Why Has The Need For Cybersecurity Increased?

If you are keen on finding the right answer to the question as to why there is a greater need for cybersecurity, you have many reasons to find quite a few things interesting and useful, as far as this article is concerned. Though the internet has been around for many years now, the world of cybersecurity is perhaps around two decades old at the most. Hence, many of us often wonder as to why there is a sudden need for increased cybersecurity. Let us therefore try and find answers for the same. It will perhaps be helpful in understanding cybersecurity from a new perspective and from a new way of thinking.

Threats Are Increasing

There is no denying the fact that cybercrime impacting businesses are on the upswing. According to some experts who offer cybersecurity solutions, the damages caused by cyber thefts and security lapses could be a whopping $400 billion. This is a steep increase compared to $250 billion around two years ago. Hence, it is quite obvious that organizations big, small, and the not-so-big are into overdrive to try and protect their businesses from e-criminals. Organizations are ready to invest big money to ramp up their security protocols and digital frontiers. But the increasing costs are still a big problem for many. Further, the world of cybersecurity is becoming quite complicated because of the increasing range of services and tools which are now in vogue. All said and done, there is a need for investing more on cybersecurity, and we are sharing a few of them over the next few lines.

The Rising Cost Of Security Breaches

There is no doubt that breaches and cyberattacks could cause extensive damages to businesses, and many small businesses have had to shut shop because of the losses caused. Any large firm could suffer a loss of around $20,000 for every security breach that it suffers. It is an understatement because it also does a lot of damage to the overall reputation and goodwill of the company. While large organizations may be able to regroup and overcome such losses, for small organizations this could be a body blow.

Hackers Are Becoming Smart And Sophisticated

There is no doubt that almost every business has a website and systems which are exposed externally fall easy prey to criminals. They are very smart in finding out entry points to internal networks where sensitive information and data is stored. Though the risk associated with hacking is quite big, hackers have reasons to try their luck in breaching the firewalls and get inside. Today’s hackers are well-prepared and are also well-funded and this has resulted in some of the most coordinated hacking. It has not impacted even big names, and therefore, one can gauge how vulnerable small and medium organizations and businesses will be.

Advanced And Easily Available Hacking Tools

Added to unlimited resources being at the disposal of hackers, they also have some of the most advanced hacking tools available with them. These tools, combined with the skill sets of these hackers, do pose a serious challenge to small and medium enterprises, in particular. Even not-so-skilled hackers can find out ways and means to break into websites and eCommerce sites making use of these hacking tools.

Tighter Regulations

Finally, apart from the ever-growing risk of criminal attacks which could wipe out small and medium businesses, tighter regulations are also a problem for these small enterprises. They need to be compliant so that they are always on the right side of the law. Many new regulations and laws are in place. Hence, organizations, big and small, cannot afford to take security laxly and therefore, have to spend the resources required for being a complaint. In case they fail, they could end up paying very heavy and tough fines.

Protect Your Business Interests With Cyber Security

While we keep talking about the achievements and the massive size of Fortune 1000 companies, we need to keep in mind that it is the small businesses which continue to remain the most important aspect of the country’s economy. As far as the USA is concerned, we should bear in mind that around 30 million small businesses are operating in this country. They employ almost 50% of the total workforce of the country. Therefore, we need to give the importance small business deserve. However, we also need to understand the challenges and problems which are being faced by small businesses.

On the one hand, the intense competition that these small businesses are subjected to by the big transnational organizations is indeed a big challenge. On the other hand, small, medium, and even big sized businesses also face cyber threats, and many of them have fallen victims to it. The rate at which this is happening is quite alarming.

The Importance Of Improved Cyber Security Measures

Because of the real threat and danger emanating from this area, there is a need to protect your business interests with cybersecurity. However, a mere statement of intent will not work on the ground, and this has to be matched with action on the ground. Hence, we will try and have a look at the various things which can be done to increase cybersecurity in general and look at it with particular reference to small and medium-sized organizations.

