Cyberattack targets Japan’s space agency | Google warns China ramping up cyberattacks against Taiwan | DeepMind AI reveals potential for thousands of new materials
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Japan’s space agency has fallen victim to a cyberattack, though authorities have reassured the public that critical information related to rocket and satellite operations remains secure. JAXA has assured the public that stringent security measures are in place to mitigate the impact of the cyberattack and prevent any further compromise of sensitive information. Verdict
Google has observed a “massive increase” in Chinese cyberattacks on Taiwan in the last six months or so, said Kate Morgan, a senior engineering manager in Google’s threat analysis division. Morgan warned that Chinese hackers are employing tactics that make their work difficult to track, such as breaking into small home and office internet routers and repurposing them to wage attacks while masking their true origin. Bloomberg
Google DeepMind has used artificial intelligence to predict the structure of more than 2 million new materials, a breakthrough it said could soon be used to improve real-world technologies. The Alphabet-owned AI firm said almost 400,000 of its hypothetical material designs could soon be produced in lab conditions. Potential applications include the production of better-performing batteries, solar panels and computer chips. Reuters
Australia
Queensland passes mandatory data breach notice laws
InnovationAus
Justin Hendry
Queensland has become only the second state to legislate a mandatory data breach notification scheme for public sector entities, as an almost identical scheme comes into effect in New South Wales. The new scheme will require state and local government entities to notify affected individuals and the state’s privacy watchdog of eligible data breaches that would likely result in serious harm.
Deep fake video scam using entrepreneur Dick Smith and Treasurer Jim Chalmers targets Australians
The Australian
David Murray
Facebook has been condemned by one of the nation’s most prominent business figures for failing to stop a new generation of scam ads that use deep fake videos of him and other high-profile Australians “endorsing” fraudulent investments. Cybertrace chief executive and online fraud investigator Dan Halpin said deep fake scams involving the use of artificial intelligence had “reached unprecedented levels of realism”.
Medical test company’s ‘serious and systemic failures’ led to cyber-attack, watchdog says
The Guardian
Josh Taylor
Medical testing company Australian Clinical Labs had “serious and systemic failures” that resulted in a cyber-attack that led to more than 200,000 customer health records and credit card details being published on the dark web, the Australian information commissioner has alleged.
Australia is having a deep tech moment
Capital Brief
Dan Van Boom and Bronwen Clune
Deep tech is about pioneering foundational tech to solve devilishly complicated problems. Australia has shown promise but needs to get better at converting knowhow to commercial success. The development of a deep tech industry — the creation of an environment where tech and science companies can thrive — will be crucial to sustaining Australia’s economy as it shifts to a greener future.
China
China makes key progress in closing mobile memory chip gap with South Korea, US as tech war rages
South China Morning Post
Che Pan
A leading Chinese semiconductor company has made the country’s first new generation of advanced mobile memory chips, achieving key progress in narrowing the gap with its South Korean and US rivals. ChangXin Memory Technologies said in a statement that it has produced China’s first lower power Double Data Rate 5 dynamic random access memory chip, a new generation of memory chip that was first introduced by South Korea’s Samsung Electronics in 2018.
Alibaba's research arm shuts quantum computing lab amid restructuring
Reuters
Casey Hall
Chinese tech giant Alibaba has cut a quantum computing laboratory and team from its research arm, donating both the lab and related experimental equipment to Zhejiang University, the company said on Monday. A spokesperson for Alibaba's in-house research initiative said the academy would continue to focus on technology research with the aim of being a leader in AI research.
China's Nio teams up with Geely on auto battery swapping
Reuters
Brenda Goh
Chinese automakers Nio and Zhejiang Geely Holding Group said on Wednesday they had signed a strategic partnership agreement on battery swapping that would see them work together on standards, technology and model development. The deal makes Geely, whose brands range from Volvo to Zeekr, the second automaker to sign a battery swapping partnership with Chinese electric vehicle maker Nio.
USA
Pennsylvania water facility hit by Iran-linked hackers
CyberScoop
Christian Vasquez and AJ Vicens
US officials are investigating an incident at a Pennsylvania water utility after hackers linked to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps — who have a history of making exaggerated and false claims about their hacking exploits — breached a device at a remote water station. The hackers breached a remote water station that regulates pressure for two townships with a population of just over 7,000 people.
Okta hack update shows challenges in rapid cyber disclosures
The Wall Street Journal
James Rundle and Catherine Stupp
Okta’s admission that an October hack of its customer support system resulted in a far larger data breach than previously thought shows how challenging prompt cybersecurity disclosures can be, just weeks before new regulations that require many companies to do just that go into effect.
