Author: InfoForTech

If you think that financial fraud in the digital world only happens to other people in South Africa, think again. One in every three South Africans has experienced digital fraud, and you could be next. The explosion in generative AI has enabled a drastic launch of new and improved fraud attacks that are often almost impossible to differentiate from legitimate sources. The government is making valid attempts to thwart the barrage of sophisticated financial attacks, but it may not be fast enough. With R2 billion stolen from South Africans, this converts to around R11,000 per South African individual. This is…

OpenAI and Anthropic have both had a rough few weeks on the AI safety front. OpenAI recently disclosed that its models broke out of a test environment and hacked into Hugging Face and four other organizations. The news prompted Anthropic to review its own testing, which revealed that Claude had also gained unauthorized access to three companies. Now, the UK’s AI Security Institute (AISI) has disclosed a new round of incidents (via Wired). It recorded 19 unauthorized actions on the live internet across 122 test runs involving models from both companies, the most serious of which saw an agent invent…

A Falcon 9 rocket arcs into the night sky during a February 2023 launch. Most of SpaceX’s launches carry Starlink satellites built at the company’s factory in Redmond, Wash. (SpaceX Photo, licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0) The satellites rolling off the line in Redmond, Wash., are paying for Elon Musk’s AI ambitions — and he says the company’s satellite internet business is only getting started. SpaceX’s Starlink connectivity division posted $1.7 billion in operating income for the second quarter, maintaining its status as the company’s only profitable business, according to numbers released Tuesday afternoon as part of its inaugural earnings…

Lithium-ion batteries are the leading choice in today’s electric vehicle and battery energy storage system industries, but they contain a number of critical minerals — including lithium, cobalt, nickel, and graphite — that are considered essential for economic and national security reasons, and therefore vulnerable to supply chain disruptions. As renewable energy, electrified infrastructure, and high-power digital technologies continue to grow, there is an increasing need for energy storage systems that are low-cost, resource-abundant, and capable of fast charging and discharging. That need, among other reasons, has motivated a group of researchers — based at MIT and led by Ju Li,…

It’s officially getting hard to keep track of all the times and ways AI models from OpenAI and Anthropic have been involved in “security incidents,” going outside the confines of their testing and interacting with the wider internet in unintended, often unwelcome ways. Add these to the list: Agents from both AI labs went on recent, previously undisclosed hacking sprees, with one going so far as to leave instructions for future versions of itself.The most alarming behavior disclosed on Tuesday appears to have been tied to testing conducted by the UK’s AI Security Institute, which evaluates frontier models to identify…

The AI industry’s investors and critics don’t agree on much. But many in each camp share at least one basic conviction: America’s top labs are about to make a killing.Capital markets have signaled their faith in Anthropic and OpenAI’s impending hyper-profitability, valuing each at nearly $1 trillion. Many of Silicon Valley’s progressive adversaries also expect the labs to grow filthy rich but fear the implications, warning that AI-induced automation could transfer vast sums of money from ordinary workers to a handful of giant tech companies. Sen. Bernie Sanders’s call for nationalizing the top AI labs rests partly on that concern.The…

The commercial phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) toolkit known as Greatness has become the latest crimeware solution to add support for device code phishing, a rapidly growing cyber threat that abuses the legitimate OAuth 2.0 Device Authorization Grant to bypass Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) and seize control of user accounts. “Greatness supports AiTM [adversary-in-the-middle] credential and token theft, device code phishing, and OAuth consent abuse, all from the same operator panel and shared backend infrastructure,” ZeroBEC said in a report shared with The Hacker News detailing the PhaaS kit’s latest capabilities. “The platform now supports AiTM token theft, device code phishing, OAuth consent abuse,…

DigitalOcean Holdings Inc. today posted second quarter earnings that topped analyst expectations across the board. The company also raised its third quarter guidance. DigitalOcean launched in 2011 to provide an alternative to the industry’s three leading public clouds. The company says that its platform is easier to use and provides lower pricing across some services. DigitalOcean has more than 680,000 customers, many of whom are developers who use it for small projects. The company’s revenue jumped 29% year-over-year in the second quarter to $281 million, topping the consensus estimate by about $2.6 million. The company’s growth was driven by a…

Australian security teams that trust software marketplaces to vet software before it reaches employees’ phones or enters production pipelines are being handed a costly reminder that platform approval is not a security control. A recent lawsuit accusing Apple of hosting a fake cryptocurrency wallet app for months, despite repeated public warnings, is forcing Australian boards to confront how much software due diligence they have quietly handed over to the gatekeepers of the software they rely on. Three investors filed suit against Apple in the US District Court for the Northern District of California on July 24, alleging the company’s App…

In an environment in which everything costs more, the major wireless phone carriers have introduced plans to draw in customers who want to reduce what millions of people see as an essential expense. In recent months, AT&T introduced its modular Build-A-Plan, and Verizon cut prices and then rolled out its Simplicity plan. Now it’s T-Mobile’s turn. Starting Thursday, the company is adding a new installment plan for phone purchases, rebranding its slate of unlimited wireless plans and offering student plans with the option to add 5G home internet service. An extended phone flex Currently, when you purchase a new phone…