Start your day with intelligence. Get The OODA Daily Pulse.
Informing your decisions with actionable intelligence
Start your day with intelligence. Get The OODA Daily Pulse.
Informing your decisions with actionable intelligence
Home > OODA Analysis and Briefs
The Defense Innovation Board (DIB) is conducting a study on Strategic Investment Capital.
A crucial insight wrought from our 2022 research was based on a pattern garnered from our Opportunities for Advantage Series. The pattern was a clear inflection point over the course of Q3 and Q4 of 2022 in National Security Investment for American Competitiveness. As result, this theme was featured in the OODA Alamanac 2023 (Jagged…
Recently, the World Economic Forum (WEF) – an international nongovernmental and lobbying organization – met in Davos, Switzerland to discuss risks facing the global community in 2023. Among the threats identified in its comprehensive The Global Risks Report 2023, cybercrime and cyber insecurity was featured in the top 10, alongside other prominent risk concerns such…
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has released the Artificial Intelligence Risk Management Framework (AI RMF 1.0), a guidance document for voluntary use by organizations designing, developing, deploying, or using AI systems to help manage the many risks of AI technologies. The AI RMF was produced in close collaboration with the private and public…
This conversation took place at the January 2023 OODA Network Member Meeting.
In recent posts, we embarked on an effort to quantify crypto and digital assets enforcement and regulatory impacts and outcomes as they emerge in 2023. In this post, we turn to the recent headlines about and the organizational behavior of the Securities and Exchanges Commission (SEC), namely the SEC’s Division of Enforcement’s Crypto Assets and…
OODA hosts a monthly video call to help members optimize opportunities and reduce risk to discuss items of common interest to our membership. These highly collaborative sessions are always a great way for our members to meet and interact with each other while talking about topics like global risks, emerging technologies, cybersecurity, and current or…
Kristin Del Rosso is a product manager at Sophos focusing on Incident Response, Threat Intelligence, and the SecOps ecosystem. Research and concerns about the US National Vulnerability Database (NVD) and Chinese strategies relative to the database are evergreen. We caught up with Del Rosso for an interview this week to discuss her presentation at LABScon.io…
As mentioned in our weekly OODA Member Network Dispatch, OODA and Katzcy are hosting an invite-only quantum networking event for the evening of 26 January in Reston VA (Thanks to both Quintessence Labs and the Fairfax County Economic Development Authority for sponsoring this event). OODA network members have received an invite. If you are not…
Editor’s note: This post is the third of a three part series based on a paper examining Chinese use of cellular technologies (including the threat to US interests) by Charlie Parton. For the full paper see: Cellular IoT Modules- Supply Chain Security -bg Because so little work has been done on the threat from Chinese cellular IoT…
According to a report on the Cost of Internet Shutdowns, there were 114 major outages across 23 countries in 2022 impacting around 700 million people (although another source puts that figure as high as 4.2 billion), representing a 41% increase from the previous year. Key findings revealed that these shutdowns consisted of approximately 51,000 hours…
“Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War,” is a captivating and informative biography of Colonel John Boyd, a brilliant and innovative military strategist who made a significant impact on modern warfare. A brilliant jet fighter pilot, forward-thinking academic, and a creative military strategist, he was a talented but wildly eccentric individual. Boyd was…
Editor’s note: This post is the second of a three part series based on a paper examining Chinese use of cellular technologies (including the threat to US interests) by Charlie Parton. For the full paper see: Cellular IoT Modules- Supply Chain Security -bg The Chinese government is actively driving the adoption of NB-IoT standards, and companies involved…
Editor’s note: This post is the first of a three part series based on a paper examining Chinese use of cellular technologies (including the threat to US interests) by Charlie Parton. For the full paper see: Cellular IoT Modules- Supply Chain Security -bg Free and open nations have woken up to the threat posed by Chinese involvement…
