NEW ASPI REPORT: Scamland Myanmar | Beijing push for AI integration | Australia threatens to fine deepfake websites
Plus, Sextortion with a twist
Good morning. It's Tuesday, 9th of September.
The Daily Cyber & Tech Digest focuses on the topics we work on, including cybersecurity, critical technologies, foreign interference & disinformation.
Follow us on Bluesky, on LinkedIn, and on X.
The scam centres have been thoroughly integrated into Myanmar’s conflict economy, and the ruling Burmese junta permits and facilitates scam projects to enrich military allies. Thus, instead of just one actor orchestrating those scams, a multitude of actors are involved, particularly non-state groups allied with the Burmese junta, along with the mainly Chinese criminal syndicates that directly run the facilities. ASPI
Beijing published a road map to accelerate the integration of AI across China’s economy and society, an initiative known as “AI Plus”. The country wants adoption of AI agents and intelligent devices to exceed 70 per cent by 2027, and 90 per cent by 2030. As AI use rises in China, questions arise about what this will mean for an already weak job market. The Straits Times
Australia’s eSafety Commissioner has written to a UK-based business, demanding it stop letting users create child exploitation material. The commission has issued a formal warning, the first step towards fining the operator, and penalties could be as high as $49.5 million. The Nightly
ASPI
Scamland Myanmar: how conflict and crime syndicates built a global fraud industry
ASPI
Nathan Ruser
In the Indo-Pacific, Myanmar is emerging as a haven for transnational organised crime outfits. This industry has now grown to such a scale that it poses a significant international threat to countries well beyond the footprint of other elements of the Burmese crisis. Transnational organised crime syndicates now operate and construct large and complex scam centres (Kyar Phyant) and are actively involved in fraud-based scamming, money laundering and human trafficking. Those activities result in substantial costs, not only for the individuals trafficked and those scammed, but also for the social and economic development of the region.
Revealed: the huge growth of Myanmar scam centres that may hold 100,000 trafficked people. The Guardian
Cyberfraud epicentre: Myanmar scam centres are a global cyber and humanitarian threat. The Strategist
🚀 We’re rebuilding 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 first to get early-access invites and launch updates: https://unitracker.aspi.org.au/
World
Undersea cables cut in the Red Sea, disrupting internet access in Asia and the Mideast
Associated Press
Jon Gambrell
Undersea cable cuts in the Red Sea disrupted internet access in parts of Asia and the Middle East, experts said, though it wasn’t immediately clear what caused the incident. There has been concern about the cables being targeted in a Red Sea campaign by Yemen’s Houthi rebels, which the rebels describe as an effort to pressure Israel to end its war on Hamas in the Gaza Strip. But the Houthis have denied attacking the lines in the past. Microsoft announced via a status website that the Mideast “may experience increased latency due to undersea fiber cuts in the Red Sea.” NetBlocks, which monitors internet access, said “a series of subsea cable outages in the Red Sea has degraded internet connectivity in multiple countries,” which it said included India and Pakistan.
Australia
Exploitative AI websites targeting Aussie kids could face $49m fine amid surge in deepfake abuse cases
The Nightly
Zac de Silva
A company that lets users create nude images of Australian kids could be fined millions of dollars if it doesn’t clean up its act. Australia’s eSafety Commissioner has written to a UK-based business, demanding it stop letting users create child exploitation material. The commissioner says around 100,000 Australians are accessing the operator’s two websites every month. The pages are some of the world’s most-visited AI nude image generators, allowing users to create naked pictures based on images of real people.
Aussie VCs back cocaine-busting defence tech’s $21 million raise
The Australian Financial Review
Yolanda Redrup
Local venture capital funds OIF Ventures and King River Capital have backed a $NZ23 million funding round by a tech start-up that uses artificial intelligence to analyse shipping data to detect illegal activity ranging from drug-trafficking to espionage. The New Zealand-based company, Starboard Maritime Intelligence, is valued at $NZ53 million on the back of the fresh capital raising, which also included Auckland-based firm Altered Capital as a lead investor. The business started out as a not-for-profit research institute in New Zealand in 2017. The company built models that helped the government identify and prioritise vessels for boarding.
