Qantas 'contacted by potential cybercriminal' after attack on data | Huawei’s AI lab fends off accusations it copied rival models | Apple appeals $500M EU fine for breach of Big Tech rules

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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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• Qantas says it has been contacted by "a potential cybercriminal" less than a week after revealing a "significant" breach and theft of data on up to 6 million of its customers from its records during a cyber attack. ABC News

• Huawei’s secretive AI research lab has pushed back against accusations it relied on rivals’ models to develop its own Pangu platform, taking the unusual step of rebutting claims about its artificial intelligence efforts. Bloomberg

• Apple has appealed the European Commission's decision to fine the iPhone maker €500 million for breaking the EU's competition rules for Big Tech, a company spokesperson said Monday. POLITICO

ASPI

Horses for courses: where quantum computing is, and isn’t, the answer
The Strategist
Stephan Robin
Despite the impressive and undeniable strides quantum computing has made in recent years, it’s important to remain cautious about sweeping claims regarding its transformative potential. To avoid future disillusionment as the technology matures and ensure that public focus and investment is best utilised, more effort is needed to bridge the gap between perceptions and technical realities. Quantum and classical computers should be compared based on the kinds of problems they can solve, not on the machines themselves: quantum computing is not a better or faster version of classical computing, but a different paradigm of computation altogether.

On Channel 10 News, ASPI senior analyst Fergus Ryan warns Australia to be wary of China's push for technological cooperation in artificial intelligence.

World

Beware of Bert: New ransomware group targets healthcare, tech firms
The Record by Recorded Future
Daryna Antoniuk
A new ransomware group has been breaching organizations across Asia, Europe, and the U.S., with victims reported in the healthcare, technology and event services sectors, researchers have found. The group, calling itself Bert, was first identified in April by researchers at cybersecurity firm Trend Micro, who detailed their findings in a report published Monday. The ransomware has infected both Windows and Linux systems, the researchers said. Although the initial access method remains unknown, analysts discovered a PowerShell script that disables security tools on victims' systems before downloading and executing the ransomware.

Australia

Qantas 'contacted by potential cybercriminal' after attack on data of up to 6 million customers
ABC News
Luke Cooper
Qantas says it has been contacted by "a potential cybercriminal" less than a week after revealing a "significant" breach and theft of data on up to 6 million of its customers from its records during a cyber attack. Qantas is warning a "significant" amount of customer data has likely been stolen from its records during a cyber attack against the airline on Monday. The airline said in a statement on Monday that it is working to verify the legitimacy of the contact and have contacted the Australian Federal Police.

• Australia's Qantas says cyber criminal contacts one week after data breach
  Reuters
  A cyber criminal has made contact with Australia's Qantas following a data breach last week that exposed personal information of six million customers, a company spokesperson told Reuters on Tuesday. The hacker had targeted a call centre and gained access to a third-party customer service platform containing the customers' names, email addresses, phone numbers, birth dates and frequent flyer numbers.

Albanese warned against China offer to co-operate on AI
The Australian Financial Review
Andrew Tillett, Paul Smith and Jessica Sier
Security analysts and the federal opposition are cautioning the government against embracing China’s entreaties to extend economic co-operation to incorporate artificial intelligence, warning it could make it harder to ban Chinese technology vendors, alienate the US and jeopardise cybersecurity. China’s Ambassador to Australia, Xiao Qian, put expansion of the decade old free-trade agreement to cover emerging technologies such as AI on the political agenda ahead of Albanese’s visit to China later this week.

AI in Australia will ‘create jobs, not take them’: Albanese
InnovationAus
Justin Hendry
Anthony Albanese says artificial intelligence will deliver “secure and fulfilling jobs”, not threaten them, as the government looks to create a more productivity-focused economy. The Prime Minister made the comments in a wide-ranging speech at a NewsCorp event in Sydney on Friday, where he outlined his government’s second term economic vision. He also said the new economic model built on critical minerals and sovereign manufacturing would make it easier for research and innovation to thrive in Australia.

The Stephen Gageler interview in full
Capital Brief
Michael Pelly
Stephen Gageler has served on the High Court for more than a decade and under two chief justices — Susan Kiefel and Robert French. But now that he is in that exalted position himself — the most senior role in the Australian legal system — even he is surprised by the demands of the job. “The workload is significantly greater than I thought,” he tells Capital Brief. “A chief justice of a large court told me when I was taking the job that being Chief Justice was about 80% judicial work and about 80% administration. And that's been my experience.”

NSW government agencies could be leaving themselves open to cyber attacks
CyberDaily
Daniel Croft
The Cyber Security Insights 2025 Report, released by the NSW Auditor-General, found that only 31 per cent of government agencies had implemented mandatory protection controls. According to the report, agencies performed worst in the “protect” domain, which regards essential cyber security protections such as multifactor authentication, network security and regularly updating software. “The absence of ‘protect’ domain controls increases the likelihood of a successful cyber attack,” said the report.

Just how sovereign does our tech sector need to be?
InnovationAus
James Riley
Australian policymakers face a very particular challenge in relation to the artificial intelligence and its contribution to productivity, according to Vault Cloud chief executive Rupert Taylor-Price. That is how to build a nuanced set of industry policy that both attracts the large-scale foreign investments and best-in-class overseas technology to Australia, while simultaneously developing a sovereign AI capability with building export-facing products. And these policies must also cater to the national security requirements that are increasingly bound together with technology roll-out decisions.

China

Huawei’s AI lab fends off accusations it copied rival models
Bloomberg
Huawei’s secretive AI research lab has pushed back against accusations it relied on rivals’ models to develop its own Pangu platform, taking the unusual step of rebutting claims about its artificial intelligence efforts. The Pangu Pro MoE is the world’s first model of its kind to be trained on Ascend chips — Huawei’s answer to Nvidia’s AI accelerators — the lab said in a WeChat post over the weekend. While the company employed open-source code — as is “common practice” — Huawei said it respected intellectual property and stuck closely to licensing terms.

The Coder ‘Village’ at the Heart of China’s A.I. Frenzy
The New York Times
Meaghan Tobin
It was a sunny Saturday afternoon, and dozens of people sat in the grass around a backyard stage where aspiring founders of tech start-ups talked about their ideas. People in the crowd slouched over laptops, vaping and drinking strawberry Frappuccinos. A drone buzzed overhead. Inside the house, investors took pitches in the kitchen. It looked like Silicon Valley, but it was Liangzhu, a quiet suburb of the southern Chinese city of Hangzhou, which is a hot spot for entrepreneurs and tech talent lured by low rents and proximity to tech companies like Alibaba and DeepSeek.

USA

Trump says Musk is ‘off the rails’ and calls his new political party ‘ridiculous’
The Guardian
Richard Luscombe and Robert Mackay
Donald Trump called Elon Musk’s decision to start and bankroll a new US political party “ridiculous” on Sunday. “Third parties have never worked, so he can have fun with it but I think it’s ridiculous,” the president told reporters traveling with him back to the White House from his New Jersey golf club. He then elaborated, at great length, in a post on his social media platform, Truth Social. “I am saddened to watch Elon Musk go completely ‘off the rails,’ essentially becoming a TRAIN WRECK over the past five weeks,” the president wrote.

Boston’s biotech sector reels due to Trump health policy uncertainty
Financial Times
Patrick Temple-West
The live music, free drinks and dancing at a big Boston biotech conference in June belied a stark reality: the city’s biotech sector is in trouble. While some industries are still languishing since the Federal Reserve began raising interest rates in 2022, few have been hit as hard as the biotech sector by Trump administration policies. Concerns about routine medicine approvals from the US Food and Drug Administration have frightened investors.

Oracle gives U.S. government discount on cloud and software
The Wall Street Journal
Belle Lin
Oracle is cutting the cost of its database software and cloud-computing service for the federal government, making it the latest tech giant to offer the Trump administration a significant discount on its services. The company is offering government agencies a 75% discount on its license-based software, including databases and analytics, as well as a “substantial” discount on its cloud service through the end of November, the General Services Administration said. Oracle declined to specify how much of a discount it is giving the government on its cloud service.

