US announces plan to counter Russian influence ahead of election | Iran pays millions in ransom to end massive cyberattack on banks | ASPI: US-Australia project on AI and human machine teaming

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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 United States on Wednesday announced a broad effort to push back on Russian influence campaigns in the 2024 election, as it tries to curb the Kremlin’s use of state-run media and fake news sites to sway American voters. The New York Times

• A massive cyberattack that hit Iran last month threatened the stability of its banking system and forced the country's regime to agree to a ransom deal of millions of dollars, people familiar with the case say. Politico

• Drawing on discussions from a series of workshops between technologists, intelligence community and Department of Defense representatives, the ASPI report argues that rapid advances in the development of AI technologies over the last few years have demonstrated the potential for AI to revolutionize how the intelligence community does all-source analysis. Special Competitive Studies Project

ASPI

The future of intelligence analysis: US-Australia project on AI and human machine teaming
Special Competitive Studies Project
William Usher, Dr Alex Caples, Katherine Kurata and Nandita Balakrishnan
Drawing on discussions from a series of workshops between technologists, intelligence community and Department of Defense representatives held in Washington, DC and Canberra, the report argues that rapid advances in the development of artificial intelligence technologies over the last few years, particularly large language models, have demonstrated the potential for AI to revolutionize how the intelligence community does all-source analysis. Therefore, the U.S. and Australian ICs should aim to build high-performance Human-Machine Teams that enable intelligence analysts to leverage generative artificial intelligence for some tasks while maintaining overall human oversight over analytic assessments. If the ICs can effectively and safely incorporate GenAI into their workflows, there would be substantial gains in the breadth and depth of their analytic work and, in turn, their ability to deliver critical insights to decision-makers.

Australian official praises Taiwan on cybersecurity
Taipei Times
Huang Ching-hsuan and Lery Hiciano
Taiwan is an excellent partner for Australia on cybersecurity issues, Australian Ambassador for Cyber Affairs and Critical Technology Brendan Dowling said on Monday. Dowling made the remarks during the Sydney Dialogue, an annual policy summit hosted by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. This year, a Taiwanese delegation led by National Security Council adviser Lee Yuh-jye attended the event focusing on cybersecurity and emerging technology issues.

PsiQuantum will 'need more money' to finish Brisbane supercomputer
Capital Brief
Daniel van Boom
PsiQuantum is not a startup starved of resources. In this year alone it announced a $940 million investment from the Federal and Queensland governments, and tax incentives from US governments worth $760 million. But it's going to need more capital to reach its goal of building the world's first commercially viable quantum computer in Brisbane by 2027, co-founder and chief scientific officer Pete Shadbolt said in an interview.

India surpasses UK in critical technologies research, ranked 2nd in 7 areas
INDIAai
Milin Stanly
According to the Critical Technology Tracker report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, India has emerged as a global research powerhouse, ranking among the top five countries in 45 out of 64 critical technologies in 2023, up from 37 a year before. The report highlights that the country has secured the second position in seven technologies.

Australia

Chief scientist’s parting gift is research for all
InnovationAus
Joseph Brookes
Australia’s outgoing chief scientist has called on the Albanese government to develop a radical open access model that would make research literature free for all Australians through centralised government deals. Dr Cathey Foley, who will leave the role later this year, on Thursday published the advice she provided to government more than a year ago on open access, which promises a $2.3 billion windfall and hundreds of new jobs.

Labor considers an artificial intelligence act to impose ‘mandatory guardrails’ on use of AI
The Guardian
Paul Karp
The Australian government is considering a European Union-style AI act to regulate minimum standards on high-risk AI across the whole economy. On Wednesday the industry and science minister, Ed Husic, released a discussion paper proposing 10 “mandatory guardrails” for high-risk AI including human oversight and the ability to challenge the use of AI or outcomes of automated decision-making.

Draft cyber laws land on Burke’s desk, with tweak to contentious new powers
Capital Brief
Anthony Galloway
New cybersecurity laws requiring businesses to report the payment of ransoms and giving the government more powers to take over the networks of critical infrastructure have been drawn up by the Department of Home Affairs and are sitting on minister Tony Burke’s desk. Multiple security sources, who were not authorised to comment publicly, confirmed to Capital Brief that Home Affairs has sent draft laws to Burke’s office.

