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There have been two major developments on the “disinformation and influence campaign” front. First, Meta Platforms just announced that they will be removing certain ad targeting options and expanding ad controls. Second, the House this week introduced the Filter Bubble Transparency Act, which “would require large-scale platforms to allow those users to consume information outside…
In late October, The National Counterintelligence and Security Center (NCSC) issued a report warning of China’s goal to achieve a technological advantage over the U.S. in certain key emerging technologies. Beijing’s long-term goal is a strategic advantage over the U.S. and its security interests by 2030 in areas such as biotechnology, genomic technology, artificial intelligence,…
On August 22, 2021, the “new” ransomware group Groove emerged on a nascent but fairly exclusive Russian-language DarkNet cybercrime forum. Groove was around for two years focusing their activities on financially motivated industrial espionage. However, what garnered substantial attention was Groove’s call to arms – calling on other extortion groups to attack U.S. interests after…
On 27 Oct 2021 OODA Network members participated in a network only salon focused on an examination of global geopolitical risks and mitigation strategies. This session provided members with an update that flowed from the OODA C-Suite Report and provided an opportunity for all present to provide inputs on areas of interest that OODA analysts…
Are we living in a super-VUCA world (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous). To help members optimize opportunities and reduce risk in this VUCA world, 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…
Microsoft officials have warned that Russia’s intelligence apparatus has been engaged in another campaign to gain unauthorized access into thousands of U.S. government, corporate, and think tank networks. The ongoing cyber-espionage campaign appears to be focused on acquiring data that is stored in the cloud. The activity further underscores Russia’s intent to target and compromise…
Innovation in “semiconductor computational capability, resources and size, weight, and power consumption (SWaP)” is the centerpiece of the five-year, $1.5 billion DARPA Electronics Resurgence Initiative and the $52 billion 2021 CHIPS Act. Computing architectures drawing inspiration from biological neural systems have been considered for decades. Here is the latest on neuromorphic computing and how the…
CISA, the FBI, and the NSA released another Joint Cybersecurity Advisory this week “to provide information on BlackMatter ransomware. Since July 2021, BlackMatter ransomware has targeted multiple U.S. critical infrastructure entities, including two U.S. Food and Agriculture Sector organizations.”
The Sunday Morning Herald reports that Xi Jinping and his loyalists have experienced a plot against their power; have deployed subsequent purges of power based on these challenges, and question the loyalty of their top military brass in China. Details of these events are reviewed here.
Public safety and law enforcement officials continue to explore a viable technological solution to their need to lawfully gain access to information on smartphones. The solution currently under consideration, Client-Side Scanning or CSS, grows out of an August 2021 proposal from Apple, Inc. A group of technologists, who for the last 25 years have come…
Attacks against supply chain, energy, water, fuel, and food, many of which are believed to have been orchestrated by Russian nationals, have underscored the need for the international community to try to find practical ways to reduce the volume of this activity. The Biden Administration decided to convene a 30-country meeting to discuss this growing…
In August of 2020, Matt Devost and Bob Gourley spoke with Chet Richards, a close associate of the late US Air Force Colonel John Boyd. Richards was there as the concept of the OODA Loop was being developed. Chet is the author of “Certain to Win”, the first book to describe how the OODA Loop…
2021 is the first year of the US Cyber Games – part of a global competition that will recognize cyber athletes who can work in competitive environments to successfully operate in cyberspace. On October 5, 2021, the first-ever US Cyber Team was announced at the US Cyber Games Draft Day in Las Vegas, Nevada.