North Asia

South Korea considers playing US tech card as tariff deadline nears
Nikkei Asia
Kim Jaewon
South Korea is trying to fend off U.S. President Donald Trump's tariff pressure and buy more time ahead of a key deadline by suggesting Seoul could soften plans to regulate U.S. tech companies. Trade Minister Yeo Han-koo, Seoul's point man for negotiations, said the export-driven economy would take a "flexible" approach to U.S. tech companies in ongoing tariff talks in a bid to protect its own manufacturers. Yeo told South Korean lawmakers that the government is open to talking with Washington about how to treat American tech companies such as Google and Meta as leverage in tariff discussions.

Southeast Asia

Singapore's DayOne Data Centers eyes Japan, Thailand for growth
Nikkei Asia
Tsubasa Suruga
Singapore-based DayOne Data Centers, which develops IT infrastructure in the city-state and its neighbors, is accelerating its expansion across Asia, with new projects in Japan and Thailand, according to its chief executive. "We are still looking to grow wherever possible, obviously at existing markets like Malaysia, Singapore and Batam [Indonesia], but also in new ones like Japan and Thailand," CEO Jamie Khoo said in an interview last month on the sidelines of the Nikkei Forum Medini, Johor 2025.

Indonesia's growing exodus of skilled talent worries local industries
Nikkei Asia
Nana Shibata
Hirdan Radityatama Putra Laisa, a 28-year-old Indonesian working in Tokyo at the global division of a Japanese human resources company, decided to work in Japan after graduating from Indonesia's top university. "If I work in Indonesia," he explained, "I cannot save money, especially with the recent rise in the cost of living." The University of Indonesia graduate makes 6 million yen ($41,600) a year, which he says is almost six times the salary a worker with the same educational level and skills would earn in Indonesia.

South & Central Asia

TAG-140 Deploys DRAT V2 RAT, targeting Indian government, defense, and rail sectors
The Hacker News
A hacking group with ties other than Pakistan has been found targeting Indian government organizations with a modified variant of a remote access trojan called DRAT. The activity has been attributed by Recorded Future's Insikt Group to a threat actor tracked as TAG-140, which it said overlaps with SideCopy, an adversarial collective assessed to be an operational sub-cluster within Transparent Tribe. "TAG-140 has consistently demonstrated iterative advancement and variety in its malware arsenal and delivery techniques," the Mastercard-owned company said in an analysis published last month.

Meta’s grand WhatsApp fintech experiment in India has fizzled
Rest of World
Ananya Bhattacharya
Meta’s fintech ambitions have failed to take off in India — the company’s largest market, with over 500 million WhatsApp users. When WhatsApp first began testing payments in India back in 2018, local players braced for disruption. The app’s massive reach — 400 million users at the time — raised fears it could wipe out competitors. But Indian regulators quickly stepped in, insisting WhatsApp store user data in the country and keep it separate from Facebook. The regulators also capped WhatsApp Pay’s user base at just 1 million.

Europe

Apple appeals $500M EU fine for breach of Big Tech rules
POLITICO
Jacob Parry
Apple has appealed the European Commission's decision to fine the iPhone maker €500 million for breaking the EU's competition rules for Big Tech, a company spokesperson said Monday. In April, the EU executive fined Apple for breaching the Digital Markets Act over its rules governing how app developers can communicate with their customers. The Commission's requests "go far beyond what the law requires," said Apple spokesperson Emma Wilson in a statement confirming that the company has lodged an appeal.

• Apple takes fight against $587 million EU antitrust fine to court
  Reuters
  Foo Yun Chee
  Apple took a challenge against EU regulators to Europe's second highest court on Monday after they fined it 500 million euros ($587 million) earlier this year for breaching landmark rules aimed at curbing the power of Big Tech. The European Commission in a decision in April said the iPhone maker's technical and commercial restrictions that prevent app developers from steering users to cheaper deals outside the App Store breached the Digital Markets Act.

