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

The Coming Revolution in Intelligence Affairs (Foreign Affairs, Aug 31 2020)
How Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Systems Will Transform Espionage

Researchers develop AI technique to protect medical devices from anomalous instructions (Help Net Security, Aug 26 2020)
Researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev have developed a new AI technique that will protect medical devices from malicious operating instructions in a cyberattack as well as other human and system errors. Complex medical devices such as CT (computed tomography), MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) and ultrasound machines are controlled by instructions sent from a host PC. Abnormal or anomalous instructions introduce many potentially harmful threats to patients, such as…

1,200 iOS apps unknowingly handing over dollars to Chinese ad platform (SC Media, Aug 25 2020)
Malicious code embedded in the Chinese mobile ad platform Mintegral SDK, used by 1,200-plus iOS apps downloaded more than 300 million times monthly, is siphoning off advertising dollars. Mintegral SDK positions its platform as presenting app developers and advertisers with an opportunity to monetize their ad-based marketing. But Snyk researchers found evidence that SDK users…


Filter Out the Noise
Since I started this curated newsletter in June 2017, I’ve clipped ~16,000 articles and narrowed them down into the best 20 per day & best 15 per week. This is my favorite way to cut through all the security marketing and hype. If you’re enjoying it, tell a friend. If you hate it, tell an enemy.
Thanks! – Lucas Samaras

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Worldwide AI spending to reach more than $110 billion in 2024 (Help Net Security, Aug 27 2020)
Global spending on AI is forecast to double over the next four years, growing from $50.1 billion in 2020 to more than $110 billion in 2024. According to IDC, spending on AI systems will accelerate over the next several years as organizations deploy artificial intelligence as part of their digital transformation efforts and to remain competitive in the digital economy. The compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for the 2019-2024 period will be 20.1%.

New AI algorithm to detect cryptocurrency miners as they steal power (Help Net Security, Aug 25 2020)
Computer scientists have developed a new artificial intelligence (AI) system that may be able to identify malicious codes that hijack supercomputers to mine for cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin and Monero. “Based on recent computer break-ins in Europe and elsewhere, this type of software watchdog will soon be crucial to prevent cryptocurrency miners from hacking into high-performance computing facilities and stealing precious computing resources,” said Gopinath Chennupati, a researcher at Los Alamos…

Deloitte Trustworthy AI framework: Helping orgs take advantage of AI while managing risks (Help Net Security, Aug 26 2020)
Deloitte‘s recent AI in the Enterprise, 3rd Edition study of enterprise AI adopters found that 95% of respondents have concerns about ethical risks of the technology. Further, more than 56% of study respondents agree that their organization is slowing adoption of AI technologies because of emerging risks.

AI on the Email Offense (Dark Reading, Sep 01 2020)
Mass domain purchasing enables email attackers to slip by traditional defenses. Here’s how artificial intelligence can stop them.

Police Across Canada Are Using Predictive Policing Algorithms, Report Finds (VICE, Sep 01 2020)
Police across Canada are increasingly adopting algorithmic technology to predict crime. The authors of a new report say human rights are threatened by the practice.

ING On The Use Of AI And ML In Financial Crime Prevention (Pymnts, Aug 31 2020)
Fraudsters aren’t just posing a threat to retail banking, but are now also targeting corporate accounts with large scale schemes that combine phishing and malware attacks, says Beate Zwijnenberg, chief information security officer for ING Group. In this month’s Preventing Financial Crimes Playbook, Zwijnenberg explains how these two-layered attacks are creating a need for AI-powered multi-layered defense systems that can detect anomalous transactions that too often go unnoticed by human analysts.

Security Flaws in Two Popular TV Set-Top Boxes Expose Customers to Attack (Infosecurity Magazine, Aug 26 2020)
The tv set up boxes are vulnerable to remote takeover, enabling cyber-criminals to launch attacks

IoT roundup: A wide-scale security flaw and energy-sector botnets (Network World Security, Aug 25 2020)
Monitoring water treatment using IoT will become $3.5 billion business.

Why companies need to lock down IoT systems (SC Media, Aug 26 2020)
During the last few years, malicious IoT hacks have grown exponentially with no immediate signs of slowing, while hackers relentlessly pursue new and creative ways to attack and exploit organizations. According to the FBI, within the past six years, attackers have amassed $144 million in ransomware payments alone – and each new attack costs more…

A new project enables data to be read directly from compressed IoT data (Help Net Security, Aug 30 2020)
The Network Computing, Communications and Storage research group at Aarhus University has developed a completely new way to compress data. The new technique provides possibility to analyze data directly on compressed files, and it may have a major impact on the so-called “data tsunami” from massive amounts of IoT devices.

Click Fraud Risk as Smartphone Discovered with Pre-Installed Malware (Infosecurity Magazine, Aug 26 2020)
Secure-D found 19.2 million suspicious transactions from Tecno W2 handsets

Fake Android notifications – first Google, then Microsoft affected (Naked Security – Sophos, Aug 28 2020)
Were you woken up by a bogus Android notification from Google or Microsoft this week?

Android Users Bugged by Fake Popups (Infosecurity Magazine, Aug 31 2020)
Phony Android notifications affect Google and Microsoft users

Malicious Android Apps Slip Through Google Play Protection (Dark Reading, Aug 31 2020)
Multiple Android apps were found spying on users and recruiting victims’ devices into ad-fraud botnets.