News of the Cyber World

[kyonides]

Sanctioned Iranian hackers behind Charlie Hebdo breach, Microsoft says

An Iranian cybersecurity company sanctioned by the U.S. government for meddling in U.S. elections was responsible for stealing and attempting to sell subscriber data from the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, Microsoft researchers said Friday.

The hackers, believed to be affiliated with the sanctioned Iranian cybersecurity company Emennet Pasargad, breached Charlie Hebdo’s systems after the publication announced in December a contest for caricatures of  Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whom it described as a “symbol of backward-looking, narrow-minded, intolerant religious power.”

On January 4, a user identifying themselves as “Holy Souls” posted a notice to a popular hacking forum claiming that it had obtained the personal information of 230,000 Charlie Hebdo customers — including names, emails, phone numbers, addresses and financial information. The user claimed to have obtained an additional 250,000 other documents, including invoices, tax reports and “Classified documents.”

The user wanted 20 bitcoins — worth roughly $340,000 at the time — in exchange for the data. The user’s post included screenshots purporting to show the data, and the French newspaper Le Monde verified with several victims the veracity of the data contained in the sample.

In 2015, Islamic State militants attacked the offices of Charlie Hebdo, leaving 12 people dead. The magazine, with a long history of publishing inflammatory satire, landed in the crosshairs of extremist militants in large part due to its history of publishing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.

Microsoft researchers cautioned that the hack may put the magazine’s subscribers in danger. “The release of the full cache of stolen data — assuming the hackers actually have the data they claim to possess — would essentially constitute the mass doxing of the readership of a publication that has already been subject to extremist threats (2020) and deadly terror attacks (2015),” the researchers said.
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Ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, the FBI issued a bulletin warning that Emennet Pasargad had been using false-flag campaigns under multiple personas” to target Israeli organizations with hack-and-leak campaigns and could use them against targets in the United States.

UK MP Asks Expert About Risks of AI and Is Told ‘It Could Kill Everyone’

At a hearing of Parliament’s Science and Technology Committee, Conservative MP Tracey Crouch asked Michael Cohen, a doctoral candidate in Engineering Science at Oxford University, to “expand on some of the risks you think are posed by AI systems to their end users.”

Cohen replied, “There is a particular risk … which is that it could kill everyone.”

He explained by using an allegory of training a dog with the use of treats as a reward.

Cohen said: “It will learn to pick actions that lead to getting treats, and we can do similar things with AI. But if the dog finds the treat cupboard it can get the treats itself without doing what we want it to do.”

He added, “If you imagine going into the woods to train a bear with a bag of treats, by selectively withholding and administering treats depending on whether it’s doing what you want it to do, what they will probably actually do is take the treats by force.”

Cohen warned of a paradigm shift where AI was capable of “taking over the process.”
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He said: “AI can cover prediction and it can cover planning mainly, and for things that are only doing prediction this is not an outcome that I think we should expect. It’s distinctly possible to develop regulation that prevents the sorts of dangerous AI that I’m talking about, while leaving open an enormous set of economically-valuable forms of AI.”
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Cohen said the “economic output of horses” collapsed after the combustion engine was developed in the early part of the 20th century, but he said AI was not yet ready to replace humans as cars replaced horse-driven wagons and stagecoaches.

“Because AI isn’t at the level where it can do what we do,” Cohen said.

 I guess it'd be far easier to simply stop any advance use of AI than developing such "regulations" that a hacker can modify at will anyway. It's not like they'll become real life Daleks, right?