The recently released documentary – Quantum Technology: Our Sustainable Future – is arguably one of the best thirty minutes you will spend pondering the future of technology and the challenges of climate change at the same time. We discovered the film while grappling with the idea of technological innovation grinding to a halt in the…
In February 2021, The White House issued an Executive Order on securing America’s supply chains, calling for “an immediate 100-day review across federal agencies to address vulnerabilities in the supply chains of semiconductor manufacturing and advanced packaging. The final review was delivered in June of 2021. The final report is an exhaustive 250-page document, of…
Google has announced a new initiative aimed at fostering the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in cybersecurity, as it believes AI is pivotal for digital security. Through the new AI Cyber Defense Initiative, Google invests in an AI-ready infrastructure and provides new defensive tools and research, as well as AI security training. To realize AI’s…
In January 2024, an operation dismantled a network of hundreds of SOHO routers controlled by GRU Military Unit 26165. This network facilitated various crimes, including extensive spear phishing and credential harvesting against entities of interest to the Russian government, such as U.S. and foreign governments, military, and key security and corporate sectors. Non-GRU cybercriminals installed…
Major technology companies, including Adobe, Amazon, Google, IBM, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, and TikTok, signed a pact Friday to voluntarily adopt “reasonable precautions” to prevent artificial intelligence tools from being used to disrupt democratic elections around the world. They gathered at the Munich Security Conference to announce a new framework for how they respond to AI-generated…
The US Federal Trade Commission moved to put new rules into place around impersonation, citing the rising threat of scams enabled by generative artificial intelligence. The agency is seeking public comment on a proposed rule that would make companies liable if they “know or have reason to know” their technology, including tools used to make…
OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman is working to secure US government approval for a massive venture to boost global manufacturing of artificial intelligence chips, an effort that risks raising national security and antitrust concerns in Washington, according to people familiar with the matter. Altman has been meeting with potential investors and partners in the…
Apple Inc., racing to add more artificial intelligence capabilities, is nearing the completion of a critical new software tool for app developers that would step up competition with Microsoft Corp. The company has been working on the tool for the last year as part of the next major version of Xcode, Apple’s flagship programming software.…
Could this be the day reality died? What will come tomorrow? Imagine putting on your Apple Vision Pro and asking it to deliver a 90 minute spy thriller full of surprising but realistic twists and drama and having it presented to you a second later. Or imagine a nefarious actor tasking the generation of information…
Russia is developing a space-based anti-satellite weapon that is “troubling” but poses no immediate threat, the White House has said. National security spokesman John Kirby confirmed the weapon was “space-based” but would not comment on reports in US media that it was either nuclear-capable or nuclear-powered. The weapon could breach the 1967 Outer Space Treaty,…
Israel’s Rafah offensive is critical to the relationship between Egypt and Israel. Egypt fears Israel won’t allow displaced Palestinians to return to Gaza while a refugee exodus would burden its struggling economy and could pose security challenges. Israel’s planned ground assault on Rafah threatens to intensify pressure on displaced Palestinians to move into Egypt’s Sinai…
As Russian forces are in the front-line city of Avdiivka, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy embarked on a mini-European tour in a new attempt to secure much-needed aid. Ukraine is being faced with battlefield challenges and a shortage of ammunition stockpiles amid delays in Western military assistance. Capturing Avdiivka is a crucial aim for Russia as it…
Over half of the Gaza Strip’s entire population is sheltering in Rafah. Much of the population was repeatedly pushed southward by Israeli military orders to move into so-called safe zones. They are now trapped against Gaza’s southernmost edge, and are awaiting the terrifying prospect of soldiers advancing on them once again. International alarm over Israel’s…
Protect AI, an AI cybersecurity startup, has disclosed eight vulnerabilities in the open-source supply chain utilized for in-house AI and ML model development, each assigned a CVE number. Among these vulnerabilities, one is rated critical, and seven are rated high severity. The vulnerabilities include arbitrary file writes, arbitrary file uploads, remote code execution (RCE), server-side…
The discovery of a potential new infection technique by NSO Group, termed “MMS Fingerprint,” is hinted at in a contract between NSO and Ghana’s telecom regulator, as part of ongoing litigation with WhatsApp. The method claims to reveal target device and operating system information without user interaction, applicable to Android, Blackberry, and iOS. Investigation by…
