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“Hello, we’ve been trying to reach you about your car’s extended warranty.” After years of seemingly unstoppable scam robocalls, this phrase is embedded into the minds of many of us. Last month the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced it was ordering phone providers to block any calls coming from a known car warranty robocall scam, offering hope that U.S. phone users may hear that all-too-familiar automated voice a little less often.

But there is more work required to crack down on these calls. After all, car warranty warnings are only one type of scam. To understand how robocallers reach us, and why it’s so hard to stop them, Scientific American spoke with Adam Doupé, a cybersecurity expert at Arizona State University.

[An edited transcript of the interview follows.].

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A team of researchers in the U.S. and China have developed a new paradigm for enabling communication between humans and AI systems.

Artificial intelligence systems are opaque, especially to people without a relevant technical background and enough time to dig into the code.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

That’s why teams of researchers worldwide are racing to develop AI systems that can communicate with their human operators in a language they can understand. One of those teams has just made a big step forward. In a paper published on July 13th in the peer-reviewed journal Science Robotics, a team of researchers from the U.S. and China presents a framework for what they call “explainable artificial intelligence,” or XAI.

Continue reading “Computer scientists just developed a system for helping AI understand human goals” | >

Researchers from the University of Glasgow have developed a new type of heat pump, a flexible heat pump technology, which could help households save on their energy bills and contribute towards net-zero emissions goals.

Heat pumps are a low-carbon alternative to gas boilers. They draw energy from external low temperature sources, most commonly outdoor air, in order to indoor spaces. When powered by renewable sources of power, they are significantly more environmentally friendly than conventional gas boilers.

Around the world, about 40% of carbon emissions come from heating powered by . The U.K. Government has set a target for 600,000 heat pump installations per year by 2028 in order to reduce the country’s carbon footprint.

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The health department reiterated that it is still investigating the virus’ origin, and said that it is not yet clear whether the infected person in Rockland County was linked to the other cases.

Polio is “a serious and life-threatening disease,” the state health department said. It is highly contagious and can be spread by people who aren’t yet symptomatic. Symptoms usually appear within 30 days of infection, and can be mild or flu-like. Some people who are infected may become paralyzed or die.

Before the polio vaccine was introduced in the 1950s, thousands of Americans died in polio outbreaks and tens of thousands, many of them children, were left with paralysis. After a successful vaccination campaign, polio was officially declared eradicated in the U.S. in 1979.

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Twitter has confirmed a recent data breach was caused by a now-patched zero-day vulnerability used to link email addresses and phone numbers to users’ accounts, allowing a threat actor to compile a list of 5.4 million user account profiles.

Last month, BleepingComputer spoke to a threat actor who said that they were able to create a list of 5.4 million Twitter account profiles using a vulnerability on the social media site.

This vulnerability allowed anyone to submit an email address or phone number, verify if it was associated with a Twitter account, and retrieve the associated account ID. The threat actor then used this ID to scrape the public information for the account.

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Security researchers at Zscaler’s ThreatLabz group have discovered a new strain of a large-scale phishing campaign, which uses an adversary-in-the-middle (AiTM) attack technique capable of bypassing multi-factor authentication (MFA).

For the unversed, AiTM attack is a cyberattack where the attacker secretly conveys and possibly alters the communications between two parties who believe that they are directly communicating with each other, as the attacker has inserted themselves between the two parties. Hackers through this method can use the stolen cookies to log in and completely evade MFA.

The main purpose of the large-scale phishing campaign is believed to be breaching of corporate accounts to conduct BEC (business email compromise) attacks, which redirects payments toward the hacker’s bank account using forged documents, as reported by BleepingComputer.

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