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The crypto marketplace continues to fly through some serious turbulence. OODA CEO Matt Devost recently noted, in response to the recent charges by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in a ‘massive’ crypto Ponzi scheme: “It is all about creative destruction. It is good to wash the fraud and opportunists out of the system. The…
It may simply be a question of timing, media attention, and the direct involvement of the #2 person in the line of POTUS succession, but the arrival today of a House Speaker Pelosi-led U.S. delegation in Taiwan is stirring global controversy and geopolitical tensions.. Perception and the media cycle do matter in our current information…
A recent report revealed several private sector Indian companies that have been involved in using corporate cyber espionage tactics against entities involved in litigation in an effort to influence their outcomes. What started off as a hacker-for-hire situation, quickly bloomed into an organized commercial endeavor for the hacker, who recruited and grew a small group…
A core value proposition and business model design principle necessary for exponential speed and scale is a sophisticated ecosystem of open-source, value-add platforms and strategic public and private sector partnerships. Such a “Quantum Computing Ecosystem” is emerging but the interoperability required for effective innovation at speed and scale between organizations and platforms within this emergent…
In February, we provided further analysis of the impact of Covid-19 and resilient supply chains – with a focus on the Ports of Los Angeles/Long Beach and their role in the strategic impact of global intermodal supply chain gridlock on IT supply chains. As a follow-up to this analysis, this recent item from the OODA…
On Wednesday, 7/28/22 In a 64-33 vote, the Senate passed the $280 billion Chips and Science Act of 2022. UPDATE Per Reuters – Thursday, 7/28/22 @ 4:15 PM: “The U.S. House of Representatives passed sweeping legislation on Thursday to subsidize the domestic semiconductor industry as it competes with Chinese and other foreign manufacturers, sending the…
China is large, complex, ambiguous, dangerous and of critical importance to business decision-making. This OODA special report investigates the capabilities and intent of the People’s Republic of China, with a special focus on factors relevant to business decision-makers. Our objective: To provide insights that are actionable for business leaders seeking to mitigate risks through informed decisions.…
This post is a really interesting convergence of a few OODA Loop research vectors: crypto miners, drought/heat wave conditions, energy policy, risk awareness, and decision-making. To start, the reason Texas ends up in the national headlines (and is tracked as a bellwether during this now consecutive, seemingly now annual record-breaking mid-summer heat waves) is that…
Recently, the U.S. Senate put forth a bill that would require annual briefings on the relationship between CYBERCOM and the NSA, with concerns being expressed how a dual-hatted leadership impacts either organization. These annual reports would presumably cover important areas such as the division and sharing of resources, how operational risk is being managed, assessments…
National Defense Magazine contextualizes the “Valley of Death” in the following manner: “The defense technology community spends a lot of time grumbling about the “Valley of Death,” a term referring to the place where innovative technologies funded by the Defense Department fail to make it into warfighters’ hands because they can’t make the transition from…
To help members optimize opportunities and reduce risk, OODA hosts a monthly video call 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…
The Nuclear-Powered Sky Hotel is the intersection of Speculative Design, “a design practice that is concerned with future design proposals of a critical nature” and the conclusion amongst foresight strategists and subject matter experts in many scientific disciplines and public policy arenas that nuclear power is central to an “all-of-the-above” portfolio for the future of…
At 10:24 p.m. last night, Natalie Andrews from the WSJ filed this update on the unexpected vote yesterday on the CHIPS Act and the FABS Act: “A bipartisan bill subsidizing domestic semiconductor production cleared its first procedural hurdle on Tuesday in a 64-34 vote, even as the details of the legislation were still being worked out.…
Recently, the United Nations (UN) Security Council stated that there needed to be more done to counter misinformation and disinformation concerning the UN’s 12 global peacekeeping operations, which have received an increase of attacks on social media channels. Approved by all council members, the statement emphasizes that strategic communications needed to be improved in order…
The U.S. Senate has fast-tracked a vote to bring to the Senate floor deliberation and final approval of the $62B in subsidies for the already Senate-approved bill known as the CHIPS Act. The separate vote today on the CHIPS act appropriations will also include a vote on the Fabs Act.
