Embracing Digital This Week

For the week of February 6, 2023. News from around the world of digital transformation in artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and cybersecurity.
 
Artificial Intelligence

According to Forbes, by 2030, AI will potentially deliver $13 trillion to the global economy, or 16% of the world's current GDP.

ChatGPT lets scammers craft emails that are so convincing they can get cash from victims without even relying on malware Some fear the powerful chatbot will make it far easier for non-coders to create malware and become cybercriminals ChatGPT Cybersecurity Social Engineering

Google has invested almost $400 million in artificial intelligence startup Anthropic, which is testing a rival to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/google-invests-anthropic-battle-chatgpt Google will be holding an event about how it’s “using the power of AI to reimagine how people search" A 40-minute event will be streamed on YouTube on February 8th at 8:30AM ET.

An AI detection tool, that checks for chatGPT written content, says Macbeth written by William Shakespeare was generated by AI. I guess chatGPT was not trained in Old English. https://venturebeat.com/ai/chatgpt-detection-tool-thinks-macbeth-was-generated-by-ai-what-happens-now/ Guess it was not trained on old English (aka Shakespearean English)

Global public cloud revenues continue to increase, with the projected 26% growth to hit $525 billion this year, according to Statista. Software as a service is projected to be $253 Billion of that revenue. However, as the growth of the cloud continues, cloud services providers are feeling the pain, as there have been several outages over the last 12 months. This has been such a problem that multiple websites have popped up that monitor and report public cloud availability like cloudharmony.com and thousandeyes.com.

Oracle and Red Hat have teamed up to provide RHEL-based virtual machine instances in Oracle’s Cloud running on Intel, AMD, and Arm processors. This teaming between former competitors is providing customers with a one stop shop for workloads that utilize oracle’s suite of products and traditional linux based workloads. This move continues to push Oracle into competition with the big Hyper-scalers like Azure, AWS, and Google.

E-commerce in South Korea and the U.S. are being attacked by an ongoing GuLoader malware campaign, cybersecurity firm Trellix disclosed late last month. The cyber attackers are shifting away from Microsoft Word document approach to NSIS (Nullsoft Scriptable Install System) an open source tool for writing installers on the Windows Operating system. GuLoader Malware Using Malicious NSIS

Pro-Russian hackers are using a new DDoS-as-a-Service Platform named Passion to target medical instituitons in the U. S., Portugal, Spain, Germany, Poland, Finland, Norway, the Netherlands, and the U.K. This software as a service offering is a subscription servivce allowing customers to select their desired attack vectors, duration and intensity. Russian Cybercriminals Launch New Passion Attack Platform

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Thursday announced the release of a Stakeholder-Specific Vulnerability Categorization (SSVC) guide that can help organizations prioritize vulnerability patching using a decision tree model. The SSVC system was created in 2019 by CISA and Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute (SEI), and a year later CISA developed its own customized SSVC decision tree for security flaws relevant to government and critical infrastructure organizations. CISA Releases Decsiion Tree Model

Embracing Digital Transformation Podcast

This week Darren Pulsipher interviews chatGPT. Check it out here.