Author: esimantiras

FBI Warns Smartphone Users…

Posted on by esimantiras

FBI Warns Smartphone Users—Hang Up And Create A Secret Word Now

source: forbes.com (contributed by Artemus founder, Bob Wallace)  |  image: fbi.gov

 

Update, Dec. 07, 2024: This story, originally published Dec. 05, now includes details of innovative technological solutions for smartphone users looking to protect themselves from the kinds of AI-generated scams the FBI has warned about. An update on Dec. 06 added details on reporting smartphone crime to the FBI along with additional input from security experts.

The use of AI in smartphone cyber attacks is increasing as recent reports have revealed; from tech support scams targeting Gmail users to fraudulent gambling apps and sophisticated biometric protection-busting banking fraud to name but a few. Now the Federal Bureau of Investigations has issued a public service announcement warning of how generative AI is being used to facilitate such fraud and advising smartphone users to hang up and create a secret word to help mitigate these cyber attacks. Here’s what the FBI warned you must do.

FBI Warns Of Generative AI Attacks Against Smartphone Users

In public service alert number I-120324-PSA, the FBI has warned of cyber attackers increasingly looking to generative AI to commit fraud on a large scale and increase the believability of their schemes. “These tools assist with content creation and can correct for human errors that might otherwise serve as warning signs of fraud,” the FBI said. Given that, as the FBI admits, it can be difficult to tell what is real and what is AI-generated today, the public service announcement serves as a warning for everyone when it comes to what to look out for and how to respond to mitigate the risk. Although not all the advice is aimed directly at smartphone users, given that this remains a primary delivery mechanism for many AI deepfake attacks, especially those using both facial and vocal cloning, it is this advice that I am focusing on.

Continue reading “FBI Warns Smartphone Users…” →

The Promise of Artificial General Intelligence is Evaporating

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The Promise of Artificial General Intelligence is Evaporating

source: mindmatters.ai (contributed by Artemus founder, Bob Wallace)  |  image: pexels.com

 

Revenue from corporate adoption of AI continues to disappoint and, so far, pales in comparison to the revenue that sustained the dot-com bubble — until it didn’t

hink back to when you took a science class in high school or college. Introductory physics, for example. There was one textbook and, if you learned the material in the book, you got a high grade in the class. If you were super serious, you might read a second textbook that reinforced what was in the first book and might even have added a few new concepts. A third book wouldn’t have added much, if anything. Reading a 10th, 20th, or 100th textbook would surely have been a waste of time.

Large language models (LLMs or chatbots) are like that when it comes to absorbing factual information. They don’t need to be told 10, 20, or 100 times that Abraham Lincoln was the 16th President of the United States, Paris is the capital of France, or that the formula for Newton’s law of universal gravitation is

Continue reading “The Promise of Artificial General Intelligence is Evaporating” →

Phone Scanner That Detects Spyware

Posted on by esimantiras

A New Phone Scanner That Detects Spyware Has Already Found 7 Pegasus Infections

source: wired.com (contributed by FAN, Steve Page)  |  image: unsplash.com

 

The mobile device security firm iVerify has been offering a tool since May that makes spyware scanning accessible to anyone—and it’s already turning up victims.

IN RECENT YEARS, commercial spyware has been deployed by more actors against a wider range of victims, but the prevailing narrative has still been that the malware is used in targeted attacks against an extremely small number of people. At the same time, though, it has been difficult to check devices for infection, leading individuals to navigate an ad hoc array of academic institutions and NGOs that have been on the front lines of developing forensic techniques to detect mobile spyware. On Tuesday, the mobile device security firm iVerify is publishing findings from a spyware detection feature it launched in May. Of 2,500 device scans that the company’s customers elected to submit for inspection, seven revealed infections by the notorious NSO Group malware known as Pegasus. Continue reading “Phone Scanner That Detects Spyware” →

FBI Warns iPhone And Android Users—Stop Sending Texts

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FBI Warns iPhone And Android Users—Stop Sending Texts

source: forbes.com (contributed by FAN, Steve Page  |  image: pexels.com

 

Republished on December 6 as new cybersecurity regulations are proposed, and with further warnings following the FBI’s encrypted communications push.

Timing is everything. Just as Apple’s adoption of RCS had seemed to signal a return to text messaging versus the unstoppable growth of WhatsApp, then along comes a surprising new hurdle to stop that in its tracks. While messaging Android to Android or iPhone to iPhone is secure, messaging from one to the other is not.

The network cyberattacks, attributed to Salt Typhoon, a group associated with China’s Ministry of Public Security, has generated heightened concern as to the vulnerabilities within critical U.S. communication networks. The reality is different. Without fully end-to-end encrypted messaging and calls, there has always been a potential for content to be intercepted. That’s the entire reason Apple, Google and Meta advise its use, highlighting the fact that even they can’t see content. Continue reading “FBI Warns iPhone And Android Users—Stop Sending Texts” →

In This Polish Village, All 5,600 Residents Live on the Same Street

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In This Polish Village, All 5,600 Residents Live on the Same Street

source: nicenews.com  |  image: pexels.com

 

take a look at this street!

 

When a drone captured a bird’s-eye view photo of a sleepy Polish town, one feature stood out, taking the village from a relatively unknown dot on a map to a social media phenomenon. 

That wow-worthy feature? Everyone in Suloszowa — with a population of 5,672 in 2023 — lives on one single street. What impresses in the aerial picture is not only the 5.6-mile road with homes dotted on either side of it, but the billowing ribbons of yellow, green, and gold fields stretching out from behind them, forming living art in the surrounding countryside. 

“Until I saw the pictures from above, I didn’t really appreciate how nice it is here,” Marian Gęgotek, a resident and tractor driver, told the Daily Mail. Local shopkeeper Edyta was similarly struck by the photo of her town making the rounds on social media, adding: “I saw the aerial picture on the internet and I know that people are talking about us, and I am not that surprised, it is a lovely view.”  Continue reading “In This Polish Village, All 5,600 Residents Live on the Same Street” →

Rising Threat of China’s Volt Typhoon

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Rising Threat of China’s Volt Typhoon

image - china tech

source: axios.com (contributed by FAN, Bill Amshey)  |  Image: pexels.com

 

Notorious China-linked hackers known for burrowing deep into U.S. infrastructure are back, according to a report out today.

Why it matters: The resurgence shows that the Chinese government isn’t backing down from its quest to infiltrate American utilities in preparation for a potential destructive cyberattack.

Zoom in: The research team at SecurityScorecard, a cyber risk assessment company, says it has noticed Volt Typhoon moving traffic through a set of compromised routers in New Caledonia, an island nation off the coast of Australia, as recently as September.

  • Global law enforcement disrupted a significant portion of Volt Typhoon’s botnet in January, but the group quickly set up new servers.
  • However, actual movement across these servers hadn’t been seen until September, according to the report.
  • Routing through New Caledonia gives the hackers a “silent bridge” to hide traffic moving between the Asia-Pacific region and the Americas, the report says. Continue reading “Rising Threat of China’s Volt Typhoon” →

Say Goodbye to Passwords

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Say Goodbye to Passwords

source: fastcompany.com  |  image: pixabay.com

 

Passkey adoption is up, and problems are being fixed.

It’s been a couple of years since Apple, Google, and Microsoft started trying to kill the password, and its demise seems more likely than ever.