A threat actor known as Stargazer Goblin has built a network of over 3,000 GitHub accounts for phishing purposes. The hacker has been creating the network since August 2022 where they began using it in a distribution-as-a-service (DaaS) operation. The 3,000 accounts form what is known as the Stargazers Ghost Network. On this network the…
BlackMeta’s 6 day distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on a United Arab Emirates bank set multiple records. The length of the attack and the sustained volume of requests over multiple waves ended after over 100 hours with an average of 4.5 million requests per second. BlackMeta is a pro-Palestinian hacktivist group with an anti-Western stance. The…
The AI race is picking up pace like never before. Following Meta’s move just yesterday to launch its new open source Llama 3.1 as a highly competitive alternative to leading closed-source “frontier” models, French AI startup Mistral has also thrown its hat in the ring. The startup announced the next generation of its flagship open…
Microsoft has announced a major update to Bing Search that overhauls the search results page with AI at the heart of its experience. Currently available to a small subset of users, Bing Search now incorporates AI-generated answers in addition to traditional search results directly on the search page. At the very top of the page…
July 19th was a day for help-desk heroes and support superstars. A routine software update by CrowdStrike, a cyber-security company, caused computer outages in offices, hospitals and airports worldwide. Most white-collar workers looked disconsolately at their screens and realised just how useless they are if they cannot log in. People in it came to the…
Google DeepMind, Alphabet Inc.’s artificial intelligence research division, said it has made strides in solving complex math problems, an area that remains challenging for today’s AI programs. On Thursday, Google rolled out AlphaProof, which specializes in math reasoning, and AlphaGeometry 2, an updated version of a model focused on geometry that the company debuted earlier this…
Who will control the future of AI? That is the urgent question of our time. The rapid progress being made on artificial intelligence means that we face a strategic choice about what kind of world we are going to live in: Will it be one in which the United States and allied nations advance a…
The US and Vietnam have discussed a sale of C-130 transport planes which could take place as early as next year. In 2022, Vietnam declared its intention to diversify its stocks of military equipment to reduce dependency on Russian equipment. Talks have focused on the C-130 as the government of Vietnam wishes to avoid antagonize…
The President of Kenya has appointed members of the opposition party to the Cabinet as part of an effort to reduce political unrest. The President of Kenya has asked four members of the opposition to join his Cabinet. This comes as part of a broader plan by the President to address rising political unrest. Weeks…
Russia has banned several Japanese business leaders from entering the country following Japan imposing sanctions. Russia has announced that 13 Japanese individuals, mostly business leaders, have been banned from entering the country. This follows the imposition of sanctions by Japan over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Japan has closely followed the other G-7 countries in responding…
Hackers have leaked documents from a Department of Defense IT services provider. Documents from Leidos, a Department of Defense IT service provider, have been leaked. The leak is reported to be related to a 2022 breach of a Diligent Corp. system and contains information related to internal investigations. The leak is being investigated by Leidos,…
Meta has deleted thousands of scam accounts linked to sextortion. Meta has announced that they have banned over sixty thousand accounts linked to sextortion scams run by the Yahoo Boys organization. The Yahoo Boys are a criminal organization based in Nigeria that are responsible for several other online scams. Accounts linked to the Yahoo Boys…
Researchers have found an exposed library containing information on millions of users of a Z-Library copycat. Researchers have identified an exposed library of data of 10 million users of a Z-Library copy. The library was connected to Z-lib which is a malicious clone of Z-Library. The library contained information such as usernames, passwords, email address,…
Pakistan’s finance minister has begun talks with China to restructure the country’s debt. Pakistan’s finance minister has traveled to Beijing to begin talks on restructing the nation’s debt. Talks have focused on proposals to reprofile 15 billion dollars of debt in the energy sector. These talks come after the International Monetary Fund suggested that Pakistan…
The UK has issued an alert that blood stocks have dropped to dangerous levels following a cyber attack. The Uk’s NHS has issued an alert that blood stocks have dropped to dangerous levels after hundreds of blood donation appointments were cancelled due to a cyber attack in June. The NHS has asked hospitals to restrict…
