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The U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has finalized its principal set of encryption algorithms designed to withstand cyberattacks from a quantum computer.
The Federal Ruling against Google is finally part of the tipping point, as many have been waiting for a much-needed wave of judicial and legislative activity to begin strengthening the U.S. cognitive infrastructure and cleaning up the information ecosystem. Details of the ruling can be found in this post.
Recent reporting reveals that the United Nations (UN) will soon hold their final negotiation meeting on its new Cybercrime Treaty.
Designed as “A Practical Guide for State and Local Governments,” Addressing the Threat of Political Violence in the 2024 Elections is diagnostic, prescriptive, directive, and immediately actionable. The report is the result of a workshop convened in the spring of 2024 consisting of a group of senior law enforcement officials, national security analysts, attorneys, legal…
DEF CON 32 runs from August 8th through 11th. Panels, challenges, and events we track annually at DEFCON 32 are included here.
The 20-year-old shooter in Bulter, Pennslyvania, on July 13, 2024, personifies not only the ‘lone actor’ threat in an information ecosystem addled with extremist and violent rhetoric – but also the ongoing generational gap within law enforcement and the intelligence community (IC). OODA Loop and the OODA Network have been on this strategic beat since…
Once again, Robert Stratton will be participating as a judge in Black Hat 2024 Startup Spotlight.
I believe the world stands on the brink of an age of tech abundance, an era marked by unprecedented technological advancements, promising significant improvements in productivity, sustainability, and quality of life.
Last week, while the Denver Metro Area experienced climate crisis conditions, inside the air-conditioned Colorado Convention Center (in two of the last presentations at SIGGRAPH 2024), Professor Mike Pritchard shared his latest research (some of which is in collaboration with NVIDIA’s Earth-2″ Initiative) on the future machine learning, earth system science and computer simulation and…
While attending SIGGRAPH 2024, the OODA Loop team awoke to local newscasts responsibly reporting – and refreshingly not catastrophizing – the exponential metrics of a wildfire that had doubled in size overnight. The proximity to the Denver Metro Area – within 20 miles – newscasters were reporting as ‘unprecedented.’ The Quarry Fire, as the conflagration…
Though Russia has not abandoned its cyber efforts against critical infrastructure, any deviation is a testament to the fact that cyber attacks against such targets are not necessarily easy to accomplish or will achieve the results that are expected.
SIGGRAPH 2024 featured a rare joint public appearance of NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang and Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the 51st annual conference on Monday, July 29th. Before the Fireside Chat with Zuckerberg, Huang also headlined a Fireside Chat with WIRED Senior Writer Lauren Goode to discuss AI and graphics for the new…
At this month’s meeting, we found ourselves in a real-time incident report context assessing the real-time impact of a super-botched global security update for its global customers by Crowdstrike. It made for a fascinating discussion. The upcoming (and highly anticipated every year by the OODA Network membership) Black Hat and Defcon 32 events in Vegas…
The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) “detected, tracked, and intercepted two Russian TU-95 and two PRC H-6 military aircraft operating in the Alaska Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) on July 24, 2024. NORAD fighter jets from the United States and Canada conducted the intercept.”
