeeding in hard jobs supporting critically important missions. He is a decorated combat Veteran who served in he US Marines for 11 years including in Operation Desert Storm/Desert Shield. He also served in the Central Intelligence Agency in service to world wide missions including leveraging technology in denied areas against…
Michael Sexton is the Cyber Program Director at the Middle East Institute. His latest book Cyber War & Cyber Peace in the Middle East: Digital Conflict in the Cradle of Civilization, is an anthology of essays examining flashpoints and developments in conflict in the cyber domain in the Middle East in the past 10 years.…
A Federal Bureau of Investigation liaison information report exposed in the Blue Leaks hack of sensitive law-enforcement data last July warned the financial services sector about scammers using cardless banking apps to commit account takeover (ATO) fraud and launder money. This also causes new concerns for Anti-Money Laundering (AML) efforts. Authored last May, the report…
Matt Devost and I started the OODAcast in March 2020 as a way of highlighting insights and lessons learned from leaders and decision-makers in our network. At the time of this writing we have posted 40 episodes of the OODAcast, and continue production of one expert interview a week. We alert readers of the OODA…
The Navy’s global, federated Defensive Cyber Operation (DCO) enclave is about to get a major upgrade. PMW 130, the Cybersecurity Program Office, recently put a Request for Information on the street to engage with industry on ideas to upgrade their Sharkcage program. 17 companies responded.
Prize Challenges have been growing in popularity as the Government tries to get out from under their cumbersome, innovation-sapping Federal Acquisition Regulations. Recently, the US Navy has seen some excellent success with their Artificial Intelligence Applications to Autonomous Cybersecurity (IA ATAC) Challenge. Anyone over 18 years of age, who is a US citizen, can participate. …
The Joint DHS, FBI, HHS advisory on the malicious targeting of the US public health sector by criminals using ransomware should cause immediate tactical action by cyber defenders in the medical and healthcare community. It also signals the need for strategic actions by executives in these and other sectors. It could also change the dynamic…
Join us 18 November 2020 from 1:00pm till 4:30pm for OODAcon Online. The OODAcon conference brings together the hackers, thinkers, strategists, disruptors, leaders, technologists, and creators with one foot in the future to discuss the most pressing issues of the day and provide insight into the ways technology is evolving. OODAcons are not just about…
South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol’s 0ffice announced on Wednesday that hackers infiltrated the personal email of a staff member just before Yoon traveled to Europe last November. Yoon’s office attributed the operation to North Korean hackers, and stated the breach did not affect any other officials. A spokesperson stated that the office constantly defends…
The Ukrainian Military announced on Wednesday that a successful naval surface drone operation sank Russia’s Tsezar Kunikov landing ship in the Black Sea. The vessel was off the coast of Alupka on the southern edge of Crimea. Ukraine’s GUR intelligence agency posted a video of the operation on Telegram. The GUR stated the warship spent…
Microsoft’s threat intelligence team recently partnered with OpenAI to produce a report on threat actors using LLMs to streamline vulnerability research, targeting, and malware development. The research did not identify any significant operations that relied on LLMs, but identified threat groups from Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran that interacted with ChatGPT to assist their…
Bitcoin is a trillion dollar asset once again. And the overall crypto market has broken $2 trillion in market capitalization. Why it matters: If it were collectively a publicly traded company, cryptocurrency would be the fourth-largest in the world, between Saudi Aramco and NVIDIA. On its own, Bitcoin would the eighth-largest, between Meta and Berkshire-Hathaway. By the…
Meta’s chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun, received another accolade to add to his long list of awards on Sunday, when he was recognized with a TIME100 Impact Award for his contributions to the world of artificial intelligence. Ahead of the award ceremony in Dubai, LeCun sat down with TIME to discuss the barriers to achieving…
Microsoft and OpenAI are revealing today that hackers are already using large language models like ChatGPT to refine and improve their existing cyberattacks. In newly published research, Microsoft and OpenAI have detected attempts by Russian, North Korean, Iranian, and Chinese-backed groups using tools like ChatGPT for research into targets, to improve scripts, and to help…