The use of computer-generated data to train artificial intelligence models risks causing them to produce nonsensical results, according to new research that highlights looming challenges to the emerging technology. Leading AI companies, including OpenAI and Microsoft, have tested the use of “synthetic” data — information created by AI systems to then also train large language models…
Stability AI is expanding its growing roster of generative AI models, quite literally adding a new dimension with the debut of Stable Video 4D. While there is a growing set of gen AI tools for video generation, including OpenAI’s Sora, Runway, Haiper and Luma AI among others, Stable Video 4D is something a bit different.…
Nvidia has fleshed out a complete software stack to ease custom model development and deployment for enterprises. Is this AI Nervana? And can AMD and Intel compete with this? In order for enterprises to adopt AI, its got to become a lot easier and more affordable. Nvidia has (re-) launched AI Foundry to help Enterprises adapt…
In a quiet industrial park in Charlotte, a small company is building drones and robots to revolutionize the American blue-collar workforce. And soon, those robots will be artificially intelligent. Lucid Bots aims to become a leader in embedding AI into physical devices for a real purpose — creating robots that can take on dangerous work…
For years, technologists have debated whether it is better for companies to keep the details of their computer code secret or share it with software developers around the world. That debate — closed versus open source — has become inflamed by the rapid development of artificial intelligence and worries that A.I. is quickly becoming a…
Two major landslides in Ethiopia have killed at least 229 people. After multiple days of heavy rain, the waterlogged hillside above a village collapsed. Several houses were buried in mud. Those who ran to help after the first landslide were hit by a second one which occurred around an hour later. The region is affected…
Germany banned the Islamic Center Hamburg today after accusing the organization of supporting Hezbollah. Germany claimed that the group, also known as I.Z.H., was extremist and acted as a front for Iran’s supreme leader. Germany’s interior minister, Nancy Faeser, stated that the I.Z.H. promotes an Islamist extremist ideology and attempts to spread antisemitism. German authorities…
Hamas and Fatah signed an “interim national reconciliation agreement” in Beijing, China yesterday. The deal is focused on keeping Palestinian control over Gaza once the Israel-Gaza war concludes. The agreement describes how an interim government would be formed at the conclusion of the war. It was signed by 12 Palestinian groups in addition to Hamas…
The United States claims that increased Russia and China cooperation in the Arctic could be a threat to regional stability. In response, the two countries accuse U.S. criticism of being misplaced and confrontational. As global warming lessens ice coverage in the Arctic, more access to shipping and fossil fuels is available. This makes the region…
Yesterday, KnowBe4 revealed that a North Korean operative had been unknowingly hired by the company. KnowBe4 is a Florida security awareness training firm. The North Korean operative was able to use an AI deep fake identity to evade hiring background checks. KnowBe4 then sent the new employee their Mac workstation, and as soon as the…
A Chinese state-sponsored hacking group known as Daggerfly has been targeting organizations in Taiwan. Daggerfly has additionally targeted a U.S. non-governmental organization (NGO) in China. The group takes advantage of vulnerabilities to deliver the MgBot malware. Recent attacks have used a newer version of MgBot called MACMA. Daggerfly has the ability to create different versions…
A vulnerability in Telegram for Android allows threat actors to distribute malicious files disguised as videos. ESET discovered the flaw through an advertisement for the exploit on a cybercrime forum. The zero-day is designed specifically for Telegram on Android. It allows actors to distribute videos which are secretly malicious files. Since Telegram downloads multimedia files…
A new piece of malware has been connected to a January 2024 attack which disrupted water-heating services in Ukraine. The malware is called “FrostyGoop” and is the first ICS malware which can use the Modbus protocol to communicate with technology systems. FrostyGoop was deliberately designed to target industrial control systems. It affected around 600 apartment…
Adobe released new Firefly tools for Photoshop and Illustrator on Tuesday, offering graphic designers more ways to use the company’s in-house AI models. Adobe’s new features let creative workers describe what they want with brief prompts, and receive AI generated textures or images that could otherwise take hours to create. As Adobe doubles down on AI,…
Chief information officers know generative AI isn’t the right tool for every tech problem. But lately some are having to throw a wet blanket on the enthusiasm of chief executives and boards intoxicated by the technology’s promise. “There are situations where we have to temper the perception that we should be doing more and more with…
