US tightens China’s access to advanced chips for AI | Russian Sandworm hackers breached 11 Ukrainian telcos since May | Israel discussing Starlink wartime backup with SpaceX
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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 Biden administration on Tuesday announced additional limits on the kinds of advanced semiconductors that American firms can sell to China, shoring up restrictions issued last October to limit China’s progress on artificial intelligence. The New York Times
The state-sponsored Russian hacking group tracked as 'Sandworm' has compromised eleven telecommunication service providers in Ukraine between May and September 2023. Bleeping Computer
Israel says it’s in talks with SpaceX on setting up Starlink internet services to bolster its wartime communications, ahead of its expected ground invasion in the Gaza Strip. Bloomberg
China
China's Baidu unveils new Ernie AI version to rival GPT-4
Reuters
Yelin Mo and Eduardo Baptista
Chinese technology giant Baidu on Tuesday unveiled the newest version of its generative artificial intelligence model, Ernie 4.0, saying its capabilities were on par with those of ChatGPT maker OpenAI's pioneering GPT-4 model. CEO Robin Li introduced Ernie 4.0 at an event in Beijing, focusing on what he described as the model's memory capabilities and showing it writing a martial arts novel in real-time. He also showed Ernie 4.0 creating advertising posters and videos.
Chinese AI startup Baichuan raises $300 million from Alibaba, Tencent, others
Channel News Asia
Chinese artificial intelligence startup Baichuan has raised $300 million from investors including Chinese tech giants Alibaba and Tencent, it said on Tuesday. The company said on its WeChat account that the round followed an early $50 million angel round. The investors include smartphone maker Xiaomi and other investment firms, it added.
Mandia: China replaces Russia as top cyber threat
CyberScoop
Christian Vasquez
After improving the sophistication and stepping up the aggressiveness of its cyber operations, China has displaced Russia as the top threat in cyberspace, the veteran cybersecurity executive Kevin Mandia said Tuesday. Speaking at the Google Public Sector Forum presented by Scoop News Group, Mandia said that Beijing’s hackers have replaced Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence service as top dog in the offensive cyber world. “China innovates more than anybody on the front lines,” said Mandia, the CEO of Mandiant, the threat intelligence and incident response firm acquired by Google last year.
News site helps decode China through memes and social media trends
VOA News
Liam Scott
Even after long periods in Beijing, Manya Koetse still felt like an outsider. At parties and over hotpot, her Chinese friends discussed memes and other social media trends, but Koetse didn’t know what they were talking about. “I just felt really left out,” the Dutch national told VOA, adding that she was missing a key way to relate to her friends and understand China more broadly. That isolated feeling led Koetse in 2013 to start a news site, What’s on Weibo, named after one of China’s largest social media platforms. One decade later, her site has contended with Chinese censorship and harassment. But What’s on Weibo has continued to provide a rare window into Chinese social media — and relatively unfiltered insights into Chinese society.
USA
US tightens China’s access to advanced chips for artificial intelligence
The New York Times
Ana Swanson
The Biden administration on Tuesday announced additional limits on the kinds of advanced semiconductors that American firms can sell to China, shoring up restrictions issued last October to limit China’s progress on artificial intelligence. The rules appear likely to bring to a halt most shipments of advanced semiconductors from the United States to Chinese data centers, which use them to produce models capable of artificial intelligence. More U.S. companies seeking to sell China advanced chips, or the machinery used to make them, will be required to notify the government of their plans, or obtain a special license.
Biden cuts China off from more Nvidia chips, expands curbs to other countries
Reuters
Alexandra Alper, Karen Freifeld and Stephen Nellis
The Biden administration plans to halt shipments to China of more advanced artificial intelligence chips designed by Nvidia and others, part of a raft of measures released on Tuesday that seek to stop Beijing from receiving cutting-edge U.S. technologies to strengthen its military. The rules, which go into effect in 30 days, restrict a broader swathe of advanced chips and chipmaking tools to a greater number of countries including Iran and Russia, and blacklist Chinese chip designers Moore Threads and Biren.
US lawmaker seeks answers from Meta, X, Google, TikTok over Israel-Hamas false content
Reuters
Zeba Siddiqui
U.S. Senator Michael Bennet on Tuesday sought information on how tech giants Meta, X, TikTok and Google were trying to stop the spread of false and misleading content about the Israel-Hamas conflict on their platforms. "Deceptive content has ricocheted across social media sites since the conflict began, sometimes receiving millions of views," Bennet, a Democrat, said in the letter addressed to the company chiefs.