Senators introduce bipartisan legislation ending involuntary facial recognition screening
The Hill
Lauren Sforza
Sens. John Kennedy and Jeff Merkley introduced bipartisan legislation on Wednesday to end involuntary facial recognition screening at airports. The pair of senators are aiming to repeal the authorization of the Transportation Security Administration to use facial recognition screening at airports, saying that the Travelers’ Privacy Protection Act would prevent the agency from “further exploiting the technology and storing traveler’s biodata.”
Temporary surveillance extension to ride on defense policy bill
The Record by Recorded Future News
Martin Matishak
US lawmakers are expected to attach a short-term extension of a controversial surveillance tool to this year’s final defense policy bill, a congressional source told Recorded Future News. By hitching a temporary renewal of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, lawmakers hope to give themselves more breathing room to hammer out a bill that would include reforms and restrictions on the surveillance powers.
Nvidia CEO says US will take years to achieve chip independence
Bloomberg
Ian King
Nvidia Corp. Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang, who runs the semiconductor industry’s most valuable company, said the US is as much as 20 years away from breaking its dependence on overseas chipmaking. Huang, speaking at the New York Times’s DealBook conference in New York, explained how his company’s products rely on myriad components that come from different parts of the world — not just Taiwan, where the most important elements are manufactured.
US debates how much to sever electric car industry’s ties to China
The New York Times
Ana Swanson and Jack Ewing
The Biden administration is now finalizing rules that will help determine whether companies like Huntsman will find it profitable enough to participate in America’s electric vehicle industry. The rules, which are expected to be proposed this week, will dictate the extent to which foreign companies, particularly in China, can supply parts and products for American-made vehicles that are set to receive billions of dollars in subsidies.
Senior CIA official posted pro-Palestine image on her Facebook page
The Financial Times
Demetri Sevastopulo and Felicia Schwartz
A top CIA official posted a pro-Palestine image on Facebook two weeks after Hamas attacked Israel, in a rare public political statement by a senior intelligence officer on a war that has sparked dissent within the Biden administration.
North Asia
Cyberattack targets Japan’s space agency
Verdict
Sarah Brady
Japan’s space agency, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, has fallen victim to a cyberattack, though authorities have reassured the public that critical information related to rocket and satellite operations remains secure. The investigation is currently ongoing, with JAXA looking into the full extent of the cyber intrusion. JAXA has assured the public that stringent security measures are in place to mitigate the impact of the cyberattack and prevent any further compromise of sensitive information.
Google warns China is ramping up cyberattacks against Taiwan
Bloomberg
Ryan Gallagher
Google has observed a “massive increase” in Chinese cyberattacks on Taiwan in the last six months or so, said Kate Morgan, a senior engineering manager in Google’s threat analysis division, which monitors government-sponsored hacking campaigns. Morgan warned that Chinese hackers are employing tactics that make their work difficult to track, such as breaking into small home and office internet routers and repurposing them to wage attacks while masking their true origin.
Ukraine - Russia
Russia-linked ransomware group has raked in more than $100 million
Reuters
Raphael Satter
A cyber extortion gang suspected of being an offshoot of the notorious Russian Conti group of hackers has raked in more than $100 million since it emerged last year, researchers said in a report published on Wednesday. Digital currency tracking service Elliptic and Corvus Insurance said in a joint report that the ransom-seeking cybercrime group known as “Black Basta” has extorted at least $107 million in bitcoin, with much of the laundered ransom payments making their way to the sanctioned Russian cryptocurrency exchange Garantex.
Europe
Finland seeks to become metaverse global leader by 2035
Euractiv
Julia Tar
The Finnish government is seeking to become a world leader in the metaverse – or virtual worlds – by 2035, according to its strategy published on Wednesday. While China, Japan, the UK, and the United Arab Emirates have started to work on similar strategies, this is the first national metaverse strategy from an EU member state. “Finland’s geopolitical position between superpowers of the world allows it to balance its interests between different actors and regions and to create mutual trust in other countries”, the document reads.
Africa
Ghana to hold first global conference on cyber capacity building
News Ghana
More than 800 delegates from over 100 countries across the globe are expected to attend the first-ever global conference on cyber capacity building from November 29th to 30th, 2023 in Accra. The two-day event will be held on the theme: “Cyber Resilience for Development”. Dr Antwi-Boasiako stated that the conference was intended to bring together a diverse group of high-level decision-makers and practitioners from governments, international organisations, the private sector, civil society, and academia.
