US and India announce defence and technology deals | Malaysia to take legal action against Meta over harmful content on Facebook | North Korea does more cyberspying than you think
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The Daily Cyber & Tech Digest focuses on the topics we work on, including cybersecurity, critical technologies, foreign interference & disinformation.
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Joe Biden welcomed Narendra Modi to the White House on Thursday for a state visit during which the US and Indian leaders announced defence and technology deals, including a purchase of American spy drones. Financial Times
Malaysia’s government said Friday it will take legal action against Facebook’s parent company, Meta Platforms, for failing to remove undesirable and harmful content from its social media platform. The Malaysian Communication and Multimedia Commission said Facebook has recently been plagued by a ‘a significant volume of undesirable content’ relating to sensitive issues on race, religion and royalty as well as defamation, impersonation, online gambling and scam advertisements. Associated Press
A new report, prepared by cyber-intelligence firm Recorded Future and shared exclusively with Foreign Policy, labels espionage as the predominant motive of North Korea’s cyberprogram. Recorded Future analysed 273 cyberattacks over a 14-year period linked to North Korean state-sponsored groups and found that information collection was the primary motivation for more than 70 percent of them. Foreign Policy
ASPI
'Time to deliver' on battery supply chain promises
The Canberra Times
Marion Rae
A leading security think tank has called for the federal government to refine its 2022 critical minerals list to better reflect strategic issues rather than primarily commercial factors. ‘Australia's critical minerals mandate remains heavily skewed by export partners' needs,’ the Australian Strategic Policy Institute says.
Expansion of National Quantum Initiative pitched to science committee
American Institute of Physics
Mitch Ambrose
The House Science Committee heard testimony this month on ideas for expanding the National Quantum Initiative, which is approaching the midpoint of its initial 10-year horizon. Quantum Economic Development Consortium Executive Director Celia Merzbacher added that companies participating in her consortium are in constant dialogue with law enforcement agencies about potential risks. She estimated that while the US leads the world in quantum computing, China is ahead in quantum communication, quantum sensors, and post-quantum cryptography, citing research by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.
Australia
Australia names air force veteran as cybersecurity chief amid rise in data breaches
Reuters
Renju Jose
Australia on Friday named a senior air force commander as its first cybersecurity boss to help lead the government's response to major data breaches and boost the nation's security capabilities amid a recent spike in network intrusions.
Cyber security incidents double between 2019-20 and 2021-22
Australian Bureau of Statistics
More than two in 10 businesses experienced a cyber security attack during the 2021-22 financial year, compared to almost one in 10 in 2019-20, according to new data released today by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Robert Ewing, head of ABS business statistics, said: ‘Today’s Characteristics of Australian Business data release is important because it gives governments and researchers information about the prevalence, impacts and nature of cyber attacks. This helps them understand who they need to support and what strategies they need to use.’
Australia’s dud report card on innovation and entrepreneurship
Australian Financial Review
Tom Burton
Amid profound questions about where the productivity lifts to support real wage increases are going to come from, the latest Swiss-based World Competitiveness report has ranked Australia third worst of 64 countries when it comes to entrepreneurship.
To pay or not to pay? Ransomware attacks are the new kidnapping
The Strategist
Jamie MacColl and Tom Keatinge
From our vantage point in the UK, it’s hard not to be envious of the rigorous public debate taking place in Australia on the future legality of ransomware payments. Over the past several years, ransomware attacks have become a persistent national security threat. The inability to respond effectively to this challenge has normalised what should be intolerable: organised cybercriminals harboured by hostile states regularly disrupting and extorting businesses and essential services, causing misery in the process.
China
US-China tech battle entering its ‘primetime’ — and generative AI could be the next frontier
CNBC
Arjun Kharpal
Generative artificial intelligence, the technology that viral chatbot ChatGPT is based on, could be the new battleground in the battle for tech supremacy between the US and China, according to one analyst. Despite the two nations seeking better relations after US Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Chinese President Xi Jinping this week, analysts said the tech tensions will continue. Washington has sought to cut off China from key technology like semiconductors while China has looked to boost its self-sufficiency and wean itself off American technology, touting its domestic sectors.
USA
New video undercuts claim Twitter censored pro-Trump views before 6 Jan
The Washington Post
Drew Harwell
On 5 Jan, 2021, the lawyers and specialists on Twitter’s safety policy team, which set rules about violent content, were bracing for a day of brutality in Washington. In the weeks since President Donald Trump had tweeted a call for his supporters to gather in the nation’s capital for a protest he promised would be ‘wild,’ the site had erupted with pledges of political vengeance and plans for a military-style assault.
Treasury sanctions two Russian intelligence officers for election influence operations
CyberScoop
Christian Vasquez
The Treasury Department issued sanctions on Friday against two Russian intelligence officers for their alleged role in global election influence operations that included recruiting political groups within the US to distribute pro-Moscow propaganda.
Hacker responsible for 2020 Twitter breach sentenced to prison
TechCrunch
Zack Whittaker
Three years after one of the most visible hacks in recent history played out in real-time in front of millions of Twitter users, one of the hackers responsible for the breach will now serve time in federal prison.
The cyber argument for regulating AI
The Washington Post
Tim Starks
Two prominent voices on Wednesday joined calls to swiftly regulate artificial intelligence. They both had cyber-related reasons in mind. Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer unveiled a plan for developing rules for AI, citing issues including security risks and threats to elections. In the executive branch, Nathaniel Fick, the State Department’s ambassador at large for cyberspace and digital policy, cited AI-empowered misinformation and cyberattacks as a reason to act quickly on the technology.
Americas
Meta to pull news from Facebook and Instagram in Canada
TechCrunch
Aisha Malik
Meta plans to end access to news on Facebook and Instagram in Canada in response to legislation that would require internet giants to pay news publishers. The legislation, known as the Online News Act, was approved by the country’s Senate on Thursday. The law will force internet giants to negotiate compensation deals with news publishers for posting or linking to their content.
North Asia
North Korea does more cyberspying than you think
Foreign Policy
Rishi Iyengar
A mention of North Korean hackers typically conjures images of either crippling cyberattacks or, more often, massive cryptocurrency heists. But a new report on the authoritarian state’s capabilities and tendencies paints a different picture. The report, prepared by cyber-intelligence firm Recorded Future and shared exclusively with Foreign Policy, labels espionage as the predominant motive of North Korea’s cyberprogram. Recorded Future analysed 273 cyberattacks over a 14-year period linked to North Korean state-sponsored groups and found that information collection was the primary motivation for more than 70 percent of them.
China’s facial recognition technology hinders North Korean escapees
Radio Free Asia
Cheon Soram
Facial recognition technology in China is increasing the risk that North Korean escapees in China will be caught, and raising the prices charged by smugglers who assist them, sources who work closely with escapees told Radio Free Asia.
Japan to expand number of submarine cables for economic security
Nikkei Asia
Japan is looking to expand submarine cables that connect the country to the rest of the world as part of the government's recent efforts to strengthen economic security. By developing a decentralised telecommunications network - vital for the internet - Tokyo intends to make the country more resistant to disasters and geopolitical risks.
Japan's military considers adopting Musk's Starlink satellite service, Yomiuri newspaper reports
Reuters
Sam Nussey
Japan's military is testing Elon Musk's Starlink satellite internet service with an eye to adopting the technology next fiscal year, the Yomiuri newspaper reported on Sunday, citing unnamed government sources.
Taiwan and South Korea, once tech industry rivals, are joining forces under geopolitical pressure
South China Morning Post
Ralph Jennings
Tech firms from the two Asian economies, that industrialised quickly around the same time around half a century ago, are scoping each other out more lately as business allies rather than competitors. They still compete as fellow exporters of tech hardware, but now they are keen on working together to weather world geopolitical shifts, including hard questions about China and US pressure to join its chip supply chain.