China

Chinese 'Spamouflage' operatives are mimicking disillusioned Americans online
The Record by Recorded Future
James Reddick
A Chinese influence operation has ramped up its efforts to impact online discourse around the U.S. elections, creating fake personas across social media platforms to spread divisive messages about the state of the country. According to a new report from the social media analytics firm Graphika, the Beijing-backed “Spamouflage” group is behind the campaign. The research builds on an earlier report from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, which highlighted a series of inauthentic accounts pushing “Make America Great Again” talking points.

Chinese chip start-up Xiangdixian said to collapse amid cash crunch and legal woes
South China Morning Post
Xinmei Sun
Chinese semiconductor start-up Xiangdixian Computing Technology has reportedly collapsed amid a cash crunch and dismissed all employees, highlighting difficulties faced by domestic chip firms despite a nationwide self-sufficiency push. Xiangdixian, based in the southwestern city of Chongqing, on Friday held an all-staff meeting where it announced the dissolution of the company, terminating the contracts of nearly 400 employees, according to reports from local media such as ijiwei and TMTPost.

Global supply chains can’t skirt China rare earths crackdown
Financial Times
June Yoon
Batteries, solar panels and nuclear weapons all have one material in common: antimony. As Beijing tightens its grip on rare-earth materials — seen as retaliation for growing trade restrictions and tariffs on Chinese-made products — global supply chains won’t be able to avoid the fallout. Rare metals prices have surged in recent months as China has started to increase restrictions on exports of the critical materials. But few have spiked like antimony.

USA

U.S. announces plan to counter Russian influence ahead of 2024 election
The New York Times
Julian E. Barnes, Glenn Thrush and Steven Lee Myers
The United States on Wednesday announced a broad effort to push back on Russian influence campaigns in the 2024 election, as it tries to curb the Kremlin’s use of state-run media and fake news sites to sway American voters. The actions include sanctions, indictments and seizing of web domains that U.S. officials say the Kremlin uses to spread propaganda and disinformation about Ukraine, which Russia invaded more than two years ago.

• Two RT employees indicted for covertly funding and directing U.S. company that published thousands of videos in furtherance of Russian interests
  Office of Public Affairs, US Department of Justice
  An indictment charging Russian nationals Kostiantyn Kalashnikov, 31, also known as Kostya, and Elena Afanasyeva, 27, also known as Lena, with conspiracy to violate the Foreign Agents Registration Act and conspiracy to commit money laundering was unsealed today in the Southern District of New York. Kalashnikov and Afanasyeva are at large.

• Justice Dept. disrupts Russian influence campaign, indicts Russian nationals
  Lawfare
  Katherine Pompilio
  On Sept. 4, the Justice Department announced that it seized 32 internet domains used by the Russian government to conduct foreign malign influence campaigns targeting voters in U.S. and foreign elections, including the upcoming 2024 U.S. presidential election. At the direction of the Russian Presidential Administration, the operation—known as “Doppelganger”—relied on influencers, artificial intelligence-created content, and social media accounts to covertly drive internet traffic to these domains to spread Russian government propaganda.

Intel’s money woes throw Biden team’s chip strategy into turmoil
Bloomberg
Mackenzie Hawkins
The Biden-Harris administration’s big bet on Intel Corp. to lead a US chipmaking renaissance is in grave trouble as a result of the company’s mounting financial struggles, creating a potentially damaging setback for the country’s most ambitious industrial policy in decades. Five months after the president traveled to Arizona to unveil a potential $20 billion package of incentives alongside Chief Executive Officer Pat Gelsinger, there are growing questions around when — or if — Intel will get its hands on that money.

The Taiwan-born ‘tech brain’ leading US military’s innovation race against PLA
South China Morning Post
Liu Zhen
The world got a glimpse of the brain behind one of the American military’s most secretive and important initiatives when she gave a rare interview just over a month ago. A US Senate committee had criticised the Rapid Defence Experimentation Reserve initiative and Taiwan-born US undersecretary of defence Heidi Shyu stepped into the spotlight to defend the programme. Shyu is the Pentagon’s chief technology officer, in charge of research and engineering, and RDER – which is meant to help the United States hold its hi-tech edge over China – has been described as her “brainchild”.

