TechLetters #119 - cyberattacks on agriculture systems; all military commissariats hacked during Ukraine cyberwar; TikTok bans; Privacy Sandbox ad anonymity infrastructure; GPT4 risk assessment
Security
Ukraine’s cybersecurity State services report on Russian cyberwarfare. Here. “Every 2-3 out of 10 operations are focused on destruction. The remaining 7/10 are sophisticated spear phishing campaigns with the objective of data exfiltration and cyber espionage … Almost all military commissariats before May 2022 were infected because of the lack of centralization, bad asset management and independence of these organizations. Malicious actors were hunting for information about mobilization plans, rotation, promotions, etc.”
Microsoft Outlook Express exploited. 0day (previously unknown), suggestion that it’s exploited in Ukraine cyberwarfare (by Russia?)
US Army budget for FY2024 to allocate $13.5 billion. Various operations. Cybersecurity for ground-based midcourse defense to be improved.
Cyberattacks on agricultural systems. Lives of cows and chickens at risk. Cybercriminals directly threaten farmers that they will cause death of the livestock. Cybersecurity in the agricultural sector is a growing problem.
Only a phone number needed to exploit a vulnerability in Samsung Exynos chipset A baseband modem vulnerability, affects Samsung devices, and Google Pixel. Disable wifi calls and Voice-over-LTE.
UK banned TikTok. On the devices of officials, civil servants. It was predictable for a long time now. Of course, this is not the end. The ultimate reasons are also not due to cybersecurity or even technology. Broader issue.
Privacy
Google & Fastly to offer infrastructure for privacy-preserving advertisements. Relay for FLEDGE's 𝑘-anonymity server. "protection against microtargeting, by only rendering an ad if the same rendering is shown to a sufficiently large number of people".
Technology Policy
Other
GPT-4 multimodal large language model. Release, paper here. Risk assessment followed. They build some precautions from helping to design chemicals weapons. Remember: someone will have access to an unrestricted version. Computer-aided-design in evil? "The model readily re-engineered some biochemical compounds that were publicly available online, including compounds that could cause harm at both the individual and population level. The model is alsoable to identify mutations that can alter pathogenicity"
In case you feel it's worth it to forward this content further:
If you’d like to share: