Leading experts warn of a risk of extinction from AI
On Tuesday, AI experts issued a dire warning saying, “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.” Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI and Geoffrey Hinton, also known as the godfather of AI who recently left Google, were among the hundreds who signed the statement posted on the Center for AI Safety’s website. The call for AI guardrails has intensified as companies have rushed to adopt new tech. This point was underscored Tuesday when chipmaker Nvidia briefly became worth over $1 trillion dollars after share prices surged due to its AI advances.
Hackers demand $3 million from Scandinavian Airlines
Hacker group Anonymous Sudan have escalated their ransom demand up to to $3 million to halt distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS) on Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) websites. Despite claiming to be politically-motivated hacktivists, Anonymous Sudan is clearly not above resorting to using extortion tactics for financial gain. The hackers said on their Telegram channel that the airline’s services have been paralyzed for more than five days. The airline acknowledged that it’s working to fix the issues in its website and mobile app that extend back to February, however its site appears to be up and running as of Tuesday.
Theranos founder turns herself in for 11-year prison term
The founder of Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes, has turned herself in for an 11-year prison sentence, after being indicted on charges of defrauding investors in her failed blood-testing tech firm. Theranos was valued at more than $10 billion in 2014, just prior to the Wall Street Journal revealing shortcomings in the company’s core technology. Holmes will need to serve no less than 85% of her 11-year sentence after which she will face three years of supervised release and she’ll also have to pay $452 million in restitution to the fraud victims.
US Supreme Court sex trafficking ruling favors social platforms
The US Supreme Court have snuffed an appeal from victims of child pornography who claimed Reddit Inc. knowingly facilitates and benefits from images of child sexual abuse. The justices ruled that Reddit can’t be held liable for violating sex trafficking laws due to a liability shield called Section 230. Earlier this month, the Supreme Court refused to limit the broad liability shield for social media platforms, including Twitter, Facebook and Google.
And now a word from our sponsor, Barricade Cyber Solutions
The human factor fuels industrial APT attacks
Kaspersky has issued a report identifying the primary factors contributing to advanced persistent threat (APT) attacks in industrial sectors. The first is the absence of isolation in operational technology (OT) networks which can allow attackers to better manage malware traffic. The report also highlights disgruntled employees and contractors as well as those accessing OT networks without adequate attention to information security measures as a significant driver of cyber-criminal activities in industrial settings. Finally, the report asserts that outdated, misconfigured and unpatched systems contribute to exacerbating the spread of security threats.
You should probably patch that – WordPress edition
Automattic, the company behind the open-source WordPress content management system, has begun force-installing security patches for the Jetpack WordPress plug-in. Jetpack has over 5 million active installs and provides free security, performance, and website management features. The critical flaw, which allows for manipulation of any WordPress files, is now addressed in Jetpack version 12.1.1.
Meanwhile another WordPress plugin called ‘Gravity Forms’ is vulnerable to unauthenticated PHP Object Injection which could lead to arbitrary file access,data exfiltration, and code execution. Gravity Forms is a custom form builder website currently used by over 930,000 companies including Airbnb, ESPN, Nike, NASA, PennState, and Unicef. The vendor has fixed the issue in version 2.7.4.
Lawyer cited 6 fake cases made up by ChatGPT
Lawyer Steven Schwartz of the firm Levidow is in trouble after admitting he used ChatGPT to help write court filings that cited six nonexistent cases invented by the artificial intelligence (AI) tool. Schwartz provided excerpts from his ChatGPT queries to show that the tool did indeed verify the bogus cases as being real. Scwartz did express regret for using AI to supplement his research and vowed to verify the authenticity of AI-produced content going forward. Federal Judge Kevin Castel, who presided over Schwartz’ case called the circumstances “unprecedented” and said Scwartz and his firm will need to show cause for why they should not be sanctioned.