Microsoft discovers state-backed Russian hackers accessed emails | Judge in India prevented Americans from seeing a blockbuster report | OpenAI bans bot developer for presidential election deepfake
Good morning. It's Monday 22nd January.
The Daily Cyber & Tech Digest focuses on the topics we work on, including cybersecurity, critical technologies, foreign interference & disinformation.
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State-backed Russian hackers broke into Microsoft's corporate email system and accessed the accounts of some of its leadership team, as well as some employees on its cybersecurity and legal teams. ABC News
Two months ago, the news agency Reuters published an eye-opening cybersecurity investigation bylined by Washington-based reporters and full of news of interest to Americans. But Americans aren’t allowed to read the story anymore — by order of a court in India. POLITICO
The artificial intelligence company OpenAI banned the developer of a bot mimicking long shot Democratic presidential hopeful Rep. Dean Phillips — the first action that the maker of ChatGPT has taken in response to what it sees as a misuse of its AI tools in a political campaign. The Washington Post
ASPI
Questions over Queensland security camera deal with Chinese company
Townsville Bulletin
James Hall
Samantha Hoffman, a senior analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, said access to the security cameras could provide direct access for the Chinese government to track political dissidents who have fled the authoritarian state while also handing over crucial data about the transport network.
World
Military-technological cooperation across the Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific
War on the Rocks
Daniel Fiott
Despite the promise of AUKUS, the program faces critical questions. The three allies already face political challenges to allow for the transfer and sharing of technology between allies. The benefits of and obstacles facing AUKUS could set an example for technological cooperation between the Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific regions. This endeavor is important because deeper technological and industrial cooperation has the benefit of strengthening and interlinking alliance structures in both regions.
Generative AI regulation dominates the conversation at Davos
Nikkei Asia
Juliette Perreard
Artificial intelligence, and how to regulate it, was overheard in more circles than ever before at this year's annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, known to host hundreds of discussions and speeches on wide-ranging topics, from diplomacy to environment to the latest technologies.
Australia
AI is producing ‘fake’ Indigenous art trained on real artists’ work without permission
Crikey
Cam Wilson
Indigenous artists in Australia say their work is being stolen and turned into another threat to their livelihoods and cultures while they are already struggling to compete with the tens of millions of dollars worth of fake art produced every year by non-Indigenous artists. Among the many jobs affected by the rapid development in generative AI, few have been as directly and immediately affected as visual arts workers. Usually trained on data scraped from the internet without permission, publicly available text-to-image generators let anyone produce instantaneously new images with just a few words.
China
Chinese scientists say they slowed down light to improve microchips
South China Morning Post
Zhang Tong
Chinese scientists say they have found a new way to make light travel on a microchip that makes it over 10,000 times slower. That could improve the performance of these microchips – known as photonic chips – and their applications in light sensing, communications and computing.
USA
State's cyber bureau has ‘raised the U.S. profile on cyber globally,’ watchdog says
Nextgov/FCW
Edward Graham
The watchdog found that CDP’s establishment in April 2022 “helped to better position State to achieve its cyber diplomacy goals” by consolidating its digital efforts within one centralized component led by an ambassador at-large, rather than spreading them out across the department.
DHS raids Chinese car parts maker's U.S. headquarters
Axios
Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian
The Department of Homeland Security executed a search warrant last week at the Ohio-based U.S. subsidiary of Qingdao Sunsong, a Chinese automobile parts manufacturer that a congressional committee has accused of trade fraud.
North Asia
Japan is now the 5th country to land on the Moon – the technology used will lend itself to future lunar missions
The Conversation
Mariel Borowitz
Japan landed its Smart Lander for Investigating the Moon, or SLIM, craft on the surface of the Moon on Jan. 20, 2024. Despite a power issue with the lander, the event holds both political and technical importance. It’s Japan’s first lunar landing – making it only the fifth country in the world to successfully land on the Moon. This is a significant achievement and solidifies Japan’s position as a leader in space technology.
Southeast Asia
Preparing for cyber D-Day in China invasion scenarios
Taipei Times
Dene-Hern Chen and Amber Wang
Taiwan’s security planners run simulated worst-case scenarios constantly to prepare for the day Beijing decides to try and take over. If China does invade, officials and cybersecurity experts say it will not limit its assaults to security forces and defense infrastructure, but effectively disconnect Taiwan from the world.
Confronting digital authoritarianism through digital democracy: Lessons from Taiwan
The Diplomat
Michael Caster
China has a history of foreign information manipulation and influence operations targeting Taiwan, from economic to political and diplomatic pressure, to cyber and cognitive warfare, and increasingly sophisticated disinformation operations. In fact, the most recent dataset from the Varieties of Democracy and Digital Society Project tracking foreign government manipulation of social media and disinformation among 202 countries from 2000-2021 showed Taiwan as the country most targeted globally by foreign disinformation operations. Rather than succumb to malicious foreign manipulation and influence, Taiwan has sought to “promote co-creation from tensions and conflicts,” in the words of Digital Minister Audrey Tang, through a whole of society approach to digital democracy. Read ASPI’s article here:
As Taiwan voted, Beijing spammed AI avatars, faked paternity tests and ‘leaked’ documents
ASPI
Albert Zhang
ASPI has identified multiple attempts by the Chinese Communist Party to manipulate Taiwanese voters by spreading disinformation and propaganda across social media. These influence operations primarily sought to undermine Democratic Progressive Party presidential and legislative candidates. We assess they likely had a minimal impact on the integrity of the election results due to the resilience of Taiwan’s civil society.
AFP’s first woman spox: Cyber expert with presidential security experience
Rappler
Bea Cupin
Padilla, a military officer with a career spanning nearly three decades, is the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP)’s new spokesperson – the first woman to hold the post in over 88 years of its existence.
South & Central Asia
How a judge in India prevented Americans from seeing a blockbuster report
POLITICO
Michael Shaffer
Two months ago, the news agency Reuters published an eye-opening cybersecurity investigation bylined by Washington-based reporters and full of news of interest to Americans. But Americans aren’t allowed to read the story anymore — by order of a court in India. It’s a disturbing turn of events that couldn’t have happened in the pre-internet era, when publishing — and censorship — were largely local affairs.
Ukraine - Russia
Telegram and WhatsApp down amid protests in remote Russian region
The Record by Recorded Future
Daryna Antoniuk
Popular messaging apps are facing disruptions this week in a remote Russian region where hundreds of people have taken to the streets to protest against the sentencing of a local activist. Access to the cellular and internet network of one of the country’s biggest telecom providers was also limited.
Europe
Fake YouTube channels: when “Sophie decrypts” or “360 Vision” work for a pro-China influence network
Le Monde
Damien Leloup and Florian Reynaud
These channels, linked to an online propaganda operation called “Shadow Play”, sing the praises of China's economy and industry, sometimes in an almost parodic manner.
ASPI
Jacinta Keast
ASPI has recently observed a coordinated inauthentic influence campaign originating on YouTube that’s promoting pro-China and anti-US narratives in an apparent effort to shift English-speaking audiences’ views of those countries’ roles in international politics, the global economy and strategic technology competition. This new campaign (which ASPI has named ‘Shadow Play’) has attracted an unusually large audience and is using entities and voice overs generated by artificial intelligence (AI) as a tactic that enables broad reach and scale. For a summary on The Strategist, click here.
The Vatican’s top expert on AI ethics is a friar from a medieval Franciscan order
Los Angeles Times
Frances D'Emilio
Benanti is the Vatican’s go-to person on the technology and he has the ear of Pope Francis as well as some of Silicon Valley’s top engineers and executives. With a background in engineering, a doctorate in moral theology and a passion for what he calls the “ethics of technology,’’ the 50-year-old Italian priest is on an urgent mission that he shares with Francis, who, in his annual peace message for 2024, pushed for an international treaty to ensure the ethical use of AI technology.
UK
Hologram lecturers thrill students at trailblazing UK university
The Guardian
Rachel Hall
Any university lecturer will tell you that luring students to a morning lecture is an uphill struggle. But even the most hungover fresher would surely be enticed by a physics lesson from Albert Einstein or a design masterclass from Coco Chanel. This could soon be the reality for British students, as some universities start to beam in guest lecturers from around the globe using the same holographic technology that is used to bring dead or retired singers back to the stage.
Big Tech
Microsoft discovers state-backed Russian hackers accessed emails of some senior employees
ABC News
Wires/ABC
State-backed Russian hackers broke into Microsoft's corporate email system and accessed the accounts of some of its leadership team, as well as some employees on its cybersecurity and legal teams, the company said on Friday. In a blog post, Microsoft said the intrusion began in late November 2023 and was discovered on January 12. It said the same highly skilled Russian hacking team behind the 2020 SolarWinds breach was responsible.
Microsoft actions following attack by nation state actor Midnight Blizzard
Microsoft
MSRC
"The Microsoft security team detected a nation-state attack on our corporate systems on January 12, 2024, and immediately activated our response process to investigate, disrupt malicious activity, mitigate the attack, and deny the threat actor further access. Microsoft has identified the threat actor as Midnight Blizzard, the Russian state-sponsored actor also known as Nobelium."