Teach habits, not headlines: beating social engineering in Australia
The Strategist
Stacey Edmonds
Criminal enterprises thrive on social engineering, coercion and weak controls. Cyber-scam compounds in Myanmar and Cambodia show the global scale of the problem: trafficked workers are forced to engineer trust at scale using romance pitches, fake investments and urgent pleas, while victims worldwide are nudged into irreversible digital payments. As well as posing a law-enforcement challenge offshore, scams present a national safety issue at home. Australians often learn about scams from headlines yet aren’t aware of the habits that can keep them safe. Australia’s cyber problem is not only technical; it’s behavioural.
China
‘Why wouldn’t people use it?’: More Chinese firms embrace AI as Beijing pushes for wider adoption
The Straits Times
Joyce Lim
Some 53 per cent of 226 Chinese companies say they are integrating AI across multiple workflows – 11 percentage points higher than the global average, according to a May 2025 survey by consulting firm Accenture. Still, the government has loftier goals. It released in late August a road map to accelerate the integration of AI across China’s economy and society, an initiative known as “AI Plus”. It wants the adoption of AI agents and intelligent devices to exceed 70 per cent by 2027, and 90 per cent by 2030. More advanced than chatbots, AI agents can automate complex tasks and take actions to achieve goals with minimal human supervision.
China pharma deals threaten U.S. biotech
Axios
Tina Reed
A surge of recent licensing deals for Chinese drugs is sending new signals that the US could be toppled as the world's biotech leader. A decade-long national strategy to develop its biopharmaceutical industry has left China in a position to deliver medical products faster and cheaper. It's part of a global power shift that's seen China emerge as a powerhouse in AI, chemistry and other areas, Andrei Iancu, undersecretary of commerce for intellectual property in the first Trump administration, told Axios. China-sourced antibodies, heart treatments and other drug candidates will make up almost 40% of all licensing deals this year, up from less than 3% five years ago, according to Evaluate Pharma.
How China’s military surged ahead in tech by firing up competition among suppliers
South China Morning Post
Amber Wang
The futuristic drones, intercontinental missiles and laser and microwave systems that rolled through central Beijing last week reflect not only the intensity of China’s military modernisation drive but also advances in the research and manufacturing ecosystem that has sprung up to develop it. At least five nuclear-capable missile types made their debut during the military parade – three can reportedly reach the continental US; one is a submarine-launched ballistic missile; and the fifth is a long-range air-launched ballistic missile.
China's e-commerce companies are getting singed by a price war
Reuters
Casey Hall
The bitter battle among China's major online companies to win the "instant retail" war is expected to further depress their short- to medium-term profits and contribute to deflationary pressures in the world's second-largest economy. The likes of Alibaba, Meituan and JD.com have been flooding consumers with discounts and coupons to gain market share in the booming one-hour delivery segment, burning their cash in the process, eating into margins, and raising questions from investors on strategy. They have also drawn increased scrutiny from regulators who are worried about a downward price spiral in China, where weak property prices and poor job stability have contributed to persistent consumer malaise.
USA
Walling off China
The Wire China
Noah Berman and Eliot Chen
Under President Donald Trump, a strategy built over two administrations to keep China behind in the AI race is adrift. Through interviews with more than two dozen former and current U.S. officials, The Wire China explores the genesis — and unwinding — of Washington’s export controls on computer chips. Some officials argue that Trump’s shock deals with Nvidia and AMD were not a deliberate reversal of U.S. strategy, but rather reflect an internal vacuum that has left China tech policy at the whim of the president. Key bodies that previously drove export control policy, including the National Security Council, have been gutted, depriving the administration of much technical expertise.