There have been just a handful of moments over the centuries when we have experienced a huge shift in the skills our economy values most. We are entering one such moment now. Technical and data skills that have been highly sought after for decades appear to be among the most exposed to advances in artificial…
Slack AI is now available for enterprise customers, though pricing details for the generative AI (gene) features have not yet been disclosed. Slack announced plans for its AI assistant app last year, focusing on three areas: AI powered search. This provides personalized answers to questions based on an organization’s knowledge base. Slack AI helps users locate…
The sudden resignations of Hungary’s President Katalin Novak and former Justice Minister Judit Varga, attributed to their involvement in granting clemency to a figure linked to child abuse, have escalated into the most significant threat to Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s decade-long rule. The departures of these influential women, symbolizing different facets of Orban’s leadership, have…
Indian police have intensified their efforts for a second day to prevent farmers from Punjab state, who are demanding minimum crop prices, from reaching the capital Delhi. The capital is heavily fortified with barricades and security forces as the farmers, still 200km away, seek to renew their protest against what they see as unmet government…
In eastern Turkey, hundreds of rescuers are engaged in the search for nine gold field workers missing after a landslide struck the Copler mine site, burying them under roughly 10 million cubic meters of earth. Four individuals, including the field manager, have been detained as part of an investigation into the incident. Concerns also loom…
A Ukrainian military report claims that the Caesar Kunikov, a significant Russian amphibious ship, has been sunk off the coast of Russian-occupied Crimea. The attack, allegedly carried out by Ukrainian forces, utilized Magura V5 sea drones, targeting the ship near Yalta. The sinking is seen as part of Ukraine’s ongoing efforts to counter Russia’s Black…
Albania’s cybersecurity authorities have accused a hacker group allegedly sponsored by the Iranian government, named “Homeland Justice,” of conducting a sophisticated cyberattack on the country’s Institute of Statistics on February 1st. The attack affected 40 computers, and while Iran’s mission to the United Nations has not responded to requests for comment, the Iranian government has…
Trend Micro revealed that the zero-day vulnerability CVE-2024-21412, fixed by Microsoft in its recent Patch Tuesday updates, has been exploited by threat groups Water Hydra and DarkCasino to target financial market traders. Discovered during Trend Micro’s analysis of a Water Hydra campaign in late December 2023, the vulnerability bypasses Microsoft Defender SmartScreen, enabling the delivery…
A team of researchers has uncovered a new DNS-related vulnerability dubbed KeyTrap (CVE-2023-50387), which they claim could potentially disable large portions of the internet. This critical flaw affects the Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC), designed to authenticate responses to DNS queries. Despite DNSSEC’s aim to prevent DNS manipulation, the KeyTrap vulnerability allows attackers to…
Zoom announced patches for seven vulnerabilities in its desktop and mobile applications, including a critical-severity bug in Windows software. The critical issue (CVE-2024-24691) could allow an attacker with network access to escalate privileges. Zoom also addressed a high-severity privilege escalation flaw (CVE-2024-24697) impacting Windows applications, which can be exploited locally. Additionally, two medium-severity vulnerabilities leading…
When a human-AI conversation involves many rounds of continuous dialogue, the powerful large language machine-learning models that drive chatbots like ChatGPT sometimes start to collapse, causing the bots’ performance to rapidly deteriorate. A team of researchers from MIT and elsewhere has pinpointed a surprising cause of this problem and developed a simple solution that enables a…
Nvidia is releasing an early version of Chat with RTX today, a demo app that lets you run a personal AI chatbot on your PC. You can feed it YouTube videos and your own documents to create summaries and get relevant answers based on your own data. It all runs locally on a PC, and…
“The video contains no teleoperation,” says Norwegian humanoid robot maker 1X. “No computer graphics, no cuts, no video speedups, no scripted trajectory playback. It’s all controlled via neural networks, all autonomous, all 1X speed.” This is the humanoid manufacturer that OpenAI put its chips behind last year, as part of a US$25-million Series A funding round.…
Americans invented Beatlemania in 1964, which was bittersweet for the British, who had invented it in 1962. Something similar is happening now to Arm Holdings. The Cambridge-headquartered chip designer has doubled in value after posting quarterly results last week. Since its Nasdaq float in September, the stock is up 192 per cent. Its market cap…