ACM SIGGRAPH – The Association for Computing Machinery, Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques – is the premier annual conference and exhibition on computer graphics and interactive techniques. This annual conference is positioned for another 40-year run as the best-in-class annual confab for research and development and strategic insights for competitive advantage…
The United States has carried out more air strikes in Yemen’s capital Sanaa. In Sanaa, two US airstrikes targeted the area of Attan, which has been controlled by the rebel movement since 2014. Houthi-held areas in Yemen have been subjected to near-daily air strikes by Washington. US President Donald Trump’s administration said the air strikes…
An October 2024 study by Software AG suggests that half of all employees are Shadow AI users, and most of them wouldn’t stop even if it was banned. The problem is the ease of access to AI tools. Seven percent of employees are already using these Chinese AI models. Enterprises need to have proactive control…
California-based data protection startup Cy4Data Labs on Thursday announced raising $10 million in a Series A funding round led by Pelion Venture Partners. Cy4Data Labs has built a solution that can protect data across on-premises, cloud, and SaaS environments. The company also provides a key management system, as well as real-time threat detection. Cy4Data Labs…
President Donald Trump’s tariffs have underscored the increasing geopolitical risk that almost all businesses now face. As the situation continues to shift with Trump’s unpredictable deal-making, it’s also becoming clear how challenging it is for companies, nonprofits, consultants, and lawyers to keep up with the rapid day-to-day changes. “We are drowning in trade updates every…
It’s considered a scientific landmark: A 1975 meeting at the Asilomar Conference Center in Pacific Grove, California, shaped a new safety regime for recombinant DNA, ensuring that researchers would apply caution to gene splicing. Those ideas have been so useful that in the decades since, when new topics in scientific safety arise, there are still…
Recent disruptions in key trade routes, from commercial shipping issues in the Red Sea to automotive production delays following floods in Europe, have exposed weaknesses in our supply chains. Traditional automation has delivered efficiency gains but introduced a hidden fragility: Systems that work perfectly within normal parameters can still break down exactly when we need…
The rolling billows of the escalating trade war between China and the US are now lapping at the shores of the emergent humanoid robotics industry, threatening to derail Tesla’s bold vision of mass-producing its Optimus robot. The company’s ambitious goal of keeping the robot’s production price at US$20,000 could be unattainable without access to China’s…
Inside a secretive set of buildings in Santa Barbara, California, scientists at Alphabet are working on one of the company’s most ambitious bets yet. They’re attempting to develop the world’s most advanced quantum computers. “In the future, quantum and AI, they could really complement each other back and forth,” said Julian Kelly, director of hardware…
Artificial intelligence’s power-hungry nature has earned it a reputation as a climate pariah. Training a single model can use more electricity than 100 US homes in an entire year. As the world’s demand for AI grows, so will data centers’ energy consumption, which is projected to more than double by 2030, according to the International…
Google has launched Gemini 2.5 Flash, a major upgrade to its AI lineup that gives businesses and developers unprecedented control over how much “thinking” their AI performs. The new model, released today in preview through Google AI Studio and Vertex AI, represents a strategic effort to deliver improved reasoning capabilities while maintaining competitive pricing in…
Large portions of Haiti’s population face hunger as violence continues in the country. Significant portions of Haiti’s population face hunger as violence continues in the country. Gang violence in the country has continued to grow as efforts to combat the power of gangs have failed. International aid to Haiti has also come under stress as…
Israel has annouced they will continue their operations in Gaza. Israel’s Prime Minister has annouced that Israel will continue its operations in Gaza. He said that the war must continue until all hostages have been released and Hamas is no longer a threat to Israel. Negotiations between Hamas and Israel have laregely stalled as both…
Former President of the Democratic Republic of the Congo Kabila has returned to the country. The Former President of the Democratic Republic of the Congo Joseph Kabila has returned to the Country. He arrived to the city of Goma which is in the country’s east and is currently under the control of rebel forces. The…
Hezbollah will not disarm until Israel withdraws forces from Lebanon. Hezbollah has annouced that they will not begin disarmament until Israeli forces withdraw from Lebanon. This annoucement comes after the United States urged Lebanon’s government to assert full control over the country. This statement was understoood by many to mean that the Lebanon should fully…
