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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…
On multiple occasions, OODA Network member Florian Wolf has presented to the OODA Network membership on the topic of small data. An evangelist and subject matter expert on the topic, Wolf is the CEO of Mergeflow, a company he founded in 2007, where he is responsible for company strategy and product design. Wolf has a…
According to a recent open-source report from Strider Technologies, “The People’s Republic of China (PRC) is employing a Talent Superpower Strategy designed to incentivize academics, researchers, and scientists to go abroad, deepen their expertise, and return to China to advance its strategic interests. What began in the 1980s as a program to send young talent…
Space debris has been a topic of conversation since a 2021 OODA Network member monthly conversation, when Leo Labs, a global, ground-based radar to track space junk business model was discussed in the context of the Russian anti-satellite [ASAT] test which broke up their Cosmos 1408 satellite, resulting in an in orbit, debris-generating event that put…
There is little doubt that cyber attacks are used by both state and nonstate actors a medium to support their geopolitical views and positions during times of regional and global crisis. The Ukraine conflict has underscored what has been going on for several years – actors resorting to offensive cyber operations to register their displeasure…
This case study is a lot more “experimental/operational” than previous posts in our ongoing Speculative Design series – with the full resources of the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command (SMDC) “in the midst of evaluating the results of experimental satellite tech designed to directly warn soldiers on the ground when GPS signals have been…
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine recently completed a study at the request of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence focused on Encryption and the future of encryption given advances in technology. The academies brought together experts for a detailed study aimed at identifying potential scenarios of critical interest.
Nate Fick, who was confirmed last week to lead the State Department’s Bureau of Cyberspace and Digital Policy, was also the co-chair (along with Jami Miscik of Global Strategic Insights) of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) Independent Task Force on Cybersecurity. In May, the CFR Task Force delivered their final report, “Confronting Reality in…
In April, The State Department launched a new cybersecurity bureau, designed to enhance digital diplomacy and online standards around the world. Last week, the Senate confirmed Nate Fick as the first person to lead the new Bureau as the first State Department Ambassador-at-Large for Cyberspace and Digital Policy. Fick is familiar to the OODA Loop…
We continue our research on Digital Self-Sovereignty, Digital Rights, and Digital Identity, which is an area of research concerned with the security of personal data, transactional or otherwise, and the individual’s right to ownership of their personal data. In the last few months, a signal-to-noise ratio has emerged on this topic, where previously there was…
The co-authors of a recent article in Foreign Affairs, America Could Lose the Tech Contest With China, Eric Schmidt and Yll Bajraktari, are Chair and CEO of the Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP), respectively. The SCSP “builds on the work of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI), which ended its congressionally-mandated work in October…
With the technological infrastructure that physicists and astronomers have brought to bear for decades as its foundational metaphor, the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) was launched two years ago to create an equally as powerful social sciences-based “Observatory” for internet researchers. We analyze the SIO’s latest offering, in partnership with Graphika: the August 24th release of…
Future Typhoons. Future Covid-19 Lockdowns. Future Pandemics. Future Climate Crises Impacts. Future Wars. All of it adds up to a clear incentive structure for American businesses to reshore manufacturing and shorten supply chains.
We continue with our survey of crypto and digital currency initiatives from around the globe, all of which are officially sanctioned to enhance national competitive advantage (in the event crypto overtakes the US dollar as the global reserve currency). It is the cumulative adoption rate of state-sanctioned crypto and digital currency legalization and regulation that…
Chinese state-sponsored cyber espionage is nothing notable as Beijing has been long engaged in the most expansive cyber-enabled data theft operation for the past decade. However, its recent activities targeting Russia’s military industries is rather novel and not widespread. What’s more, this is not the first Chinese APT actor that has brazenly targeted its close…
Internet speeds in Pakistan have greatly slowed over the past few days. Many believe that the crash is caused by the Pakistani government testing a new firewall-like system. The system would allow the government to survey and control Pakistan’s internet. Millions of users and businesses are currently affected by the slowdown. The government is denying…
A cyberattack has disrupted the business operations of Microchip Technology. The attack has primarily affected the company’s manufacturing facilities, and it is difficult for the company to fulfill orders. Microchip Technology began to detect suspicious activity on its IT systems on August 17. Two days later the company determined that an unauthorized party had accessed…
A threat actor known as Blind Eagle is targeting organizations and individuals in Latin America. The targeted countries include Colombia, Ecuador, Chile, and Panama. The attacks are spread across different sectors, including “governmental institutions, financial companies, energy and oil and gas companies.” The attacks begin with a phishing email impersonating legitimate institutions and encouraging victims…
Quarkslab, a French security firm, found a major backdoor in RFID cards made by Shanghai Fudan Microelectronics group. The company is one of the top chip manufacturers in China. The backdoor allows for the instant cloning of the contactless smart cards. The cards are used around the world to open office doors and hotel rooms.…
A hacker has breached Toyota and stolen around 240GB of data. While the company has not disclosed any further information about the attack, it stated that it has contacted those affected by the incident. ZeroSevenGroup, the actor supposedly behind the attack, said that they hacked a U.S. branch of Toyota. However, Toyota has said that,…
OpenAI and Anthropic spend billions of dollars a year training models like GPT-4 and Claude, but competitive price dumping is making the business around these platforms rather precarious. Aidan Gomez, CEO of competing AI provider Cohere, says that selling access to models is quickly becoming a “zero margin business” in a podcast appearance on Monday.…
Today, I’m talking with Thomas Dohmke, the CEO of GitHub. GitHub is the platform for managing code — everyone from solo open-source hobbyists to the biggest companies in the world relies on GitHub to maintain their code and manage changes. But it’s been owned by Microsoft since 2018, which makes this a perfect Decoder episode…
ElevenLabs, a startup developing AI-powered tools to create and edit synthetic voices, is making its Reader app available across the world with support for 32 languages. The app, first released in June in the U.S., the U.K. and Canada, lets users upload any text content — like articles, PDF documents or e-books — and listen to…
In case you hadn’t noticed, humanoid robots have joined the workforce. An evergreen staple of science fiction, autonomous AI-driven machines with feet, legs that bend at the knee, torsos, arms with hands and fingers, all topped with a head are now being deployed in real workplaces. Specifically: Amazon is piloting the use of Agility Robotics’ humanoid robot,…
Agents come in many forms, many of which respond to prompts humans issue through text or speech. Yet as organizations figure out how generative AI fits into their plans, IT leaders would do well to pay close attention to one emerging category: multiagent systems. In such systems, multiple agents execute tasks intended to achieve an…
Protestors and Haitian police clash in Port-au-Prince. Residents of neighborhoods that have been under attack by gangs for months began protesting Monday in Port-au-Prince. Haitian police set up barricades and deployed tear gas against the protestors. The protestors have said that the government’s response to rising gang violence has been ineffective and that the international…
Ukraine has begun large scale evacuations of Pokrovsk as Russian forces advance on the city. Ukraine has begun large scale evacuation efforts in Pokrovsk as Russian forces continue their advance on the city. Pokrovsk is a key defensive and logistic center for Ukrainian forces, and its capture would significantly hamper efforts to hold the Donetsk…
The United States has announced that Israel has agreed to a cease-fire proposal. The United States has announced that Israel has agreed to the terms of a cease-fire proposal. The details of the proposal are not known at this time, but the announcement said that it addressed several concerns of both parties. The announcement made…
