Telstra, Microsoft push AI through Australian fiber network | Is Lenovo a blind spot in US anti-China security measures? | The Global Race to Control A.I.
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Telstra and Microsoft are expanding AI infrastructure across Australia through Telstra’s Intercity Fibre Network. This partnership enhances connectivity and accelerates AI ecosystem development in the region. Telstra is also deploying Microsoft's AI tools, including 21,000 Copilot licenses, to upskill its workforce and improve customer interactions. RCRWireless News
Lenovo's involvement in the US Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative raises concerns due to its Chinese origins, especially amid increasing US-China tensions. Despite its global operations and diverse leadership, Lenovo's ties to China spark debate over its trustworthiness in protecting US infrastructure. Lenovo denies being controlled by the Chinese government, but scepticism remains, especially given China's National Intelligence Law. The Register
Nations are racing to control AI, fearing dependence on foreign tech. AI nationalism drives new laws, alliances, and investments, particularly in the U.S., China, and Saudi Arabia. The U.S. leads due to powerful tech giants and AI chips, while the EU pushes for regulation. Global AI development increasingly reflects national interests. The New York Times
ASPI
The Musk-Trump Conversation, Musk in China
Omny Studio
Elon, Inc.
Bethany Allen, head of program for China investigations and analysis at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute unpacks Musk’s business ventures in China and what his involvement with the country means for Tesla and the electric vehicle industry at large.
Australia
Telstra, Microsoft push AI through Australian fiber network
RCRWireless News
Catherine Sbeglia Nin
Australian operator Telstra is extending Microsoft’s AI infrastructure throughout the footprint of its Intercity Fibre Network project as part of an extended strategic partnership between the two companies. The tie-up will accelerate Australia’s AI ecosystem by building high-capacity intercity fiber routes for Microsoft, they said, adding that its underscores the critical role that connectivity infrastructure playing in fueling AI advancements.
China
Is Lenovo a blind spot in US anti-China security measures?
The Register
Dan Robinson
Lenovo's participation in a cybersecurity initiative has reopened old questions over the company's China origins, especially in light of the growing mistrust between Washington and Beijing over technology. Last week, Lenovo announced to the world that it is now involved in the Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative (JCDC) initiative, which was established by the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to enlist private sector help in addressing threats to US critical infrastructure.
The West needs China for clean energy. It will pay a price to break free
CNN
Hanna Ziady
The United States and Europe are racing to narrow China’s commanding lead in clean energy technologies, throwing subsidies at local manufacturers and hiking tariffs on Chinese imports in a strikingly protectionist turn. But the West needs to avoid repeating Europe’s mistake of becoming overdependent on a single supplier — Russia — for cheap gas and wants the economic rewards that come from developing its own technologies of the future.
Beijing’s Baltic confession exposes undersea vulnerability
The Interpreter
Cynthia Mehboob
China has finally acknowledged that the Hong Kong-flagged ship NewNew Polar Bear was responsible for damaging critical undersea infrastructure in the Baltic Sea. The incident – which Beijing is calling an “accident” – occurred in October 2023 and involved the Chinese ship damaging the 77 kilometre Balticconnector pipeline, an essential energy source for Finland along with an undersea data cable that connects Estonia to Sweden. The acknowledgement emerged in reporting by the South China Morning Post this week, but it won’t put an end to suspicions about cable sabotage.
China-backed earth Baku expands cyber attacks to Europe, Middle East, and Africa
The Hacker News
Ravie Lakshmanan
The China-backed threat actor known as Earth Baku has diversified its targeting footprint beyond the Indo-Pacific region to include Europe, the Middle East, and Africa starting in late 2022. Newly targeted countries as part of the activity include Italy, Germany, the U.A.E., and Qatar, with suspected attacks also detected in Georgia and Romania. Governments, media and communications, telecoms, technology, healthcare, and education are some of the sectors singled out as part of the intrusion set.
Beyond fusion: preparing for systems rivalry with China
War On the Rocks
Liza Tobin, Addis Goldman, and Katherine Kurata
As the U.S. government considers further restricting China’s access to the advanced semiconductors critical to the AI revolution, military-civil fusion — the Chinese Communist Party’s strategy to intentionally blur the lines between military and civilian sectors — lies at the heart of the drama. Previous controls, imposed in 2022 and expanded in 2023, came on the heels of the discovery of U.S. semiconductor technology in a supercomputer engineered to develop hypersonic missiles for the People’s Liberation Army. New evidence suggests that U.S. microelectronics technology has also aided Chinese advancements in nuclear weapons, torpedoes, and other military applications.
USA
Why newsrooms haven’t published leaked Trump campaign documents
The Washington Post
Will Sommer and Elahe Izadi
An alleged Iranian hacking operation that the Donald Trump campaign says leaked internal documents to reporters has run into a surprising problem: So far, newsrooms have been reluctant to run with the material.
The nation’s best hackers found vulnerabilities in voting machines — but no time to fix them
POLITICO
Maggie Miller
Some of the best hackers in the world gathered in Las Vegas over the weekend to try to break into voting machines that will be used in this year’s election — all with an eye to helping officials identify and fix vulnerabilities. The problem? Their findings will likely come too late to make any fixes before Nov. 5.
‘No time to waste’: NIST formally issues standards for defence against quantum hacking
Breaking Defence
Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
This morning the National Institute of Standards & Technology officially released the long-awaited final versions of three new post-quantum encryption algorithms, with additional, more specialized algorithms on the way. They’re all designed to defend against future hacks carried out by quantum computers, an unproven but rapidly developing threat that could quickly crack the kinds of encryption used almost universally today, including those used in the most sensitive Pentagon systems.
Biden administration pledges $11 million to open source security initiative
The Record by Recorded Future
Jonathan Greig
The White House and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) are partnering on an $11 million initiative to gain an understanding of how open source software is used across critical infrastructure and to better secure it. The White House announced the measure on Friday, and at the DEF CON cybersecurity conference over the weekend, National Cyber Director Harry Coker said DHS will fund it under the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
The government unveils its quantum counter-weapons
POLITICO
John Hendel
The federal government laid out its first line of defense against quantum cyberattacks on Tuesday — a major bulwark against one of the cybersecurity community’s biggest fears. The National Institute of Standards and Technology published the world’s first three official post-quantum cryptographic algorithms, tools designed to protect key systems against future quantum computers powerful enough to crack any code generated by a modern computer.
North Asia
South Korea says North Korean hackers stole technical data on spy planes and tanks
Tech Radar
Sead Fadilpašic
The South Korean government has accused North Korea of stealing critical information about major military equipment. Citing reports in local media, BleepingComputer says South Korea’s ruling People Power Party (PPP) has warned about the theft of information on K2 tanks and Baekdu and Geumgang spy airplanes.
Southeast Asia
As Malaysia steps up social media controls, TikTok calls for self-regulation of online content
South China Morning Post
Joseph Sipalan
TikTok has made a case for self-regulation of content shared on social media platforms, as Malaysia’s government ploughs ahead with plans to tighten laws governing social media in the country with a binding licence. Critics have slammed Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim’s administration for imposing what they say are regressive regulations that, in addition to controlling content seen as harmful, could threaten freedom of speech and potentially lead to social media companies going cold on Malaysia’s market.
East Asia
India watchdog orders rare recall of Apple antitrust reports
Reuters
Aditya Kalra
India's antitrust body has taken the unusual step of recalling two reports that detailed alleged breaches of competition law by Apple, opens new tab, which complained that the regulator had disclosed commercial secrets to competitors including Tinder-owner Match. The move will prolong an already delayed investigation, which began in 2021, centering on Apple's alleged abuse of its dominant position in the apps market to force developers to use its proprietary in-app purchase system, at a fee of up to 30%.
Ukraine-Russia
China-linked hackers could be behind cyberattacks on Russian state agencies, researchers say
The Record by Recorded Future
Daryna Antoniuk
Hackers have targeted dozens of computers belonging to Russian state agencies and tech companies with malicious tools linked to Chinese threat actors, according to a new report. In a campaign dubbed EastWind discovered late last month by researchers at Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky, the attackers used the GrewApacha remote access trojan (RAT), an unknown PlugY backdoor and an updated version of CloudSorcerer malware, which was previously used to spy on Russian organizations.
Russia launching more sophisticated phishing attacks, new report finds
The Guardian
Stephanie Kirchgaessner
Russia’s state security agency is launching increasingly sophisticated phishing attacks against US, European and Russian civil society members, in some cases by impersonating individuals who are personally close to the targets of the attacks, according to a new investigation by security researchers. A new report by the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto and Access Now comes as the FBI has separately launched an investigation into suspected hacking attempts by Iran targeting an adviser to Donald Trump and advisers to the Harris-Walz campaign.
Rivers of phish: sophisticated phishing targets Russia’s perceived enemies around the globe
Citizenlab
John Scott-Railton1, Rebekah Brown2, Ksenia Ermoshina, and Ron Deibert
A sophisticated spear phishing campaign has been targeting Western and Russian civil society. This campaign, which we have investigated in collaboration with Access Now and with the participation of numerous civil society organizations including First Department, Arjuna Team, and RESIDENT.ngo, engages targets with personalized and highly-plausible social engineering in an attempt to gain access to their online accounts. We attribute this campaign to COLDRIVER (also known as Star Blizzard, Callisto and other designations). This threat actor is attributed to the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) by multiple governments.
Europe
EU subsidy raids on Chinese company Nuctech were legal, court rules
South China Morning Post
Finbarr Bermingham
Chinese company Nuctech’s claims that the European Commission’s dawn raids of its premises seeking evidence of state subsidies were illegal have been thrown out by a court in Luxembourg. On Monday, the Luxembourg-based General Court, the EU’s second-highest court, dismissed the case on all grounds in a landmark ruling expected to send shock waves through Chinese businesses operating in Europe.
NATO must recognize the potential of open-source intelligence
Atlantic Council
AM Sir Christopher Harper, KBE, RAF (Ret.) and Robert Bassett Cross MC
Today, seventy-five years after the Alliance was formed, such open-source intelligence (OSINT) is more important—and more powerful—than ever. However, underinvestment in OSINT capabilities and a culture favoring classified data currently hold back member states’ intelligence-collection potential. To fully utilize the available technology to detect threats from adversaries, NATO member states must overcome these barriers to embrace open-source intelligence enabled by artificial intelligence (AI).
A world-first law in Europe is targeting artificial intelligence. Other countries can learn from it
The Conversation
Rita Matulionyte
The European Union has taken a world-leading role in addressing these risks. In recent weeks, its Artificial Intelligence Act came into force. This is the first law internationally designed to comprehensively manage AI risks – and Australia and other countries can learn much from it as they too try to ensure AI is safe and beneficial for everyone.
UK
As social media inflames the UK race riots, Facebook makes it harder to police its platform
ABC News
Michael Workman and Kevin Nguyen
A week before race riots broke out across England and Northern Ireland, entrepreneurial trolls operating from Africa launched a Facebook page called "Patriots of Britain". They started publishing anti-immigrant misinformation from the moment it was created in late July and boosted its content with fake followers from Vietnam and India, with the probable aim of building an audience that they could then drive to websites featuring ads.
Big Tech
X doesn’t mark the spot for Trump and Musk
Bloomberg
Magnus Henriksson
The final installment of our summer conversation series, Papadopoulos speaks with Bethany Allen, head of program for China investigations and analysis at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. Allen unpacks Musk’s business ventures in China and what his involvement with the country means for Tesla and the electric vehicle industry at large.
Why is Elon Musk's X struggling with technical problems?
BBC
BBC
He may be the richest man in the world, but - as his glitch-prone conversation with Donald Trump showed - it seems Elon Musk still can't overcome X's technical problems. Mr Musk's interview with the presidential hopeful was delayed by 40 minutes while the platform struggled with tech issues. It was not X's first high-profile malfunction.
Former X employees, experts doubt Musk claim of cyberattack on Trump talk
The Washington Post
Joseph Menn
Former engineers at X and outside experts cast further doubt Tuesday on Elon Musk’s claim that a 40-minute delay in his Monday audio conversation with Donald Trump was caused by a “massive” cyberattack. Musk said Monday that the technical glitches that stopped the heavily promoted episode on Spaces, X’s live audio platform, from starting on time were because of a distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attack, in which many devices send meaningless data at once to overwhelm an offering.
Half of crypto ads on Facebook are scams or violate Meta’s policies, consumer regulator alleges
The Guardian
Josh Taylor
More than half of cryptocurrency-related ads on Facebook analysed by Australia’s consumer regulator were scams or violated Meta’s policies, a court has heard. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) took Meta to court over celebrity scam ads in 2022, alleging the company had engaged in false, misleading or deceptive conduct in publishing the ads, and aiding and abetting the false conduct by the advertisers.