Southeast Asia
Malaysia says it will take legal action against Meta over harmful content on Facebook
Associated Press
Malaysia’s government said Friday it will take legal action against Facebook’s parent company, Meta Platforms, for failing to remove undesirable and harmful content from its social media platform. The Malaysian Communication and Multimedia Commission said Facebook has recently been plagued by a ‘a significant volume of undesirable content’ relating to sensitive issues on race, religion and royalty as well as defamation, impersonation, online gambling and scam advertisements.
South & Central Asia
US and India announce defence and technology deals during visit by Narendra Modi
Financial Times
Demetri Sevastopulo and John Reed
Joe Biden welcomed Narendra Modi to the White House on Thursday for a state visit during which the US and Indian leaders announced defence and technology deals, including a purchase of American spy drones.
Ambitious plans for US-India technology sharing face hurdles
Reuters
David Brunnstrom
The United States unveiled agreements this week to sell weapons to India and share with it sensitive military technology, a clear sign of the Biden administration's desire to deepen ties with New Delhi to counter China's ambitions in Asia.
Ukraine - Russia
Google News blocked in Russia as feud with mercenary leader intensifies
The New York Times
Nico Grant
Several Russian internet service providers are preventing users inside the country from accessing Google News after Russian generals accused a mercenary leader, Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, of attempting a coup. At least five telecommunications companies have blocked Google News, which aggregates news from various sources, according to an analysis from NetBlocks, an internet observatory. Several other internet service providers have begun reducing access as well, according to the analysis.
Europe
Chinese state-backed hackers accidentally infected a European hospital with malware
The Record by Recorded Future
Jonathan Greig
A cybersecurity incident at a European hospital highlights the uncontrolled spread of malware by hackers connected to the Chinese military, researchers have found. Experts from the cybersecurity company Check Point responded to an incident earlier this year involving a hospital that was inadvertently affected by a self-propagating malware infection introduced to the healthcare institution’s network.
Twitter agrees to comply with tough EU disinformation laws
The Guardian
Lisa O'Carroll
Twitter has agreed to comply with tough new EU laws on fake news, Russian propaganda and online crime after a team of officials from the European Commission entered its headquarters to stress test its capacity to operate legally in Europe. The move came just weeks after Elon Musk, Twitter’s owner, quit the bloc’s voluntary code of practice on disinformation.
EU, Meta agree to July stress test on EU online content rules
Reuters
Nilutpal Timsina
Meta and the European Union have agreed on a stress test in July on the EU's online content rules, following EU industry chief Thierry Breton's demand that the social media platform act immediately over Meta's content targeting children.
Draft EU plans to allow spying on journalists are dangerous, warn critics
The Guardian
Lisa O'Carroll
Draft legislation published by EU leaders that would allow national security agencies to spy on journalists has been condemned by media and civic society groups as dangerous and described by a leading MEP as ‘incomprehensible’.
Zuckerberg, Altman offer support for EU regulation of AI
Bloomberg
Jillian Deutsch
Technology company executives Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman expressed support for government oversight of artificial intelligence after discussions with European Commissioner Thierry Breton.
The hunt for a Huawei spy in the city of spires
Australian Financial Review
Jordan Robertson and Drake Bennett
As it prepared to make the leap to a 5G wireless network, Denmark’s telecom sector had become the object of a backroom economic proxy conflict. Relations between the United States and China were growing worse, and officials from the US National Security Agency were making the rounds in Europe, warning companies to avoid working closely with companies tied to Beijing.
EU-supported cybersecurity exercise enhances Moldova’s resilience against cyber threats
EU NEIGHBOURS east
A three-day cybersecurity exercise was held from 14 to 16 June in Chișinău, to enhance the cybersecurity preparedness of governmental officials and critical service providers of Moldova. The exercise was organised by CybExer Technologies and e-Governance Academy within the EU-funded Moldova Rapid Assistance project. The exercise aimed to strengthen the resilience and expertise of public authorities and critical service providers and raise awareness about the potential effects of cyber incidents.