Big Tech
The West is on a world tour against Huawei
POLITICO
Mathieu Pollet and John Hendel
The cheap, reliable networking equipment built by Chinese telecom giants has become a growing flashpoint for Western countries, whose governments worry about both security and an overreliance on Chinese technology. The United States has begun physically rooting out its own Huawei-built infrastructure, a policy called “rip and replace.” In Europe, many countries have blocked and are phasing out the Chinese vendor from 5G networks.
Apple users warned about fake update that steals money, passwords
News.com.au
Ben Cost
Dubbed the “ClearFake” scam, the cybernetic Trojan horse has been targeting Windows systems since July but just recently started targeting Mac users as well, according to a recent Malwarebytes report that confirmed its existence, Bleeping Computer reported. This sinister cyber phishing scheme works by bombarding both phone and MacBook users with counterfeit Chrome updates that appear on compromised sites via JavaScript injections.
Elon Musk’s embrace of Israel unlikely to ease X’s advertiser concerns
The Washington Post
Will Oremus
Just over a year after Musk acquired Twitter, pledging to make it a haven for free speech and subsequently laying off much of its workforce, its advertising business is on the ropes. Reports of spiking hate speech on the platform; Musk’s decision to prioritize the posts of paying subscribers over those of journalists and media outlets; and his own trollish, sometimes incendiary posts have sparked advertiser boycotts, while other brands and influential users backed away. Those include The Washington Post, which said Tuesday that it had paused advertising on X.
Artificial Intelligence
Google DeepMind AI reveals potential for thousands of new materials
Reuters
Martin Coulter
Google DeepMind has used artificial intelligence to predict the structure of more than 2 million new materials, a breakthrough it said could soon be used to improve real-world technologies. In a research paper published in Nature, the Alphabet-owned AI firm said almost 400,000 of its hypothetical material designs could soon be produced in lab conditions. Potential applications for the research include the production of better-performing batteries, solar panels and computer chips.
As AI-controlled killer drones become reality, nations debate limits
The New York Times
Eric Lipton
The United States, China and a handful of other nations are making rapid progress in developing and deploying new technology that has the potential to reshape the nature of warfare by turning life and death decisions over to autonomous drones equipped with artificial intelligence programs. That prospect is so worrying to many other governments that they are trying to focus attention on it with proposals at the United Nations to impose legally binding rules on the use of what militaries call lethal autonomous weapons.
Why won’t OpenAI say what the Q* algorithm is?
The Atlantic
Karen Hao
An OpenAI spokesperson didn’t comment on Q* but told me that the researchers’ concerns did not precipitate the board’s actions. Two people familiar with the project, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of repercussions, confirmed to me that OpenAI has indeed been working on the algorithm and has applied it to math problems. But contrary to the worries of some of their colleagues, they expressed skepticism that this could have been considered a breakthrough awesome enough to provoke existential dread.
Misc
Every Bitcoin payment 'uses a swimming pool of water'
BBC
Chris Vallance
Every Bitcoin transaction uses, on average, enough water to fill “a backyard swimming pool”, a new study suggests. That's around six million times more than is used in a typical credit card swipe, Alex de Vries of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, calculates. The figure is due to the water used to power and cool the millions of computers worldwide Bitcoin relies on. It comes as many regions struggle with fresh water shortages.
Research
Spurring Science: Examining US government grant activity in AI
Center for Security and Emerging Technology
Christian Schoeberl and Hanna Dohmen
This data brief analyses over 200,000 US government grants awarded to industry and academic recipients for artificial intelligence research between January 2017 and May 2023. The authors find that while the majority of federal grants are awarded to academic recipients, industry played an outsized role in US government grant funding of AI research. Moreover, departments within the US Department of Defense appear to prioritize funding industry and AI research relative to other funding agencies.
Events & Podcasts
India’s technology competition with China
Brookings
Pranay Kotasthane, Trisha Ray and Tanvi Madan
When it comes to China, geopolitics and technology are linked in India’s thinking. This has resulted in bans on Chinese social media and gaming apps, restrictions on Chinese investment in India’s tech sector, concerns about telecom networks and semiconductor supply chains, and more. And India’s concerns about Chinese inroads into its tech sector are only growing.
Jobs
(Senior) Analyst /Project Manager: Indo-Pacific Centre for Hybrid Threats
ASPI
ASPI’s Cyber, Technology and Security areas is looking for a (senior) analyst / project manager to lead on designing and developing an appropriate model for an Indo-Pacific Hybrid Threats Centre. The proposed Centre will be a focal point for policy-oriented research, analyses and information on hybrid threats that affect Indo-Pacific nations - with a focus on cyber and technology-related threats.
The Daily Cyber & Tech Digest is brought to you by the Cyber, Technology & Security team at ASPI.