Georgia National Guard will use phone location tracking to recruit high school children | Hikvision review found contracts targeted Uyghurs | Nation-state actors taking advantage of weak passwords
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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 Georgia Army National Guard plans to combine two deeply controversial practices — military recruiting at schools and location-based phone surveillance — to persuade teens to enlist, according to contract documents reviewed by The Intercept. The Intercept
Chinese surveillance giant Hikvision has repeatedly denied reports that the company is complicit in human rights abuses targeting Uyghurs in China's northwestern region of Xinjiang. But new details from an internal review of its contracts with police agencies in the region reveal the company has known since at least 2020 that some of its Xinjiang contracts were a "problem" because they included language about targeting Uyghurs as a group, according to a recording of a recent private company meeting obtained by technology trade publication IPVM and exclusively shared with Axios. Axios
Weak passwords and other comprises of user identity continue to drive security incidents for Google Cloud customers, with weak passwords accounting for nearly half of the incidents affecting its clients, according to a report released by the company Thursday and first shared with CyberScoop. CyberScoop
Australia
Australian insurers warn against outright ransomware payment ban
iTnews
Ry Crozier
The Insurance Council of Australia has warned the government to tread carefully in its contemplation of an outright ban on paying ransoms and extortion demands in data breach incidents.
Australia's IPH reveals data breach originated from member firm's systems
Reuters
Jaskiran Singh
Australia's IPH said on Monday a forensic probe into the data breach last month revealed that a limited set of data, which originated from member firm Spruson & Ferguson, was downloaded by an unauthorised third-party.
China
Hikvision internal review found contracts targeted Uyghurs
Axios
Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian and Ina Fried
Chinese surveillance giant Hikvision has repeatedly denied reports that the company is complicit in human rights abuses targeting Uyghurs in China's northwestern region of Xinjiang. But new details from an internal review of its contracts with police agencies in the region reveal the company has known since at least 2020 that some of its Xinjiang contracts were a "problem" because they included language about targeting Uyghurs as a group, according to a recording of a recent private company meeting obtained by technology trade publication IPVM and exclusively shared with Axios.
Discord leak suggests China doesn’t need TikTok to find U.S. secrets
The Washington Post
Will Oremus
The Discord document dump is the latest in a colorful 21st-century tradition of secrets spilled online, from WikiLeaks’ earliest uploads to Russian operatives’ hack of the Democratic National Committee. At a time when swaths of the U.S. government are fixated on Chinese spycraft, it serves as a reminder that information leaks in the internet age can come from just about anywhere — a risk the U.S. government has generally accepted as a price of free speech, said Anumpam Chander, a law professor at Georgetown University and an expert on technology regulations.
Why China's chip industry still has power despite export curbs
Nikkei Asia
Mo Yelin, Dy Zhihang, Liu Peilin and Qian Tong
Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang warned Japan, "Do not do unto others what you don't want done unto you" after Tokyo decided to curb exports of semiconductor gear, joining a U.S.-led pact to limit access for Chinese companies to cutting-edge chip technology.
The green energy factory facing a storm of China backlash
The Wall Street Journal
Phred Dvorak
Chinese clean-energy manufacturers were enticed by huge green subsidies to expand in the U.S. Now, they are confronting a storm of anti-China sentiment. Projects across the country involving Chinese companies face resistance, including a $3.5 billion battery factory Ford Motor Co. is setting up with the help of Chinese battery company Contemporary Amperex Technology Co.
USA
F.B.I. arrests two on charges tied to Chinese police outpost in New York
The New York Times
William K. Rashbaum and Karen Zraick
Two men were arrested on Monday and charged with conspiring to act as agents of the Chinese government in connection with a secret police outpost they operated in Manhattan’s Chinatown, federal officials announced.