There Is A Real Fear Of Recession

Unless the problem of cybersecurity and the risks that it poses to small and medium enterprises is addressed urgently, it is quite possible that we could be entering into a phase of recession, as far as this country is concerned. Previously, all recessions were top-down. In other words, the big names crumbled, and this led to a massive deflation of the economy and resulted in job losses and other such problems.

Experts, however, feel that now the challenge of cybersecurity could force many small and medium businesses to go broke and therefore, recession this time around could be bottom-up instead of being top-down. Hence, let us look at some of the most common ways and means by which cybersecurity can be increased for small business. These are simple steps and could go a long way in protecting the businesses from the threat of cyber attackers.

Importance Of Using Strong Passwords

It is always better to choose a strong password combination. It should contain a combination of upper case letters, lower case letters, alphabets, and special characters. The passwords should be between eight and twelve characters long. You must try and avoid personal data as a password. Understand the need for changing passwords regularly. Never use the same password for multiple accounts. The benefit of using two-factor authentications should also be kept in mind.

Put Up A Strong Firewall

Firewalls are effective gatekeepers between the internet and your computer. Firewalls protect the sites from malware, viruses and other such unwanted things. Have the right control access in place.

Control Access

Control access could go a long way in preventing different types of cyberattacks. You would do well to have well defined and well thought out control access protocols. For example, controlling physical access to a computer network and the premises where they are located, is a simple yet highly effective step. You also must try and restrict access to unauthorized users. Access to data, information, and services must be restricted with the help of effective application controls.

The Importance Of Security Software

You must not underestimate the importance of security software. These include spy-software, anti-virus software, and anti-malware software. They keep your system safe and help to identify and remove malware and other malicious software before they can cause any damage.

Regular Updating Of Programs And Applications

We often tend to ignore the importance of regular updating of various applications and programs that we are using. This should be avoided because updating is a normal process, and such updates come with increase security features and other such things. They help in keeping your system and website safe from bugs and other vulnerabilities. Many small business houses have fallen prey to cybercriminals because they have been lax in updating of applications and programs.

Hence, you should always be proactive when it comes to protecting your business interests from various cybersecurity threats.

AI Labs Now In 10 Indian Institutes To Train Students

Microsoft announced the launching of Artificial Intelligence (AI) enabled digital labs in 10 educational institutions in India that solely focus on training students. The ‘Intelligent Cloud Hub’ program includes institutes like BITS Pilani, SRM Institute of Science and Technology, BML Munjal University, ISB, KL University, Kalpataru Institute of Technology, KL University, Periyar University, SVKM (NMIMS) and Trident Academy of Technology. Microsoft said in a statement that it would support the select institutions with infrastructure, curriculum and content along with access to cloud and Artificial Intelligence (AI) services as well as developer support.

The collaboration with colleges and universities could greatly increase institutional setup along with educator capability, and provide relevant educational choices for students which could help them acquire the required skills. “With the right technology infrastructure, curriculum and training, we can empower today’s students to build the India of tomorrow,” said Anant Maheshwari, President, Microsoft India. Training programs on cloud computing, data sciences, AI and internet of things will be provided for the faculty. The faculty would also receive assistance in strategizing content and curricula for project-based and experiential learning. According to a recent study by Microsoft and International Data Corporation Asia-Pacific, lack of skills and resources have been one of the top challenges faced by Indian organizations in adopting AI to improve their businesses.

Money Laundering chases DeepDotWeb Out of Business

DeepDotWeb, a famous deep web market and cryptocurrency news site was shut down by FBI along with the efforts from authorities in Israel, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Brazil.

The page now reads that FBI has seized the page and the warrant is obtained by the United States Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Pennsylvania under the authority of 18 USC 1956 (h), 981, 982, which is related to money laundering even though it is not mentioned right away. The website published news items on deep web market places and crypto currencies and crimes related to them. There were links related to market and exchange but the website was not a part of any such deals.

Several people in the administrative posts of this website are doubted to be arrested and the charges that were posed on the website remain unsaid.

Read More…..

Bigdata Analytics Innovation Augments Human Intelligence at Cryptek Labs

Optimized technologies are being inculcated by many organizations lately. Ideally usage of resources has to encourage growth and result in success. Data is the core of the entire sharp-witted digital world. Industries are equipped with big data analytics which is derived from data. Data, as it is, is ever-evolving needs to be processed with advanced technology instead of conventional ones. Large volumes of data are being dealt with big data analytics techniques instead of depending on traditional methods.

Big data is being adapted by many companies though it is a vast subject to understand and get accustomed to. Real-time data analysis, predictive data analysis, usage of emotional AI and sentiment analysis are recent advancements of technology. To increase the number of customers, the company uses predictive behavioral targeting and real-time voice sentiment.

Cryptek Labs core services include, Affective Computing (Behavioral and Emotion AI): Real-time voice sentiment analysis deriving human behavioral informatics from speech and language, Predictive behavioral targeting utilizing big data for customer modeling, targeting and analytics, Real-time deep neural traffic-management system.

The company introduced a new channel for indiscriminately blanketed ads. It began by targeting the right people, in the right place, at the right time, sending them to the best-performing sales representative, and then speaking to them in the right language. Each step of this process is achieved through various aspects of their proprietary and patent-pending technology.

Here, technologies augment human experience and wisdom in new ways. One of the sectors the company is most interested in contributing to is smart cities initiatives through a real-time traffic management neural network system.

Cryptek Labs has improved from a one-dimensional big data analytics company to a holistic system focused on results whether through predictive behavioral targeting, affective computing via voice intonation analysis or neural AI traffic management.

Some fundamental chokeholds for big data are storage, streaming and processing along with privacy, regulation and security. Soon the Internet of things (IOT) and big data could be combined for the purpose of knowledge discovery.

Read More…..

Google Search is Loaded with Augmented Reality

Google at its I/O keynote revealed that it is adding 3D Augmented Reality to its search results. This means when the word “Shark” is typed the search results turns in to a display of a 3D shark on the screen or overlay on a camera feed. Dresses and shoes can be seen in life-size before shopping online through this much advanced feature.

For the past two years Google has been working on Augmented Reality-based features. Android ARCore platform was introduced in 2017. It had tools like Whimsical Playground system with augmented reality stickers and playmoji which had characters like the Avengers and Detective Pikachu placed into the camera feeds. Google is also into testing Augmented Reality directions for Google Maps which is seen turn-to-turn that was announced at I/O event last year. Furniture could be seen life-size with the help of Google app Wayfair.

Facebook declared an expansion of Spark AR platform at F8 conference which was held last week. AR enabled Google search can be extremely useful for the users in buying clothes.

Read More…..

Bitcoin Lighting to Fix Payment Problems

Bitcoin Lighting is to be incorporated as a step forward towards fixing the long-standing payment problems. A new routing is proposed to be merged into the official definition of lightning.

Christian Decker, one of the most inventive lightning developers for the tech startup Blockstream, identified that the proposal, which he wrote, is moving on to the next stage at CoinDesk’s Consensus 2019 conference, emphasizing that this change will pave the way for many highly-anticipated lightning features.

Lightning is experimental even now and considered incautious to use. Some people lose money to bugs in the protocol. The new features of lightning are promising to fix the payment method and make it easier to use. Decker stated to CoinDesk: “This enables quite some cool new features, including multi-path routing, trampoline routing, and so forth. It’s on the agenda for today’s [IRC specification] meeting and I’m confident it’ll get merged today, so we can get started on the next wave of features.”

Decker has also already written up a code implementation, putting the proposal into practice. The proposal is a handy change and which is why it is now being merged into specifications.

These specifications need to be coded in order to remain interoperable, which implies that one person using one implementation can send a payment of another.

Decker said “It is a multi-frame proposal, which allows us to include more information in the routing onion, the same technology used in the popular privacy-minded browser Tor”.

The payment process which cannot be seen by the intermediaries is like “onion” where at each hop in the network, a layer of obstacle is peeled off. If there are four hops then four layers tend to be peeled off until the payment reached the recipient.

The onion routing format is changed by the proposal so that more information that the other routing tools needed could be included.

Read More…..

AI Can Now Detect Cheating In Assignments And Identify Fake News

Ever since the invention of the internet, students’ lives were made easier with everything being a click away. The internet has been a useful tool for students, but it has also made cheating and plagiarism easy, which becomes a tedious process for professors and lecturers to analyze each student’s paper. The University of Copenhagen’s Department of Computer Science has adopted artificial intelligence to detect cheating on assignments. Scientists can now with nearly 90% accuracy, detect whether a student’s assignment is authentic or if it has been written by a ghostwriter.

Schools in Denmark use the Lectio platform to identify if a student has handed in plagiarized work or if it has been copied from previously submitted assignments. The major written assignment that Danish students write in their final year counts for double and students have gone to the extent of tendering their writing assignments on Den Blå Avis, a classified Danish website. Ghostwriter is a program that has been built on branches of artificial intelligence like machine learning and neural networks that are used for recognizing patterns in texts and images. A dataset of 130,000 written assignments from over 10,000 different high school students made by MaCom has been made available to Ghostwriter project researchers at the Department of Computer science. In a report, Stephan Lorenzen said, “I think that it is realistic to expect that high schools will begin using it at some point. But before they do, there needs to be an ethical discussion of how the technology ought to be applied. Any result delivered by the program should never stand on its own, but serve to support and substantiate a suspicion of cheating.”

The technology has proven to be useful not just in schools and institutions but it also helps analyze Twitter tweets and determine whether they had been written by users or paid imposters or robots. Developers have openly discussed the idea of teaming up with the police force to analyze forged documents which is usually a task carried out by forensic document examiners.

Read More…..

Blockchain Technology to Enter the World of Education

Educational institutions around the world have always looked for ways to modernize teaching methods and incorporate the newest technologies in order to provide students with an ideal education experience. With changing trends, education systems constantly demand for change and new methods. Education institutions have direct access to student data. In 2017, education sector data breach had doubled in number, exposing the data of hundreds and thousands of students. Hence, security and verification has become a major concern.

Blockchain technology has been widely known for its reliability and efficiency in securing data and information. The technology can help protect student data and also provide selective access to the authorities. Employing blockchain technology in the security system and the transportation network will enable parents and authorities to track the student’s whereabouts and also provide details of the bus drivers.

Incorporating blockchain security protocols in education has multiple advantages. It can be used to track the performance and achievements of students, which can then be shared with employers. This prevents the possibility of students padding their resume with false and exaggerated information. Blockchain can also be used to distribute diplomas and degrees among students, which again eliminates the possibility of students lying about their qualifications. Multiple universities have embraced the idea of accepting tuition fee in the form of bitcoins which is comparatively safe and convenient. Hence, the possibilities are endless with blockchain technology.

Read More…..

New AI Technology can Guess a Person’s Appearance from Their Voice

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has made its mark in the modern world. For many years, humans have dreamt of a world with autonomous transportation and personal virtual assistants like Cortana, Siri, Alexa and so on. Almost 60 years later, autonomous vehicles and personal virtual assistants have become one of the most commonly used forms of AI technology. It is now part of an average human’s day to day life. AI can now do a lot more than facial recognition and voice recognition. It can bring to life portraits with just a single image.

Recent innovation in AI technology enables it to guess the appearance of a person with just their voice. Researchers at Carnegie University managed to stun people with their new AI experiment where a short audio clip of a person’s voice is played and the technology reconstructs what the person might look like in real life. The results were not completely accurate but they did provide a remarkable resemblance to what the person looks like in real life. The team described how they trained a generative adversarial network to analyze short voice clips and “match several biometric characteristics of the speaker,” resulting in “matching accuracies that are much better than chance.” Despite the Speech2Face algorithm being a cutting-edge invention, it also raises concerns with regard to privacy breach and discrimination. In a report, the team said, “Although this is a purely academic investigation, we feel that it is important to explicitly discuss in the paper a set of ethical considerations due to the potential sensitivity of facial information and any further investigation or practical use of this technology will be carefully tested to ensure that the training data is representative of the intended user population.”

Read More…..

Robots and Humans Proven To Be More Efficient Together Than Alone

Autonomous vehicles and robots that function without any human guidance have taken the tech world by a storm. On multiple occasions, it has been established that robots alone can complete tasks with more speed and efficiency when compared to humans. Researchers at the University of Gottingen, Germany, have managed to prove that this is not always the case. The researchers performed an experiment where humans, robots and a mixed team of humans and robots were assigned transport tasks using vehicles. The research team simulated a process from production logistics, such as the typical supply of materials for use in the car or engineering industries. The duration taken by each team was measured. The coordination of processes between the humans and the robots was the most efficient and it caused the fewest accidents. The results were published in the International Journal of Advanced Manufacturing technologies. It stated that the mixed team consisting of both humans and robots had successfully managed to beat the other teams.

Professor Mathias Klumpp said, “This brings a crucial ray of hope when considering efficiency in all discussions involving automation and digitization. There will also be many scenarios and uses in the future where mixed teams of robots and humans are superior to entirely robotic machine systems. At the least, excessive fears of dramatic job losses are not justified from our point of view.” In various fields of business administration, computer science and sociology of work and industry highlighted the requirements for successful human-machine interaction. Hence, it was concluded that companies should pay more attention to their employees in the technical implementation of automation.

Read More…..

Samsung Upgrades IoT to Exynos i T100

Samsung announced an upgrade in IoT to Exynos i T100 for secure and reliable IoT devices that are designed for short-range communications. Exynos i T100 lets Samsung take advantage over the latest IoT devices along with the previous versions Exynos i T200 for Wi-Fi and Exynos i S111 for long-range narrow-band (NB) communications.

Exynos i T100 is comprised of a power-efficient 28-nanometer (nm) process technology which is efficient to be used with short-range IoT devices that work on automation and control environments within homes or businesses. The applications for devices that are compatible would be smart lighting, home security and monitoring, temperature control, fire and gas detectors and fitness wearables.

Ben Hur, senior vice president of System LSI marketing at Samsung Electronis said that the low-power short-range IoT solutions that connected various products in homes or buildings could make lives easier and safer. He also said that the Exynos i T100 engineered with multiple communication protocols along with strong security capabilities, would help further extend IoT services in areas where they could benefit everyday lives.

Short-range communication protocols, Blutooth Low Energy (BLE) 5.0 and Zigbee 3.0 are being supported by the Exynos i T100 and also the processor with memory in small single-chip package are being integrated to enhance flexibility in the process of development in manufacturing devices.

Security features are strong, free from hacking and the wireless IoT devices can automate and control their environment. It also comprises of a separate Security Sub-System (SSS) hardware block for data encryption and a Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) which identifies each chipset uniquely.

The additional advantageous feature of the currently sampling Exynos i T100 is that it can withstand extreme temperatures from -40°C to 125°C.

Read More…..

Supply Chain Hackers Plant Malwares in Videogames

Supply chain attacks create commotion in the security sector by attacking the companies that share the codes to the selective users. Kaspersky and ESET researchers have found that the hackers who aimed at Asus through the supply chain hack recently have spotted three videogame developers and attacked their programming tools, this time, a level higher.

It was not long before that Asus software update corrupted the computers. Kaspersky researchers decoded that Microsoft Visual Studio development tool versions were attacked by these hackers and they were used in the development of three selective video games. This malware is then planted into selective games and will result in infecting the players with twisted version of the programs.

It is observed by the Kaspersky researchers that these incidents are pieces of the larger puzzle comprising of connected supply chain hacks which also hijacked softwares like CCleaner and Netsarang.

Vitaly Kamluk, the Director of Asia- focused research of Kaspersky says that videogame attacks are unnoticed by the software companies and they are digitally signed with the malware for use. In Asus, the hackers used compromised server after altering and signed them safe with the company’s key.

Kamluk inferred that there were many software developers out there who were completely unaware of that potential threat, that angle of being attacked and that if their most trusted tools were backdoored, they would keep producing compromised executables and if they digitally signed them, they would be trusted by the users, security software, and so on. He also said that they found a weak spot of the global developer community, and that was what they were exploiting.

Read More…..

Drones Continue to Be the Center of The Tech World

The CIA first used an unmanned predator for killing on 4th February 2002, which is now widely known as drones. Drones have been in the tech world ever since. Within a decade, drones have managed to make it to the billion-dollar industry. But drones were almost unheard of in India, until, Gaurav Mehta with his co-founder Rahat Kulshetra started Quidich Innovation Labs which happens to be India’s only drone manufacturing organization to fly all 360-degree rigs. In an interview by Entrepreneur India, Gaurav Mehta said, earlier, the only way to get an aerial shot was with the help of a helicopter which had its own logistics drawbacks and was not economical. Drones on the other hand are comparatively cheap and also reduce survey time. Quidich has been at the forefront of taking big leaps in filmmaking, sports, surveillance, geological mapping and urban mapping.

Being the first of its kind, Quidich has provided live aerial services across the P1 PowerBoat Racing Champion, FIH Hockey World Cup 2018 and IPL 2018, 2019. The company has also digitized over 200 telecom towers and takes up a new project every 3-4 months. The company initiated building an end-to- end workflow for vertical asset inspection to contribute to the dream of Digital India. Starting from data collection, defect identification, digitization and report generation, the startup delivers extremely accurate data, build efficiency and reduces accidents.

The company has been looking for ways to expand its business globally and is keen on partnering with ICC World Cup. The startup has also been using Qrius, the buggy cam, to cover live matches, which helps increase the quality of the shots. Post Amazon’s announcement of its Prime Drone Delivery feature, the drone manufacturing industry, has more opportunities to increase its business in the near future. Considering the recent draft regulation for drones released by the Indian government, the regulatory challenges against drones are high. In a report by Entrepreneur India, Mehta stated that, the increasing regulations by the Ministry of Civil, against the technology is a drawback and could also kill an upcoming technology like this. He also suggests that instead of adopting a more permission intensive system, we need to adopt a more information intensive system that could benefit the consumers and also the producers.

Read More…..

Google Search is Loaded with Augmented Reality

Google at its I/O keynote revealed that it is adding 3D Augmented Reality to its search results. This means when the word “Shark” is typed the search results turns in to a display of a 3D shark on the screen or overlay on a camera feed. Dresses and shoes can be seen in life-size before shopping online through this much advanced feature.

For the past two years Google has been working on Augmented Reality-based features. Android ARCore platform was introduced in 2017. It had tools like Whimsical Playground system with augmented reality stickers and playmoji which had characters like the Avengers and Detective Pikachu placed into the camera feeds. Google is also into testing Augmented Reality directions for Google Maps which is seen turn-to-turn that was announced at I/O event last year. Furniture could be seen life-size with the help of Google app Wayfair.

Facebook declared an expansion of Spark AR platform at F8 conference which was held last week. AR enabled Google search can be extremely useful for the users in buying clothes.

Robots Can Now Detect And Predict Human Movement

Researchers performed an experiment where humans, robots and a mixed team of humans and robots were assigned transport tasks using vehicles. The duration and efficiency of each team was measured by the researchers and the coordination of processes between the humans and the robots were the most efficient and caused the fewest accidents. Factory and construction sites require intense and heavy-duty tasks which cannot be done by humans singlehandedly. Hence, humans and robots working together in factories and construction sites have proven to be efficient.

Industrial robots are comparatively larger and heavier than an average robot which could be dangerous to people. Researchers at MIT have designed a new algorithm that could help make humans and robots working together even safer. With the help of the algorithm the robots can anticipate the trajectory of humans as they move and immediately freeze in front of anything that resembles a person. Researchers came up with a “partial trajectory” method that uses real-time trajectory data with a large library of reference trajectories that have been previously gathered. This has proven to be a better way of anticipating human movement. The technology could also be used in domestic robots in terms of in-home care for the elderly.

Read More…..

AI To Identify Objects By Touch With Sensor-Packed Glove

Robots can now identify an object and how to grip different objects with the help of a sensor-packed glove developed by a team of MIT scientists. Touch is one of the five senses of humans which is now incorporated in robots. A massive dataset that enables an AI system to recognize objects through touch alone has been compiled by scientists from MIT. This could help robots handle things better and it may also help in designing prosthetics.

The sensor-packed glove is called the “scalable tacile glove” or STAG, and is very economical. The glove has been laminated with conductive polymer that reacts to applied pressure. The glove is rather a simple knit glove which has over 550 tiny sensors and costs about $10 to produce. Researches have tested the glove with 26 different objects like a soda can, scissors, tennis ball, spoon, pen, a mug and so on. Upon holding the objects, the sensors gathered a pressure-signal data which was then interpreted by a neural network. The glove could identify and predict the weight of the object with up to 76 percent accuracy. The glove could handle any object within about 60 grams. The sensor provides data that allows researchers to see how different regions of the hand work together. In a report, MIT researcher Subramanian Sundaram said, “We’ve always wanted robots to do what humans can do, like doing the dishes or other chores. If you want robots to do these things, they must be able to manipulate objects really well.”

Read More…..

Fake Linkedin Profile With AI Generated Picture Raises Concerns

Artificial Intelligence has been widely used for facial recognition and with AI generated software programs like Deepfake, there has been a lot of controversies surrounding people’s privacy concerns. AI fakes and fake accounts on social networking services has been a rising concern among people. A recent incident has managed to cause espionage fears.

According to a report by the Associated Press, the technology had been recently used by a spy to create a fake picture on LinkedIn to attract a particular set of targets. The profile had not just been a fake, but the picture used may have been created by an AI-powered program. The fake profile was given the name Katie Jones and had around 52 connections and among those were links to Washington political figures. The profile claims that she has worked for years as a “Russia and Eurasia fellow” at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. But according to the DC-based think tank, there had no record of her employment. There has also been no record her claimed degree in Russian Studies from the University of Michigan. The LinkedIn profile was attempting to network with former US government officials and policy experts and hence using an AI-generated photo would’ve made the profile resistant to reverse-image searches.

Tech experts were convinced that the photo has been created by AI based on the flaws which are common among photos fabricated by GANs. In order to create the phots, the GANs will model the fake faces from existing pictures of real people and essentially the AI algorithms will choose different traits such as hairstyles, eye shapes and mouth and merge them together to create an entirely new person. The account had later been removed by LinkedIn. The Microsoft-owned company said in a statement, “We regularly invest in new ways to prevent fake accounts or fraudulent activity on our platform, including a set of tools, human review and intelligence from a variety of sources.”

Read More…..

Cybersecurity Features: Rising or Falling?

State involvement, cyber norms of state behaviour, and internet governance continue to place a long shelter over cyber security. Suggestions to provide better security such as security awareness, user education, patch management, and better passwords continue to remain a challenge. The computer security community has to face email fraud, security budgets, privacy concerns, 5G network deployment, and artificial intelligence. But the vital question is where does the actual problem lie? The risk in aviation is less about the airplane and more about the lack of consequences.

While it is still logical, it is hardly practical and would be unrealistic to expect all private and public sector organizations to stop trying to safeguard their systems and wait for the international community to adhere, implement, agree, and draft to a treaty that establishes cyber norms.

Read More…..

Return of Trojan Malware

In the last year, there has been an increase in Trojan malware attacks as cyber criminals have changed their tactics from short term gain and obvious random ware attacks to more long term and subtle with the aim being of taking information which includes banking information and personal information.

Backdoor and trojan attacks have risen to become the most detected against businesses. Trojan attacks have has doubled in the last year by 132 percent between the year 2017 and 2018. The lead malware intelligence analyst at Malwarebytes told ZDNet, “When you say spyware, people think of how it’s been around for a decade or more and it’s old and boring, but it’s really effective and it’s really come back into fashion with the rise in attacks on businesses and a thirst for data exfiltration. Despite its potentially mundane trappings, spyware is quite a big deal again.” TrickBot is continuously being updated with latest abilities. The malware has new abilities of being able to steal browser histories and passwords from victims in a move which improves TrickBot’s capability to collect data.

Read More…..