Trump's CIA Clandestine campaign against China | ByteDance fined for endangering children through viral game 'French Scar' | Yemen’s Houthi rebels claim to have a hypersonic missile
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Two years into office, President Donald Trump authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to launch a clandestine campaign on Chinese social media aimed at turning public opinion in China against its government, according to former U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the highly classified operation. Reuters
TikTok owner ByteDance Ltd. was fined €10 million by the Italian competition authority, for failing to protect the safety of children and vulnerable people from a dangerous viral game known as the French scar challenge. Bloomberg
Yemen's Houthi rebels claim to have a new, hypersonic missile in their arsenal, Russia's state media reported Thursday, potentially raising the stakes in their ongoing attacks on shipping in the Red Sea and surrounding waterways against the backdrop of Israel's war on Hamas in the Gaza Strip ABC News
ASPI
The Strategist
Carlyle A. Thayer
Under the new CSP, defence cooperation also will be expanded to include defence industry, maritime security, information and intelligence sharing, strengthening maritime cooperation, and enhancing cooperation in cyber-security and critical technology, including through cyber security capacity-building initiatives to address cyber security threats. The commitment to expand defence industry collaboration with Vietnam is timely. In February 2021, the 13th National Congress of the Vietnam Communist Party adopted a resolution of far-reaching importance for the modernisation of the Vietnam People’s Army.
Australia
Coalition urges Australia to follow US move to ban TikTok
The Australian Financial Review
Nick Bonyhady
The Coalition has all but demanded that the government follow the United States’ lower house and tell TikTok’s Chinese parent company to sell the app or face a ban. The social media app is used by a third of Australians. In a letter to the government seen by The Australian Financial Review, opposition home affairs spokesman James Paterson said the country could not afford to be left behind after the US House of Representatives approved an anti-TikTok bill. “Urgent action is required to address the threat posed by authoritarian regimes that seek to disrupt our democracy and public discourse through targeted disinformation campaigns online,” Senator Paterson wrote.
Australia ranks high in global malware detection rates, reveals Trend Micro
Tech Day
Catherine Knowles
Trend Micro, a player in global cybersecurity, has disclosed that Australia was among the top ten countries with the highest number of malware detections, amounting to 2.7% of total global detections. Additionally, Australia ranked eighth among countries with the highest detection of URL victims at 52 million. The company noted a high detection rate of malicious URLs in Australia suggesting it is an effective attack vector for cybercriminals. The findings underline the importance of enhanced employee education on phishing attacks and attest to the growing sophistication of cyber attackers in targeting fewer victims for greater financial gains.
Rise of artificial intelligence could cut wages of workers who don't 'upskill' as AI job ads surge
ABC News
David Chau
Is artificial intelligence (AI) going to take over your job? Unfortunately, the answer might be ""yes"" if your work involves a lot of repetitive tasks that can be easily automated. Workers in administration, financial, legal, manufacturing, retail, media and wholesale roles are most at risk, according to a Future of Work report published by LinkedIn. However, the company's chief economist Karin Kimbrough is an optimist. She believes AI will help most employees as they'll focus less on the mundane tasks — and more on the work that's genuinely interesting or requires a ""higher cognitive load"".
Nissan contacting 100,000 A/NZ customers after December breach
iTnews
Richard Chirgwin
Government IDs, personal info compromised. Up to 100,000 Australian and New Zealand customers may have been affected by Nissan’s December cyber incident. The company first disclosed the incident on December 5, saying its corporate and financial services in business units in Australia and New Zealand were impacted. Today, Nissan Australia provided an update in which it said it has begun contacting affected customers. “We now know the list of affected individuals includes some of Nissan's customers (including customers of our Mitsubishi, Renault, Skyline, Infiniti, LDV and RAM branded finance businesses), dealers, and some current and former employees," the company said.
China
TikTok ban: China attacks 'bandit logic' of House vote
BBC
Bernd Debusmann Jr.
China has attacked a bill going through Congress that could ultimately see TikTok banned in the US, accusing it of "unjustly" behaving like a "bandit". The bill passed by the House of Representatives would give TikTok's parent company six months to divest from the firm or face a ban on the app. It still faces an uphill battle in the Senate but President Joe Biden says he will sign it if it passes Congress. Beijing has vowed to take" necessary measures" to protect its interests.
Funds pour into Chinese AI startups challenging OpenAI's Sora
Nikkei Asia
Du Zhihang and Han Wei Caixin
Venture capital investors are pouring hundreds of millions of yuan into China's burgeoning video generation startups, betting on their potential in the artificial intelligence race to rival OpenAI's text-to-video model Sora. This week, two leading Chinese generative AI startups announced the successful closure of their latest funding rounds, with each securing more than 100 million yuan ($14 million). Both aim to catch up with Sora in the coming months.
China’s police pledge to build ‘new quality combat capacity’ with tech aimed at preventing risks
South China Morning Post
Hayley Wong
Police departments across China have pledged to create and strengthen “new quality combat capacity” with technology aimed at “preventive policing” and efficiency. During the country’s annual legislative session last week, Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong reminded delegates from the northern province of Hebei to speed up efforts to achieve “new quality combat capacity”. While Chinese officials have used the phrase “combat capacity” in the context of public security before, Wang was the first to use the phrase “new quality combat capacity” during a nationwide meeting with the country’s provincial police chiefs in January when he renewed demands for the “modernisation” of local policing.
As China plays catch-up in AI advancements, Premier Li vows more leeway to ‘overtake rivals’
South China Morning Post
Frank Chen
In his elevation of artificial intelligence as a key pillar underpinning China’s pursuit of long-term growth, Premier Li Qiang has vowed to cultivate a more tolerant “trial and error” culture while allowing ample room to explore different technical paths for the rapidly growing technology. Li devoted his first field trip after the target-setting parliamentary meetings known as the “two sessions” to tech firms in the capital city of Beijing, where state media said he heard about the latest developments in the realms of AI, semiconductors and autonomous vehicles such as self-driving cars.
USA
Exclusive-Trump launched CIA covert influence operation against China
Reuters
Two years into office, President Donald Trump authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to launch a clandestine campaign on Chinese social media aimed at turning public opinion in China against its government, according to former U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the highly classified operation. Three former officials told Reuters that the CIA created a small team of operatives who used bogus internet identities to spread negative narratives about Xi Jinping’s government while leaking disparaging intelligence to overseas news outlets. The effort, which began in 2019, has not been previously reported.
US ban of TikTok would rob Biden, Democrats of 2024 election tool
Reuters
Nandita Bose, Helen Coster and Heather Timmons
If President Joe Biden keeps his promise to sign a bill that could ban TikTok over its ties to the Chinese government, he may rob his reelection campaign of a platform that he and fellow Democrats rely on to reach younger voters. Biden's campaign got thousands of "likes" on Tuesday for a TikTok video skewering Republican rival Donald Trump about cutting Social Security spending. But the comments were focused on another issue altogether: the proposed ban. "Good thing we saw this on TikTok," said one. "How are you going to use this to campaign if you ban it?" asked another. House Republicans voted Wednesday to force TikTok's Chinese owner ByteDance to divest its 170 million user U.S. business, or face a ban.
TikTok needs to get creative to find a deal that wards off a US ban
Bloomberg
Alex Barinka
While the US government has now moved one step closer to forcing China’s ByteDance Ltd. to divest its gem of an asset, TikTok, how could that actually work? The bill is born out of concerns that China, through ByteDance, could access data from TikTok’s 170 million monthly US users or somehow influence what Americans see on their feed.
AI image-generator Midjourney blocks images of Biden and Trump as election looms
ABC News
Matt O'Brien
The popular artificial intelligence image-generator Midjourney has started blocking its users from creating fake images of President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump ahead of the upcoming U.S. presidential election, according to tests of the AI tool by The Associated Press. With the election in full swing, it's time to “put some foots down on election-related stuff for a bit,” Midjourney CEO David Holz told several hundred members of the service's devoted userbase in a digital office hours event Wednesday. Declaring that "this moderation stuff is kind of hard,” Holz didn't outline exactly what policy changes were being made but described the clampdown as a temporary measure to make it harder for people to abuse the tool.
Stanford: Data of 27,000 people stolen in September ransomware attack
Bleeping Computer
Sergiu Gatlan
Stanford University says the personal information of 27,000 individuals was stolen in a ransomware attack impacting its Department of Public Safety network. The university discovered the attack on September 27 and disclosed one month later that it was investigating a cybersecurity incident impacting SUDPS systems. In an update published on Monday, Stanford said the attackers didn't gain access to other systems outside the Department of Public Safety's network.
Americas
Canada reviewing TikTok's expansion plan for national security risks
Reuters
Canada in September ordered a national security review of a proposal by TikTok to expand the short-video app's business in the country, the industry ministry said on Thursday. The potential outcome of the review, which could range from Canada asking TikTok to take mitigation measures to even blocking the expansion, could add to the company's growing woes. On Wednesday, the U.S. House passed a bill to force TikTok's Chinese owner ByteDance to divest the U.S. assets of the app or face a ban. The measure is the latest in a series of moves in Washington to respond to U.S. national security concerns about China, from connected vehicles to advanced artificial intelligence chips to cranes at U.S. ports.
North Asia
Japan doubles defense tie-ups with private sector in drones, AI
Nikkei Asia
Yusuke Takeuchi
Japan's Ministry of Defense has doubled joint research projects with the private sector, Nikkei has learned, working with such partners as Hitachi and Mitsubishi Electric to hone technologies like drones and AI. The ministry was involved in about 30 such projects in fiscal 2023, the most ever and up from 14 a year earlier. Through its Advanced Technology Bridging Research program, the ministry teams up with businesses to develop defense applications for the latest technologies in their existing products and services.
Southeast Asia
Thai clean power provider hears skeptics, rides electric bus bet
Nikkei Asia
Francesca Regalado
Thailand's Energy Absolute expects half of its revenue to come from its electric vehicle ecosystem this year, even though investors skeptical of demand for its batteries and commercial fleets have sent its stock plunging 54% in the past year. Deputy Chief Executive Officer Amorn Sapthaweekul said new government subsidies, announced in February, will encourage bus operators and logistics companies to electrify. That would justify EA's production budget of 5,000 vehicles this year while exploring Southeast Asia for potential customers and raising capacity at its lithium-ion battery facility from 1 gigawatt-hours to 4 to fill orders from the Chinese companies EVE and Sunwoda, he told Nikkei Asia.
Ukraine - Russia
UK-Ukraine TechBridge launches skills training for tech careers
GOV.UK
Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, Department for Business and Trade, Nusrat Ghani MP, and Leo Docherty MP
Ukrainians will be able to access pro bono training in key skills from top tech companies through the UK-Ukraine TechBridge. The TechBridge Skills and Development Programme helps Ukrainian citizens access training and opportunities to continue professional development despite disruption caused by Russia’s illegal invasion.
Europe
Tech giants face EU grilling over use of generative AI tools
Bloomberg
Jillian Deutsch and Stephanie Bodoni
Big Tech platforms face a grilling from European Union regulators over their readiness to deal with potential pitfalls arising from generative AI tools. The European Commission will fire off a series of requests for information to Microsoft Corp., Alphabet Inc., Meta Platforms Inc., X, Snapchat and TikTok under the EU’s flagship Digital Services Act, according to EU officials on Thursday. The EU will also open a formal probe into Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s AliExpress into concerns of online consumer protection.
