Smart Devices and Cyber Attack Risks

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Very few sites in the world are resilient to that level of inbound traffic And a staggering death toll starts coming into focus after last week's Venezuela earthquakes It's Monday, june twenty ninth. I'm Luke Varas for the Wall Street Journal and here is the AM edition of What's News, The top headlines and business stories moving your world today China has caught up with anthropic in cybersecurity potentially resetting the global AI race seecurity researchers say that a new model released by China's Z. AI lags behind products from anthropic and open AI in some tasks, but can match them in finding security bugs The release of the model comes as U.S. lawmakers have tried restricting access to the most potentially disruptive AI models, like anthropics, mythos However, as journal tech reporter Sam Schener explained, Z. AI's model being open weight, meaning it can be downloaded, used and modified without supervision makes that impossible What that means is that there's a kind of toothpaste out of the tube scenario. You have on one hand the U.S trying to lock down some of these capabilities. You have anthropics saying, okay, we're not going to release the most powerful version of Mythos beyond a certain set of trusted partners. And then you even had the administration telling Anthropic that it had to pull back its fable model because the guardrails against foreign use weren't high enough. So the question of whether or not these capabilities that could help enable potential cyber attacks are going to get out there is becoming a much more real one And then on the other side of the street, practically, you have another company giving away models with similar capabilities for free. And so if those models are out there and they have similar capabilities, then There's some critics who say the U.S is just shooting itself in the foot by not allowing U. S. companies to sell and distribute their models as well of the White House AI strategy say it's been lax in restricting use of Chinese open wayight models, which are popular among U. S. businesses Jacob Helberg, under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs, defended the administration, saying it's quote very much focused on Chinese open source models. South Korean stocks have paired their losses today after the country's president announced a plan to invest nearly two trillion dollars in the country's semiconductor sector, data centers and robotics Memory chip giants Samsung and SK Heinenex also committed to substantial new investments to build chip making facilities SK HinX, Samsung and US company Micron Technology are the world's leading suppliers of high bandwidth memory chips, which are crucial components for NVIidia's AI accelerators shares of both South Korean companies have been on a wild ride this year on the back of the AI buildout Both crossing the one trillion dollar market value threshold After days of back and forth fighting, the U.S and Iran have agreed to resume peace talks The latest flare up began on Thursday and reached a peak over the weekend as the US hit a range of Iranian targets, and Tehran said that it targeted American bases in Kuwait and Bahrain Middle East correspondent Ben Wafau Khong told me that after things potentially heading towards a return to war Hks in Qatar ort back on. They would take place possibly this week in Doha, which is one of the parties that was attacked by Iran, but it is the Kimi Jetor. We willll focus on the streat of homeomers trying to find an understanding between both sides, But potentially I would suspect also on the release of cash that is held in Qatar And most importantly, both sides agrees to stop attacking each other. Meanwh why is there any real appetite though for potentially releasing money to Iran if just in the last few days the country has been launching new attacks around the region First of all, remember, we are talking about a cycle where there's always stke and to. And There's always attacks and then there's negotiations, there's attacks, and there's negotiations again. So obviously the question would be whether like you said, there would be an agreement to lease some cash when there could be always suspicion that it could be used to fund the military. Now on that, there is a limitation. I mean, the US has said it's only humanitarian money, only for food, so that benefits really the Iranian people And according to the US, it's also U.S. products The other thing is they would be gradual. so they would be limited amounts at a time That pretty much the reason we suspect that Iran stopped the fighting because they realize that the next sequence, which is getting subgash is going to be jeopardized. So I think it's a huge incentive for Iran to stop the fighting do think they could get some money released. Oil prices are trading slightly higher today on renewed supply concerns, though they remain below Friday's levels when the US and Ian And nearly fifty thousand people remain unaccounted for in Venezuela following a pair of earthquakes last Wednesday according to an online platform tracking missing loved ones Venezuela's government has said that more than four thousandteen hundred people died, though officials expect that number to rise Fading of finding more survivors, families who've been digging through the rubble of collapsed buildings themselves ed for more support from authorities, including heavy machinery. Got have a marking on Some residents have criticized the government of acting President Delseie Rodriguez, accusing it of restricting volunteer workers access to disaster sites and bureaucracy that slowed the arrival of rescue teams from overseas Venezuelan government didn't respond to requests for comment coming up how your home devices could secretly be powering cyber attacks, and we'll cast our eyes to center court for an unexpected return at Wimbledon. Those stories after the break If your organization isn't managing its data with Epure, then it's likely scattered all over the place In three days have I ridden to bring thee warning. The records thy great AI machine requires are strewn across five kingdoms The Everpure Data Management platform unifies data so you can always find it. No messenger needed. No more running around. Get out of the data Dark agges with Everpure, a new era in data management Smart devices are everywhere these days. And while they're aimed at making our lives more seamless, these everyday gadgets, from innocent looking smart doorbells to our cell phones, could be our biggest privacy vulnerability. Our homes are filled with internet connected devices. and every year millions of those products, especially knockos that you buy online can contain a secret digital backdor that opens up access to your home internet so that anyone, including bad actors can surf the web as if they were you. Now cyber criminals are taking advantage of this loophole. Journal reporter Jack Gillum tested a number of these malware riddled products to investigate how criminals are using them to launch cyber attacks For just under eight hundred dollars total, I purchased two digital picture frames from Amazon and three superboxes from Walmart These are streaming devices that connect to your TV and give you free access to shows and movies. Within minutes of turning the devices on, there was a surge of internet traffic on an entirely separate internet connection I set up for this experiment Visits to gambling, porn, cryptocurrency, and loads of other sketchy websites started pouring in from users around the world. Jack says that by leveraging home internet connections, criminals are carrying out some of the biggest cyber attacks we've ever seen. Security experts believe manufacturers are being paid to add this malware. But many people also get tricked into downloading the software onto their phones or computers. Once you connect an infected device to the internet, the backdoor software links up with an intermediary server that's run by what's known as a residential proxy company. These residential proxy companies runnt out access to tens of millions of home networks around the world, but the problem is actually worse than that They figured out a way to seize control of these back doors, and they started taking over these residential networks Residential proxy networks aren't always used for nefarious reasons, as companies can use them to see how their ads are being viewed from the perspective of real users government and industry officials say these networks have ballooned in recent years and have been adopted by government backed hackers looking to hide their connections to countries like Russia, China, and North Korea Investigators at Comcast started looking into this more than two years ago, and their findings that linked millions of consumer devices to criminal activity rocked the cybersecurity world. Karim Maroouse is Comcast's executive Director of cybersecurity Let's imagine we pile every friend of ours who we've ever known and we say, hey twwelve noon on Thursday Let's send a bunch of traffic to some site we're not thrilled with today That's effectively what a distributed n serervice attack is, but now it's done at massive scale Let's say a million machines, two million machines are doing that simultaneously. What we're seeing is through these R proxy networks, That's the initial entry point that creates a whole set of computers Streaming devices, picture frames, smart refrigerators all hitting the same site at the same time, very few sites in the world are resilient to that level of inbound traffic. We have seen some of the largest computer attacks, meaning computers attacking other computers at human request ever recorded in our digital history in the last several months. and some warning They're much larger ones on the horizon if we don't get a hold of this problem Makers of the photo frrame couldn't be reached for comment and Amazon said that the product is out of stock and that it takes action when it confirms that a third party product is infected with malware Walmart said that all items sold through third party sellers are expected to meet the company's standards and that when a violation is detected, swift action is taken to find out how Your devices from Backdor hackers, check out the link we've left in our show notes. And finally, it's time to get two TV's going as the summer of sports heats up joining the World Cup knockout stage Wimbledon is getting underway this morning in London. and in addition to appearances by the game's current stars This year's championships will see the return of forty four year old Grand Slam winner Serena Williams, who was already slated to play doubles with her sister Venus accepted a last minute wild card slot to play singles. Well, I thought not every day W Bon holds a wild card for someone and I didn't to name probably like a handful of people. happened to be one of those people and I thought, well, I should really take this opportunity Who knows if I'll ever make it here again? this could be it. Serena's first singles match in nearly four years is scheduled for tomorrow, when she'll face off against twenty year old Australian Maya Joint. Though if you can't wait that long for the tennis, don't worry. because competition began just as we had published this morning And that's it for What's News for this Monday morning. Today's show was produced by Daniel Bach and Hattie Muer, our supervising producer is Sandra Kilhoff, and I'm Luke Fargus for the Wall Street Journal. 'll be back tonight with a new show. and until then Thanks for listening Still running global payroll like a relay race, Dal replaces fragmented payroll vendors with one global system, No third parties. Hire manage and pay teams in one hundred and fifty plus countries, with in house local experts in white glove delivery, and Dal plugs into what you already use, Workday, SAP, Netsuite Operate like a local, everyverywhere. Visit dE l d. com slash wsj. That's dEel dot com slash wsj