Civil rights organizations, including NOYB and the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, have urged the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) to rule against Meta’s subscription scheme allowing European users to pay to opt out of data tracking on Facebook and Instagram. They argue that such a system violates EU data privacy laws and the Fundamental…
The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) reported that a threat actor infiltrated a US government organization’s network by exploiting compromised credentials from a former employee’s administrative account. With these credentials, the attacker accessed an internal VPN, conducted reconnaissance, and executed LDAP queries on a domain controller. The compromised account was not removed by…
On the morning of November 18, during a tech conference in Tokyo, Ting Cai received a news alert about OpenAI’s Sam Altman, who had been ousted in a boardroom coup. Cai, chief data officer of Japanese tech giant Rakuten, was caught off guard. He had flown back from San Francisco days earlier, where he had…
Google is expanding the range of Gemini large language models it is making available to developers on its Vertex AI platform today. Gemini 1.0 Pro (which was still known as Gemini Pro 1.0 only a week ago — because Google is very good at branding) is now generally available after being in public preview for a…
Humans have unique sensory functions, among them binaural hearing — meaning we can identify types of sound, as well as what direction it’s coming from and how far away it is, and we can also differentiate multiple sources of sound all occurring at once. While large language models (LLMs) are impressive in their ability to…
The International Federation of Robotics, or IFR, today listed its picks for the top five global robotics trends of this year. The Frankfurt, Germany-based organization attributed growing demand for automation to technological innovations. The IFR noted that the stock of operational robots around the world attained a new record of about 3.9 million units in 2022.…
Barely two months after launching Gemini, the large language model Google hopes will bring it to the top of the AI industry, the company is already announcing its successor. Google is launching Gemini 1.5 today and making it available to developers and enterprise users ahead of a full consumer rollout coming soon. The company has…
Group-IB, a cybersecurity company based in Singapore, recently attributed the development of sophisticated banking trojans to Chinese-speaking cyber crime group GoldFactory. One of the group’s prominent trojans, GoldPickaxe, is capable of harvesting identity documents, facial recognition data, and SMS information on iOS and Android devices. The threat group has previously targeted Thailand, Vietnam, and other…
On February 7, a barge carrying oil capsized on a reef of the coast of Tobago. The incident occurred when a tug and a barge, both headed to St. Vincent and the Grenadines, reportedly changed course to avoid collision with a nearby cruise ship port. It is unknown whether anyone died during the crash. The…
On Thursday, the U.S. Central Command announced that it seized an Iranian arms shipment headed for Yemen on January 28. The shipment contained 200 medium-range ballistic missile components, underwater and surface naval drone components, anti-tank missile launcher assemblies, and communication and network equipment. Centcom Commander Michael Erik Kurilla said Iran directly enables the Houthis’ mission…
Representative Mike Turner, Republican chair of the U.S. House of Representatives intelligence committee, publicly called for the declassification of intelligence regarding a “serious national security threat” on Wednesday. The New York Times later reported that the intelligence pertains to a Russian space-based anti-satellite nuclear program. The weapon is not currently in orbit. Senators Mark Warner…
On February 1, a hacking organization attacked Albania’s Institute of Statistics (INSTAT) with a wiper virus that deleted data on six computers and spread to 40. On Tuesday, the National Authority for Electronic Certification and Cyber Security attributed the attack to Homeland Justice, an Iran-backed organization that has previously operated against Albanian entities. Albania severed…
South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol’s 0ffice announced on Wednesday that hackers infiltrated the personal email of a staff member just before Yoon traveled to Europe last November. Yoon’s office attributed the operation to North Korean hackers, and stated the breach did not affect any other officials. A spokesperson stated that the office constantly defends…
The Ukrainian Military announced on Wednesday that a successful naval surface drone operation sank Russia’s Tsezar Kunikov landing ship in the Black Sea. The vessel was off the coast of Alupka on the southern edge of Crimea. Ukraine’s GUR intelligence agency posted a video of the operation on Telegram. The GUR stated the warship spent…
Microsoft’s threat intelligence team recently partnered with OpenAI to produce a report on threat actors using LLMs to streamline vulnerability research, targeting, and malware development. The research did not identify any significant operations that relied on LLMs, but identified threat groups from Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran that interacted with ChatGPT to assist their…
Bitcoin is a trillion dollar asset once again. And the overall crypto market has broken $2 trillion in market capitalization. Why it matters: If it were collectively a publicly traded company, cryptocurrency would be the fourth-largest in the world, between Saudi Aramco and NVIDIA. On its own, Bitcoin would the eighth-largest, between Meta and Berkshire-Hathaway. By the…