LiDAR has been a cornerstone of autonomous vehicle and robotics industries. While it’s become an industry standard, the technology has its drawbacks. Chief among them is high cost. As the former CTO and CEO of LiDAR leader Velodyne, Anand Gopalan is aware of the tech’s pluses and minuses. It’s telling, then, that the executive’s latest…
The integration of artificial intelligence has been both a boon and a bane for cybersecurity. While AI systems offer unprecedented capabilities for defense, they also simplify and accelerate things from the attacker’s perspective and present new, sophisticated challenges that require immediate attention. As AI continues to grow more powerful, securing these systems becomes not just…
Facebook parent company Meta Platforms Inc. debuted a new and powerful AI model that Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg called “state of the art” and said will rival similar offerings from competitors like OpenAI and Alphabet Inc.’s Google. The new model released Tuesday, called Llama 3.1, took several months to train and hundreds of millions…
The government of Bangladesh declared a public holiday Monday and kept the internet show down following days of protests. The internet remained shutdown in Bangladesh on Monday following days of protests. Bangladesh has seen days of large and deadly protests over a system of reserving government jobs for the relatives of the Bangladesh War of…
Negotiations over the withdrawal of coalition forces from Iraq have progressed. Coalition and Iraqi negotiators have begun to discuss the withdrawal of coalition forces from Iraq. The tentative timeline for the withdrawal to begin is this fall and for the withdrawal to be completed by the fall of 2025. There are plans to leave a…
Israeli forces reenter Khan Younis area to disrupt Hamas operations. Israeli forces reentered the Khan Younis area with tanks following reports that Hamas was attempting to organize forces in the area. The operation came after new evacuation orders were issued to civilians in the area. The Gaza Health Ministry reported that at least 200 civilians…
Superior Court of Los Angles shutdown by cyber attack. A cyber attack against the Superior Court of Los Angles took place over the weekend. The computer system of the court were shutdown once the attack was detected. A preliminary investigation has found that no data was compromised. Read more: https://www.securityweek.com/california-officials-say-largest-trial-court-in-us-victim-of-ransomware-attack/
Spanish police have arrested members of a pro-Russia hacking group. Spanish police have arrested three members of a pro-Russia hacking group accusing them carrying out cyber attacks against Spain and other NATO members. Following the arrests, the group NoName launched DDoS attacks Spanish critical infrastructure. NoName has been behind other attacks against nations which support…
Groups have been observed abusing Google Cloud systems for credential phishing. Google has reported that the PINEAPPLE and FLUXROOT groups have used Google Cloud systems to facilitate credential stealing operations. FLUXROOT has previously used cloud programs such as Microsoft Azure and Dropbox to facilitate attacks. Google has said that is working to take down suspicious…
Hamas and Fatah agree to form a national unity government. Hamas and Fatah have agreed to form a unity government following negotiations in Beijing. The deal between the two factions focuses on how the West Bank and Gaza will be rebuilt following the war. Israel has condemned the deal and reaffirmed its commitment to destroying…
A new coalition of groups aims to launch cyber attacks against NATO. The largest alliance of hacker groups to date has been formed with the goal of launching attacks against NATO, Ukraine, and Israel. The group was formed through a merger of existing pro-Russia groups. The alliance has said they are acting in response to…
Nearly 4 in 5 of the companies diving headlong into generative AI are seeing a positive return on their investment, according to results of a new ServiceNow study, shared first with Axios. Businesses are under tremendous pressure to demonstrate they aren’t missing out on the AI revolution, but many companies have struggled to go from…
Imagine asking a sophisticated AI model for tips on making the perfect pizza, only to be told to use glue to help the cheese stick. Or watching it fumble through basic arithmetic problems that a middle schooler could solve with ease. These are the limitations and quirks of generative AI and the large language models…
Elon Musk said Tesla will have humanoid robots in production to be used within the company next year. He said Monday morning that Tesla would use the robot for internal use first and then aim to produce it for other companies in 2026. Tesla, an electric-vehicle maker, has been working on the robot for several…
Artificial intelligence startup Cohere Inc. is now one of the world’s most valuable artificial intelligence companies, and one of the largest startups in Canada — but unlike some of its Silicon Valley competitors, it’s not particularly flashy. In a new funding round, Cohere was valued at $5.5 billion, vaulting it to the upper echelons of…