This is the 3rd installment of our OODA Almanac series which are intended to be a quirky forecasting of themes that the OODA Network think will be emergent each year. The theme for last year was exponential disruption, which was carried through into our annual OODAcon event. This year’s theme is “jagged transitions” which is…
Salesforce unveiled Agentforce on Thursday, a suite of AI-powered autonomous agents designed to augment human workers across various business functions. The company positions this as the “third wave” of AI, moving beyond predictive models and generative AI to what it calls “agentic systems.” Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO of Salesforce, emphasized the transformative potential of…
OpenAI released two major new preview models today: o1-preview and o1-mini (that mini one is also a preview, despite the name)—previously rumored as having the codename “strawberry”. There’s a lot to understand about these models—they’re not as simple as the next step up from GPT-4o, instead introducing some major trade-offs in terms of cost and…
Much has changed in the 16 months since I last set foot in Figure’s Sunnyvale headquarters. For one thing, there’s signage on the outside of what was an otherwise non-descript Silicon Valley office building in an equally non-descript Silicon Valley office park. For another, there’s no longer an empty desk in sight. The robotics company currently…
OpenAI will launch an AI product it claims is capable of reasoning, allowing it to solve hard problems in maths, coding and science in a critical step towards achieving humanlike cognition in machines. The AI models, known as o1, are touted as a sign of the progression of technological capabilities over the past few years…
The First Matabele War, fought between 1893 and 1894, foretold the future. In its opening battle, roughly 700 soldiers, paramilitaries and African auxiliaries aligned with the British South Africa Company used five Maxim guns — the world’s first fully automatic weapon — to help repel over 5,000 Ndebele warriors, some 1,500 of whom were killed at…
The US has announced it will support expanding the UN Security Council. The US ambassador to the UN has announced that the US will support expanding the Security Council. The proposal calls for adding two permanent seats from African nations along with a rotating seat for small island developing nations. This proposal comes after several…
Senegal’s president has dissolved the parliament and called for a snap election. Senegal’s president has dissolved the parliament and called for a snap election. This comes after weeks of tensions between his administration and the parliament. The parliament was controlled by the opposition and there had been a tense atmosphere following the election in March.…
Mexico’s judicial reform has been ratified. Mexico’s judicial reform has been passed by the Congress and the required number of state legislatures. President López Obrador said he would officially publish the changes this weekend. The reforms will make the judicial branch elected which critics have said could lead to more corruption. Supporters have said that…
North Korea has revealed a uranium enrichment facility amid plans to grow its nuclear arsenal. North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un unveiled a uranium enrichment facility to the world. This public show of force comes amid plans from the regime to invest in its nuclear arsenal. South Korea condemned the move saying that it violates…
UK Police have arrested a teenager in connection with the Transport for London cyberattack. UK police announced they have made an arrest in connection with the Transport for London cyberattack. They announced that the suspect was 17 years old. Transport for London has also announced that the personal data of customers was compromised by the…
Business email scams have cost up to 55 billion dollars according to FBI. According to a new port business email scams have cost companies over 55 billion dollars. Business emails scams are often large scale and complicated attacks against corporations. The report outlines that cyber crime continues to be a persistent threat and that it…
Iranian hackers have been targeting Iraqi cyber infrastructure. A new report outlines how Iranian hackers have been targeting Iraqi cyber infrastructure. The cyber attacks have focused on governmental assets. The attacks have employed several different types of malware that focus on taking over command and control functions. They have also employed social engineering attacks to…
Customers of central Asian banks have been targeted by a new Android malware. Researchers have said the new malware has been spread through telegram channels.
