Tag Archives: Biz & IT

Feds seize $15 billion from alleged forced labor scam built on “human suffering”

Federal prosecutors have seized $15 billion from the alleged kingpin of an operation that used imprisoned laborers to trick unsuspecting people into making investments in phony funds, often after spending months faking romantic relationships with the victims. Such “pig butchering” scams have operated for years. They typically work when members of the operation initiate conversations… Read More »

Nvidia sells tiny new computer that puts big AI on your desktop

For the OS, the Spark is an ARM-based system that runs Nvidia’s DGX OS, an Ubuntu Linux-based operating system built specifically for GPU processing. It comes with Nvidia’s AI software stack preinstalled, including CUDA libraries and the company’s NIM microservices. Prices for the DGX Spark start at US $3,999. That may seem like a lot,… Read More »

OpenAI wants to stop ChatGPT from validating users’ political views

The timing of OpenAI’s paper may not be coincidental. In July, the Trump administration signed an executive order barring “woke” AI from federal contracts, demanding that government-procured AI systems demonstrate “ideological neutrality” and “truth seeking.” With the federal government as tech’s biggest buyer, AI companies now face pressure to prove their models are politically “neutral.”… Read More »

Hackers can steal 2FA codes and private messages from Android phones

The new attack class is reminiscent of GPU.zip, a 2023 attack that allowed malicious websites to read the usernames, passwords, and other sensitive visual data displayed by other websites. It worked by exploiting side channels found in GPUs from all major suppliers. The vulnerabilities that GPU.zip exploited have never been fixed. Instead, the attack was… Read More »

Why Signal’s post-quantum makeover is an amazing engineering achievement

To provide these confidentiality guarantees, the Signal Protocol updates secret key material each time a message party hits the send button or receives a message, and at other points, such as in graphical indicators that a party is currently typing and in the sending of read receipts. The mechanism that has made this constant key… Read More »

Microsoft warns of new “Payroll Pirate” scam stealing employees’ direct deposits

Microsoft is warning of an active scam that diverts employees’ paycheck payments to attacker-controlled accounts after first taking over their profiles on Workday or other cloud-based HR services. Payroll Pirate, as Microsoft says the campaign has been dubbed, gains access to victims’ HR portals by sending them phishing emails that trick the recipients into providing… Read More »

AI models can acquire backdoors from surprisingly few malicious documents

Fine-tuning experiments with 100,000 clean samples versus 1,000 clean samples showed similar attack success rates when the number of malicious examples stayed constant. For GPT-3.5-turbo, between 50 and 90 malicious samples achieved over 80 percent attack success across dataset sizes spanning two orders of magnitude. Limitations While it may seem alarming at first that LLMs… Read More »

Bank of England warns AI stock bubble rivals 2000 dotcom peak

Share valuations based on past earnings have also reached their highest levels since the dotcom bubble 25 years ago, though the BoE noted they appear less extreme when based on investors’ expectations for future profits. “This, when combined with increasing concentration within market indices, leaves equity markets particularly exposed should expectations around the impact of… Read More »

Salesforce says it won’t pay extortion demand in 1 billion records breach

Salesforce says it’s refusing to pay an extortion demand made by a crime syndicate that claims to have stolen roughly 1 billion records from dozens of Salesforce customers. The threat group making the demands began their campaign in May, when they made voice calls to organizations storing data on the Salesforce platform, Google-owned Mandiant said… Read More »