U.S. arrests two, charges dozen for alleged illegal U.S. activities by Chinese security agents
The Wall Street Journal
James Fanelli, James T. Areddy and Aruna Viswanatha
More than 40 Chinese security officers and their associates wielded thousands of fake social-media personas to discredit American policies and set up a secret police station in New York City to harass China’s critics, U.S. prosecutors charged in three complaints unveiled Monday.40 officers of China’s national police charged in transnational repression schemes targeting U.S. residents
The United States Department of Justice
Office of Public Affairs
Two criminal complaints filed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York were unsealed today in federal court in Brooklyn charging 44 defendants with various crimes related to efforts by the national police of the People’s Republic of China – the Ministry of Public Security – to harass Chinese nationals residing in the New York metropolitan area and elsewhere in the United States.
The critical minerals club
Foreign Policy
Christina Lu
U.S. lawmakers are scrambling to weaken China’s grip on the critical mineral supply chains that are key to the global energy transition, as escalating tensions stoke fears of strategic vulnerabilities and potential geopolitical disruptions.
The US is pouring money into surveillance tech at the southern border
Center for Strategic and Emerging Technology
Tate Ryan-Mosley
Late last year, the agency responsible for policing the border, US Customs and Border Protection, began asking for proposals for a $200 million upgrade and expansion of a network of surveillance towers that pepper a trail from San Diego, California, to near Port Isabel, Florida. CBP claims that these towers help agents monitor border crossings, intercept human trafficking and drug smuggling, and provide an essential service in a time of crisis, and the program has cost over a billion dollars since 2005.
Americas
Trudeau, rival clash over Twitter labeling CBC 'government funded'
Reuters
Steve Scherer
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Monday accused Conservative rival Pierre Poilievre of enlisting U.S. billionaires to attack Canada's public broadcaster, after Poilievre prodded Twitter owner Elon Musk to label the CBC "government-funded."
South & Central Asia
US tech giants warn India’s fact-checking rule will ‘profoundly infringe’ on press freedom
TechCrunch
Manish Singh
The Asia Internet Coalition, an influential industry organization representing technology giants such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, Apple, and Amazon, has voiced concerns over a recent amendment to India’s IT rules, saying the changes grant the local government expansive content removal authority without implementing adequate procedural safeguards.
Ukraine - Russia
China smartphone sales rise to more than 70% of Russian market
Reuters
Alexander Marrow
Chinese smartphones made up more than 70% of the Russian market in the first quarter of 2023, consumer electronics retailer M.Video-Eldorado said, up from around 50% last year. China's smartphone surge comes after Samsung and Apple both curtailed sales in Russia over the conflict in Ukraine, with Chinese manufacturers Xiaomi and Realme now occupying the market's top two spots.
Russians boasted that just 1% of fake social profiles are caught, leak shows
The Washington Post
Joseph Menn
The Russian government has become far more successful at manipulating social media and search engine rankings than previously known, boosting lies about Ukraine’s military and the side effects of vaccines with hundreds of thousands of fake online accounts, according to documents recently leaked on the chat app Discord.
Europe
Georgia National Guard will use phone location tracking to recruit high school children
The Intercept
Sam Biddle
The Georgia Army National Guard plans to combine two deeply controversial practices — military recruiting at schools and location-based phone surveillance — to persuade teens to enlist, according to contract documents reviewed by The Intercept.
China ‘greatest threat’ to Dutch economic security, Dutch intelligence says
Reuters
Anthony Deutsch and Toby Sterlin
China is the greatest threat to Dutch economic security, the Netherlands' intelligence service said on Monday in an annual assessment of threats it said included commercial espionage and covert investments. While the Netherlands regards China as a major trading partner, its military ambitions are driving attempts to obtain Dutch and Western technologies, the agency known by its acronym AIVD, said in its 2022 annual report.
Dutch intel agency paints grim picture of multiple threats
Associated Press
Mike Corder
The Dutch national intelligence agency painted a grim picture Monday of a growing number of internal and external threats to the rule of law in the Netherlands compounded by Russia’s war in Ukraine, international cyberattacks and espionage.
ChatGPT and advanced AI face new regulatory push in Europe
The Wall Street Journal
Sam Schechner
European Union lawmakers want to give regulators new powers to govern the development of technologies like those behind ChatGPT, the biggest push so far in the West to curb one of the hottest areas in artificial intelligence.