CISA, FBI urge admins to patch Atlassian Confluence immediately
Bleeping Computer
Sergiu Gatlan
CISA, FBI, and MS-ISAC warned network admins today to immediately patch their Atlassian Confluence servers against a maximum severity flaw actively exploited in attacks. Tracked as CVE-2023-22515, this critical privilege escalation flaw affects Confluence Data Center and Server 8.0.0 and later and is remotely exploitable in low-complexity attacks that don't require user interaction.
Meta, US government spar in court over toughened privacy order
Reuters
Diane Bartz
Lawyers for Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, and the U.S. government tangled on Tuesday over the U.S. Federal Trade Commission's plan to toughen a 2019 privacy order. In May, the FTC accused Meta of misleading parents about how much control they had over who their children had contact with in the Messenger Kids app, among other issues, and proposed tightening an existing agreement on privacy to include a ban on making money from minors' data.
‘Phantom hacker’ scams that target seniors’ savings are on the rise, FBI says
CNBC
Greg Iacurci
There has been a nationwide increase in “phantom hacker” scams, a type of fraud “significantly impacting senior citizens,” who often lose their entire bank, savings, retirement or investment accounts to such crime, according to the FBI. “Phantom hacker” scams are an evolution of tech support scams, a type of cybercrime.
Southeast Asia
Hackers trying to corrupt AI, raising level of ransomware threat: S’pore cyber-security director
The Straits Times
David Sun
Cyber criminals are actively trying to corrupt generative AI, which may then put the ability to create ransomware in the hands of individuals. The looming threat is what keeps Mr Willis Lim, the director of the National Cyber Threat Analysis Centre at the Cyber Security Agency of Singapore, up at night. Generative AI platforms like ChatGPT were created to be a productivity tool.
Ukraine - Russia
Russian Sandworm hackers breached 11 Ukrainian telcos since May
Bleeping Computer
Bill Toulas
The state-sponsored Russian hacking group tracked as 'Sandworm' has compromised eleven telecommunication service providers in Ukraine between May and September 2023. That is based on a new report by Ukraine's Computer Emergency Response Team citing 'public resources' and information retrieved from some breached providers.
Russia wants to isolate its internet, but experts warn it won’t be easy
The Record by Recorded Future
Daryna Antoniuk
As Russia’s war with Ukraine drags on, the Kremlin has doubled down on its efforts to take control of the internet on its own turf. Last week, for example, the renowned Russian human rights activist Alexey Sokolov was detained for five days for "displaying symbols of extremist organizations." The organization in question was Facebook, whose logo and link Sokolov had placed on his website.
Europe
TikTok fights back over €345 million teen privacy fine in EU
Bloomberg
Stephanie Bodoni
TikTok, the Chinese-owned video—sharing platform, is fighting back in the courts after regulators in Europe slapped it with a €345 million ($363 million) data privacy fine and a compliance order for failing to take care of the private data of its teenage users. The ByteDance Ltd. unit said it’s filed an appeal in the European Union’s General Court against the penalty and is also challenging locally an order by its lead data regulator in Ireland to eliminate “deceptive or manipulative” practices that could undermine privacy.
UK
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz could snub British AI summit
BBC
Jessica Parker and Zoe Kleinman
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz may turn down his invitation to a major UK summit on artificial intelligence, the BBC understands. The government is hosting an event aimed at tech leaders, academics and political leaders to discuss AI safety on 1 November. The agenda will focus on specific future threats posed by the rapidly evolving tech, such as cyber security.
Middle East
Israel says it’s discussing Starlink wartime backup with SpaceX
Bloomberg
Marissa Newman
Israel says it’s in talks with SpaceX on setting up Starlink internet services to bolster its wartime communications, ahead of its expected ground invasion in the Gaza Strip. The announcement comes as Israel goes to war with Hamas in Gaza, following a deadly cross-border invasion on Oct. 7 that killed more than 1,400 Israelis, mostly civilians. The Israeli army has responded with heavy airstrikes in Gaza, which have killed more than 2,800 Palestinians, and stopped fuel, water and electricity supply into the Hamas-run Strip while amassing hundreds of thousands of troops along the front lines.