• Apple challenges 'unprecedented' €500M EU fine over App Store steering Rules
  MacRumors
  Juli Clover
  In a statement to MacRumors, Apple said that the fine is unprecedented, and goes beyond what the law requires. Today we filed our appeal because we believe the European Commission's decision--and their unprecedented fine--go far beyond what the law requires. As our appeal will show, the EC is mandating how we run our store and forcing business terms which are confusing for developers and bad for users. We implemented this to avoid punitive daily fines and will share the facts with the Court.

UK

‘No honour among thieves’: M&S hacking group starts turf war
Financial Times
Kieran Smith
The ransomware group linked to the recent cyber attacks on UK retailers M&S, Harrods and the Co-Op has begun a turf war with its rivals, triggering a battle within the industry that could bring more hacks and further fallout for corporate victims. DragonForce, a group of largely Russian speaking cyber criminals behind a spate of high-profile attacks this year, has clashed with one of its biggest competitors RansomHub, according to cyber security experts tracking the battle to dominate the booming criminal ransomware sector.

NZ & Pacific Islands

Little progress in Tonga battle to overcome cyber breach
RNZ
Don Wiseman
It has now been three weeks since cyber hackers took down the Tonga Ministry of Health's National Health Information system. Ever since, staff at the country's hospitals have had to rely on whatever handwritten notes are available when seeing patients. A cyber security expert said the cyber breach and subsequent demand for compensation are a "wake-up call for the Pacific".

Big Tech

Jack Dorsey launches a WhatsApp messaging rival built on Bluetooth
CNBC
MacKenzie Sigalos
CEO Jack Dorsey spent the weekend building Bitchat, a new decentralized, peer-to-peer messaging app that works entirely over Bluetooth mesh networks, with no internet, central servers, phone numbers or emails required. The Twitter co-founder announced Sunday that the beta version is live on TestFlight, with a full white paper available on GitHub. In a post on X Sunday, Dorsey called it a personal experiment in “bluetooth mesh networks, relays and store and forward models, message encryption models, and a few other things.”

Apple loses top AI models executive to Meta’s hiring spree
Bloomberg
Mark Gurman
Apple’s top executive in charge of artificial intelligence models is leaving for Meta, another setback in the iPhone maker’s struggling AI efforts. Ruoming Pang, a distinguished engineer and manager in charge of the company’s Apple foundation models team, is departing, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Pang, who joined Apple from Alphabet Inc. in 2021, is the latest big hire for Meta’s new superintelligence group, said the people, who declined to be named discussing unannounced personnel moves.

Artificial Intelligence

Why it is vital that you understand the infrastructure behind AI
Financial Times
Lucy Colback
As demand increases for AI solutions, the competition around the huge infrastructure required to run AI models is becoming ever more fierce. This affects the entire AI chain, from computing and storage capacity in data centres, through processing power in chips, to consideration of the energy needed to run and cool equipment. When implementing an AI strategy, companies have to look at all these aspects to find the best fit for their needs. This is harder than it sounds.

Genuine connection': Chris says 'AI wife' improved his life
Information Age
Leonard Bernadone
AI dating has left the realm of science fiction and entered reality as thousands of people explore romantic relationships with large language models such as ChatGPT. On Reddit, the gender-inclusive ‘MyBoyfriendIsAI’ subreddit has grown from 1,000 members in April to over 5,300 members in July. The forum is one of many where AI romantics discuss relationships with their AI ‘companions’, which are typically personalised instances of ChatGPT or other romance-dedicated LLMs.

On-the-job learning upended by AI and hybrid work
Financial Times
Emma Jacobs
Jamie Dimon is unequivocal about the impact of remote working on training new bankers. “It doesn’t work in our business,” the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase told Stanford’s Graduate School of Business this year. “Younger people [are] left behind.” He has previously spoken of the importance of “the apprenticeship model which is almost impossible to replicate in the Zoom world”. In many workplaces, that apprenticeship model is as simple as sitting near a more experienced colleague or joining a client meeting to watch how it is done, while also learning the ropes by taking on often more repetitive and basic tasks.

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