Infineon Technologies AG announced a breakthrough in the production of compound semiconductors that it said will help bring down manufacturing costs and speed their adoption for artificial intelligence applications. The German chipmaker said Wednesday it has successfully developed 300 millimeter (12 inch) gallium nitride wafers, which can produce 2.3 times more chips than 200 millimeter…
Meta is winning the open source AI story by using the term to push a large language model (LLM) that is not open source. But really, the Meta camp can call open source whatever it wants. AI creates a paradox for the open source community. On one side are the open pragmatists and on the…
Building AI-powered robots that can flexibly operate in the real world is going to take much longer than Silicon Valley believes and promises, according to the former head of Google’s robotics moonshot project, writing in Wired. Today’s generative AI revolution rests on the assumption that a multitude of long-awaited technologies — including humanoid robots, self-driving…
The most transformative promise of AI has always been its potential for autonomy, to create systems that can act intelligently on their own without human supervision. However, this kind of “Agentic AI” has remained out of reach for most enterprise use cases, until now. Across industries, two related trends will change our perception of what is…
What a difference a few days make. OpenAI is now in talks to raise about $6.5 billion at a valuation of around $150 billion, The Times reports. Those numbers vastly exceed what ChatGPT’s parent company had been seeking not too long ago. If the round comes together — talks remain fluid, and there’s no guarantee they…
Earlier this week, the U.S. accused Iran of supplying short-range missiles to Russia to be used against Ukraine. This led a trio of European states to impose new sanctions against Iran. Now, Iran is condemning these allegations and pledging to respond to the new sanctions. Iran is denying their supply of weapons to Russia and…
This morning, North Korea fired multiple short-range ballistic missiles off its east coast. This is the country’s first public weapon firing in around two months. South Korea and Japan both detected the launch. The firings come just days after Kim Jong Un pledged to “put his nuclear force fully ready for battle with its rivals.”…
In defiance of sanctions, North Korea is continuing to supply advanced short-range ballistic missiles to Russia. These sanctions were imposed to prevent North Korea from creating these weapons and to stop Russia from importing them. However, the two countries continue to defy the restrictions. Investigators looked at four of the missiles in Kyiv and found…
Mexico’s Senate has passed a judicial overhaul supported by President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. The Senate debate was briefly suspended when protestors broke into the building in an attempt to block the vote. The controversial reform was approved with 86 votes in favor of the proposition and 41 against. Mexico will now be the world’s…
An Iran state-sponsored actor called OilRig is targeting the Iraqi government in a sophisticated cyber attack campaign. The attacks have focused on different government networks such as the Prime Minister’s Office and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The campaign is using the Veaty and Spearal malware families. The attackers first work to compromise email accounts…
A new attack called “WordDrone” is using a bug from an older version of Microsoft Word to install backdoors. The attack is being used to deliver malware to Taiwanese drone makers with the goal of cyber espionage. The WordDrone attacks also hope to disrupt supply chains related to the military and the satellite industry. In…
A new attack method called “PixHell” has the ability to potentially undermine air gaps at sensitive organizations. In the attack, sound waves are generated by pixels on a screen. The sound waves can then transmit information across air gaps which were thought to be impenetrable. An air gap is a complete physical separation between networks.…
The Singapore Police Force (SPF) has arrested five Chinese nationals and one Singaporean national for involvement in malicious cyber activities. These arrests come after a series of raids conducted earlier this week at several locations. The men arrested this week are believed to be involved in a “global syndicate” conducting malicious cyber activities. One of…
Matt Shumer, co-founder and CEO of OthersideAI, also known as its signature AI assistant writing product HyperWrite, has broken his near two days of silence after being accused of fraud when third-party researchers were unable to replicate the supposed top performance of a new large language model (LLM) he released on Thursday, September 5. On his…
French AI startup Mistral has released its first model that can process images as well as text. Called Pixtral 12B, the 12-billion-parameter model is roughly 24GB in size. Parameters roughly correspond to a model’s problem-solving skills, and models with more parameters generally perform better than those with fewer parameters. Built on one of Mistral’s text models, Nemo…
Elevated in prominence over the past few years, CIOs are now an integral part of the C-suite, with salaries and compensation packages now commensurate with that stature. “As key officers of their companies, technology leaders have entered a more lucrative compensation bracket,” notes Martha Heller, CEO of Heller Search Associates. Since 2023, compensation for CIOs…
Humanoid robots are heading for the home. OpenAI-backed robotics company 1X just dropped a short and sweet teaser video for their new humanoid robot, Neo Beta. In the video, the robot hands a person a bag and poses with them for a picture. While this is the first video 1X has shared of Neo, a…
Google Cloud’s CEO says his company has several paths to monetizing artificial intelligence (AI). “We have seen 10-times growth year over year of people using our clusters,” Thomas Kurian said Tuesday (Sept. 10) at a Goldman Sachs tech conference. “Sixty percent of all AI startups use our clusters for training and inference,” added the executive, whose comments…
Ali Mohamed Kibao, a Tanzanian opposition official, was abducted and killed over the weekend. This has added to Tanzanian fears of a pre-election crackdown, and led some to question the democratic credentials of the current president. Kibao went missing after being abducted by armed men. His body was found a day later, and an autopsy…
Yesterday, Israeli airstrikes targeting Hamas militants in a Gaza humanitarian zone killed at least 19 and wounded 60. The death toll will likely rise, as some people have been reported missing after the strike. The bombing appeared to use 2,000-pound bombs. Israel has received criticism for using these weapons in heavily populated areas. The strikes…
Yesterday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken accused Iran of sending missiles to Russia for use in Ukraine. The Biden administration believes that Iran sent short-range ballistic missiles to Russia and is now imposing more sanctions against Iran. Blinken said that Russia will likely use the missiles in Ukraine within weeks. This supply could greatly…
Last week, Turkey and Palestinian officials said that Israeli soldiers shot an American-Turkish activist. Israel is now stating that it is highly likely its soldiers killed the activist. The victim is 26-year-old Aysenur Ezgi Eygi. She was taking part in a protest in the occupied West Bank last week. The protest was a demonstration against…
CosmicBeetle, a known threat actor, is using a new ransomware strain called “ScRansom.” The hacking group customized the ransomware strain and is using it in Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America to target small and medium-sized businesses. CosmicBeetle likely works as an affiliate for RansomHub. ScRansom is being used to attack businesses across a variety…
Wisconsin Physicians Service Insurance Corporation (WPS) suffered a data breach last year, and now 950,000 individuals are being impacted. The MOVEit hack was used to breach WPS. This hack involves the exploit of a zero-day in the MOVEit Transfer managed file transfer (MFT) software, allowing access to customer data. A Russian-speaking ransomware group, CIOp, carried…
A cluster of Chinese threat groups known as “Crimson Palace” is carrying out attacks on Asian governments and their secrets. The threat clusters are based out of the People’s Republic of China and have compromised at least a dozen targets. One of these targets was a Southeast Asian government organization. Operation Crimson Palace has been…
Humans not artificial intelligence should make the key decisions on using nuclear weapons, a global summit on AI in the military domain agreed Tuesday, in a non-binding declaration. Officials at the Responsible AI in the Military Domain (REAIM) summit in Seoul, which involved nearly 100 countries including the United States, China and Ukraine, adopted the…
Apple today announced that Apple Intelligence will begin in beta starting in October, with iOS 18.1. The first features of the Apple Intelligence suite will be exclusive to US English language users. Apple will roll out Apple Intelligence to more languages over time. In December, the company will add support for English dialects in Australia,…
It was early January 2016, and I had just joined Google X, Alphabet’s secret innovation lab. My job: help figure out what to do with the employees and technology left over from nine robot companies that Google had acquired. People were confused. Andy “the father of Android” Rubin, who had previously been in charge, had…
It took just one weekend for the new, self-proclaimed king of open source AI models to have its crown tarnished. Reflection 70B, a variant of Meta’s Llama 3.1 open source large language model (LLM) — or wait, was it a variant of the older Llama 3? — that had been trained and released by small…
The US Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) plans to introduce mandatory reporting requirements for developers of advanced AI models and cloud computing providers. The proposed rules would require companies to report on development activities, cybersecurity measures, and results from red-teaming tests, which assess risks such as AI systems aiding cyberattacks or…
Avis Car Rentals was the victim of a data breach. Avis Car Rentals has notified authorities that its systems were breached by malicious actors in early August. The breach has exposed up to three hundred thousand customers’ data. The company has advised customers to contact credit reporting agencies if they experience any unauthorized activity. Read…
Canadian firm Slim CD was the vicitm of a large scale data breach. The Canada based payment processing firm Slim CD had its system breached over the summer. The breach exposed the personal information of nearly 1.7 million users. There is currently no evidence that the stolen data has been used to commit any fraud.…
Poland has dismantled a Russian and Belarusian linked sabotage group. Polish authorities announced that they have dismantled a Russian and Belarusian linked sabotage group. Polish authorities accused the group of carrying out attacks on public and private institutions across Poland. They said the aim of the attacks was collecting sensitive data. Polish authorities said this…
A Chinese APT has been found to use Visual Studio Code as an espionage tool. Researcher have found that the Chinese APT, Mustang Panda, has been using Visual Studio Code (VSC) as a tool to spy on Southeast Asian governments. The group used VSC’s reverse shell feature to gain access to targeted networks and deploy…
The Justice Department’s second monopoly case against Google got underway Monday in a Virginia court, with federal prosecutors taking aim this time at the internet giant’s lucrative business as the middleman for online ads. The case could be a boon for major news organizations, including Gannett, News Corp. and the Guardian, as well as The…
For over two decades, Google has dominated the online search market, establishing a $175 billion business that has become integral to the internet. Controlling roughly 90% of the global search market, Google’s position now faces unprecedented challenges due to the rise of generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) and chatbots, such as OpenAI’s SearchGPT prototype. This technological…
Robots perceive the world around them very differently from the way humans do. When we walk down the street, we know what we need to pay attention to—passing cars, potential dangers, obstacles in our way—and what we don’t, like pedestrians walking in the distance. Robots, on the other hand, treat all the information they receive…
Anthropic was started in 2021 by former OpenAI executives and researchers who set out to build a more safety-minded AI company — a real theme among ex-OpenAI employees lately. Anthropic’s main product right now is Claude, the name of both its industry-leading AI model and a chatbot that competes with ChatGPT. Anthropic has billions in…
Shortly before Steve Jobs’s death in 2011, Apple filled a cramped auditorium in Cupertino, Calif., for the unveiling of its fifth iPhone. The device’s biggest selling point was a new software feature called Siri, which helped cause a jump in iPhone sales. On Monday, Apple is planning to run that play again. For the first…
An estimated 750,000 Israelis have taken to the streets in one of Israel’s biggest-ever protests as they demanded that the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu strike a deal to free remaining captives in Gaza. Organizers say 500,000 people attended rallies in Tel Aviv, and 250,000 others joined rallies in towns elsewhere in the country.…
The Houthis have claimed to have shot down a United States military drone over Yemen. Yahya Saree, the military spokesman of the Houthi group, said that the MQ-9 Reaper was shot down by air defenses over Marib as “it was carrying out hostile activities”. This is the eighth drone of this type to be shot…
Latvia and Romania, NATO members who are allies of Ukraine, have said that Russian drones violated their airspace. Romania said a Russian drone entered its airspace during nighttime attacks across the Danube River, while Latvia said one crashed in the eastern part of the country a day earlier. Romania’s Ministry of National Defence said that…
The Russian offensive toward the Ukrainian town of Pokrovsk, which has become a focal point of the war in recent months, has stalled along one key section of the front for more than a week. But Russia continued to advance elsewhere, and pressed on Saturday with long-range bombardment of more distant cities.In a risky, surprise…
Germany’s domestic intelligence agency (BfV) has warned that Russia’s GRU military intelligence service has been carrying out cyberattacks against NATO and European Union countries. The BfV said in a statement they are engaged in malicious activities targeting critical infrastructure globally, including in the United States. The statement, titled a Joint Cybersecurity Advisory, was issued by…
A vulnerability in the popular LiteSpeed Cache plugin for WordPress could allow attackers to retrieve user cookies and potentially take over websites. The debug log file is publicly accessible, which means an unauthenticated attacker could access the information exposed in the file and extract any user cookies stored in it. This would allow attackers to…
The Predator spyware has resurfaced with fresh infrastructure after a drop in activity caused by US sanctions against Intellexa Consortium, Recorded Future reports. The malware, primarily used by government actors, allows operators to infiltrate devices and access or exfiltrate sensitive data, and even to activate the infected device’s cameras and microphones, without the user’s knowledge.…
OpenAI’s paid business offerings reached a milestone, reaching one million paying business users across ChatGPT Enterprise, Team and Edu offerings. The one million user mark significantly increased from the 600,000 the company posted in April this year. In January, OpenAI chief operating officer Brad Lightcap revealed ChatGPT Enterprise, the first of the business-focused subscription products…
Informing your decisions with actionable intelligence
Copyright © 2025 — All Rights Reserved.
Notifications
Informing your decisions with actionable intelligence