UK
Capita investigates authenticity of ransomware gang leaks
The Record by Recorded Future
Alexander Martin
Capita, the United Kingdom’s largest outsourcing company, said on Monday that it has not yet been able to confirm whether data released by a ransomware group was in fact stolen from the company.
Bank of England says may need limits on using stablecoins for payments
Reuters
Huw Jones
There may need to be limits initially on the use of major stablecoins for payments, and they should also be backed by high quality and liquid assets to protect consumers, Bank of England Deputy Governor Jon Cunliffe said on Monday.
Africa
In Nigeria, government and local VCs are helping startups weather the tech downturn
Rest of World
Temitayo Lawal
As startup ecosystems across the world reel from a funding crunch, in Nigeria — the leader in startup funding among all African nations in 2022 — the government and local investors have stepped in to offer the support the fledgling industry needs.
Big Tech
Nation-state actors are taking advantage of weak passwords to go after cloud customers, Google says
CyberScoop
Tonya Riley
Weak passwords and other comprises of user identity continue to drive security incidents for Google Cloud customers, with weak passwords accounting for nearly half of the incidents affecting its clients, according to a report released by the company Thursday and first shared with CyberScoop.
Twitter suspends user for sharing Washington Post story about Pentagon docs leaker
Techdirt
Mike Masnick
You’ve likely heard about recent leaks of Pentagon documents that were first leaked via a Discord server. On Wednesday, the Washington Post’s Shane Harris and Samuel Oakford broke quite a story about where the documents came from, discussing the small, private Discord group, and the guy who operated it. Twitter now appears to be permanently suspending at least some accounts that have shared the Washington Post story.
Artificial Intelligence
Competition authorities need to move fast and break up AI
Financial Times
Sarah Myers West
At present, Big Tech companies such as Microsoft, Google and Amazon are positioned to strengthen their foothold on the digital economy, consolidating their power by dominating both the commercial AI industry and the horizon for future AI research. Without the robust enforcement of competition laws, generative AI could irreversibly cement Big Tech’s advantage, giving a handful of companies power over technology that mediates much of our lives.
ChatGPT's AI to power Chegg study buddy as educators wrestle with tech
Reuters
Jeffrey Dastin
The artificial intelligence behind ChatGPT, the homework-drafting chatbot that some schools have banned, is coming to more students via the company Chegg Inc. The U.S. educational software maker has combined its corpus of quiz answers with the chatbot’s AI model known as GPT-4 to create CheggMate, a study aide tailored to students.
Sony World Photography Award 2023: Winner refuses award after revealing AI creation
BBC
Paul Glynn
The winner of a major photography award has refused his prize after revealing his work was in fact an AI creation. German artist Boris Eldagsen's entry, entitled Pseudomnesia: The Electrician, won the creative open category at last week's Sony World Photography Award.
Misc
Satellites threaten astronomy, but a few scientists see an opportunity
The New York Times
Lyndie Chiou
Each night, the stars of the sky compete with thousands of satellites. The number of intruders is only growing as constellations of satellites proliferate, with companies planning to launch orbiters by the tens of thousands to transmit internet and other communications signals back to Earth. Among them are SpaceX, which has already launched thousands of Starlink satellites, and Amazon, which plans to begin its Project Kuiper constellation later this year. For astronomers studying the universe from the surface of our world, this is a mounting problem.
Research
An overview of global cloud competition
Center for Strategic and International Studies
James Andrew Lewis
The United States made an immense effort, with some success, to dissuade countries from using Chinese suppliers for their 5G infrastructure. This success will be of limited value if Huawei and other Chinese companies become the main suppliers of cloud infrastructure and services.
Jobs
ICPC Senior Analyst or Analyst - China
ASPI ICPC
ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre (ICPC) has a unique opportunity for exceptional and experienced China-focused senior analysts or analysts to join its centre. This role will focus on original research and analysis centred around the (growing) range of topics which our ICPC China team work on. Our China team produces some of the most impactful and well-read policy-relevant research in the world, with our experts often being called upon by politicians, governments, corporates and civil society actors to provide briefings and advice.
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