Thursday, October 31, 2024

Imagine the consequences…

https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/31/canada_cybersec_threats/

Chinese attackers accessed Canadian government networks – for five years

India makes it onto list of likely threats for the first time

A report by Canada's Communications Security Establishment (CSE) revealed that state-backed actors have collected valuable information from government networks for five years.

The biennial National Cyber Threat Assessment  described the People's Republic of China's (PRC) cyber operations against Canada as "second to none." Their purpose is to "serve high-level political and commercial objectives, including espionage, intellectual property (IP) theft, malign influence, and transnational repression."

The report also named Russia and Iran as significant hostile states – which isn't surprising.

The inclusion of India, named for the first time as an emerging threat, may be. Canada and India are, after all, both democracies and share membership of the UK-centric Commonwealth of Nations.





Should the people with the passwords also be posting tings online?

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/colorado-voting-system-partial-passwords-accidentally-posted-government-website-2024-10-30/

Colorado voting system partial passwords accidentally posted on government website

Partial passwords to some parts of the state's voting systems that were accidentally posted online pose no threat to Nov. 5 general election, the Colorado Department of State said on Tuesday.

The department said a spreadsheet located on its website "improperly" included a hidden tab including partial passwords to certain components of Colorado voting systems.





Tasteless. Seems trivial but could kill.

https://databreaches.net/2024/10/30/fbi-investigated-disney-world-cyberattack-after-restaurant-menus-were-changed/

FBI investigated Disney World cyberattack after restaurant menus were changed

Gabrielle Russon reports on your latest reminder of the insider threat:

A fired Disney World employee is accused of hacking into an online system and altering Disney World restaurant menus by changing fonts and prices, adding profanity and manipulating the food allergy warnings, according to new federal documents.
The cyberattack caused at least $150,000 in damage and has gotten the FBI involved. Disney printed the wrong menus but realized the mistake in time. The menus were not sent to restaurants or distributed to the public.
A criminal complaint against Michael Scheuer was filed last week in U.S. District Court’s Orlando division. He was arrested on Oct. 23.

Read more at Florida Politics.

Note that this allegedly vengeful former employee also risked public health and safety. By editing the menus to suggest that certain items were safe for people with peanut allergies when they weren’t, he risked people having life-threatening anaphylactic incidents. There is no allegation that anyone was actually harmed or injured, however, as Disney detected the alterations before menus could be sent out to restaurants.

There seems to be a lot more to this case, as the affidavit in support of the complaint refers to DDoS attacks and Scheuer allegedly “doxing” his victims.

DataBreaches reminds readers that a complaint is just unproven allegations at this point.





To be expected? AI algorithms generate formulaic speech.

https://techxplore.com/news/2024-10-text-ai-generated-figured-method.html

How can you tell if text is AI-generated? Researchers have figured out a new method

Have you ever looked at a piece of writing and thought something might be "off"? It might be hard to pinpoint exactly what it is. There might be too many adjectives or the sentence structure might be overly repetitious. It might get you thinking, "Did a human write this or was it generated by artificial intelligence?"

In a new paper, researchers at Northeastern University set out to make it a little easier to answer that question by analyzing the syntax, or sentence structure, in AI-generated text. What they found is that AI models tend to produce specific patterns of nouns, verbs and adjectives more frequently than humans.

The work is published on the arXiv preprint server.

"It empirically validates the sense that a lot of these generations are formulaic," says Byron Wallace, director of Northeastern's data science program and the Sy and Laurie Sternberg interdisciplinary associate professor. "Literally, they're formulaic."





Perspective.

https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/4963246-ai-sentience-welfare-study/

Plans must be made for the welfare of sentient AI, animal consciousness researchers argue

Computer scientists need to grapple with the possibility that they will accidentally create sentient artificial intelligence (AI) — and to plan for those systems’ welfare, a new study argues.

The report published on Thursday comes from an unusual quarter: specialists in the frontier field of animal consciousness, several of whom were signatories of the New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness.

But while the probability of creating self-aware artificial life over the next decade might be “objectively low,” it’s high enough that developers need to at least give it thought, Sebo said.





Tools & Techniques. Because you can’t subscribe to everything?

https://www.bespacific.com/all-of-the-paywall-removers-in-one-place/

All of the paywall removers in one place

Archive Buttons – Simply enter the URL of the article and click the archive buttons to remove any paywall.



 

No comments: