Top of the Day

 

Microsoft breakthrough challenges Australia’s quantum strategy

 

(Andrew Horton – ASPI The Strategist – 25 February 2025) The global strategic landscape is being redrawn not on battlefields, but in the arcane realm of quantum physics. Microsoft’s unveiling last week of Majorana 1 is a technological bombshell: it is the first quantum chip powered by a topological core architecture, ensuring fault resistance. This breakthrough demands an urgent rethinking of Australia’s move to post-quantum encryption, as it challenges the foundations of our defence and intelligence capabilities. – https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/microsoft-breakthrough-challenges-australias-quantum-strategy/

 

DeepSeek is in the driver’s seat. That’s a big security problem

(Danielle Cave – ASPI The Strategist – 25 February 2025) Democratic states have a smart-car problem. For those that don’t act quickly and decisively, it’s about to become a severe national security headache. Over the past few weeks, about 20 of China’s largest car manufacturers have rushed to sign new strategic partnerships with DeepSeek to integrate its AI technology into their vehicles. This poses immediate security, data and privacy challenges for governments.  While international relations would be easier if it weren’t the case, China’s suite of national security and intelligence laws makes it impossible for Chinese companies to truly protect the data they collect. – https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/deepseek-is-in-the-drivers-seat-thats-a-big-security-problem/

 

Apple’s largest-ever $500 billion US investment boosts silicon, jobs amid China tech war

 

(Aman Tripathi – Interesting Engineering – 24 February 2025) Apple has announced a staggering $500 billion investment in the United States over the next four years. Notably, this is the company’s largest-ever spend commitment. “We are bullish on the future of American innovation, and we’re proud to build on our long-standing US investments with this $500 billion commitment to our country’s future,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. A significant portion of this multi-billion dollar investment will be dedicated toward the production of advanced silicon at TSMC’s Fab 21 facility in Arizona. – https://interestingengineering.com/culture/apples-500-billion-us-investment

 

Managing Risks in AI-Powered Biomedical Research

 

(Scott Hadly – Stanford HAI – 24 February 2025) Artem Trotsyuk doesn’t want to frighten anybody, but he does want people, specifically those using artificial intelligence in biomedical research, to sit up and pay attention. Trotsyuk, a fellow with the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics, says the breakneck speed of advances in artificial intelligence offers incredible potential to accelerate drug discovery, improve disease diagnosis, and create more personalized treatments, but with these great opportunities come great risks, some of which we still don’t fully understand. – https://hai.stanford.edu/news/managing-risks-ai-powered-biomedical-research

 

DeepSeek’s ByteDance Data-Sharing Raises Fresh Security Concerns

 

(Elizabeth Montalbano – Dark Reading – 24 February 2025) Security researchers are sounding the alarm over the use of DeepSeek across organizations after a South Korean data protection agency reported that the AI chatbot is sending information back to a third party — namely, China’s ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok. South Korea’s data protection regulator, the Personal Information Protection Commission (PIPC), suspended new downloads of DeepSeek in South Korea last week, the commission told told South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency. A day later, it publicly confirmed its reason for the move: it found that the chatbot sent data from the nation’s users to ByteDance, although the commission does not yet know “what data was transferred and to what extent,” according to a published report. – https://www.darkreading.com/cyber-risk/deepseek-bytedance-data-sharing-security-concerns

 

North Korea’s Lazarus hackers behind $1.4 billion crypto theft from Bybit, researchers say

 

(James Reddick – The Record – 24 February 2025) Cybersecurity researchers say North Korean hackers are behind the largest cryptocurrency heist in history and are actively laundering the more than $1.4 billion in cryptocurrency stolen from the Bybit exchange on Friday. Soon after the incident, the blockchain analytics firm TRM Labs released a short blog post saying they had determined with “high confidence” that North Korean hackers were behind the incident, “based on substantial overlaps observed between addresses controlled by the Bybit hackers and those linked to prior North Korean thefts.” – https://therecord.media/lazarus-hackers-behind-bybit-crypto-heist

Thailand Targets Cyber Sweatshops to Free 1,000s of Captives

(Tara Seals – Dark Reading – 24 February 2025) Up to 100,000 victims of human trafficking could be held in compounds in Myanmar, Thai police are warning, forced to operate round-the-clock cybercrime campaigns via workstations and call centers set up there. Thai Police General Thatchai Pitaneelaboot, director of the Anti-Human Trafficking Center, told the Guardian that tens of thousands of kidnapped people are being held in captivity and forced to work the scams, which are run by 30 to 40 Chinese criminal gangs. The cybermill activities could include social engineering, running fake gaming sites, or working on cryptomining, among other things. – https://www.darkreading.com/cyber-risk/thailand-cyber-sweatshops-free-captives

What’s missing from the AI debate? Patience.

(Trey Herr – Atlantic Council – 18 February 2025) Artificial intelligence (AI) is evolving quickly, but the forces driving its development—computing infrastructure, model design, and the economics of deployment—are far from settled. There are no magic beans, no single indicators. Rather, there are a handful of strong signals that interact with each other such that interpreting one in isolation can easily lead to mistaken predictions on where AI is headed. Assuming that more compute power inevitably produces better models, for example, ignores that different companies and lines of research are taking different paths to solve the “systems problem” of AI. Unfortunately, too many institutions—investors chasing returns, policymakers rushing to position themselves, and media outlets eager to shape the narrative—currently mistake motion for progress. In dollar terms, around 50 percent of all new venture capital investments went into AI service and related companies in 2024, including more than 60 percent of all activity in the fourth quarter and “six of the top ten deals.” – https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/whats-missing-from-the-ai-debate-patience/

 

Security

Hackers pose as e-sports gamers online to steal cryptocurrency from Counter-Strike fans

(Daryna Antoniuk – The Record – 24 February 2025) Cybercriminals are exploiting major e-sports tournaments to target players of the popular video game Counter-Strike 2 (CS2), researchers have found. According to a new report by cybersecurity firm Bitdefender, scammers are hijacking YouTube accounts to impersonate professional CS2 players, including Oleksandr ‘s1mple’ Kostyliev, Nikola ‘NiKo’ Kovač and Danil “donk” Kryshkovets, and launching fake livestreams. – https://therecord.media/hackers-pose-as-esports-gamers-to-steal-crypto-from-fans

Botnet looks for quiet ways to try stolen logins in Microsoft 365 environments

(Joe Warminsky – The Record – 24 February 2025) Cybersecurity researchers say a large botnet-driven campaign poses a threat to Microsoft 365 environments that still use an authentication process that the tech giant has been phasing out in recent years. The attackers are employing a botnet of 130,000 compromised devices for “large-scale password spraying attacks” at Microsoft 365 setups that still use “non-interactive sign-ins with Basic Authentication,” according to a report from SecurityScorecard. – https://therecord.media/botnet-credentials-microsoft-spraying-attack

Frontiers

 

China’s Engine AI unveils world’s first humanoid robot that masters frontflip

 

(Jijo Malayil – Interesting Engineering – 24 February 2024) Chinese robotics startup EngineAI claims its PM01 is the first humanoid robot to successfully perform a frontflip. The Shenzhen-based startup shared footage of the robot completing the stunt, receiving applause from onlookers. The video ends with PM01 walking through the Shenzhen Tourist Information Center, with Engine AI stating that the robot is evolving daily. Launched in December 2024, the PM01 is a smaller version of the SE01, Engine AI’s flagship humanoid known for its realistic walking gait. – https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/chinas-first-humanoid-robot-frontflip

Defense, Intelligence, and War

New plug-and-play AI can protect pilots of non-stealth planes: Raytheon

(Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. – Breaking Defense – 24 February 2025) One of the largest defense companies on the planet just unveiled a small upgrade that could make a big difference in the survival rates of US aircrews. And by deploying an AI device powerful enough to be militarily useful, yet small enough to be retrofitted on a fighter jet, Raytheon’s new Cognitive Algorithm Deployment System (CADS) is a major step towards a long-sought holy grail of “cognitive electronic warfare.”. The problem CADS helps to solve is a growing one: Adversaries like Russia increasingly employ — and export — reprogrammable digital radars that can rapidly reconfigure the signals they use to locate, track and shoot down airplanes. Those rapid changes, in turn, can confound Western radar-warning systems, which work by comparing each signal they pick up to a pre-loaded database of known threats. Raytheon is fighting back by upgrading its warning systems with AI, allowing them to analyze and identify the danger in real time — and, with a little luck, alert the pilot before it’s too late to evade. – https://breakingdefense.com/2025/02/new-plug-and-play-ai-can-protect-pilots-of-non-stealth-planes-raytheon/

Drones are the next chapter in US-India’s defense partnership

(Lauren C. Williams – Defense One – 24 February 2025) The U.S. and India are launching a new alliance for autonomous systems, which builds on bipartisan groundwork laid by previous administrations and could be a stabilizing force for the democracies’ future tech exchanges. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi joined President Donald Trump in Washington on Feb. 13 to discuss tariffs, technology, and energy and defense initiatives. – https://www.defenseone.com/defense-systems/2025/02/drones-are-next-chapter-us-indias-defense-partnership/403203/?oref=d1-homepage-river