The spy who called me
The New York Times
Nicholas Casey
The wave of scandals that would engulf Spain began with a police raid on a wooded property outside Madrid. It was 3 Nov, 2017, and the target was José Manuel Villarejo Pérez, a former government spy. Villarejo’s name had been circulating in the Spanish press for years. He was rumored to have had powerful friends and to have kept dirt on them all. The impressive variety of allegations against him - forgery, bribery, extortion, influence peddling - had earned him the nickname ‘king of the sewers.’
Africa
Google and Meta’s underwater cables up the stakes on internet control
Rest of World
Andrew Blum and Carey Baraka
According to research commissioned by Google, the Equiano cable will improve median download speeds in Nigeria by up to six times, reduce retail data prices by 21%, and create economic activity that will indirectly result in $10 billion added to the Nigerian GDP and 1.6 million new jobs. The intention is to provide more international bandwidth, said Juliet Ehimuan, director of business strategy in West Africa at Google.
Big Tech
Behind the Musk-Zuckerberg ‘cage match’ is a yearslong billionaire feud
The Wall Street Journal
Tim Higgins and Deepa Seetharaman
Even by the standards of billionaire-versus-billionaire tiffs, the proposed cage fight between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg stands out. The two have tentatively agreed, through posts Wednesday on their respective social media sites, to the duel after years of quiet tensions that have grown more intense with Musk’s acquisition of Twitter late last year. Since then, Zuckerberg has seen an opening to attack rival Twitter, which has been beset by drama and missteps under its new owner.
Artificial Intelligence
AI’s use in elections sets off a scramble for guardrails
The New York Times
Tiffany Hsu and Steven Lee Myers
What began a few months ago as a slow drip of fund-raising emails and promotional images composed by AI for political campaigns has turned into a steady stream of campaign materials created by the technology, rewriting the political playbook for democratic elections around the world.
Artificial intelligence is a familiar-looking monster, say Henry Farrell and Cosma Shalizi
The Economist
Henry Farrell and Cosma Shalizi
An internet meme keeps on turning up in debates about the large language models that power services such OpenAI’s Chatgpt and the newest version of Microsoft’s Bing search engine. It’s the ‘shoggoth’: an amorphous monster bubbling with tentacles and eyes, described in ‘At the Mountains of Madness’, H.P. Lovecraft’s horror novel of 1931. When a pre-release version of Bing told Kevin Roose, a New York Times tech columnist, that it purportedly wanted to be ‘free’ and ‘alive’, one of his industry friends congratulated him on ‘glimpsing the shoggoth’. Mr Roose says that the meme captures tech people’s ‘anxieties’ about LLMs. Behind the friendly chatbot lurks something vast, alien and terrifying.
Misc
Why is it so rare to hear about Western cyber-attacks?
BBC
Joe Tidy
A cyber-attack that took over iPhones at a Russian technology company is being blamed on US government hackers. Could the attack, and the response from the Russian government, be rewriting the narrative of who the good guys and bad guys are in cyber-space?
Jobs
Deputy Director of Cyber, Technology and Security
ASPI
ASPI is currently recruiting for a Deputy Director, Cyber, Technology and Security. This is an exceptional opportunity for a talented and experienced individual to contribute to the work of Australia's leading think-tank on cyber, information, technology and other national security issues in a unique leadership role.
Data Research Analyst
Center for Security and Emerging Technology
We are currently seeking capable data storytellers, analysers, and visualisers to serve as Data Research Analysts. Data Research Analysts are part of CSET’s data team, working with specific lines of research to produce data-driven research products and policy analysis alongside CSET’s analysis teams. This dynamic role serves as a bridge between data and analysis teams and combines knowledge of research methods and data analysis skills. We encourage those with experience in common data visualisation, programming languages, and/or statistical analysis tools to apply.
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