BreachForums hacking forum admin sentenced to 20 years supervised release
Bleeping Computer
Lawrence Abrams
Conor Brian Fitzpatrick was sentenced to 20 years of supervised release today in the Eastern District of Virginia for operating the notorious BreachForums hacking forum, known for the sale and leaking of personal data for hundreds of millions of people worldwide. Fitzpatrick was charged in March 2023 for his involvement in the theft and sale of sensitive personal information belonging to "millions of U.S. citizens and hundreds of U.S. and foreign companies, organizations, and government agencies" on the Breached cybercrime forum.
Google is tracking you even in Incognito Mode, new disclaimer is up
ABP News
ABP News Bureau
Google has finally admitted that it tracks your search history, activities, the websites you visit and the services they use even in Incognito mode. Following the search engine's agreement to settle a $5 billion USD privacy lawsuit that accused it of tracking users illegally in incognito mode, it has now updated the disclaimer to reflect the transparency. In its Canary version (Early-access version which allows users and developers to test new features and updates before they are rolled out for everyone), Google now states that data will still be collected even in Incognito mode.
Google is getting worse as it loses its fight against search engine spam
Business Insider
Lakshmi Varanasi
These days, search engine results are filled with spam content, according to a new paper from a team of researchers in Germany. And it's making it harder for people to access helpful information online — the core function of the internet. Their baseline finding was that search engines have "significant problems" with affiliate links — paid-for links that refer a customer to a seller. While the number of product reviews online that contain affiliate links isn't huge, the researchers said these reviews are overrepresented in search engine results.
5G holds great promise for industry, but challenges remain
Forbes
Steve Banker
5G promises high bandwidth, low latency, and massive IoT device connectivity. For industry, the ability to better connect machines, objects, and devices is what is driving excitement for this technology. Patrick Arnold, a research analyst at ARC Advisory Group, says that suppliers of industrial solutions are responding by investing in new product design and incorporating 5G into their portfolios.
Artificial Intelligence
OpenAI suspends bot developer for presidential hopeful Dean Phillips
The Washington Post
Elizabeth Dwoskin
The artificial intelligence company OpenAI banned the developer of a bot mimicking long shot Democratic presidential hopeful Rep. Dean Phillips — the first action that the maker of ChatGPT has taken in response to what it sees as a misuse of its AI tools in a political campaign.
From cartoon lions to channelling dead dictators, here's how artificial intelligence is being used in elections around the world
ABC News
Amber Jacobs and Will Jackson
Divyendra Singh Jadoun, an artificial intelligence (AI) expert based Rajasthan in northern India, gets asked to do two kinds of jobs for political campaigns. "One is to enhance the image of their existing politician that they are endorsing," he told the ABC, "and the second one is to harm the image of the opponent party." Mr Jadoun mostly uses AI tools to translate and dub content, something that's crucial in a country as linguistically diverse as India. But recently, he has had to turn down some more controversial requests.
Nightshade, the free tool that ‘poisons’ AI models, is now available for artists to use
VentureBeat
Carl Franzen
Months after it was first announced, Nightshade, a new, free software tool allowing artists to “poison” AI models seeking to train on their works, is now available for artists to download and use on any artworks they see fit. Developed by computer scientists on the Glaze Project at the University of Chicago under Professor Ben Zhao, the tool essentially works by turning AI against AI. It makes use of the popular open-source machine learning framework PyTorch to identify what’s in a given image, then applies a tag that subtly alters the image at the pixel level so other AI programs see something totally different than what’s actually there.
Misc
Cryptographers just got closer to enabling fully private internet searches
WIRED
Madison Goldberg
Three researchers have crafted a long-sought version of private information retrieval and extended it to build a more general privacy strategy. The work, which received a Best Paper Award in June 2023 at the annual Symposium on Theory of Computing, topples a major theoretical barrier on the way to a truly private search. “[This is] something in cryptography that I guess we all wanted but didn’t quite believe that it exists,” said Vinod Vaikuntanathan, a cryptographer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was not involved in the paper. “It is a landmark result.”
Jobs
Cyber, Technology & Security Program Coordinator
ASPI CTS
The Coordinator will coordinate CTS’s business processes, projects, stakeholder engagement and events schedule. The Coordinator will work closely with Director CTS, senior ASPI staff, other ASPI Programs and Corporate, Strategic Communications and Finance areas. The ideal candidate has 1-3 years’ experience in executive assistance, business coordination or events management roles.
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