AUS: AEC warns it doesn’t have power to deter political misinfo | India: Meta approved political ads that incited violence | Ukraine's Kyivstar allocated $90m to deal with cyberattack aftermath
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The Daily Cyber & Tech Digest focuses on the topics we work on, including cybersecurity, critical technologies, foreign interference & disinformation.
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The Australian Electoral Commission has said it expects AI-generated misinformation at the next federal election, potentially from overseas actors, but warned that it doesn’t have the tools to detect or deter it. The Guardian
The Facebook and Instagram owner Meta approved a series of AI-manipulated political adverts during India’s election that spread disinformation and incited religious violence. The Guardian
Ukraine's leading mobile operator Kyivstar has allocated $90 million to deal with a suspect Russian cyberattack on its services and said it had hit its growth. Reuters
World
Countries wooing corporate digital nomads hope to make them stay
Financial Times
Emma Agyemang
“Digital nomad” visas are increasingly being used by countries to attract remote corporate workers, according to tax experts, as governments seek to outbid each other in a global war for talent. More countries have introduced a form of digital nomad visa — allowing a person to live in a country and work remotely — since the pandemic increased demand from employees to “work from anywhere”. The notion of a “digital nomad” has tended to suggest footloose freelancers backpacking across countries or working on beaches from their laptops.
Whether EVs or solar panels, protectionism has the same distorting effect
The Interpreter
John Edward
With the denial of chips, the United States has successfully persuaded Taiwan not to make advanced chips for China, and persuaded the Netherlands not to sell China machines for fabricating chips. By contrast, the United States does not seem to be even trying to persuade other countries to refuse Chinese EVs. Nor could it successfully do so, with Australia a case in point.
Australia
AEC warns it doesn’t have power to deter AI-generated political misinformation at next election
The Guardian
The Australian Electoral Commission has said it expects AI-generated misinformation at the next federal election, potentially from overseas actors, but warned that it doesn’t have the tools to detect or deter it. A parliamentary committee into artificial intelligence heard on Monday that the new technology could pose risks to “democracy itself”, with concerns voters might encounter deepfakes and voice clones of Anthony Albanese or Peter Dutton before the next poll.
Scams Australia: Aussies ‘not alerted’ to massive fraud network
The Australian
David Murray
The corporate regulator has been accused of failing to alert tens of thousands of Australians who lost more than $200m to an international scam syndicate, as German police reveal they gave authorities a comprehensive database of victims at serious risk of losing more. A crime network operating out of Serbia used mass advertising campaigns on Facebook and elsewhere online, featuring fake celebrity endorsements, to draw people into fraudulent cryptocurrency schemes. It is still active. Australia was by far the most affected country, making up more than one-third of the 90,000 victims from 90 countries worldwide.
China
The battlegrounds that could decide a US-China war over Taiwan
Financial Times
Kathrin Hille and Demetri Sevastopulo
The Pentagon says China is also developing electronic warfare systems and directed-energy weapons, such as lasers, that could be used to deny the US access in space. Chinese published research and reports about modern warfare techniques suggest that disrupting US information systems used in the field would be a priority.
Chinese nationals are trying to get from Indonesia to Australia by boat
ABC News
Wing Kuang
Indonesian authorities revealed that the people smugglers used TikTok to lure in the Chinese nationals and get them to set sail for Australia. Li and Zhang never met before boarding the boat in Jakarta. However, they both say they had been browsing on social media platforms Xiaohongshu and Douyin - the Chinese version of TikTok - looking for ways to leave their country. They spotted advertisements about smuggling operations to Australia via boat in comment sections.
USA
VCs and the military are fueling self-driving startups that don’t need roads
TechCrunch
Rebecca Bellan
A new crop of early-stage startups - along with some recent VC investments - illustrates a niche emerging in the autonomous vehicle technology sector. Unlike the companies bringing robotaxis to city streets, these startups are taking their tech off-road. Two recent entrants - Seattle-based Overland AI and New Brunswick-based Potential - are poised to get a first-mover advantage on this segment of autonomy.
An Nvidia co-founder’s latest bet: Making ‘Quantum Valley’ in New York
The Wall Street Journal
Jimmy Vielkind
Priem spent a decade as Nvidia’s chief technology officer. While he cashed out well before the company’s valuation topped $2 trillion, he amassed a large enough fortune to fund multimillion-dollar gifts to educational and other causes. The goal of his latest bet is to establish New York’s Hudson Valley as an epicenter of quantum-computing research in the country, he said. His vision is to create a critical mass of talent that will lead to spinoff businesses. While school and regional officials share his optimism, the task might be tricky in an upstate New York city whose former industrial primacy faded with the detachable shirt collar.
Southeast Asia
South-East Asian scam compounds ‘test market’ for AI deep-fake technology
The Australian
Amanda Hodge
The UN Office on Drugs and Crime says Southeast Asia’s criminal scam enterprises are fast becoming the test market for commercially available artificial intelligence technologies, such as real-time deep fake face-swapping software and chatbots, now being openly marketed to cyber scam bosses on encrypted chat platforms such as Telegram. Across Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos and The Philippines, industrial-scale scam compounds are believed to be generating more revenue than the regional drug trade on the backs of tens of thousands of workers caught up in what Interpol calls a “global human trafficking crisis”, subjected to debt bondage, beatings and sexual exploitation.
Thailand’s digital future: Initiatives for regional dominance
Open Gov
Azizah Saffa
One of the most significant projects in Thailand effort to become Southeast Asia digital hub was the submarine cable initiative, which is expected to enhance communication network. The new Asia Direct Cable project, currently under construction, will span 9,400 kilometres and connect six countries: China, Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, Vietnam, and Thailand. The project is slated for completion around the fourth quarter of 2024.
Efficiency boost: Vietnam’s digital shift in logistics and e-commerce
Open Gov
Samaya Dharmaraj
There is ongoing tech revolution driving Vietnam towards modernisation and economic development, with a strong focus on transforming the logistics sector. The exponential growth of e-commerce presents substantial opportunities for logistics companies, as the increase in online transactions drives higher demand for transportation, logistics, and delivery services. However, this surge also poses challenges that necessitate efficient logistics solutions.
South & Central Asia
Revealed: Meta approved political ads in India that incited violence
The Guardian
Hannah Ellis-Petersen
The Facebook and Instagram owner Meta approved a series of AI-manipulated political adverts during India’s election that spread disinformation and incited religious violence, according to a report shared exclusively with the Guardian. Facebook approved adverts containing known slurs towards Muslims in India, as well as Hindu supremacist language and disinformation about political leaders.
Ukraine - Russia
Ukraine's Kyivstar allocated $90 million to deal with cyberattack aftermath
Reuters
Ukraine's leading mobile operator Kyivstar has allocated $90 million to deal with a suspect Russian cyberattack on its services and said it had hit its growth. The hack, described by its CEO as the biggest cyberattack on telecoms infrastructure in the world, struck Kyivstar in December, damaging infrastructure and disrupting mobile phone signals for millions of Ukrainians. Kyivstar, owned by Amsterdam-listed mobile telecoms operator Veon, has 24.3 million mobile subscribers, as well as more than 1.1 million home internet subscribers.
Defining success in Ukraine
The Strategist
Richard Haass
Despite sanctions, Russia has been able to ramp up its military-industrial base and has access to weaponry and ammunition produced in Iran and North Korea and to Chinese manufactured goods and technologies that contribute to the Kremlin’s war effort.
Europe
Europe sees signs of Russian sabotage but hesitates to blame Kremlin
The Wall Street Journal
Bojan Pancevski
European investigators increasingly see Russian fingerprints around recent acts of suspected sabotage on strategic infrastructure but are struggling to respond. Reacting to clandestine threats is difficult because evidence around the suspected attacks -including a severed undersea gas pipeline, cuts in a vital internet connection and the disruption of a rail network - often isn’t conclusive.
Their trains were stalled. These hackers brought them back to life
The Wall Street Journal
Jack Gillum and Karolina Jeznach
Suspicion that train manufacturer Newag planted code to disable locomotives in Poland after about a dozen of the railway’s trains needed to be refurbished. A group of white hat hackers discovered that the trains’ computers had software code in them that, in certain circumstances, could trigger them to shut down, specifically in certain GPS coordinates that pinpoint boundaries around the company’s competitors.
As supernatural claims spread online, Vatican updates its rules on them
The New York Times
Elisabetta Povoledo
The Roman Catholic Church has long been vigilant when it comes to supernatural apparitions like professed sightings of the Virgin Mary, weeping Madonnas or bleeding crucifixes. Over the centuries, it has endorsed only a small percentage of the thousands that have been claimed, in an effort to protect the faithful from charlatans, doctrinal errors or attempts to profit. Yet the age of social media has accelerated the spread of unverified claims, leaving the Vatican fearful that such phenomena can easily spin out of hand and out of its control.
UK
AI chatbots’ safeguards can be easily bypassed, say UK researchers
The Guardian
Dan Milmo
Guardrails to prevent AI models behind chatbots from issuing illegal, toxic or explicit responses can be bypassed with simple techniques, UK government researchers have found. The UK’s AI Safety Institute said systems it had tested were “highly vulnerable” to jailbreaks, a term for text prompts designed to elicit a response that a model is supposedly trained to avoid issuing.
Big Tech
ByteDance now has China’s most popular AI chatbot
Bloomberg
Jane Zhang
Doubao, the artificial intelligence-powered chatbot released in August, surpassed Baidu’s Ernie Bot in downloads last year and now has more regular monthly users on iOS in China, according to Sensor Tower data. Ernie got off to the fastest start in the country, but ByteDance has now taken the lead and other rivals are approaching.
TikTok tests 60-minute videos, expanding into YouTube’s territory
South China Morning Post
Coco Feng
TikTok, the short video platform originally popular for its 15-second lip-synching content, is now testing 60-minute video uploads with certain creators, in a challenge to veteran online video giant YouTube. The feature, first shared publicly by UK-based social media consultant Matt Navarra, allows users to upload from both the mobile app and desktop, according to a screenshot he posted on Thursday on Meta Platforms’ Threads.
Google attacks Microsoft cyber failures in effort to steal customers
Bloomberg
Dina Bass
Google is betting Microsoft Corp.’s very public cybersecurity failures - along with deep discounts - will persuade corporate and government customers to use the search giant’s productivity software rather than Office. Last month, the US Cyber Safety Review Board issued a scathing report documenting Microsoft’s inability to stop China-linked hackers from breaking into the email accounts of US officials last year. The report called on Microsoft to institute urgent reforms, which the company has pledged to do as part of its biggest security overhaul in more than two decades.
Artificial Intelligence
South Korea, UK to co-host second global AI summit as boom fans risks
Reuters
Joyce Lee
South Korea and the United Kingdom will co-host the second global AI summit in Seoul this week, as the breathtaking pace of innovation since the first AI summit in November leaves governments scrambling to keep up with a growing array of risks. British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol will oversee a virtual summit on Tuesday, amid calls for better regulation of AI despite disagreements over how the technology may affect humanity.
World is ill-prepared for breakthroughs in AI, say experts
The Guardian
Dan Milmo
The world is ill-prepared for breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, according to a group of senior experts including two “godfathers” of AI, who warn that governments have made insufficient progress in regulating the technology. The recommendations are made by 25 experts including Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, two of the three “godfathers of AI” who have won the ACM Turing award – the computer science equivalent of the Nobel prize – for their work. The intervention comes as politicians, experts and tech executives prepare to meet at a two-day summit in Seoul on Tuesday.
Microsoft’s AI chatbot will ‘recall’ everything you do on its new PCs
The Guardian
Microsoft wants laptop users to get so comfortable with its AI chatbot that it will remember everything you’re doing on your computer and help figure out what you want to do next. The software giant on Monday revealed an upgraded version of Copilot, its AI assistant, as it confronts heightened competition from big tech rivals in pitching generative AI technology that can compose documents, make images and serve as a lifelike personal assistant at work or home.
The ‘dead internet theory’ makes eerie claims about an AI-run web. The truth is more sinister
The Conversation
Jake Renzella and Vlada Rozova
If you search “shrimp Jesus” on Facebook, you might encounter dozens of images of AI generated crustaceans meshed in various forms with a stereotypical image of Jesus Christ. Some of these hyper-realistic images have garnered more than 20,000 likes and comments. So what exactly is going on here? The “dead internet theory” has an explanation: AI and bot-generated content has surpassed the human-generated internet.