Working professionals spend a lot of their valuable time in unproductive meetings. To help remedy that problem, Microsoft, Google, Zoom, and Otter.ai have released AI-enabled meeting tools. Now, Otter.ai is claiming its newest feature set places it above all other competitors. On Tuesday, Otter.ai unveiled Meeting GenAI, which is a set of AI tools that…
The United Nations is going to announce an investigation into North Korean sponsored cyberattacks against cryptocurrency companies. The attacks potentially brought in $3 billion to fund the country’s nuclear program. An advanced copy of the investigation report shows the UN investigators are looking at 58 specific cyberattacks believed to be waged by the Democratic People’s…
An ongoing campaign targeting Microsoft Azure corporate clouds has already compromised dozens of environments and hundreds of individuals. The activity involves data exfiltration, financial fraud, and impersonation, among others, in a variety of organizations. The organizations affected are in different geographic regions and industry verticals. The phishing, however, is directed at highly strategic individuals in…
China’s government has been attempting to show the US as indulging in the same cyber activities it has been accused of carrying out over the past several years. Its efforts have been ongoing for two years. A recent examination of Beijing’s claims by researchers show they are often based on previously leaked US intelligence and…
The United States Senate has approved a $95 billion aid package for Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan after months of back and forth. Democrats were in favor of the legislation, however, Republicans were divided and were voting it down. The bill has $14 billion in aid for Israel’s war against Hamas, $10 billion for humanitarian aid…
Police in northern India fired tear gas on protesting farmers to prevent them from marching on Delhi. The capital is ringed by cement blocks, razor wire, and fencing on three sides to keep the farmers who are demanding minimum crop prices at bay. The government fears a repeat of a 2020 protest that lasted a…
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has simulated a strike against a major Israeli airbase. The show of its naval capabilities was aired by state television on Tuesday. The IRGC fired a range of munitions from its ships and submarines. The action was a message as Israel’s war on Gaza escalates and tensions rise in the…
OpenAI’s revenues have surpassed $2bn on an annualised basis, as the runaway success of its flagship artificial intelligence product ChatGPT puts it among the fastest-growing technology companies in history. The San Francisco-based start-up’s yearly run rate — a measure of the previous month’s revenue multiplied by 12 — hit the $2bn milestone in December 2023, according…
As President Biden met with heads of state around the world these past couple of years, he’s been repeating a curious phrase. “Open RAN.” This obscure technology for cellular towers — which the Brookings Institution once dubbed the “Huawei killer” — is Washington’s anointed champion to try to unseat Chinese tech giant Huawei Technologies from…
Over the last few years, cryptocurrency hacking has become a pervasive and formidable threat, leading to billions of dollars stolen from crypto platforms and exposing vulnerabilities across the ecosystem. As we revealed in last year’s Crypto Crime Report, 2022 was the biggest year ever for crypto theft with $3.7 billion stolen. In 2023, however, funds…
In a bid to enhance the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), researchers from Google Deepmind and University of Southern California have proposed a new ‘self-discover’ prompting framework. Published on arXiV and Hugging Face this morning, the approach goes beyond existing prompting techniques used by LLMs and has been found capable of improving the…
Decades after automation began taking and transforming manufacturing jobs, artificial intelligence is coming for the higher-ups in the corporate office. The list of white-collar layoffs is growing almost daily and include jobs cuts at Google, Duolingo and UPS in recent weeks. While the total number of jobs directly lost to generative AI remains low, some…
A narrowly divided US Senate moved closer to passing a $95.34bn aid package for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, showing undiminished bipartisanship. The bill includes $61bn for Ukraine, $14bn for Israel in its war against Hamas, and $4.83bn to support partners in the Indo-Pacific, including Taiwan, and deter aggression by China. It also would provide $9.15bn…
Hamas has warned Israel that a ground offensive in Rafah would imperil negotiations on a truce and the exchange of captives and prisoners. Aid groups and foreign governments, including Israel’s key ally the US, have voiced deep concern over Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s pledge to extend ground military operations into the far-southern Gaza city.…
More than half of Gaza’s population is squeezed into miserable tent cities in Rafah, a small city along Egypt’s border. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has threatened to overrun the area. Rather than opening its border to give Palestinians a refuge from the onslaught, Egypt has reinforced its frontier with Gaza. It has also…
As the Russia-Ukraine war wages on, both Ukraine’s former top commander and his replacement have emphasized the same looming problem: a need to relieve exhausted, battered troops whose combat tours have stretched nearly two years. While Ukraine relies on allies for weaponry, replenishing the ranks is a domestic challenge. Military analysts have mostly coalesced around…
The US Justice Department announced on Friday that the Warzone RAT cybercrime enterprise has been dismantled as a result of an international law enforcement operation. Warzone is a remote access trojan that allows users to stealthily connect to infected devices and conduct various activities, such as browsing files, recording keystrokes, taking screenshots, stealing credentials, and…
The FCC has revealed the unanimous adoption of a Declaratory Ruling that makes voice cloning technology used in common robocall scams targeting consumers illegal. The rise of these types of calls has escalated during the last few years as this technology now has the potential to confuse consumers with misinformation by imitating the voices of…
U.N. experts say they are investigating 58 suspected North Korean cyberattacks valued at approximately $3 billion, with the money reportedly being used to help fund its development of weapons of mass destruction. The high volume of cyberattacks by North Korean hacking groups who report to the Reconnaissance General Bureau, North Korea’s primary foreign intelligence organization,…
The US Department of State has announced a $10 million reward for information leading to the identification and location of leaders of the Hive ransomware cybergang, roughly a year after law enforcement dismantled the operation and seized its Tor-based website. The Hive ransomware, operational since June 2021, victimized over 1,500 entities and garnered over $100…
Ivanti has released patches for a high-severity vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-22024 with a CVSS score of 8.3, affecting its enterprise VPN and network access products, including Connect Secure, Policy Secure, and ZTA gateway appliances. The vulnerability, described as an XML external entity (XXE) issue in the SAML component, could allow unauthenticated attackers to access restricted…
Cybersecurity firm Bitdefender has uncovered a new macOS backdoor named RustDoor, believed to be connected to the ransomware families Black Basta and Alphv/BlackCat. RustDoor, written in Rust programming language, masquerades as Visual Studio and has been circulating since November 2023, remaining undetected for about three months. Bitdefender identified several variants of RustDoor, sharing backdoor functionality…
A bipartisan congressional investigation has revealed that several US venture capital firms, including GGV Capital, GSR Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and Walden International, invested billions in Chinese technology companies operating in semiconductor, AI, and cybersecurity sectors. The report, released by the House Select Committee on China, highlights investments totaling over $1.9 billion in AI…
United Parcel Service Inc.’s largest layoffs in its 116-year history were made possible, in part, by new technologies including artificial intelligence, CEO Carol Tomé said last week. Citing one example, she said that machine learning allows salespeople to put together proposals without having to ask pricing experts for guidance. UPS is among a growing number…
Robotics companies raised $749 million in December 2023 as a result of 41 investments. You can see each investment in the table below or a PDF version here. Robotics investments reached about $12.9 billion for 2023. In December 2023, makers of autonomous mobile robots for indoor applications such as e-commerce fulfillment were well represented. Examples…
As 2023 fades into the background, the new year has started with significant developments in the cryptocurrency world. January 10th saw the SEC approve 11 U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs, a significant milestone in crypto history. After just one week of trading, these ETFs outperformed silver ETPs, making Bitcoin the second-largest exchange-traded commodity by volume. This…
Altman was already trying to lead the development of human-level artificial intelligence. Now he has another great ambition: raising trillions of dollars to reshape the global semiconductor industry. The OpenAI chief executive officer is in talks with investors including the United Arab Emirates government to raise funds for a wildly ambitious tech initiative that would boost…
After seemingly lurking on the sidelines most of last year, Apple is starting to shake things up in the field of artificial intelligence—and open-source AI in particular. The Cupertino-based tech giant has partnered with the University of Santa Barbara to develop an AI model that can edit images based on natural language, the same way people…
Security analysts and officials have said they believe the risk of a nuclear weapon being used somewhere, while still small, has increased to a level not seen in decades. China’s military strategists are now “looking to nuclear weapons not only as a defensive shield, but as a potential sword — to intimidate and subjugate adversaries.”…
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping have spoken about creating a ‘multipolar, fairer world order’ in face of US-led efforts to contain their countries. During an hour-long phone call on Thursday, Xi and Putin denounced the “US policy of interfering in the internal affairs of other states”, Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov told…
Russia and Ukraine have each exchanged 100 prisoners of war (POWs) following mediation by the United Arab Emirates. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said his country “will make every effort to continue prisoner exchanges”, in a Friday post on X. So far, 3,135 Ukrainian POWs have been freed from Russian captivity. In January, the two countries…
OpenAI, backed by Microsoft, is gearing up to revolutionize task automation with its latest venture into agent software. This cutting-edge technology aims to streamline complex tasks by seamlessly taking control of users’ devices, heralding a new era of efficiency and productivity. Meanwhile, as the world eagerly anticipates the deployment of these innovative assistants, OpenAI’s CEO…
Right around the time you are getting this email, Google finally released their long-awaited powerful AI, which, in the continued tradition of sudden AI name changes, is no longer Bard but rather Gemini Advanced. I have had early access to this LLM for over a month (as a reminder, I take no payments from any…
The Biden administration on Thursday said leading artificial intelligence companies are among more than 200 entities joining a new U.S. consortium to support the safe development and deployment of generative AI. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo announced the U.S. AI Safety Institute Consortium (AISIC), which includes OpenAI, Alphabet, Anthropic and Microsoft along with Facebook-parent Meta Platforms,…
Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai still loves the web. He wakes up every morning and reads Techmeme, a news aggregator resplendent with links, accessible only via the web. The web is dynamic and resilient, he says, and can still—with help from a search engine—provide whatever information a person is looking for. Yet the web and its…
First, there were talking digital assistants like Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant. Then there were online chatbots like ChatGPT and Google Bard. Now, the two are merging. On Thursday, Google introduced Gemini, a smartphone app that behaves like a talking digital assistant as well as a conversational chatbot. Responding to voice and text requests, it…
Google recently announced a new feature of Google Play Protect, which will block the installation of sideloaded applications that request sensitive permissions on Android devices. Fraudsters frequently leverage these permissions to intercept passwords via SMS or notifications. The feature will specifically scan for four requests from apps in real-time: RECEIVE_SMS, READ_SMS, BIND_Notifications, and Accessibility. If…
Pakistan has begun counting votes after general election polling ended on Thursday. Pakistan has experienced phone outages, militant attacks, and widespread violence during the highly polarized voting period. On Wednesday, an Islamic State attack on electoral candidates’ offices in Balochistan province killed 26 people. Despite a widespread troop deployment across the country and the temporary…
On Thursday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected ceasefire and hostage release terms proposed by Hamas as strikes continued on Gaza’s southernmost border city of Rafah. Netanyahu called Hamas’s proposal “delusional” and claimed victory is only months away. Before Netanyahu’s rejection of the proposal, intense diplomatic efforts tried to prevent conflict from reaching Rafah, where…
South Korea’s National Intelligence Service stated that North Koreans working in China have staged rare protests in response to poor working conditions and various “incidents and accidents.” In one instance in late January, as many as 3,000 North Koreans working at a military-affiliated trading company protested due to unpaid wages and strict pandemic-era lockdowns. China…
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