Spread of malware curtailed by expert who simply registered a domain name for a few dollars, giving many across world time to protect against attack.
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Category: cybercrime/malcode – Page 210
Malicious software that blocks access to computers is spreading swiftly across the world, snarling critical systems in hospitals, telecommunications and corporate offices, apparently with the help of a software vulnerability originally discovered by the National Security Agency.
The reports of the malware spread began in Britain, where the National Health Service (NHS) reported serious problems throughout Friday. But government officials and cybersecurity experts later described a far more extensive problem growing across the Internet and unbounded by national borders. Europe and Latin America were especially hard hit.
“This is not targeted at the NHS,” British Prime Minister Theresa May told reporters. “It’s an international attack, and a number of countries and organizations have been affected.”
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In the near future, as artificial intelligence (AI) systems become more capable, we will begin to see more automated and increasingly sophisticated social engineering attacks. The rise of AI-enabled cyberattacks is expected to cause an explosion of network penetrations, personal data thefts, and an epidemic-level spread of intelligent computer viruses. Ironically, our best hope to defend against AI-enabled hacking is by using AI. But this is very likely to lead to an AI arms race, the consequences of which may be very troubling in the long term, especially as big government actors join the cyber wars.
It will become the problem and the solution.
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Security analysts could soon become the first employees asked to show up to work inside virtual reality.
Thanks to a new virtual reality tool built by the Colorado-based startup ProtectWise, cybersecurity professionals may soon be patrolling computer networks — like real world beat cops — inside a three-dimensional video game world.
Scott Chasin, CEO and co-founder of ProtectWise, sees a future in which companies might even have war-rooms of Oculus Rift-wearing security analysts who patrol their networks in VR. “I see an opportunity in the not-too-distant future in which a large organization who has a lot of IT infrastructure might have rooms full of security analysts with augmented reality and VR headsets on,” he told me.
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The DARPA Targeted Neuroplasticity Training (TNT) program is exploring ways to speed up skill acquisition by activating synaptic plasticity. If the program succeeds, downloadable learning that happens in a flash may be the result.
In March 2016, DARPA — the U.S. military’s “mad science” branch — announced their Targeted Neuroplasticity Training (TNT) program. The TNT program aims to explore various safe neurostimulation methods for activating synaptic plasticity, which is the brain’s ability to alter the connecting points between neurons — a requirement for learning. DARPA hopes that building up that ability by subjecting the nervous system to a kind of workout regimen will enable the brain to learn more quickly.
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Decentralization of technology and ever cheaper electronics and materials will also bring more risks. Not to mention the serious risks of terrorism.
Here is a less harmful example of what decentralized tech can do.
Using computers they’d built out of discarded electronics and hidden in a closet ceiling, two inmates in an Ohio prison hacked the facility’s network, downloaded porn, and applied for credit cards with stolen information, according to a report released Tuesday (April 11) by Ohio’s inspector general’s office.
The computers were discovered in 2015 after the IT department at the Marion Correctional Institution, a medium-security prison, noticed that a computer on the network had exceeded its daily usage limit. Alerts indicated that the computer had attempted to hack through the network’s controls, but was unsuccessful.
Although a contractor for the prison was logged into the computer in question, the IT department believed someone else was responsible for the breaches, as the flagged activity had taken place outside of working hours. After obtaining the computer’s name and IP address, the IT workers determined it was an unauthorized device, “because part of its computer name, ‘-lab9-,’ fell outside of the numbers assigned to the six known computers used in the PC training area.”
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- Researchers are using advancing technology to expand and augment our traditional senses, tapping into how our brains process signals and manipulating that sensory feedback.
- This research is transforming lives, giving the blind ways to “see” and the deaf ways to “hear,” and it could one day lead to the development of new senses altogether.
Traditionally, humans have five recognized senses: sight, touch, taste, smell, and sound. In the strictest sense, our reality is defined by anything and everything we experience through those five senses, but today’s technology is allowing us to live in a world beyond them.
The idea that humans may have more senses isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds. For example, our sense of balance and our body’s inherent pain monitoring capabilities would both be considered crucial sensory inputs. Not everyone experiences the traditional five senses in the same way, either. A small fraction of the population (around 4.4 percent) has synesthesia, a form of sensory perception that causes them to experience crosswired sensations such as “seeing” sounds or “feeling” tastes.
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Why is RAND opening a Bay Area office?
The San Francisco Bay Area is really at the center of technology and transformation. That’s also been a focus at RAND since our very first report, Preliminary Design of an Experimental World-Circling Spaceship, in 1946, which foretold the creation of satellites more than a decade before Sputnik.
Today, our researchers are working on important questions related to autonomous vehicles, drones, cybersecurity, education technology, virtual medicine—the same questions driving Silicon Valley startups and billion-dollar Bay Area corporations. At the same time, we’re looking at issues surrounding social inequality, drug policy, water resource management, and transportation, all of which directly relate to the Bay Area.
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We’ve created the world’s first Spam-detecting AI trained entirely in simulation and deployed on a physical robot.
Our vision system successfully flagging a can of Spam for removal. The vision system is trained entirely in simulation, while the movement policy for grasping and removing the Spam is hard-coded. Our detector is able to avoid other objects, including healthy ones such as fruit and vegetables, which it never saw during training.
Deep learning-driven robotic systems are bottlenecked by data collection: it’s extremely costly to obtain the hundreds of thousands of images needed to train the perception system alone. It’s cheap to generate simulated data, but simulations diverge enough from reality that people typically retrain models from scratch when moving to the physical world.
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