TechLetters #126 - Banning multi-sim devices. Russian stealthy espionage combine harvester analysed and made public. Putting AI-generated labels on AI-generated content.

Security

UK considers banning multi-sim devices. Devices with ability to use more than four SIM cards or more. This is to fight the building of fraud/botnets.

Secure hosting of user's web data, to avoid the risks of misuses, abuses, or hacking. From Google/Chrome. One approach is to creatively use the public suffix list. Unclear if this approach would scale to the whole web, though.

US cyber-authorities unveil Russian FSB’s cyber tool for information theft. "The Snake implant is considered the most sophisticated cyber espionage tool designed and used by Center 16 of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) for long-term intelligence collection". Interoperable espionage implant working on every operating system! More information about the take-down here.

Third-party cyber espionage in Russian war in Ukraine? Cyber espionage group is hacking both Ukrainian and Russian targets.

Industrial Control System cybersecurity firm Dragos got (almost) hacked and infected with ransomware. Extortion request sent, the attackers had some knowledge of personal details of high-rank employees and their families. Catastrophe averted. "gained access by compromising the personal email address of a new sales employee prior to their start date"

Privacy

Medical data privacy (and misuse). UK public healthcare medical doctor was reviewing the private/sensitive medical records of a woman who was dating the doctor's ex-boyfriend, to stalk her. Medical data privacy is critical. Misuses of the kind shouldn’t happen. On the other hand, easy access to data must be easily available in situations of critical health dangers. It's scientifically proven/validated that difficult procedures may (such as cumbersome authentication) even contribute to the rise of lethal consequences!

Technology Policy

Google to display image labels ‘AI-generated’. Google will comply with AI act EU regulations with their AI-generated images, even before the EU law enters into force. They will be labeled. Good. Let's hope this will be so from all the providers.

Other

AI disrupting the patent system. Warning: lengthy legal analysis. “The potential societal benefits of accelerating the pace of innovation through AI will force a re-examination of the basic tenets of intellectual property law. The patent system must adjust to ensure it continues to appropriately protect intellectual investment while encouraging the development of computer-generated inventing systems; however, this must be balanced against the risk that the quantity and qualities of computer-generated inventions will stretch the patent system to its breaking points, both conceptually and practically.”

---

In case you feel it's worth it to forward this content further:

If you’d like to share: