Chinese hackers blamed for severe breach at US Cyber Firm F5 | Microsoft aims to make most new products outside China from 2026 | Labor to crack down on crypto ATMs amid scam surge
Plus, Sam Altman Says OpenAI is not the moral police of the world
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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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A potentially “catastrophic” breach of a major US-based cybersecurity provider has been blamed on state-backed hackers from China, according to people familiar with the matter. Bloomberg
Microsoft aims to produce the majority of its new products outside of China as early as next year, while Amazon Web Services is expanding its supply chain shift down to the component level. Nikkei Asia
The Albanese government will create new powers to crack down on the use of crypto ATMs after authorities warned that they have become a major source of criminal activity, including scams, money laundering and terrorism financing. Australian Financial Review
ASPI
6G isn’t about speed. It’s about sovereignty
The Strategist
Jason Van der Schyff
The race to 6G isn’t just about bandwidth. It’s about control over spectrum, standards, supply chains and the values underpinning tomorrow’s infrastructure. If 5G taught us anything, trust and interoperability need to be built in from the start. The Indo-Pacific is already the world’s most contested connectivity environment. Through submarine cables, cloud platforms and national 5G rollouts, governments are already making decisions that will shape how their citizens communicate, how their economies function and who sets the rules. The shift to 6G only sharpens that contest.
🚀 We’ve rebuilt ASPI’s China Defence Universities Tracker from the ground up. The major expansion adds richer profiles, rankings powered by the Critical Technology Tracker, new mapping of links to China’s state-owned defence industry, analysis of China–Russia research ties, and data on the surge in dual-use research centres—now covering 180+ entities with faster search. Be among the first to subscribe and explore new data and exclusive insights: https://unitracker.aspi.org.au/
World
Microsoft warns of a 32% surge in identity hacks, mainly driven by stolen passwords
The Record by Recorded Future
Jonathan Greig
Hackers are increasingly using stolen identities to breach organizations, impersonating employees or contractors before stealing data and launching ransomware, according to new research. Microsoft’s 85-page Digital Defense Report 2025 covers dozens of pertinent cybersecurity issues including ransomware, nation-state attacks, AI and more. But the company’s researchers said the one statistic that stood out more than most others was the continued success of password attacks that allowed hackers to take over victim accounts.
Australia
Labor to crack down on crypto ATMs amid scam surge
The Australian Financial Review
Ryan Cropp and Paul Smith
The Albanese government will create new powers to crack down on the use of crypto ATMs after authorities warned that they have become a major source of criminal activity, including scams, money laundering and terrorism financing. Crypto ATMs allow individuals to purchase Bitcoin and other popular cryptocurrencies with either cash or debit cards, and have exploded in number off the back of a surge in prices and a friendly regulatory regime ushered in by US President Donald Trump.
Maincode debuts Matilda AI after ditching ‘sovereign’ label
The Information
Tom Williams
Melbourne-based artificial intelligence company Maincode gave the first public demonstration of its “Australian-made” model Matilda on Wednesday, as co-founder and CEO Dave Lemphers continued to walk back earlier comments that the firm was building truly sovereign AI. Lemphers debuted Matilda at SXSW Sydney after the AI model, which has been in development for over a year, was initially announced in August as Australia’s “first built from scratch, totally sovereign foundational AI model”.
Electoral watchdog seeks new powers to curb platform disinformation
InnovationAus
Joseph Brookes
Australia’s election watchdog has urged lawmakers to give him more enforcement powers and set up legislated minimum standards for online platforms to respond to disinformation amid a “deterioration in the information environment”. The call for a new notice power and legislated standards for platforms to address suspected illegal content follows several pieces of disinformation around the 2025 federal election. The regulator says it encountered varying response times and methods from online platforms to address the misleading content.
China
China set to boost science funding in pursuit of Nobel ambitions
Nikkei Asia
Kentaro Suzuki
China under President Xi Jinping is set to increase basic-research funding as a share of its research and development budget, aiming to cultivate key high-tech industries and expand the ranks of its Nobel Prize winners. The ruling Chinese Communist Party’s 20th Central Committee will hold its fourth plenary session from Monday to Thursday of next week. It will discuss the party’s 15th five-year plan, which will cover economic policy until 2030. Promoting science and technology will form a key part of this plan.
Tech war: workers at Nexperia’s China plant fear being caught in dispute crossfire
South China Morning Post
Coco Feng
Workers at a large Nexperia packaging plant in the southern Chinese city of Dongguan said they are worried about becoming collateral damage in a simmering political dispute between the Netherlands and China that has upended the management of the Dutch semiconductor maker. During a visit by the Post on Thursday, operations at the factory appeared normal even as staff were aware of the power struggle between Nexperia’s Dutch management and its Chinese owner, Wingtech Technology, over control of the company.
How ByteDance made China’s most popular AI chatbot
WIRED
Zeyi Yang
When Chinese AI startup DeepSeek became a global sensation in January, it not only shocked Silicon Valley but also startled ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company. The Chinese tech giant had already launched Doubao, its own flagship AI assistant app with tens of millions of users. But when DeepSeek became the best-known Chinese AI company overnight, no one was talking about Doubao anymore.
USA
Chinese hackers blamed for severe breach at US cyber firm F5
Bloomberg
Margi Murphy, Patrick Howell O’Neill, and Jordan Robertson
A potentially “catastrophic” breach of a major US-based cybersecurity provider has been blamed on state-backed hackers from China, according to people familiar with the matter. Seattle-based F5 Inc. disclosed on Wednesday morning in a regulatory filing that nation-state hackers had breached its networks and gained “long-term, persistent access” to certain systems. The intruders stole files including portions of source code from the company’s BIG-IP suite of application services, which are widely used by Fortune 500 companies and government agencies, in addition to details about some flaws that could be used to target the company’s customers.
Multiple high-severity vulnerabilities in F5 products and incident impacting F5
Australian Signals Directorate
Dairy Farmers of America confirms June cyberattack leaked personal data
The Record by Recorded Future
Jonathan Greig
The Dairy Farmers of America said cybercriminals breached company systems in June, gaining access to the information of employees and members of the cooperative. The organization previously confirmed to the outlet Dairy Herd Management in June that multiple manufacturing plants within its network were dealing with a ransomware attack. A notorious ransomware gang took credit for the incident days after the statement was released.
Ransomware attack ensnares $4.3 trillion Muni Market’s key site
Bloomberg
Eric Hudson and Amanda Albright
MuniOS.com, a distribution platform for state and local government bond offering documents, has been out of service for several days due to a ransomware attack, according to people familiar with the matter. The website, operated by Ann Arbor, Michigan-based tech company ImageMaster LLC, is the platform that thousands of borrowers in the $4 trillion market use to showcase their offering documents.
US warns world will ‘decouple’ from China if it imposes new export controls
Financial Times
Demetri Sevastupulo
Treasury secretary Scott Bessent warned Beijing that its new sweeping export controls on rare earths and critical minerals would force the US and other countries to decouple from China. Speaking alongside US trade representative Jamieson Greer at a news conference on Wednesday, Bessent said China was taking on the entire world with the regime. “If China wants to be an unreliable partner to the world, then the world will have to decouple,” Bessent said.
Chalmers rejects US call to ‘decouple’ from China Australian Financial Review
FCC moves to expel one of Hong Kong’s largest telco companies from U.S. networks
CNBC
Dylan Butts
Regulators in the U.S. have moved to block one of Hong Kong’s largest telecommunications companies from accessing domestic networks, citing national security concerns. The U.S. Federal Communications Commission announced on Wednesday that it had initiated proceedings to potentially bar HKT Trust and HKT Ltd and its subsidiaries from interconnecting with American networks, escalating concerns over its ties to China.
A giant new AI data center is coming to the epicenter of America’s fracking boom
The Wall Street Journal
Bradley Olson
An Nvidia backed AI startup is planning to build a massive data-center complex with CoreWeave that is capable of generating its own power on a site that is two-thirds the size of Central Park. Poolside is joining with the cloud-infrastructure provider on a plan to build a data center on more than 500 acres of land that sits on a sprawling ranch in West Texas. The site is owned by the Mitchell family, which has run oil-and-gas companies for decades in the state and is located in the heart of the fracking boom.
One Republican now controls a huge chunk of US election infrastructure
WIRED
Kim Zetter
The news last week that Dominion Voting Systems was purchased by the founder and CEO of Knowink, a Missouri-based maker of electronic poll books, has left election integrity activists confused over what, if anything, this could mean for voters and the integrity of US elections. The company, acquired by Scott Leiendecker, a former Republican Party operative and election director in Missouri before founding Knowink, said in a press release that he was rebranding Dominion.
North Asia
North Korean hackers seen using blockchain to hide crypto-stealing malware
The Record by Recorded Future
Daryna Antoniuk
North Korean state-linked hackers have begun using public blockchains to deliver malware and steal cryptocurrency, in what researchers say is the first known case of a nation-state adopting the technique. Google security researchers said on Thursday that they observed a Pyongyang-backed hacking group, tracked as UNC5342, deploying a method known as EtherHiding.
AI-powered textbooks fail to make the grade in South Korea
Rest of World
Junhyop Kwon
The program — a flagship initiative of former President Yoon Suk Yeol — took shape over the last year and a half, with about a dozen publishers approved to develop the digital textbooks. When the textbooks were launched at the start of the school year in March for math, English, and computer science, Ko was disappointed, he told Rest of World. “All our classes were delayed because of technical problems with the textbooks,” Ko said.
Southeast Asia
Cambodia to repatriate South Koreans ensnared by scam industry amid diplomatic pressure
The Record by Recorded Future
James Reddick
Cambodia said on Thursday that it will repatriate a group of South Korean nationals in custody after their release from scam compounds, amid diplomatic pressure from the South Korean government following the death in Cambodia of a 22-year-old Korean university student. In a press release, the Cambodian National Police said they would deport 59 South Korean nationals who were rescued from scam centers or arrested for other “various crimes.”
South & Central Asia
AI flood forecasting allows aid to reach farmers before disaster strikes
Rest of World
Jesmin Papri and Gayathri Vaidyanathan
Farmers on Jamira, a tiny island on Bangladesh’s flood-prone Jamuna River, are used to warring with the river that’s eating their land. Next year, they’ll have one more weapon in their arsenal: cash payments from the international nonprofit GiveDirectly delivered days before a flood hits. The group uses Google’s artificial intelligence-based flood forecasting to identify at-risk villagers.
Europe
Thirsty AI mega projects raise alarm in some of Europe’s driest regions
CNBC
Sam Meredith and April Roach
Europe’s ambitious artificial intelligence strategy is at risk of colliding with an often overlooked but critically important environmental issue: water scarcity. The European Union has big plans for data center expansion, announcing in April that it intends to at least triple its capacity over the next five to seven years as part of a push to become a world-class AI hub. The rapid rollout of data centers, which power all aspects of the digital economy, from social media and online banking to AI tools like ChatGPT, has sparked some concern — particularly in regions already facing water scarcity.
Hybrid war threat looms over Sweden’s cashless society
Bloomberg
Evelina Yousefi
Marcus Murray has spent more than two decades probing the weak points of financial institutions. As the founder of Truesec, one of Sweden’s biggest cybersecurity firms, he has helped banks across Northern Europe protect themselves against intruders. Increasingly, though, clients are concerned about a different type of threat — state actors not trying to steal or extort money, but simply to cause chaos by shutting down banking systems or eroding trust in their operations.
Big Tech
Sam Altman says OpenAI isn’t ‘moral police of the world’ after erotica ChatGPT post blows up
CNBC
Ashley Capoot
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Wednesday that the company is “not the elected moral police of the world” after receiving backlash over his decision to loosen restrictions and allow content like erotica within its chatbot ChatGPT. The artificial intelligence startup has expanded its safety controls in recent months as it faced mounting scrutiny over how it protects users, particularly minors. But Altman said Tuesday in a post on X that OpenAI will be able to “safely relax” most restrictions now that it has new tools and has been able to mitigate “serious mental health issues.”
Microsoft aims to make most new products outside China from 2026: sources
Nikkei Asia
Lauly Li and Cheng Ting-Fang
Microsoft aims to produce the majority of its new products outside of China as early as next year, while Amazon Web Services is expanding its supply chain shift down to the component level, sources briefed on the matter told Nikkei Asia. Such moves reflect U.S. tech companies’ efforts to decouple their supply chains from China more quickly amid ongoing Washington-Beijing tensions. Microsoft has asked multiple suppliers to help prepare “out of China” production for its Surface laptop computers and data center servers, including key components and assembly, starting next year, sources briefed on the matter said.
X plans to show more information about user profiles to help improve trust
TechCrunch
Sarah Perez
As AI makes it easier to create bots that act ever more human-like, Elon Musk’s X is developing a new feature that would expose more information about the users behind an X profile in an effort to help people better understand who they’re talking to on the platform. According to a new post by X’s head of product Nikita Bier, the social network will begin experimenting with displaying more information on user profiles, including details such as the date the account was created, its location, the number of username changes it has undergone, and how it’s utilizing X’s service.
Nvidia chief holds onto hope for policy change as China market share drops to 0 from 95%
South China Morning Post
Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang said the company’s position in China has dropped from 95 per cent of the advanced chip market to zero, as the US semiconductor giant is not allowed to sell its advanced products to mainland companies under US export restrictions. “Hopefully, we will continue to explain and inform and hold on to hope for a change in policy”, he said at a Citadel Securities event in New York on October 6. A video of the interview was published on Wednesday.
Apple’s head of ChatGPT-Like AI search effort to leave for Meta
Bloomberg
Mark Gurman
The Apple Inc. executive leading an effort to develop AI-driven web search is stepping down, marking the latest in a string of high-profile exits from the company’s artificial intelligence division. The executive, Ke Yang, is leaving for Meta Platforms Inc., according to people with knowledge of the matter. Just weeks ago, he was appointed head of a team called Answers, Knowledge and Information, or AKI. The group is developing features to make the Siri voice assistant more ChatGPT-like by adding the ability to pull information from the web.
Artificial Intelligence
The AI industry’s scaling obsession is headed for a cliff
WIRED
Coco Feng
A new study from MIT suggests the biggest and most computationally intensive AI models may soon offer diminishing returns compared to smaller models. By mapping scaling laws against continued improvements in model efficiency, the researchers found that it could become harder to wring leaps in performance from giant models whereas efficiency gains could make models running on more modest hardware increasingly capable over the next decade.
Teen sues maker of fake-nude software
The Wall Street Journal
Julie Jargon
A New Jersey teenage girl whose real photo was allegedly transformed by a classmate into at least one fake-nude image is suing the developer of the “clothes removal” software that was used. The lawsuit, filed on behalf of the teen by a Yale Law School professor, his students and a trial attorney, is intended to confront a new threat to students around the country.
When face recognition doesn’t know your face is a face
WIRED
Matt Burgess
Autumn Gardiner thought updating her driving license would be straightforward. After getting married last year, she headed to the local Department of Motor Vehicles office in Connecticut to get her name changed on her license. While she was there, Gardiner recalls, officials said she needed to update her photo. That’s when things started to go wrong. Every time staff tried to take her photo, Gardiner says, the system would reject it. “Everyone’s watching. They’re taking more photos,” she recalls.
Events & Podcasts
The Sydney Dialogue 2025
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute is pleased to announce the Sydney Dialogue, the world’s premier policy summit for critical, emerging and cyber technologies, will return on 4-5 December. Now in its fourth year, the dialogue attracts the world’s top thinkers, innovators and policymakers, and focusses on the most pressing issues at the intersection of technology and security. TSD has become the place where new partnerships are built among governments, industry and civil society, and where existing partnerships are deepened.
The Daily Cyber & Tech Digest is brought to you by the Cyber, Technology & Security Programs team at ASPI and supported by partners.