Meta’s chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun, received another accolade to add to his long list of awards on Sunday, when he was recognized with a TIME100 Impact Award for his contributions to the world of artificial intelligence. Ahead of the award ceremony in Dubai, LeCun sat down with TIME to discuss the barriers to achieving…
Microsoft and OpenAI are revealing today that hackers are already using large language models like ChatGPT to refine and improve their existing cyberattacks. In newly published research, Microsoft and OpenAI have detected attempts by Russian, North Korean, Iranian, and Chinese-backed groups using tools like ChatGPT for research into targets, to improve scripts, and to help…
There have been just a handful of moments over the centuries when we have experienced a huge shift in the skills our economy values most. We are entering one such moment now. Technical and data skills that have been highly sought after for decades appear to be among the most exposed to advances in artificial…
Slack AI is now available for enterprise customers, though pricing details for the generative AI (gene) features have not yet been disclosed. Slack announced plans for its AI assistant app last year, focusing on three areas: AI powered search. This provides personalized answers to questions based on an organization’s knowledge base. Slack AI helps users locate…
The sudden resignations of Hungary’s President Katalin Novak and former Justice Minister Judit Varga, attributed to their involvement in granting clemency to a figure linked to child abuse, have escalated into the most significant threat to Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s decade-long rule. The departures of these influential women, symbolizing different facets of Orban’s leadership, have…
Indian police have intensified their efforts for a second day to prevent farmers from Punjab state, who are demanding minimum crop prices, from reaching the capital Delhi. The capital is heavily fortified with barricades and security forces as the farmers, still 200km away, seek to renew their protest against what they see as unmet government…
In eastern Turkey, hundreds of rescuers are engaged in the search for nine gold field workers missing after a landslide struck the Copler mine site, burying them under roughly 10 million cubic meters of earth. Four individuals, including the field manager, have been detained as part of an investigation into the incident. Concerns also loom…
A Ukrainian military report claims that the Caesar Kunikov, a significant Russian amphibious ship, has been sunk off the coast of Russian-occupied Crimea. The attack, allegedly carried out by Ukrainian forces, utilized Magura V5 sea drones, targeting the ship near Yalta. The sinking is seen as part of Ukraine’s ongoing efforts to counter Russia’s Black…
Albania’s cybersecurity authorities have accused a hacker group allegedly sponsored by the Iranian government, named “Homeland Justice,” of conducting a sophisticated cyberattack on the country’s Institute of Statistics on February 1st. The attack affected 40 computers, and while Iran’s mission to the United Nations has not responded to requests for comment, the Iranian government has…
Trend Micro revealed that the zero-day vulnerability CVE-2024-21412, fixed by Microsoft in its recent Patch Tuesday updates, has been exploited by threat groups Water Hydra and DarkCasino to target financial market traders. Discovered during Trend Micro’s analysis of a Water Hydra campaign in late December 2023, the vulnerability bypasses Microsoft Defender SmartScreen, enabling the delivery…
A team of researchers has uncovered a new DNS-related vulnerability dubbed KeyTrap (CVE-2023-50387), which they claim could potentially disable large portions of the internet. This critical flaw affects the Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC), designed to authenticate responses to DNS queries. Despite DNSSEC’s aim to prevent DNS manipulation, the KeyTrap vulnerability allows attackers to…
Zoom announced patches for seven vulnerabilities in its desktop and mobile applications, including a critical-severity bug in Windows software. The critical issue (CVE-2024-24691) could allow an attacker with network access to escalate privileges. Zoom also addressed a high-severity privilege escalation flaw (CVE-2024-24697) impacting Windows applications, which can be exploited locally. Additionally, two medium-severity vulnerabilities leading…
When a human-AI conversation involves many rounds of continuous dialogue, the powerful large language machine-learning models that drive chatbots like ChatGPT sometimes start to collapse, causing the bots’ performance to rapidly deteriorate. A team of researchers from MIT and elsewhere has pinpointed a surprising cause of this problem and developed a simple solution that enables a…
Nvidia is releasing an early version of Chat with RTX today, a demo app that lets you run a personal AI chatbot on your PC. You can feed it YouTube videos and your own documents to create summaries and get relevant answers based on your own data. It all runs locally on a PC, and…
“The video contains no teleoperation,” says Norwegian humanoid robot maker 1X. “No computer graphics, no cuts, no video speedups, no scripted trajectory playback. It’s all controlled via neural networks, all autonomous, all 1X speed.” This is the humanoid manufacturer that OpenAI put its chips behind last year, as part of a US$25-million Series A funding round.…