A team of researchers have uncovered a massive network of Russian linked malicious domains. A team of researchers have uncovered a network of cites used by the FIN7 cyber gang. The organization acquired thousands of domains through Russian and Estonian domain resellers as part of a large scale phishing operation. FIN7 has previously been the…
Researchers have found that Chile’s largest pension fund exposed the personal data of millions of Chileans. A team of researchers identified that a database owned by Chile’s largest pension fund was not properly secured and left millions of Chilean’s personal data exposed. An unprotected cloud server and poor authentication protocols allowed the researchers to gain…
US officials say that Iran launched cyber attack against both the Trump and Harris campaigns. US officials announced that Iran was responsible for cyber attacks against the Trump and Harris campaigns. They also announced that Iran was conducting broader operations to influence the outcome of the election and sow discord. Iran denied these allegations. Read…
Doctors in India are protesting after female doctor was killed at her place of work. Following the killing of a female doctor at her place of work, doctors across India have started protesting the government’s failure to protect women. They have demanded that the government take steps to protect women’s rights and safety. The government…
An IRGC linked group has been found to be using a modular Trojan horse malware. APT 42, an Iranian linked IRGC group, has been found to be using a modular Trojan horse malware. This was discovered after the group deployed the malware as part of phishing attacks against Israeli citizens. This represents an interesting development…
A search engine is a vast mechanical Turk – a reinforcement learning engine that uses human activity to understand the web. PageRank used signal from links created by people, but once people started using Google at scale, that usage itself created far more signal: which results you clicked on, how you changed your searches to…
In today’s column, I continue my ongoing analysis of the latest advances and breakthroughs in AI, see my extensive posted coverage at the link here, and focus in this discussion on a recent research study that suggests modern-day generative AI and large language models (LLMs) have a semblance of a “shared imagination”. I will do…
Google has released the latest version of Imagen 3, its AI text-to-image generator, to users in the US, as spotted by VentureBeat. The tool, which you can access on Google’s AI Test Kitchen, is supposed to generate images with “better detail, richer lighting, and fewer distracting artifacts” compared to Google’s previous models. Google first announced…
Apple reportedly has “a team of several hundred people” working on a new product that attaches an iPad-style display to a robotic arm that uses actuators to tilt up and down as well as spin 360 degrees, according to a report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. The tabletop device could reportedly serve multiple purposes, letting you…
Sean Ammirati has been teaching a class on entrepreneurship for more than a decade. A professor at Carnegie Mellon University, Mr. Ammirati has groups of mostly graduate students start businesses from scratch over the course of the spring semester. Some of the start-ups that his 49 students created this year were classic examples of the…
On Friday, United Nations Secretary General António Guterres called for a weeklong cease-fire in Gaza to permit polio vaccinations. Shortly afterwards, the first case of polio in Gaza in many years was announced. Polio is highly contagious, primarily affecting young children, and can lead to death. The virus behind the disease was found in wastewater…
A suicide bomber attack killed 16 soldiers in southern Yemen, wounding 18 others. The attack occurred at a military post in the province of Abyan, and Yemeni pro-government soldiers were killed. The suicide bomber “drove a booby-trapped car into a site for the security forces.” Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) has claimed responsibility for…
Ukraine has destroyed a key Russian bridge, greatly setting back Russian supply lines. It appears that Ukraine additionally tried to target at least one more bridge in the western Kursk region as it attempts to consolidate its territorial advances. Analysts say that the destruction of the critical bridge could make it difficult for Russia to…
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in Israel yesterday as part of Washington’s ceasefire efforts. The U.S., Qatar, and Egypt are currently attempting to secure a ceasefire and captive swap deal between Israel and Hamas. The mediators believe the proposal they put forward may finally close the gap between the two groups. Negotiations are…
Oregon Zoo’s ticketing service was hacked earlier this year, impacting around 118,000 individuals. A web skimmer was likely used in the attack which occurred from December 20, 2023 to June 26, 2024. During the incident, customer names and payment card information were accessed by the attackers. Oregon Zoo stated that malicious actors were able to…
Microsoft recently patched a security flaw in Microsoft Windows which was exploited by Lazarus Group. Lazarus Group is a state-sponsored actor with ties to North Korea. The security flaw, CVE-2024-38193, was a privilege escalation vulnerability allowing an attacker to gain SYSTEM privileges. Lazarus Group was able to exploit the zero-day and gain unauthorized access to…