The government isn’t ready for cyber chaos in the food and agriculture sector
The Record by Recorded Future
Eric Geller
The nightmare scenarios are numerous: Desiccated farms menaced by out-of-control tractors. Meatpacking plants silently overrun by diseased animals. Trucks clogging highways for hours, their cargo areas full of rotting food. The U.S. Department of Agriculture is supposed to prevent these disasters by helping the food and agriculture sector protect its infrastructure from physical threats and cyberattacks. But in an era of growing digital dangers, USDA is woefully unprepared to play that role, according to policymakers, independent experts and even the department’s own warnings to Congress.

How Chinese engineers helped build the US semiconductor empire: a timeline
South China Morning Post
Victoria Bela
From building the first electronic computer to maintaining a stronghold of semiconductor design, the United States has long been a beacon for advanced electronics development. But behind America’s rise stand many Chinese scientists and engineers whose important contributions have largely remained in the shadows.

White House Office of the National Cyber Director releases roadmap to enhance internet routing security
The White House
Today, the White House Office of the National Cyber Director released a Roadmap to Enhancing Internet Routing Security, which aims to address a key security vulnerability associated with the Border Gateway Protocol – the protocol that underpins the way information is routed across networks. By addressing BGP, ONCD is taking on a hard problem that has long threatened the security of internet traffic.

Cryptocurrency industry faces ‘difficult to detect’ North Korean social engineering scams, FBI says
The Record by Recorded Future
Joe Warminsky
The FBI is adding “highly tailored, difficult-to-detect social engineering campaigns” to the list of scams and hacks that North Korea aims at decentralized finance operations and similar businesses. In an alert issued Tuesday, the bureau says that despite the “sophisticated technical acumen” of such companies, they can fall victim to the social engineering schemes, which involve “complex and elaborate” operations to gather information about employees and build rapport with them.

South & Central Asia

Pakistan installs firewall in censorship drive, hitting businesses
Nikkei Asia
Adnan Aamir
Sajida, a 23-year-old freelance digital content creator, first noticed that WhatsApp stopped working for her in the second week of August. She could not download media files and send voice notes. She soon found out she wasn't the only one suffering. The internet speed in Pakistan plummeted by 30% to 40% in mid-August, according to industry body Wireless and Internet Service Providers Association, creating chaos for businesses and individuals who rely heavily on fast and reliable connectivity.

Europe

Hackers linked to Russia and Belarus increasingly target Latvian websites, officials say
The Record by Recorded Future
Daryna Antoniuk
Politically motivated hackers linked to Russia and Belarus are targeting Latvian government and critical infrastructure websites in a new wave of cyberattacks, according to Latvian cybersecurity officials. The goal of the attacks is to disrupt access to websites rather than to steal sensitive data, said Baiba Kaskina, head of the Latvian сomputer emergency response team, in an interview with local media.

UK

TfL faces 'ongoing cyber security incident'
BBC
Tom Edwards
Transport for London's computer systems have been targeted in an ongoing cyber attack. It said there was no evidence customer data had been compromised and there was currently no impact on TfL services. Insiders have told BBC London they have been asked to work at home if possible, and that it is the transport provider's backroom systems at the corporate headquarters that are mainly affected.

Middle East

Iran pays millions in ransom to end massive cyberattack on banks, officials say
Politico
Matthew Karnitschnig
A massive cyberattack that hit Iran last month threatened the stability of its banking system and forced the country's regime to agree to a ransom deal of millions of dollars, people familiar with the case say. An Iranian firm paid at least $3 million in ransom last month to stop an anonymous group of hackers from releasing individual account data from as many as 20 domestic banks in what appears to be the worst cyberattack the country has seen, according to industry analysts and western officials briefed on the matter.

Tehran summons Australian ambassador over 'norm-breaking' Instagram post, Iranian media reports
ABC News
Andrew Thorpe
Australia's ambassador to Iran has been summoned to the foreign ministry office in Tehran over an Instagram post supporting Wear It Purple Day. The post, which is intended to support LGBT inclusion and visibility, remains live on the Australian embassy's official account. Homosexual activity is illegal in Iran, which is governed by Islamic clerical authorities, and gay sex can be punished by the death penalty.

Big Tech

Publish data on ride-hailing apps ‘to cut exploitation and emissions’, say campaigners
The Guardian
Heather Stewart
Uber and other ride-hailing apps should b forced to publish data on drivers’ workloads so that regulators can tackle exploitation and cut carbon emissions, campaigners argue. Analysis by the pressure group Worker I Exchange suggests drivers for Uber and its smaller rivals may have missed out on more than £1.2bn in wages and costs last year because of the way they are compensated.