Americans invented Beatlemania in 1964, which was bittersweet for the British, who had invented it in 1962. Something similar is happening now to Arm Holdings. The Cambridge-headquartered chip designer has doubled in value after posting quarterly results last week. Since its Nasdaq float in September, the stock is up 192 per cent. Its market cap…
Working professionals spend a lot of their valuable time in unproductive meetings. To help remedy that problem, Microsoft, Google, Zoom, and Otter.ai have released AI-enabled meeting tools. Now, Otter.ai is claiming its newest feature set places it above all other competitors. On Tuesday, Otter.ai unveiled Meeting GenAI, which is a set of AI tools that…
The United Nations is going to announce an investigation into North Korean sponsored cyberattacks against cryptocurrency companies. The attacks potentially brought in $3 billion to fund the country’s nuclear program. An advanced copy of the investigation report shows the UN investigators are looking at 58 specific cyberattacks believed to be waged by the Democratic People’s…
An ongoing campaign targeting Microsoft Azure corporate clouds has already compromised dozens of environments and hundreds of individuals. The activity involves data exfiltration, financial fraud, and impersonation, among others, in a variety of organizations. The organizations affected are in different geographic regions and industry verticals. The phishing, however, is directed at highly strategic individuals in…
China’s government has been attempting to show the US as indulging in the same cyber activities it has been accused of carrying out over the past several years. Its efforts have been ongoing for two years. A recent examination of Beijing’s claims by researchers show they are often based on previously leaked US intelligence and…
The United States Senate has approved a $95 billion aid package for Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan after months of back and forth. Democrats were in favor of the legislation, however, Republicans were divided and were voting it down. The bill has $14 billion in aid for Israel’s war against Hamas, $10 billion for humanitarian aid…
Police in northern India fired tear gas on protesting farmers to prevent them from marching on Delhi. The capital is ringed by cement blocks, razor wire, and fencing on three sides to keep the farmers who are demanding minimum crop prices at bay. The government fears a repeat of a 2020 protest that lasted a…
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has simulated a strike against a major Israeli airbase. The show of its naval capabilities was aired by state television on Tuesday. The IRGC fired a range of munitions from its ships and submarines. The action was a message as Israel’s war on Gaza escalates and tensions rise in the…
OpenAI’s revenues have surpassed $2bn on an annualised basis, as the runaway success of its flagship artificial intelligence product ChatGPT puts it among the fastest-growing technology companies in history. The San Francisco-based start-up’s yearly run rate — a measure of the previous month’s revenue multiplied by 12 — hit the $2bn milestone in December 2023, according…
As President Biden met with heads of state around the world these past couple of years, he’s been repeating a curious phrase. “Open RAN.” This obscure technology for cellular towers — which the Brookings Institution once dubbed the “Huawei killer” — is Washington’s anointed champion to try to unseat Chinese tech giant Huawei Technologies from…
Over the last few years, cryptocurrency hacking has become a pervasive and formidable threat, leading to billions of dollars stolen from crypto platforms and exposing vulnerabilities across the ecosystem. As we revealed in last year’s Crypto Crime Report, 2022 was the biggest year ever for crypto theft with $3.7 billion stolen. In 2023, however, funds…
In a bid to enhance the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), researchers from Google Deepmind and University of Southern California have proposed a new ‘self-discover’ prompting framework. Published on arXiV and Hugging Face this morning, the approach goes beyond existing prompting techniques used by LLMs and has been found capable of improving the…
Decades after automation began taking and transforming manufacturing jobs, artificial intelligence is coming for the higher-ups in the corporate office. The list of white-collar layoffs is growing almost daily and include jobs cuts at Google, Duolingo and UPS in recent weeks. While the total number of jobs directly lost to generative AI remains low, some…
A narrowly divided US Senate moved closer to passing a $95.34bn aid package for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, showing undiminished bipartisanship. The bill includes $61bn for Ukraine, $14bn for Israel in its war against Hamas, and $4.83bn to support partners in the Indo-Pacific, including Taiwan, and deter aggression by China. It also would provide $9.15bn…
Hamas has warned Israel that a ground offensive in Rafah would imperil negotiations on a truce and the exchange of captives and prisoners. Aid groups and foreign governments, including Israel’s key ally the US, have voiced deep concern over Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s pledge to extend ground military operations into the far-southern Gaza city.…
More than half of Gaza’s population is squeezed into miserable tent cities in Rafah, a small city along Egypt’s border. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has threatened to overrun the area. Rather than opening its border to give Palestinians a refuge from the onslaught, Egypt has reinforced its frontier with Gaza. It has also…
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