Researchers at Palo Alto Networks have discovered an actor extorting around 110,000 domains. The bad actor has been able to compromise the organizations’ cloud environments through exposed .env files. The .env files are typically stored on unsecure applications and servers. Additionally, they contain sensitive information including hard-coded access keys, SaaS API keys, and database login…
On Friday, OpenAI announced that it has banned a group of accounts linked to an Iranian influence campaign. The operation was aiming to sway the upcoming election through the use of ChatGPT-generated content. It used ChatGPT to create commentary on the election which was then published on social media and websites. OpenAI did not find…
Lambda, an AI infrastructure company forged out of the ashes of a third-party Google Glass facial recognition app has teamed up with Nous Research, a newish startup dedicated to creating “personalized, unrestricted AI,” to launch Hermes 3, a new fine-tuned version of Meta’s open source Llama 3.1-405 billion parameter large language model (LLM). Hermes 3,…
OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google Gemini have been duking it out for your chatbot prompts for months, but the competition is really starting to heat up. While Claude took the top spot on AI benchmarking tool LMSys Chatbot Arena earlier this year, Gemini had been reigning supreme. Now, though, a new version of ChatGPT-4o (20240808) has…
There has been no end to talk of embracing artificial intelligence — or any other new technology for that matter — before one’s competitors take hold of it. The consequences, it is always said, are dire, with slow-adopting companies becoming dinosaurs ready to suffer the effects of an asteroid hit. But business leaders are apparently…
Many of our first interactions with robots have watching a robot vacuum cleaner negotiate its way around our couch and make perilous journeys across our rugs. With recent advancements in AI, we may be getting closer to the moment that brings larger and more advanced humanoid robots into our homes at scale. Long popularized in…
No doubt artificial intelligence will be a paradigm shift for society. But the extent to which AI will replace human workers in the future remains up for debate. To get a better idea how AI will change the labor market for technology professionals, the recently formed AI-Enabled ICT Workforce Consortium has published its inaugural report,…
The first case of an mpox variant has been registered outside of Africa. On Wednesday, the World Health Organization declared mpox a global public health emergency. Sweden has confirmed its first case of mpox clade I, a more dangerous variant of mpox. The variant spreads through close contact. After an outbreak of the mpox variant…
The effects of Typhoon Ampil will reach Eastern Japan today. The storm has already flooded some streets in the Tokyo area and is forcing evacuations. The typhoon is additionally disrupting businesses and travel across Japan. Japanese authorities are warning that the storm may cause extreme winds, waves, and even landslides. The heaviest rain and most…
Last week, a junior doctor was found dead at the Kolkata hospital where she worked. Her body showed evidence of rape and extreme physical brutality. Protests and walkouts have broken out across India in uprising against misogyny and violence against women in the country. Thousands of doctors have walked out of major public hospitals demanding…
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine stated on Thursday that Ukraine has captured the Russian town of Sudzha. This would be Ukraine’s first capture of a Russian city in the last 10 days. Military experts say that Ukrainian soldiers have captured most, if not all, of Sudzha. Recent videos and broadcasts show Ukrainian troops and flags…
AutoCanada disclosed a cyberattack this week that disrupted some internal IT systems. AutoCanada is a major Canadian car dealership and was also recently impacted by the CDK Global ransomware attack. The CDK Global ransomware attack forced many car companies to switch to pen and paper in June, impacting earnings. AutoCanada discovered the incident on August…
Recently, Russian-linked hackers have been targeting various Eastern European non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the media. Two spear-phishing campaigns are being conducted by the attackers, primarily focused on Russian and Belarusian organizations. One of the campaigns is called “River of Phish” and has been attributed to COLDRIVER. COLDRIVER is affiliated with Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB).…
Georgy Kavzharadze, a Russian national, was sentenced to three years and four months in prison in the U.S. for various cybercrimes. Kavzharadze sold stolen data on an online cybercriminal marketplace, Slilpp, including financial, login, and personal information. Over almost five years, he listed around 626,000 stolen login credentials on thr online marketplace. He sold over…
Iran has been accused of attempting to access the personal email accounts of individuals involved with both ongoing U.S. presidential campaigns. Google was able to disrupt the hacking campaign, which was conducted by APT42, an Iranian nation-state group. The attacks occurred in May and June. The targets included various individuals associated with the U.S. government…