Samsung phones save passwords in plain text after they are copied. Samsung phones have been found to save passwords in plain text after they are copied. The phones also do not delete information from the clipboard which means the plain text data is stored forever. Samsung has said that they will work to address the…
Ahold Delhaize has confirmed that data was stolen during a ransomware attack. Dutch food company, Ahold Delhaize, has confirmed that data was stolen during a ransomware attack. Brands owned by the company were also impacted by the breach. The company confirmed that the attackers were able to extract files from their system. The company has…
Legends International has confirmed that it was the victim of a cyber attack. The event management company Legends International has confirmed that it was the vicitm of a cyber attack. The company has disclosed that over 8,000 people have been impacted by the breach. The company has said that they do not believe that any…
The FTC has found that $470 million have been lost to scam text messages. The FTC has found that over $470 million have been lost to scam text messages. Text messages scams have been more common and increasingly complex in recent years. Common scams are the “fraud alter” and “employment” scams. These scams involve an…
As tensions with a combative China rise, the U.S. is looking at the commercial market to modernize with new military technology applications, speakers at a Future of Defense event said. President Trump issued an executive order last week that aims to ramp up innovation and production capabilities across aviation, shipbuilding and more. Axios’ Colin Demarest…
With so much enthusiasm about the rapid advancement we’ve made in using LLMs this year, some of the remaining barriers and bottlenecks tend to get lost in the shuffle. As with all prior technologies, companies have to introduce an AI project the right way. The way I’ve heard it said is that new workflows and…
The Federal Aviation Administration is testing systems to detect drones in New Jersey, after a series of unexplained drone sightings in the state last year raised alarm. The testing, over a two-week period in the community of Cape May, includes about 100 off-the-shelf Unmanned Aerial Systems, commonly called drones, ranging in size from smaller than…
Investors still have an AI FOMO problem: 57.9% of global VC dollars invested in Q1 went to AI and machine learning startups, according to the latest PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor. “The fear of somebody else winning your market has never been higher than it is now,” said Maria Palma, general partner at Freestyle Capital. “You haven’t…
Project Eleven, a quantum computing research and advocacy firm, has launched the Q-Day Prize, a global competition offering 1 bitcoin (BTC) to the first team able to break an elliptic curve cryptographic (ECC) key, the cryptography which secures the Bitcoin network, using Shor’s algorithm on a quantum computer. Shor’s algorithm is a quantum computing method…
One of the co-founders of Elon Musk’s Neuralink Corp. is building a different kind of brain implant.That device, made by the startup Precision Neuroscience Corp., went in 63-year-old Tim Fisher earlier this month. In an operating room in Philadelphia, a surgeon placed a sliver of film, thinner than a human hair and embedded with over…
Two months after DeepSeek, China’s artificial intelligence star, rattled Washington and shook Wall Street, U.S. officials are taking steps to crack down on the Chinese start-up and its support from America’s leading chip maker, Nvidia. The Trump administration this week moved to restrict Nvidia’s sale of A.I. chips to China. It also is weighing penalties…
The European Central Bank has interest rates for the seventh time. The European Central Bank has cut interests rate for the seventh time. The move comes amid increased economic uncertainty due to changes in United States’s trade policy. The bank had aimed to pause rate cuts but has changed policy due to the changing trade…
Nigeria’s president says that 40 people have died after a shooting. Nigeria’s president has said that 40 people were killed after a shooting. The government stated that it believed the shooting to be connected to religous tensions. The shooting occured at a Christian farming community in the country’s North. Tensions betwen Christians and Muslims in…
Ukraine is continuing to pursue negotiations with partners for additional aid. As Russia continues to strike Ukraine, Ukraine has continued to pursue negotiations with allies. Ukraine meet with the members of the “coalition of the willing” in Paris to discuss continued support and security pledges. Ukraine has also continued negotiations with the United States. Ukraine…
62 Taiwanese military members have been found to have Chinese residency permits. Taiwan’s government has annouced that they found 62 military members held Chinese residency permits. Taiwanese law does not prohibit holding a Chinese residency permit but does restrict the ability of those that hold one to access sensitive information. The government said they did…
Chinese espionage groups have been observed using open-source tools to carry out attacks. The Chinese espionage group, UNC5174, has been observed using open-source tools to carry out attacks. Researchers say that the move mirrors what they have seen in other state sponsored groups. Increasingly groups are using cheaper open-source tools rather than developing custom tools.…