Ukraine’s foreign minister will head to China on Tuesday for two days of talks in a bid to persuade Beijing to reduce its support for Russia and get behind Kyiv’s push for “sustainable” peace. A close political and economic ally of Moscow, Beijing denies that it supports Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. However, China has not…
European leaders have been relying on President Biden to guide them through some of the continent’s darkest days in decades. He pushed European allies to get it together when it came to defense and to commit to spend more on NATO. European leaders are worried Mr. Biden was the last of his kind, an American…
United States President Joe Biden has heeded calls to withdraw his re-election bid. The announcement on Sunday came amid mounting pressure from his fellow Democrats. His initial statement did not include an endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris, but he followed up a few minutes later with an expression of support. The 46th US president’s…
Israeli fighter jets bombed a port in Yemen controlled by the Iran-backed Houthi militia on Saturday in retaliation for the group’s deadly drone attack in Tel Aviv a day earlier which was a rare breach in Israel’s air defenses. It was the first time Israel has publicly struck the group following months of escalating Houthi…
Many organizations across the world suffered major disruptions on Friday after cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike pushed out a faulty update. Individuals and organizations have been warned that threat actors are leveraging the CrowdStrike incident for phishing, scams, and malware delivery. As it typically happens with major global events, threat actors have jumped on the opportunity, leveraging…
Google on Thursday officially introduced the Coalition for Secure AI (CoSAI), a new initiative aimed at tackling the cybersecurity risks associated with artificial intelligence (AI). CoSAI includes founding members such as Amazon, Anthropic, Chainguard, Cisco, Cohere, GenLab, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, NVIDIA, OpenAI, PayPal, and Wiz. CoSAI is posed to support efforts in adopting common security…
Microsoft says roughly 8.5 million Windows devices were impacted by the faulty software update from CrowdStrike. The faulty update triggered massive IT outages across the global economy on Friday. While less than one percent of all Windows machines have been impacted, Microsoft says it is deploying hundreds of its engineers and experts to work directly…
With demand for Apple’s iPhone slowing down, how will Tim Cook and his team lure consumers to its ecosystem? Data from analysts CIRP show that demand for the iPhone —specifically the current iPhone 15 model—is lower than that of the iPhone 14 in this quarter. This echoes the pattern of lower demand seen in Q1…
On Friday morning, some of the biggest airlines, TV broadcasters, banks, and other essential services came to a standstill as a massive outage rippled across the globe. The outage, which has brought the Blue Screen of Death upon legions of Windows machines across the globe, is linked to just one software company: CrowdStrike. CrowdStrike plays…
For years, the people building powerful artificial intelligence systems have used enormous troves of text, images and videos pulled from the internet to train their models. Now, that data is drying up. Over the past year, many of the most important web sources used for training A.I. models have restricted the use of their data,…
Robots are on the rise. The International Federation of Robots reports there were 3.9 million robots in operation in 2022 or about 151 robots per 10,000 workers. In 2023, that number increased by 593,000, and will rise yet again by another 718,000 by 2028, according to Statista. Robots have clearly infiltrated the modern warehouse with…
Groq, an AI hardware startup, has released two open-source language models that outperform tech giants in specialized tool use capabilities. The new Llama-3-Groq-70B-Tool-Use model has claimed the top spot on the Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard (BFCL), surpassing proprietary offerings from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. Rick Lamers, project lead at Groq, announced the breakthrough in an…
A drone attack on Tel Aviv, Israel has killed one person and injured at least 10. Yemen’s Houthi group has claimed responsibility for the attack. The Israeli military is opening an investigation into the attacks. The investigation will seek to determine why Israel’s air defense systems did not activate to intercept the target. Houthi armed…
Following U.S. weapons sales to Taiwan, China has now suspended all nuclear arms talks. China stated that this sale has “compromised the political atmosphere” for negotiations on nuclear non-proliferation. This could potentially disrupt global arms-control efforts. China and the U.S. had begun nuclear weapons discussions back in November 2023 to create trust before a summit…
Ukraine has lost a critical position on the eastern bank of the Dnipro River, located in the south near Kherson. Ukrainian troops had worked hard to win the position. However, after months of fighting Russia was able to reclaim the ground. A majority of the main positions in Krynky, a village where Ukrainian troops had…
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