Embracing Digital This Week

Yet another thing parents need to be worried about. AI voice cloning! In a recent virtual abduction from a cyber bad actor, the mother of a 15 year old grow was called and spoofed using her daughter's voice to announce her abduction. Followed by ‘I’ve got your daughter’. Quick thinking, the mom texted her husband to check on the location of their daughter who was safe. The FBI is investigating this and several other instances.

Eugenia Kuyda is the founder of Replika, a US chatbot app that says it offers users an "AI companion who cares, always here to listen and talk, always on your side". Launched in 2017, it now has more than two million active users. Each has a chatbot or "replika" unique to them, as the AI learns from their conversations. Users can also design their own cartoon avatar for their chatbot.

NVIDIA, Getty Images Collaborate on Generative AI. The companies aim to develop two generative AI models using NVIDIA Picasso, part of the new NVIDIA AI Foundations cloud services. Users could employ the models to create a custom image or video in seconds, simply by typing in a concept. Joint effort aims to customize text-to-image and text-to-video foundation models to spawn stunning visuals using fully licensed visual content.

Is COBOL finally dead? GFT and Cloud Frame are joining forces to help organizations move their COBOL programs to more efficient platforms. COBOL was developed in 1959 as one of the first multi-vendor-supported languages for mainframe business users. It has become increasingly expensive to debug and maintain COBOL systems due to the lack of Programmers that still work with COBAL.

Large language models (LLMs) are all the rage, with ChatGPT leading the way. This is only good for cloud service providers as LLMs require large amounts of computing and data storage for deployment and development. Not to be left behind, cloud service providers Azure, AWS, and Google have all announced their own LMS solutions to compete in this new battleground for Cloud dominance. Let’s ask ChatGPT who the winner will be.

Google has thrown its hat into the ring of confidential computing with a new offering providing complete privacy of sensitive data by encrypting data at rest in transit and now in use. Azure and AWS have similar product offerings that provide confidential computing to public and private sector customers.

In an interesting DDoS attack, threat actors inundated npm, an open-source package repository for Node.js, by creating malicious websites and publishing empty packages with links to those malicious websites to take advantage of the ecosystem’s good reputation on search engines. Over 1.42 million bogus packages were uploaded.

Over 1,000,000 WordPress sites are estimated to be infected by an ongoing campaign to deploy Balada Injector malware. The attacks are known to play out in waves once every few weeks. The attacks redirect random subdomains to various scam sites, including websites with fake tech support. The best way to combat this is to update your plugins on your WordPress sites.

The Iranian nation-state group, MuddyWater has been carrying out destructive attacks on hybrid cloud environments under the guise of ransomware operations. The threat actors are masquerading as a standard ransomware campaign but are essentially destroying and disrupting critical IT operations. Findings have shown that MuddyWater has collaborated with DEV-1084 to pull off these attacks.