TikTok hit by €10 million Italian fine for ‘French Scar’ game
Bloomberg
Samuel Stolton
TikTok owner ByteDance Ltd. was fined €10 million by the Italian competition authority, for failing to protect the safety of children and vulnerable people from a dangerous viral game known as the French scar challenge. The Italian antitrust regulator said on Tuesday that TikTok’s Irish, British and Italian branches failed to protect users from such harmful games, which involves pinching your cheek hard enough to leave a bruise on your cheekbone. The watchdog said the viral challenge threatens the “psycho-physical safety of users.” It has been investigating TikTok’s alleged failure to clampdown on harmful content since March 2023.
Top start-up hubs reinvent the model for European tech sector needs
Financial Times
John Thornhill
Mention start-up centres, and most people think Silicon Valley. Think start-up hubs, and you probably think of Y Combinator: the storied US accelerator, whose motto is “make something people want”, has attracted budding entrepreneurs from all over the world who, like Steve Jobs of Apple fame, dream of putting “a dent in the universe”. Since 2005, Y Combinator has nurtured and funded 4,000 start-ups with a combined valuation of $600bn, including Airbnb, Dropbox and Stripe. Every region of the world has looked on with envy at this model of entrepreneurial dynamism and tried to copy the West Coast playbook. None has succeeded in the same way.
Europe’s content police have a new target: generative AI
POLITICO
Mark Scott
Brussels wants to show its new digital content rules can bite. On Thursday, the European Commission announced an investigation into AliExpress, the Chinese e-commerce giant, and asked LinkedIn, the Microsoft-owned social network, for more information on how it was complying with the 27-country bloc’s Digital Services Act. The Commission also said it was demanding that many of the world’s largest social media companies and search engines explain how they handled threats posed by so-called generative artificial intelligence.
E.U. removes Russian tech tycoon from sanctions list
The New York Times
Anatoly Kurmanaev
The European Union has lifted sanctions against a Russian technology tycoon, in a rare break from a policy of punishing the country’s elites for the invasion of Ukraine. Arkady Volozh, who co-founded Russia’s largest tech company, Yandex, was taken off the list of sanctioned individuals after condemning the invasion of Ukraine and taking public steps to sever ties to Russia. The decision was announced in a document published by the European Council on Wednesday. Mr. Volozh is one the most prominent Russian figures to be cleared of sanctions by a major Western power since the start of the war.
Africa
Much of west and central Africa without internet after undersea cable failures
The Guardian
Much of west and central Africa has been left without internet service, as operators of several subsea cables reported failures. The cause of the cable failures on Thursday was not immediately clear. The African subsea cable operator Seacom confirmed that services on its west African cable system were down and that customers who relied on that cable were being redirected to the Google Equiano cable, which Seacom uses. “The redirection happens automatically when a route is impacted,” it said by email. Network disruptions caused by cable damage have occurred in Africa in recent years. However, today’s disruption “points to something larger [and] this is amongst the most severe,” said Isik Mater, director of research at NetBlocks, a group that documents internet disruptions around the world.
Middle East
Report claims Yemen's Houthis have a hypersonic missile, possibly raising stakes in Red Sea crisis
ABC News
Jon Gambrell
Yemen's Houthi rebels claim to have a new, hypersonic missile in their arsenal, Russia's state media reported Thursday, potentially raising the stakes in their ongoing attacks on shipping in the Red Sea and surrounding waterways against the backdrop of Israel's war on Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The report by the state-run RIA Novosti news agency cited an unnamed official but provided no evidence for the claim. It comes as Moscow maintains an aggressively counter-Western foreign policy amid its grinding war on Ukraine. However, the Houthis have for weeks hinted about “surprises” they plan for the battles at sea to counter the United States and its allies, which have so far been able to down any missile or bomb-carrying drone that comes near their warships in Mideast waters.
HPE taps Saudi Arabia as it extends its production footprint
Nikkei Asia
Lauly Li
Hewlett Packard Enterprise has begun making servers in Saudi Arabia to meet onshore production demand from the Middle East and boost supply chain resilience, the CEO of the world's second-biggest server maker told Nikkei Asia. Supply chain resilience "is a very important topic," Antonio Neri said in an interview on the sidelines of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. "It's not just driven by the geopolitical situation, but also the ability to deal with disruptions. Think about hurricanes, typhoons, earthquakes and everything that we have to deal with. We have to do that in the context [of providing a] guaranteed supply experience to our customers."
Gender & Women in Tech
At Women Leaders in Cybersecurity conference, experts weigh risks and opportunities associated with new tech
NYU Law
At a January 26 conference hosted by Women Leaders in Cybersecurity, law firm partners, government officials, corporate leaders, and other experts in law and tech convened to discuss new cybersecurity regulations and artificial intelligence’s impact on business and law. Judith Germano, founder and lead counsel of Germano Law LLC, who started the discussion series Women Leaders in Cybersecurity at NYU in 2016, delivered opening remarks. “For nine years, we’ve been bringing together amazing people, women experts in cybersecurity,” she said. “The way that it started was sitting through a lot of conferences with all men on the panel. People would say to me, ‘I’m sorry, but there just aren’t any women in cybersecurity.’ And I said, ‘Of course there are. You just need to look a little harder.’”
Events & Podcasts
The Sydney Dialogue
ASPI
The Sydney Dialogue was created to help bring together governments, businesses and civil society to discuss and progress policy options. We will forecast the technologies of the next decade that will change our societies, economies and national security, prioritising speakers and delegates who are willing to push the envelope. We will promote diverse views that stimulate real conversations about the best ways to seize opportunities and minimise risks.
Jobs
Junior Editor for The Strategist
ASPI
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute is seeking a junior editor for The Strategist website, Australia’s leading site for national security commentary and analysis. We are looking for a strong editor and writer who has excellent attention to detail and solid policy judgement, and who can work with ASPI staff, on writing and editing their own work. Candidates will preferably have a background in journalism, editing or security and international policy, with at least two years’ experience in a relevant field.
Cyber, Technology & Security Program Coordinator
ASPI
ASPI is looking for a high-performing individual to join our Cyber, Technology & Security Program as a Coordinator. The Coordinator will coordinate CTS’s business processes, projects, stakeholder engagement and events schedule. The Coordinator will work closely with the CTS Director, senior ASPI staff, other ASPI Programs, Corporate, Strategic Communications and Finance areas. The ideal candidate will have 1-3 years’ experience in executive assistance, business coordination or events management roles.
Deputy Director Defence Strategy & National Security
ASPI
ASPI is currently recruiting for a Deputy Director, Defence Strategy & National Security. This is an exceptional opportunity for a talented and experienced individual to contribute to the work of Australia's leading think-tank on strategic defence policy issues in a unique leadership role.
Professional Development Program Coordinator
ASPI
Our Program Coordinators are fundamental to the success of our professional development programs. Success demands adept communication and interpersonal skills, a focus on client service, exceptional organisational abilities coupled with keen attention to detail, and the capability to think on your feet, problem-solve, and meet deadlines effectively. We currently have one position to be filled as soon as possible and will be looking to fill another position in the next three to six months via a merit list established from this recruitment application.
ASPI Northern Australia Strategic Policy Centre (NASPC) Administration Officer
ASPI
This role also works across the Head of the NASPC's alternate policy centres, the Strategic Policing and Law Enforcement Program, involving work across illicit drugs, illicit finance, transnational serious organised crime, and modern slavery, and ASPI’s Counter-terrorism Policy Centre. The successful applicant will have the chance to assist with coordinating a project in the first half of 2024 focused on northern Australia's connections with Pacific Island Countries, liaising with senior Government and international representatives.
China Analyst or Senior Analyst
ASPI
ASPI has an exciting opportunity for an analyst or senior analyst to explore China's evolving foreign and security policy, political economy and impact on the Indo-Pacific and the world. ASPI’s China analysts conduct rigorous data-driven research, publish impactful reports that shape the public policy discourse and contribute to the wide catalogue of influential China work published by ASPI. The difference between the analyst and senior analyst levels will depend on experience level and demonstration of past work.
The Daily Cyber & Tech Digest is brought to you by the Cyber, Technology & Security team at ASPI.