US weighs annual China chip supply approvals for Samsung, Hynix
Bloomberg
Mackenzie Hawkins
The US is proposing annual approvals for exports of chipmaking supplies to Samsung and SK Hynix factories in China, a compromise aimed at preventing disruptions to the global electronics industry after Trump officials revoked Biden-era waivers that let the companies more easily get such shipments. Officials in the US Commerce Department last week presented to Korean counterparts a “site license” idea to supplant indefinite authorizations the chipmakers secured under the previous administration, according to people familiar with the matter. Those so-called validated end user designations are set to expire at the end of this year.
The spectacular comeback tour of a crypto convict
The New York Times
Ryan Mac and David Yaffe-Bellany
Ross Ulbricht, who created the Silk Road dark web marketplace and was serving a life sentence for drug distribution, has embarked on a strange and unexpected comeback after President Trump pardoned him in January. Now Mr. Ulbricht has embarked on a strange and unexpected afterlife. His comeback is the type of surreal spectacle that has defined the Trump era, where rap sheets are no barrier to reinvention. And he has come to embody the growing bond between Mr. Trump and the crypto world, a once-lawless industry that now wields astonishing influence in Washington.
Americas
Indigenous group in Brazil takes TikTok to court over planned data center
Rest of World
Lais Martins
In late August, an Indigenous group in the Brazilian state of Ceará, in the country’s northeast, brought a formal complaint before federal authorities, asking them to halt the development of a TikTok data center they said was being built on their land. TikTok is investing in a $10 billion data center in Brazil’s northeast. Indigenous people who claim the allocated land say they were not consulted on the project. Brazil aims to attract big tech companies to transform into a global data center hub.
North Asia
Germany debuts at SEMICON Taiwan for stronger chip ties with Taipei
Focus Taiwan
Lin Shang-ying and Evelyn Kao
Germany will establish its first ever national pavilion at SEMICON Taiwan, when the event starts on Wednesday in Taipei, with the country looking to raise its profile and strengthen semiconductor ties with Taiwan as global chip demand accelerates. Martin Mayer, a semiconductor investment expert at Germany Trade & Invest, an economic development agency of the Federal Republic of Germany, told CNA before departing for Taipei over the weekend that Taiwan is seen as a crucial partner in developing Germany's semiconductor ecosystem.
Could Taiwan’s new ‘high-low’ attack drone strategy counter mainland China’s arsenal?
South China Morning Post
Lawrence Chung
Taiwan is moving swiftly to expand its long-range strike abilities with a new class of low-cost UAVs. This comes as military planners seek affordable alternatives to expensive cruise missiles and Washington deepens cooperation with Taipei on drones and emerging technologies. At the centre of the island’s latest effort is its top weapons developer, the National Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology, which has partnered with US defence company Kratos to convert its jet-powered MQM-178 Firejet target drone into a long-range loitering munition dubbed the Chien Feng IV.
South & Central Asia
TikToker Sana Yousaf's murder highlights deadly risks for Pakistan's female influencers
ABC News
Meghna Bali, Som Patidar and Bhat Burhan
Sana was a popular influencer originally from Chitral, in northern Pakistan. She had half a million Instagram followers before her death; her TikTok account has since surged to more than a million. Sana's murder has shocked Pakistan, but she is not the only woman who has been killed for her social media use. Activists say the killings are part of a larger pattern of violence against women in Pakistan. After Sana's killing, the Digital Rights Foundation analysed online comments and found many users glorified her murderer and framed her death as an inevitable consequence of her being online. The DRF called it "gendered disinformation" — a narrative that shifts blame from perpetrators to victims by portraying women's visibility as immoral.
Nepal bans 26 social media platforms, including Facebook and YouTube
The New York Times
Bhadra Sharma
Nepal’s government has banned dozens of social media platforms after they failed to comply with new registration requirements, disrupting essential communication and raising concerns over free speech. The 26 blocked platforms include messaging apps like WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram and WeChat, as well as websites like YouTube and LinkedIn. It has ignited fears about how it could affect press freedom and the tourism industry, and particularly about how families can continue to communicate with relatives working abroad as migrant laborers. About 7.5 percent of Nepal’s 29 million population was living abroad in 2021, according to census figures cited by the Nepal Economic Forum.
Ukraine – Russia
Russia’s ‘spook in your pocket’: The Kremlin rolls out a messaging app
POLITICO
Eva Hartog
As Russian troops grind into eastern Ukraine, the Kremlin is advancing on another front in its battle for total control. This time, the target is its own population. Taking a page from the Chinese playbook, Moscow is pushing its citizens to use a messaging app that gives the government access to user data, while isolating them from the rest of the internet. The app, called Max, has drawn comparisons to China’s WeChat for its lack of end-to-end encryption and a privacy policy that allows authorities to access personal information such as chat logs, contacts, photos and location data.
Europe
Europe’s defence tech start-ups attract investment surge
Financial Times
Tim Bradshaw, Sylvia Pfeifer and Clara Murray
Investment in Europe’s booming defence technology start-ups has surged since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, as venture capital firms abandon earlier caution and pile in to military businesses. Companies in the sector have raised €2.4bn since the start of 2022 including €1.4bn in the first seven months of this year alone, up from just €30mn in 2020 and €150mn in 2021. The figures are the latest evidence of the strength of investor appetite for the wave of new companies developing everything from unmanned mini-submarines and autonomous drones to “bio-robotic” cockroaches.
China's BYD to start Hungary EV plant by end-2025, executive says
Reuters
Nick Carey
China’s BYD will start production at its new electric-vehicle plant in Hungary by the end of 2025, an executive said. "This shows we are in Europe to stay," BYD's Executive Vice President Stella Li said during a press event at the Munich car show. The first model off the line will be the Dolphin Surf compact electric car. In July BYD was considering delaying mass production in Hungary until 2026 and operating the plant below capacity for at least the first two years.
Uber, China’s Momenta to start testing robotaxi services in Munich
The Wall Street Journal
Jiahui Huang
Ride-hailing company Uber Technologies and Chinese autonomous driving company Momenta are collaborating to test autonomous vehicles in Germany next year. The companies said in a joint statement that Momenta’s advanced autonomous driving technology will be integrated with Uber’s global platform to provide robotaxi services. The partnership will start testing in Munich next year with the goal of expanding to other European cities. The ride-hailing app has partnered with Chinese robotaxi companies WeRide and Pony AI in the Middle East.
UK
MoD puts £182m towards ‘cyber sixth forms’ to boost defence
The Telegraph
Poppy Wood
Teenagers will be able to learn about cyber warfare in sixth form as part of a £182 million government funding package to boost defence recruitment. Five new “technical excellence colleges” focused on defence are set to open across the country next year to develop the skills needed to ensure national security. The Ministry of Defence said it hoped to create a fresh pipeline of submarine engineers, specialist welders, and cyber warfare specialists that the defence industry will need in the years to come.
Middle East
The ‘invisible kingpin of data centres’ riding the Gulf’s AI boom
Financial Times
Chloe Cornish
When an Abu Dhabi artificial intelligence company wanted access to an enormous data centre in France earlier this year, it turned to a former child actor turned investment banker to broker the deal. Zachary Cefaratti, founder of boutique advisory Dalma Capital, has leveraged an eclectic contacts book that includes OpenAI chief Sam Altman and senior Middle Eastern politicians to become a below-the-radar fixer for data centres, cryptocurrency mining and technology groups in the Gulf. The 37-year-old’s clients include G42, the AI group chaired by powerful Emirati royal Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed al-Nahyan; Abu Dhabi sovereign investor ADQ; and the encrypted social media network Telegram.