Hamas hijacked victims’ social media accounts to spread terror
The New York Times
Sheera Frenkel and Talya Minsberg
In a new war tactic, Hamas has seized the social media accounts of kidnapped Israelis and used them to broadcast violent messages and wage psychological warfare, according to interviews with 13 Israeli families and their friends, as well as social media experts who have studied extremist groups. In at least four cases, Hamas members logged into the personal social media accounts of their hostages to livestream the Oct. 7 attacks. In the days since, Hamas also appeared to infiltrate their hostages’ Facebook groups, Instagram accounts and WhatsApp chats to issue death threats and calls for violence. Hamas members also took hostages’ cellphones to make calls to taunt friends and relatives, according to the Israeli families and their friends.
Social media users accuse Facebook and Instagram of suppressing pro-Palestinian posts
The New York Times
Mike Isaac
Thousands of Palestinian supporters say their posts have been suppressed or removed from Facebook and Instagram, even if the messages do not break the platforms’ rules. Meta, which owns the two social networks, said that some of those posts were hidden from view because of an accidental bug in the company’s systems. In particular, messages of support for Palestinian civilians, many of whom have been displaced, injured or killed by Israeli airstrikes, were being hidden from the platforms, users said. Some people have also reported that Facebook suppressed accounts that called for peaceful protests in cities around the United States, including planned sit-ins in the San Francisco Bay Area over the weekend.
The crypto exchange moving money for criminal gangs, rich Russians and a Hamas-linked terror group
The Wall Street Journal
Angus Berwick
The U.S. last year sanctioned a Moscow-based crypto exchange to stymie Russian efforts to evade the financial blockade imposed after the invasion of Ukraine. A year on, the exchange is booming. Despite its place on the U.S. blacklist, which restricts transactions with sanctioned entities, Garantex has become a major channel through which Russians move funds into and out of the country, according to trading data and people familiar with the firm. It has also been a vehicle for Russian cybercriminals to launder their earnings, U.S. authorities say.
Israel orders freeze on crypto accounts in bid to block funding for Hamas
Financial Times
Scott Chipolina
Israeli law enforcement authorities have ordered dozens of cryptocurrency accounts to be closed and seized millions of dollars’ worth of crypto coins as they step up longstanding efforts to cut links between crypto markets and Hamas after its attack on the country.
Big Tech
Private health data still being exposed to big tech, report says
Bloomberg
Jessica Nix
Despite recent efforts to address the issue, medical-related websites continue to be mined for data including personal medical information, in an apparent violation of patients’ privacy rights, according to a new study. Some of the most common tracking pixels were from Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Microsoft Corp., Meta Platforms Inc. and ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, according to a report by the cybersecurity company Feroot Security.
Signal President Meredith Whittaker on resisting government threats to privacy
Rest of World
Andrew Deck
Just over a year ago, Meredith Whittaker stepped into the role of president of the Signal Foundation — and from the beginning, she has been dealing with political threats to encryption. The foundation’s flagship product, the Signal messaging app, has drawn in users with its default end-to-end encryption and an uncompromising stance on privacy. But those same features have also made it a target. Governments in China, Egypt, Cuba, Uzbekistan and, most recently, Iran have banned Signal outright. In the U.K., recently passed legislation could target messenger services and require an app like Signal to moderate harmful content such as terrorist content or child abuse imagery.
Artificial Intelligence
AI chatbots could help plan bioweapon attacks, report finds
The Guardian
Dan Milmo
The artificial intelligence models underpinning chatbots could help plan an attack with a biological weapon, according to research by a US thinktank. A report by the Rand Corporation released on Monday tested several large language models and found they could supply guidance that “could assist in the planning and execution of a biological attack”. However, the preliminary findings also showed that the LLMs did not generate explicit biological instructions for creating weapons.
Misc
Underwater cables play a huge role in global communication, security and the world's economy
ABC News
Sophie Kesteven and Ann Arnold
When people think about global communications, they might think of satellites, miles above the Earth. But in fact the vast majority of the world's telecommunications goes through hundreds of garden hose-sized fibre optic cables that run along the ocean floor. While most nations rely on these submarine cables for communications, they can fall foul of geopolitics and international tensions. And things can get very difficult when they are damaged, cut or tampered with.
Deepfake porn is out of control
WIRED
Matt Burgess
Google’s and Microsoft’s search engines have a problem with deepfake porn videos. Since deepfakes emerged half a decade ago, the technology has consistently been used to abuse and harass women—using machine learning to morph someone’s head into pornography without their permission. Now the number of nonconsensual deepfake porn videos is growing at an exponential rate, fueled by the advancement of AI technologies and an expanding deepfake ecosystem.
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