Hamas will not attend ceasefire talks in Doha, but has said they will participate in talks at a later date. Hamas has said they will not attend talks that are scheduled to take place in Doha. The group has said they want stronger commitments from the parties involved before attending further talks. US and Israeli…
The WHO has declared a global health emergency due to the spread of a new variant of the mpox virus. The WHO has declared a global health emergency due to the spread of a new and deadly form of mpox. This new variant has been found in 13 countries and is affecting large numbers of…
The Prime Minister of Japan has announced that he will not be seeking another term of office. The Prime Minister of Japan has announced that he will not be seeking another term of office, and called for new leaders to seek to the lead the country and the ruling party. The ruling Liberal Democratic Party…
Critics and opponents of Putin have been targeted by a phishing campaign. A new report has shown that a large scale phishing operations has been organized which targets Russian opponents of Putin. The phishing operation has been linked to groups that are known to be assets of Russian police and intelligence agencies. The phishing emails…
The Central Bank of Iran and other large banks have been crippled by a cyber attack. Reports indicate that a large scale cyber attack has disrupted the operations of the Central Bank of Iran and other large banks. Current estimates are that this attack represents one of the largest cyber attacks on Iranian infrastructure. As…
A China backed cyber group has expanded its operations to Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. The China backed group, Earth Baku, has expanded its operations into Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. As part of this expansion the group has also changed its tactics to include using public facing applications as entry points. The…
Thai coalition announces that Pheu Thai will be nominated as the nation’s Prime Minister. Following a series of court rulings that have reshaped the political landscape of the country, a coalition of parties have nominated Pheu Thai to the be the next Prime Minister. Thai has said that the country needs to move on from…
A new threat actor has targeted Azerbaijan and Israel Diplomats. A new threat actor has engaged in cyber attacks against Azerbaijani and Israeli diplomats. The group behind the attacks is currently unknown; however, it is suspected that the attacks began in July. The attacks begin with phishing emails, and escalate to installing malware packages that…
At a recent bank board meeting, directors were treated to a surprise. They listened to the chief executive talk strategy—except it wasn’t actually the CEO talking. It turned out to be a voice-cloning model that was trained, using the CEO’s prior earnings calls, to generate new content. More boards are undertaking such staged exercises to…
As research and adoption of artificial intelligence continue to advance at an accelerating pace, so do the risks associated with using AI. To help organizations navigate this complex landscape, researchers from MIT and other institutions have released the AI Risk Repository, a comprehensive database of hundreds of documented risks posed by AI systems. The repository…
The IDC CIO Sentiment Survey has consistently shown automation climbing the priority list since 2020. Indeed, according to the 2023 survey (September 2023), 71.1% of respondents said they were accelerating or continuing to invest in automation to replace part of the workforce, and 73.7% said it was to improve processes in the context of difficult…
A group of visual artists and illustrators is celebrating a federal judge’s decision this week to allow key parts of their class-action lawsuit against the makers of popular AI image generators to move forward. The artists allege that tech start-ups including Midjourney and Stability AI violated various laws by training their AI image tools on…
The Made By Google launch event saw the official unveiling of the Pixel 9 series and Pixel 9 Pro Fold, but it was the tech giant’s slew of new AI features that stole Tuesday’s show, firmly intensifying the smartphone AI arms race against Apple. Setting a new benchmark for what consumers can expect from their…
Today, new peace talks aimed at stopping the Sudanese civil war will commence in Switzerland. The talks are backed by the U.S., but Sudan’s military has refused to attend the negotiations. Famine was officially declared in the Darfur region of Sudan earlier this month, sparking urgency to bring peace to the country. The Rapid Support…
Today, Thailand’s Constitutional Court announced their decision to remove Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin from office. The court cites Srettha’s ethical shortcomings as the reason behind the ruling, as he appointed a minister with a criminal conviction which goes against official moral and ethical standards. Srettha is now the fourth Thai prime minister in the last…
On Sunday, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian announced that his cabinet would be composed of several conservatives and only one woman. This announcement sparked backlash, and Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s vice president for strategy, subsequently resigned. Pezeshkian’s allies have accused him of abandoning his campaign promises to bring change to Iran. Zarif’s resignation comes as a…
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