Big Tech
Meta suppressed research on child safety, employees say
The Washington Post
Jon Swaine and Naomi Nix
After leaked Meta studies led to congressional hearings in 2021, the company deployed its legal team to screen, edit and sometimes veto internal research about youth safety in VR, according to a joint statement the current and former employees submitted to Congress in May. They assert Meta’s legal team was seeking to “establish plausible deniability” about negative effects of the company’s products, according to the statement, which, along with the documents, was obtained by The Post. The internal documents include guidance from Meta’s legal team instructing researchers how to handle sensitive topics that carried the risk of bad press, lawsuits or action by regulators.
Alibaba leads $100 million investment in Chinese humanoid robot startup
CNBC
Evelyn Cheng
As the race for household robots heats up, Chinese humanoid startup X Square Robot announced it had secured around $100 million in a funding round led by Alibaba Cloud. It’s the Shenzhen-based startup’s eighth round of financing since the company launched less than two years ago in December 2023, according to Chief Operating Officer Yang Qian. She told CNBC the latest deal brings total investment in X Square Robot to around $280 million. Venture capitalists have rushed to pour money into humanoid robots on expectations that their integration with generative artificial intelligence will transform how machines interact with human beings.
Artificial Intelligence
How AI is helping one doctor treat cancer: ‘It’s moved out of the hype phase’
Financial Times
Sarah Neville
In the skilled hands of oncologist Dr Raj Jena, artificial intelligence is saving not just time, but lives. Last year the specialist, who works at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in the east of England, was appointed as the UK’s first clinical professor of AI in radiation oncology at the University of Cambridge. In the first in a series of profiles exploring how AI is transforming specific jobs, he tells the Financial Times he now divides his week between seeing patients and researching technologies that hold promise to improve their care. In 2018, Jena co-devised with Microsoft a tool called Osairis that has hugely speeded up the process of planning treatment for those whose tumours are susceptible to radiation.
Psychological tricks can get AI to break the rules
WIRED
Kyle Orland
Researchers convinced large language model chatbots to comply with “forbidden” requests using a variety of conversational tactics. The size of the persuasion effects shown in "Call Me a Jerk: Persuading AI to Comply with Objectionable Requests" suggests that human-style psychological techniques can be surprisingly effective at "jailbreaking" some LLMs to operate outside their guardrails. But this new persuasion study might be more interesting for what it reveals about the "parahuman" behavior patterns that LLMs are gleaning from the copious examples of human psychological and social cues found in their training data.
Misc
Sextortion with a twist: Spyware takes webcam pics of users watching porn
ArsTechnica
Andy Greenberg
Sextortion-based hacking, which hijacks a victim's webcam or blackmails them with nudes they're tricked or coerced into sharing, has long represented one of the most disturbing forms of cybercrime. Now one specimen of widely available spyware has turned that relatively manual crime into an automated feature, detecting when the user is browsing pornography on their PC, screenshotting it, and taking a candid photo of the victim through their webcam.
Roblox to verify ages of all gamers who use chat and text features
The Record by Recorded Future
Suzanne Smalley
Roblox says that by the end of the year it will expand its age estimation program to anyone using its chat and text features. The gaming site, which hosts 112 million users daily, has been dogged by reports of child predators grooming victims on the platform. In 2024, it sent the U.S. National Center for Missing and Exploited Children more than 24,000 reports of suspected child sexual exploitation. Roblox will now use a combination of facial age estimation technology, ID age verification, and verified parental consent to “provide a more accurate measure of a user's age than simply relying on what someone types in when they create an account,” according to a company blog post.
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.
Stop the World: NATO’s Florence Gaub forecasts the future to shape it
ASPI
What does it mean to be a professional futurist, and what does it take to be a good one? For Florence Gaub, research director of NATO’s Defense College, it’s not about predicting the future, but about stretching the imagination of decision-makers so they can understand possible risks and act today to shape the future. Technology and data are just as important as the human element, and a key question is whether technological advances could finally give us a working crystal ball. So far, AI lacks human imagination and ‘can’t really tell good stories’, so the immediate answer is no.
The Daily Cyber & Tech Digest is brought to you by the Cyber, Technology & Security Programs team at ASPI and supported by partners.
