A Review of the Best News of the Week on AI, IoT, & Mobile Security

You Could Become an AI Master Before You Know It. Here’s How. (MIT Technology Review, Oct 17 2017)
At first blush, Scot Barton might not seem like an AI pioneer. He isn’t building self-driving cars or teaching computers to thrash humans at computer games. But within his role at Farmers Insurance, he is blazing a trail for the technology. Barton leads a team that analyzes data to answer questions about customer behavior and the design of different policies…

Mobile carriers sell users’ personal information to third parties (CSO Online, Oct 16 2017)
Some U.S. mobile carriers seem to be providing personal information, such as your name, address and the real-time location of your phone, to mobile authentication companies. Although it is doubtful you willfully agreed to this, you are most likely opted-in, as this is supposedly being done for security — for fraud detection purposes.The discovery that mobile phone companies provide API access to personal information was made by software engineer Philip Neustrom…with demo links…

Impersonating iOS Password Prompts (Schneier on Security, Oct 12 2017)
This is an interesting security vulnerability: because it is so easy to impersonate iOS password prompts, a malicious app can steal your password just by asking. Why does this work? iOS asks the user for their iTunes password for many reasons, the most common ones are recently installed iOS operating system updates, or iOS apps that are stuck during installation…


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Google Taught AI How to Program More AI (Slate Magazine (blog), Oct 16 2017)
The company’s A.I. project, AutoML, has successfully taught machine-learning software how to program machine-learning software. In some cases, the machines programmed better A.I. software than even the Google researchers could design.

How smart cities can protect against IoT security threats (Network World Security, Oct 11 2017)
As long as developers work in tandem with one another, the security problems presented by the development of IoT within smart cities won’t be insurmountable.

Can Machine Learning Outsmart Malware? (Dark Reading, Oct 11 2017)
Using machine learning in the cybersecurity domain is a growing trend with many advantages, but it also has its risks.

Iphone iOS 11 QR code scanner provides ‘backdoor’ exploitable by criminals (SC Media UK, Oct 16 2017)
Apple’s new operating system for iPhones and iPads contains a Quick Response (QR)-scanning based ‘backdoor’ that could be used by criminals.

Google Home Mini glitch triggers secret recordings (Naked Security – Sophos, Oct 17 2017)
Artem Russakovskii’s Google Home Mini recorded and uploaded every nearby sound over a two-day period

Oracle leverages machine learning to manage, secure enterprise systems (Network World Security, Oct 10 2017)
Oracle announced at its recent OpenWorld conference new products with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning capabilities to quickly identify security threats.

Monitor your Azure IoT solutions with Azure Monitor and Azure Resource Health (Microsoft Azure Blog, Oct 10 2017)
Azure IoT Hub is now fully integrated with Azure Monitor and Azure Resource Health to provide you with rich, frequent data about the operations of your Azure IoT hub and diagnose problems quickly.

With new strategy, Dell will invest $1B into the ‘internet of things’ (SiliconANGLE, Oct 12 2017)
Dell said it will invest $1 billion in new IoT products, research and partnerships over the next three years. The company is tapping the chief technology officer of its VMware Inc. subsidiary, Ray O’Farrell, to lead a new group…

5 Areas Government will use Artificial Intelligence (FederalNewsRadio.com, Oct 14 2017)
1. The Future of Driving, 2. Smarter and Safer Cities, 3. Precision Medicine, 4. Cybersecurity, and 5. Finance

How artificial intelligence is becoming a key weapon in the cyber security war (PC World, Oct 13 2017)
AI models can determine a file’s maliciousness with no previous knowledge of the file, relying instead upon analysis of the file’s innate properties. With sufficient quality data available, AI techniques easily outperform traditional signature-based or indicator of compromise (IoC) based prevention approaches, which retroactively seek out the artifacts an attacker leaves during a breach.

7 Surprising Facts about AI and Big Data in Cybersecurity (insideBIGDATA, Oct 06 2017)
The correlation between data volumes and IT security seems straightforward, but in reality it’s complex and at times paradoxical. Here are 7 surprising facts about big data and artificial intelligence (AI) as they are used in cybersecurity.

Artificial Intelligence on your mobile: Does it really deserve the hype? (euronews, Oct 16 2017)
In the previous generation of phones, AI was cloud-based and required an internet connection to be accessed. What is different about AI on mobile devices is that the new generation of smartphones will combine the cloud-based AI to built-in AI engines on the hardware. This novelty has been announced by tech giants such as Google, Apple and Huawei.