Loneliness is a problem that AI won't solve
The New York Times
Jessica Grose
When I was reporting my ed tech series, I stumbled on one of the most disturbing things I’ve read in years about how technology might interfere with human connection: an article on the website of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz cheerfully headlined “It’s Not a Computer, It’s a Companion!” This week, OpenAI released an update to its ChatGPT chatbot, an indication that the inhuman future foretold by the Andreessen Horowitz story is fast approaching
ChatGPT to lose voice over Johansson similarity
BBC
Liv McMahon
OpenAI says it will remove one of the voices used by ChatGPT after it was likened to Hollywood actress Scarlett Johansson. Users spotted the similarity in the chatbot's "Sky" voice option, which reads responses aloud to users, when OpenAI showcased features of its new model. The flirty, conversational upgrade to its AI chatbot drew comparisons to the 2013 film Her, starring the actress. In November, Ms Johansson reportedly took legal action against an artificial intelligence app which used her likeness without permission in an advert.
Misc
The fan site authorities say is 'profiting from the exploitation and sexualisation of children'
ABC News
Carla Hildebrandt, Jessica Longbottom and Dunja Karagic
Social media is housing an online underworld where young girls' photos and videos are being "exploited" and consumed by men. The issue ranges from a small website allowing parents to sell access to photos of their children, to large platforms where hundreds of kidfluencer "fans" describe sexual fantasies.
Critical minerals need insulation from China’s market manipulation
The Strategist
Angus Barker
Rare earths play a critical role in today’s world. Through their use in electric vehicles, wind turbines, robots and military applications, they sit at the crossroads of the two major preoccupations of our time: geopolitics and decarbonisation. Thanks to its virtual monopoly in the global processing of rare-earth metals, China can shift value anywhere in its vertically integrated supply chain to squash incipient competition. For Australia and its allies, this is choking off access to private sector capital to build their own rare-earth mines, refineries and magnet-making plants.
Research
Governing in the age of AI: A new model to transform the state
Tony Blair Institute for Global Change
Alexander Iosad, David Railton, Tom Westgarth
For the private sector, the AI revolution promises greater productivity, lower costs and higher customer satisfaction. For governments, it presents an opportunity to reshape the social contract with citizens and change the trajectory of public-service delivery. The private sector is acting on this promise already – and governments must seize the opportunity at hand. Safe, explainable AI systems can make government fairer and more transparent, liberating and empowering people.
Railway cybersecurity market size is estimated to reach USD 7.44 billion by 2029, growing at a CAGR of 10%
Whatech
Akshay Rajput
Railroad cyber security is a suite of commonly used solutions or services to protect railroad-related networks, systems, and programs from digital attacks. Cyber-attacks generally focus on altering, accessing, or destroying railroad-related information due to unauthorized use. The Global Railway Cybersecurity market research report published by market insight reports discovers the current outlook in global and key regions from the viewpoint of Major Players, Countries, Product Types, and end industries. The world leading companies include Thales Group, Siemens AG, Nokia Networks, Alstom, Wabtec, and Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.
Events & Podcasts
The Sydney Dialogue
ASPI
The Sydney Dialogue was created to help bring together governments, businesses and civil society to discuss and progress policy options. We will forecast the technologies of the next decade that will change our societies, economies and national security, prioritising speakers and delegates who are willing to push the envelope. We will promote diverse views that stimulate real conversations about the best ways to seize opportunities and minimise risks.
JoiningFORCES
ASPI
The JoiningFORCES conference will explore ways to bridge national and international boundaries to deliver more joint, collective and effective defence. It will bring together government ministers, senior defence officials, leading industry figures, and international experts across the two-day event and formal dinner. We will also use collaborative wargaming and scenario exercise techniques to generate insights on enhancing regional deterrence. Our focus will be on strategic and operational level challenges and will consider the vital role of industry in delivering capability at the speed needed to meet the strategic threats Australia faces.
WDSN's Policy Views and Brews
ASPI
ASPI’s Women in Defence and Security Network is excited to invite you to its inaugural ‘Policy Views and Brews’ networking event! Designed to be a relaxed atmosphere where like-minded people can exchange ideas on a range of themes within defence, policy and national security, each meet-up will revolve around a specific topic, inspired by a pre-designated article sent out beforehand.
It wouldn’t happen in Australia: can the centre hold?
National Security Podcast
ANU National Security College
How does distrust in democratic institutions and political leaders affect social cohesion in Australia? Is the rise of authoritarianism within democracies a symptom of broader systemic problems? How can democratic institutions in Australia counter challenges like terrorism, radical extremism, and threats to cybersecurity? In this episode, Misha Zelinsky, Lydia Khalil, and James Paterson join Jane Halton to discuss the current challenges and threats to democracy and its institution, particularly in Australia.
The Daily Cyber & Tech Digest is brought to you by the Cyber, Technology & Security team at ASPI.