Illegal activity in Ads on Meta Apps linking to Telegram
Cybersecurity for Democracy
Damon McCoy, Laura Edelson, and Yael Eisenstat
Finding illegal content in ads on Meta is as simple as searching for Telegram links in the Meta ad library. We did so on August 28th, and we manually reviewed the most recently posted ads in the United States from that day with links to Telegram. We found that 64% of those Telegram-linked ads appear to have violated Meta’s policies, including some promoting illegal activity.

Elon Musk’s Starlink backtracks to comply with Brazil’s ban on X
The Guardian
Elon Musk’s satellite-based internet service provider Starlink backtracked late on Tuesday and said it would accept and enforce a Brazilian supreme court justice’s order to block the billionaire’s social media platform, X, formerly Twitter. Previously, Starlink informally told the telecommunications regulator Anatel that it would not comply until Justice Alexandre de Moraes reversed course. Now, Starlink has said in a statement posted on X that it will heed de Moraes’s order despite him having frozen the company’s assets.

Artificial Intelligence

AI hit by copyright claims as companies approach ‘data frontier’
Financial Times
George Hammond
Top artificial intelligence companies are facing a wave of copyright litigation and accusations that they are aggressively scraping data from the web, a problem exacerbated as start-ups hit a “data frontier” hindering new advances in the technology. This month, a trio of authors sued Anthropic for “stealing hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books”, claiming the San Francisco AI start-up “never sought — let alone paid for — a licence to copy and exploit the protected expression contained in the copyrighted works fed into its models”.

Regulators will always struggle to keep pace with AI development
Financial Times
Louise Lucas
Legislators across the globe are tussling with artificial intelligence. Early efforts are voluminous but hardly speedy. The EU’s AI Act, first out of the blocks, runs to 144 pages. Regulation lags behind innovation by a country mile. The EU was obliged to add in a chapter for generative AI part way through its process. True, few economic, financial and societal issues are untouched by the peripatetic technology. That requires a lot of guardrails.

AI is rapidly being commoditized
TechCrunch
Kyle Wiggers
Say what you will about generative AI. But it’s commoditizing — or, at least, it appears to be. In early August, both Google and OpenAI slashed prices on their budget-friendliest text-generating models. Google reduced the input price for Gemini 1.5 Flash (the cost to have the model process text) by 78% and the output price (the cost to have the model generate text) by 71%. OpenAI, meanwhile, decreased the input price for GPT-4o by half and the output price by a third.

Research

Spyware vendors thwart restrictions with new names and locations
The Washington Post
Joseph Menn
Some of the most criticized names in the secretive business of selling high-end surveillance tools to government spies have continued to thrive despite international efforts to regulate the market, fresh research shows. The people behind some companies that have come under fire for enabling repressive governments to spy on human rights advocates, opposition leaders and journalists have renamed those companies, started new ones or shifted from one country’s legal jurisdiction to another — and sometimes done all three, according to a study by the Atlantic Council’s Cyber Statecraft Initiative and researchers at American University.

Events & Podcasts

Podcast: Tech and the alliance
United States Studies Centre
From the Quad Principles on Critical and Emerging Technology to AUKUS Pillar II, technology is increasingly seen as an issue of national security and it is playing a larger role than ever in US alliances and partnerships in the Indo-Pacific. What is driving this technological cooperation? What can allies and partners gain by working together? What’s next on the tech agenda for the alliance? USSC Non-Resident Fellow Jennifer Jackett joined Director of Engagement and Impact Mari Koeck on the USSC Briefing Room to discuss these issues.

Jobs

ASPI Research Internship
ASPI
Have you recently completed your studies (undergraduate or postgraduate) and want to develop your expertise in defence, foreign and national security policy, including in areas such as strategic competition, defence, deterrence, foreign interference, technology, and security? Do you want to inform the public and government on the critical strategic choices facing Australia and learn what it takes to be a professional analyst? If so, apply for the ASPI Research Internship Program! Please note that this is a paid internship program. Applications will close at midnight Friday 27 September 2024.

The Daily Cyber & Tech Digest is brought to you by the Cyber, Technology & Security team at ASPI.