Google confirms Iran-linked hackers targeted Trump, Biden campaigns
POLITICO
Maggie Miller
An Iranian government-linked hacking group has targeted officials on the campaigns of President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, and attacks are ongoing against campaign officials, Google’s cybersecurity arm announced Wednesday. The report — put out days after the Trump campaign confirmed to POLITICO that it had been hacked — does not say if the hackers were behind the specific hacked and leaked documents that POLITICO reported on.
Artificial Intelligence
The global race to control A.I.
The New York Times
Adam Satariano and Paul Mozur
As artificial intelligence advances, many nations are worried about being left behind. The urgency is understandable. A.I. is improving quickly. It could soon reshape the global economy, automate jobs, turbocharge scientific research and even change how wars are waged. World leaders want companies in their country to control A.I. — and they want to benefit from its power. They fear that if they do not build powerful A.I. at home, they will be left dependent on a foreign country’s creations.
Inside the U.S. competition to create AI security tools
Axios
Sam Sabin
Generative AI's promise to automatically detect and patch security flaws in code is nearly a reality — as seen during a government-backed competition at the DEF CON hacker conference over the weekend. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency announced the finalists for its AI Cyber Challenge (AIxCC) at DEF CON on Sunday.
How ‘deepfake Elon Musk’ became the Internet’s biggest scammer
The New York Times
Stuart A. Thompson
An A.I.-powered version of Mr. Musk has appeared in thousands of inauthentic ads, contributing to billions in fraud. All Steve Beauchamp wanted was money for his family. And he thought Elon Musk could help. Mr. Beauchamp, an 82-year-old retiree, saw a video late last year of Mr. Musk endorsing a radical investment opportunity that promised rapid returns. He contacted the company behind the pitch and opened an account for $248. Through a series of transactions over several weeks, Mr. Beauchamp drained his retirement account, ultimately investing more than $690,000. Then the money vanished — lost to digital scammers on the forefront of a new criminal enterprise powered by artificial intelligence.
Copyright group takes down Dutch language AI dataset
Reuters
Reuters
Dutch-based copyright enforcement group BREIN has taken down a large language dataset that was being offered for use in training AI models, the organization said on Tuesday. The dataset included information collected without permission from tens of thousands of books, news sites, and Dutch language subtitles harvested from "countless" films and TV series, BREIN said in a statement. Director Bastiaan van Ramshorst told Reuters it was not clear whether or how widely the dataset may already have been used by AI companies.
Research
New RAND Research – Why do AI Projects Fail?
Inside Ai News
Editorial Team
By some estimates, 80% of AI projects fail – more than double the rate of non-AI IT projects – but why? A group of RAND researchers investigated this issue and found five key problems leading to failure.
Events
Podcast
Stop the World: TSD Summit Sessions: Economic security with Abigaël Vasselier
ASPI
ASPI’s Executive Director, Justin Bassi, interviews Abigaël Vasselier, head of the Foreign Relations team at the Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS) in Berlin. They discuss – and debate – how the EU and individual member states have responded to Russia’s war on Ukraine, Beijing’s use of economic power to coerce and the increasing alignment and cooperation between Beijing and Moscow.
Jobs
Analyst or Researcher – Climate and Security Policy Centre
ASPI
We are seeking a high-performing individual to join our Climate and Security Policy Centre as a Researcher/Analyst. We are looking to recruit individuals to support the assessment of security risks posed by climate change in the Indo-Pacific. The role will involve data and policy analysis. The closing date for applications is 16 August 2024– an early application is advised as we reserve the right to close the vacancy early if suitable applications are received.
Receptionist/Corporate Coordinator
ASPI
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) is looking for an experienced Receptionist/Corporate Coordinator. This is an outstanding opportunity for a highly organised and skilled individual to join our dynamic, positive, and hardworking team. The Receptionist/Corporate Coordinator will handle daily administrative operations at ASPI, serving as the primary contact for visitors and phone inquiries. The role involves a variety of administrative tasks and several corporate responsibilities. The closing date for applications is 16 August 2024– an early application is advised as we reserve the right to close the vacancy early if suitable applications are received.
The Daily Cyber & Tech Digest is brought to you by the Cyber, Technology & Security team at ASPI.