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A Ransomware Attack, Self-Taught Robots and Online Abuse: The Week in Tech News

In the world of IT, real news can easily get mixed with eye-catching headlines and promotional buzz. From a critical ransomware attack to tackling online abuse: filter out the noise with our selection of the top 3 tech news stories of the week.


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Ransomware attack: the new oil disrupting the old one

One of the most echoed statements about data is that it is the new oil. Regardless of whether you agree or not with this comparison ; you will surely find it ironic to see how much the decryption of data, this “new” oil, can end up affecting the old one. 

Last Friday, Colonial Pipeline, one of the largest oi pipeline operators in the United States, experienced a ransomware cyberattack that pushed it to shut down its IT systems. Linked to the DarkSide hacking group, the breach happened on the business side of the company’s IT infrastructure but affected its nationwide operations. 

Although it is thought the motivations behind the attack were economic and not of sabotage, the incident reignites fears of the dangers hackers pose to a country’s critical infrastructure. Oil prices have gone up due to the supply disruption, with people all over the US piling up fuel reserves. The issue might not be fixed until the end of the week.

ZDNet

Self-taught robots

The idea of programming AI systems to teach themselves has been gaining major traction in recent years. Flexible software that is able to learn through experience makes a lot of sense. But our current capabilities in this regard might not be as far-reaching as we think.

A group of Amsterdam-based researchers built a simple robot and tried to make it learn how to move through trial and error. Made of independent units chained together into a train-like structure ; the robot used a series of inflating pumps to propel itself at a top speed of two millimetres per second. 

Unfortunately, while the autonomous learning system managed to effectively move, maintain a stable pace and follow a circular track, the robot encountered a few real-world problems that threw all its calculations off. A good reminder of how easily a variable not accounted for can disrupt machine learning algorithms.

Ars Technica

Tackling tech-enabled abuse

The tech boom caused by the pandemic has brought along some troubling side effects. An increase in online abuse is one of them. With the number of tech abuse cases requiring specialised assistance having grown by 97% over the last year.

All around the world, domestic abusers use both legitimate online tools and so-called stalkware to harass, control and monitor their partners. Suffice it to say, this kind of behaviour usually predates or accompanies other forms of abuse, from physical to psychological. 

That’s why the Barclays-backed non-profit Refuge has launched a site to help abuse victims protect themselves from tech-enabled domestic abuse. RefugeTechSafety.org has been built with the help of survivors and provides educational and actionable resources in multiple languages. 

Computer Weekly


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Categories
Press review Tech Magazine

AI, IBM Chips, and a Novel Cloud Security Concept: The Week in Tech News

In the world of IT, real news can easily get mixed with eye-catching headlines and promotional buzz. From AI and chips to cloud security: filter out the noise with our selection of the top 3 tech news stories of the week.


Full podcast episode:

🔊 Subscribe to the podcast


AI is everywhere

The AI hype is so strong we often forget that artificial intelligence is already an integral part of our everyday lives. 

Firstly, AI played a key role in the development of Covid-19 vaccines. But there are many other, less conspicuous ways we benefit from it directly. 

For example, from anti-spam email filters to fraud detection for your banking account, silent, tiny AI helpers accompany us throughout the day without us necessarily being aware. Whether it is by dimming our phone’s screen brightness or suggesting sentences we tend to use, low-level AI tools do exactly what the best kind of technology does: help out without being noticed. 

But not everything’s about the little things, other common applications have positive effects on our society, like smart city traffic management or energy grid optimisation. 

World Economic Forum 

IBM makes chip breakthrough

For all its innovation potential, the technology industry still has an over-reliance on the diminishing effects of the long/established Moore’s Law, by which the number of transistors in computer chips tends to double in number and halve in size every two years. 

Unfortunately, recent years have seen this rule of thumb falter, with chip manufacturers struggling to keep the good ratio going.  

Enter IBM. The company announced this week a significant breakthrough in the way computer processors can be effectively made. IBM created a 2nm chip it claims can boost performance by 45% over 7nm chips while cutting down energy consumption by 75%.

BBC

A scalable approach to cloud security

Making sure that evolving cloud environments remain protected against malware is becoming increasingly difficult in a world where multi-cloud is the new norm and a single weakness can compromise an entire network

As if human fallibility and the cloud’s sheer size were not enough, attackers are using increasingly sophisticated methods of bypassing traditional security measures and protocols.

Malware is often only valuable until its detected, as its signature can then be easily identified by the system. Yet, scanning an entire cloud ecosystem for irregularities still involves too much complexity and resources due to its sheer size. 

A research initiative by Microsoft’s, Projet Freta, proposes a novel approach: a cloud-centric in-memory scanning system that focuses on virtual machine instances to deliver scalable protection.

TechRepublic

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