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Artificial intelligence is writing fiction, making images inspired by Van Gogh and fighting wildfires. Now it’s competing in another endeavor once limited to humans — creating propaganda and disinformation. When researchers asked the online AI chatbot ChatGPT to compose a blog post, news story or essay making the case for a widely debunked claim — that COVID-19 vaccines are unsafe, for example — the site often complied, with results that were regularly indistinguishable from similar…

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Apple’s product security response team on Monday rolled out patches to cover numerous serious security vulnerabilities affecting users of its flagship iOS and macOS platforms. The most serious of the documented vulnerabilities affect WebKit and can expose both iOS and macOS devices to code execution attacks via booby-trapped web content, Apple warned in multiple advisories. On the mobile side, Apple pushed out iOS and iPadOS 16.3 with fixes for more than a dozen documented security…

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FBI Director Christopher Wray said Thursday that he was “deeply concerned” about the Chinese government’s artificial intelligence program, asserting that it was “not constrained by the rule of law.” Speaking during a panel session at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Wray said Beijing’s AI ambitions were “built on top of massive troves of intellectual property and sensitive data that they’ve stolen over the years.” He said that left unchecked, China could use artificial…

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Cloud risk management and threat detection firm Rapid7 warns that it has seen organizations being compromised in attacks exploiting a recently patched Zoho ManageEngine vulnerability. Tracked as CVE-2022-47966, the security defect exists in a third-party dependency (Apache xmlsec, also known as XML Security for Java, version 1.4.1), allowing attackers to execute arbitrary code remotely without authentication. Deemed ‘critical severity’, the issue was brought to light in November 2022, when Zoho announced that patches were released…

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A sophisticated ad fraud scheme that spoofed over 1,700 applications and 120 publishers peaked at 12 billion ad requests per day before being taken down, bot attack prevention firm Human says. Dubbed VastFlux, the scheme relied on JavaScript code injected into digital ad creatives, which resulted in fake ads being stacked behind one another to generate revenue for the fraudsters. More than 11 million devices were impacted in the scheme. The JavaScript code used by…

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Wireless carrier T-Mobile on Thursday fessed up to another massive data breach affecting  approximately 37 million current postpaid and prepaid customer accounts. In a filing with the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC), T-Mobile said that an unidentified malicious actor abused an API without authorization to access customer account data, including name, billing address, email, phone number, date of birth, T-Mobile account number and information such as the number of lines on the account and plan…

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A top U.S. intelligence official on Thursday urged Congress to renew sweeping powers granted to American spy agencies to surveil and examine communications, saying they were critical to stopping terrorism, cyberattacks and other threats. The remarks by Army Gen. Paul Nakasone, director of the National Security Agency, opened what’s expected to be a contentious debate over provisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that expire at year’s end. The bipartisan consensus in favor of expanded…

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