Chinese APT Mustang Panda has updated their tactics to use more modern backdoor tools. The Chinese APT Mustang Panda has updated their tactics to use more modern tools. The APT has been active for over a decade and is known for targeting government entities. The group has largely relied on Windows zero day exploits for…
CISA has warned users to update their credentials after the Oracle Cloud Hack. In March, a hacker annouced that they had breached Oracle’s cloud system. At first Oracle denied that the breach had occuired but his since admitted that a successful attack was carried out. CISA has issued guidence following the attack warning users that…
The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality has been the victim of a data breach. The Oregon Department of Environemtnal Quality has been the victim of a data breach. The Rhysida has claimed to have stolen 2.5 Terrbites of information from the agency. The group is demanding a payment of $2.5 million for the return of…
Profluent, a biotechnology company that is using AI to design proteins, says it has demonstrated “scaling laws” in the performance of AI models for biology that are similar to those AI researchers have previously claimed for AI models built to handle language. The finding means that building larger AI models for protein design, and feeding…
UK government officials have raised private concerns that Chinese-manufactured drones are being used to take high resolution images of critical national infrastructure sites in the UK, going against guidance from the country’s security services. National Grid Plc, which operates the nation’s electricity and gas networks, uses drones made by Shenzhen-based SZ DJI Technology Co. to…
Microsoft researchers claim they’ve developed the largest-scale 1-bit AI model, also known as a “bitnet,” to date. Called BitNet b1.58 2B4T, it’s openly available under an MIT license and can run on CPUs, including Apple’s M2. Bitnets are essentially compressed models designed to run on lightweight hardware. In standard models, weights, the values that define…
Quantum physics gets a bad rap. The behaviour of the atoms and particles it describes is often said to be weird, and that weirdness has given rise to all manner of esoteric notions – that we live in a multiverse, say, or that the reality we see isn’t real at all. As a result, we…
While ChatGPT and generative AI dominate headlines, a quieter revolution is unfolding in AI-powered robotics, transforming businesses and reshaping industries. Far from science fiction, these intelligent machines are automating tasks, boosting efficiency, and sparking debates about their impact on jobs. AI robots fuse artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer vision, natural language processing, with physical hardware…
Juniper Payments, a Velera company, added an embedded artificial intelligence-driven fraud prevention engine to its Payments Hub platform for banks and credit unions. The enhancement is designed to support financial institutions’ broader adoption of instant payments by delivering real-time fraud detection at the point of origin and processing, the provider of interbank transaction and reporting…
Nvidia said on Tuesday that the U.S. government had blocked the sale of some of its artificial intelligence chips to China without a license and would begin requiring a license for future sales. The restrictions are the first major limits that President Trump’s administration has put on semiconductor sales abroad. It raises the possibility that…
Israel’s defense minister on Wednesday threatened an escalation in the Gaza war if Hamas did not soon release hostages. Cease-fire negotiations between Israel and Hamas have been stalled, and the United Nations is warning that Gaza’s humanitarian situation may be at its worst since the conflict began. The defense minister’s statement comes as former Israeli…
Iran’s foreign minister is traveling to Russia this week to discuss Iran’s nuclear talks with the US. The trip’s announcement came as a second talk between Iran and the US was revealed, following up on an initial meeting between the two countries over Iran’s nuclear power. Iran and the US had held constructive talks over…
Jordan has thwarted a plot threatening its national security, arresting 16 people. The plan had involved manufacturing, explosives, a drone production site, and the illegal import of rockets. The suspects have been referred to Jordan’s security court by the General Intelligence Department for trial. At least one rocket was found ready to be launched. The…
China has paused the export of critical rare earth minerals mined or processed in China as a result of the country’s escalating trade war with the US. Crucial US military products, such as Air Force fighter jet engines are powered by these materials. The wide range of restrictions on critical minerals and agents is a…
Two data breaches as insurance administrator Landmark Admin and software solutions provider Young Consulting have impacted over 2.6 million individuals. Landmark Admin notified around 800,000 people that it had fallen victim to a ransomware attack back in October 2024. Young Consulting estimates that over 1 million people were impacted in its data breach. Social Security,…
MITRE, the organization running the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) program, is risking losing the U.S. federal funding behind the effort this week. On Wednesday, the current funding pathway for MITRE to run the program will expire. In a leaked email, MITRE VP said that a break in CVE service would deteriorate national vulnerability databases,…
A Chinese state-sponsored actor, “UNC5147”, has been using open source tools to attack its victims. The attacker has been using a new command and control (C2) tool, the “Vshell”, in its campaign since January, as well as a variant of “Snowlight” malware. Threat actors are beginning to use open source tools in their attacks more…
Hertz, an American car rental company, has suffered a data breach from a ransomware attack last year. The ransomware group had exploited zero-day vulnerabilities in Cleo, a vendor providing a file transfer platform used by Hertz. The number of customers impacted by the attack is still unknown, but Hertz operates in over 160 countries around…
One of President Donald Trump’s top officials has warned European allies hesitant about working with Elon Musk’s satellite internet company that they needed to choose between US and Chinese technology. Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr told the Financial Times that “allied western democracies” needed to “focus on the real long-term bogey: the rise of…
Last week, I spoke with two US Marines who spent much of last year deployed in the Pacific, conducting training exercises from South Korea to the Philippines. Both were responsible for analyzing surveillance to warn their superiors about possible threats to the unit. But this deployment was unique: For the first time, they were using…
OpenAI on Monday launched a new family of models called GPT-4.1. Yes, “4.1” — as if the company’s nomenclature wasn’t confusing enough already. There’s GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1 mini, and GPT-4.1 nano, all of which OpenAI says “excel” at coding and instruction following. Available through OpenAI’s API but not ChatGPT, the multimodal models have a 1-million-token context…
A US satellite startup will launch the first communications satellite dedicated to Taiwan, strengthening the self-ruled democracy’s resilience against possible Chinese attempts to impose an information blackout in the event of an invasion. Astranis Space Technologies Corp. will partner with Taiwan’s biggest telecommunications company Chunghwa Telecom Co. to dedicate a MicroGEO satellite to the island,…
In the wake of criticism over the underwhelming performance of its AI products, especially in areas like notification summaries, Apple on Monday detailed how it is trying to improve its AI models by analyzing user data privately with the aid of synthetic data. Using an approach called “differential privacy,” the company said it would first…
Quantum professionals around the world overwhelmingly agree that quantum utility will arrive within the next decade, according to a new survey by Economist Impact. Quantum utility refers to the point at which quantum computers provide practical advantages over classical computers in solving specific real-world problems. A whopping 83% of the survey’s respondents think that moment…
Players from all over the world are eager to take the lead in humanoid robotics. No one country is completely dominant in this 21st century “space race”. However, China and the United States are undoubtedly in the first tier. “In the US, the focus is on staying at the forefront of technology and exploring unknown…
Enterprise retrieval augmented generation (RAG) remains integral to the current agentic AI craze. Taking advantage of the continued interest in agents, Cohere released the latest version of its embeddings model with longer context windows and more multimodality. Cohere’s Embed 4 builds on the multimodal updates of Embed 3 and adds more capabilities around unstructured data.…
On Monday, Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salaf visited Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa in Damascus in his first official visit to Syria. The trip was an effort to renew the relationship between the two countries, which has for long been tense. Before former Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad was ousted by opposition forces, Syria was accused of…
The presidential election of Gabon, a Central African nation, was won by Gen. Brice Oligui Nguema. Nguema previously took power in the country after staging a coup in 2023, and won over 90 percent of the votes in the recent election. He will now govern the country for the next seven years. The election represents…
Qatar and Egypt are expressing “grave concern” about the recent escalation of death and violence in the Gaza Strip. The two countries are renewing their stress over efforts to achieve a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel to end the fighting. They both support an Arab-backed Gaza reconstruction plan, clashing with U.S. and Israel calls to…
Daniel Naboa has secured re-election in Ecuador’s presidential election on Sunday. He won the race by a large margin, demonstrating Ecuadorian voters’ faith in his ability to tackle the country’s security crisis. Naboa defeated Luisa González in the election, who said she would not recognize the race’s results. Both candidates had accused the other of…
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