In 2022, all three companies embraced an alternative called passkeys, which sync securely between your devices and are protected by face recognition, a fingerprint, or a PIN. The thinking goes that if you don’t have to remember a password—or even create one in a password manager—you’re less likely to fall prey to phishing scams. And if websites don’t have to store their customers’ passwords anymore, security breaches won’t be as disastrous. Continue reading “Say Goodbye to Passwords” →

Hyper-Smelling AI

Posted on by esimantiras

This Hyper-Smelling AI Can Sniff Out Counterfeit Sneakers—and That’s Only the Beginning

source: fastcompany.com  |  image: pexels.com

 

Osmo, an AI startup focused on mapping scent, has an ambitious plan to use its sensor tech to find everything from fake shoes to tumors growing inside your body.

I want a tricorder,” Alex Wiltschko tells me on a Zoom call. Wiltschko, the founder of the AI company Osmo, is referring to the handheld device used by the Enterprise’s crew in its exploration across the universe. In Stark Trek, the tricorder can tell crew members everything they need to know about an object simply by holding it nearby.

One could say that Wiltschko and his team have created an alpha version of the fantasy device. His team has developed a backpack-sized machine equipped with a smelling sensor that uses artificial intelligence to identify counterfeit products by analyzing their chemical composition. Osmo has recently partnered with sneaker resale platforms to show that the high-tech sniff test is capable of identifying fakes with a high degree of accuracy. 

IT’S ALL ABOUT THE MOLECULES

Everything in the world has a smell, from clothes to cars to your body. Those scents are volatile molecules, or chemistry that “flies” off those objects and reaches our nostrils to tell us things. You experience this consciously and clearly when something is new to your nose, like smelling a new car or a pair of sneakers. Continue reading “Hyper-Smelling AI” →

Winning the AI Race

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Winning the AI Race

source: axios.com (contributed by FAN, Bill Amshey)  |  image: unsplash.com

 

The Biden administration’s AI directive is a green light to the Pentagon, intelligence agencies and their eager suppliers.

  • The documents enshrine the technology as a defense imperative. Expect greater investment, including in energy and workforce, with check-ins along the way.
  • It also validates the high-risk, high-reward work of early movers.

Why it matters: This signals a more a hands-off approach, which should help allay private-sector worries about cumbersome guardrails.

What they’re saying: If the U.S. fails to deploy AI more extensively and at a quicker pace than its adversaries, advantages earned over decades in land, air, sea, space and cyber could be erased, national security adviser Jake Sullivan warned Thursday.

  • “Even if we have the best AI models, but our competitors are faster to deploy, we could see them seize the advantage in using AI capabilities against our people, our forces and our partners and allies,” he said at the National Defense University.
  • “We could have the best team but lose because we didn’t put it on the field.”

What we’re hearing: Defense industrial base players are generally pleased.

  • Contractors already embrace a software first, hardware second approach.
  • The White House messaging clarifies what’s fair game — and what’s out of bounds. Guidance should boost experimentation and adoption.

The bottom line: There are few “precedents for a document such as this one, which seeks to comprehensively state U.S. national security interests and strategy toward a transformative technology,” Gregory Allen, director of the Wadhwani AI Center at CSIS, told me.

  • “NSC-68, which defined U.S. early nuclear strategy, comes to mind.”

A “City Within a City” Is Coming to Phoenix

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A “City Within a City” Is Coming to Phoenix

source: nicenews.com  |  image: unsplash.com

 

Things are getting meta in Phoenix: Plans are in the works to build a $7 billion “city within a city” and drive value in the local economy.
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Called “Halo Vista,” the project in the Arizona capital would span 2,300 acres, with 28 million square feet dedicated to residential, retail, office, and industrial spaces. All of that will surround a semiconductor chip manufacturing complex, Newsweek reports, citing The Arizona Republic.
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“As historic as this is, it’s maybe just the beginning,” Richard Mack, one of the developers of the project, said at a launch event. Three other plants are planned for the site and are projected to create 10,000 total permanent jobs, not to mention another 80,000 jobs for the surrounding development.
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The team behind Halo Vista reiterated that it’s more than structures they’re seeking to build: “I really hope people understand this is a community we are trying to develop, and not any one thing,” Mack added.