Cyber & Cognitive Conflict Compass (4C)
by Matthias Schulze and Lena Drews
This week, we're witnessing hackers leveraging AI for cyber ops, China labeling AI like it's a new fashion trend, Researchers are uncovering AI's hidden agendas (and potential Russian dialects) and Elon Musk's Twitter successor getting into a DDoS drama. With the US turning autocracy, the EU wants to do tech sovereignty… again… but this time for real… right? … right???! Meanwhile, HP printers are bricking themselves, Chinese hackers persist in networks for 300 days and a Microsoft 0-day lives longer than 600 days!
Cyber Conflict
China’s Volt Typhoon hackers dwelled in US Electric utility company for 300 Days. Patience is key! (link)
Russian disinformation network saturates AI chatbots with propaganda (link). For that reason, it is good that researchers made a tool for revealing AI’s “hidden objectives” and it works quite well (link)
Hacktivists Head Mare and Twelve join forces to attack Russian entities (link)
Kaspersky report on SideWinder APT targeting the nuclear and maritime sector in Asia and Africa (link)
Cyber Policy around the world
New AI-labeling regulations in China now require AI-generated content, such as images, videos, and audio, to be labeled with both human- and machine-readable notifications.
Starlink has signed an agreement with India’s “Jio and Airtel”, a big telecommunications company that resell its space broadband services (link)
President Trump selects Cybersecurity Expert Sean Plankey to lead CISA. Tough job given that CISA is affected by budget cuts concerning its Red-Teaming and Election-Security units. Plankey served as Director of Cyber Policy on the National Security Council during the first Trump administration, (link)
More indicators of digital authoritarianism: Inside Elon Musk’s ‘Digital Coup’ (link). Under Trump, AI scientists are being told to remove ‘Ideological Bias’ from Powerful models (link). US National Cancer institute isn't allowed to publish information on certain topics without special approval (link) and Meta plans to test X’s community notes algorithm for alternative fact-checking (link)
As a result, digital sovereignty discussions got some boost in Europe: more EU partners have second thoughts on buying the software-defined F35 fighter jets due to dependencies from the US (link). The EU Commission is revising the rules on how the public sector awards contracts in Europe to prioritize EU tech (link). Additionally, many EU companies don’t have crisis-contingency plans, which is bad in the current situation (link). Lastly, it might be time to rethink the false narrative of a good Silicon Valley (link).
IT-Security News
Deep Seek is capable of generating malicious code. So, the UK's National Cyber Centre predicts that the influence of AI on offensive cyber operations could be significant by the end of this year (link). Exhibit A: Attackers are using generative AI for cyber ops, but German companies haven't adapted to these new realities (link). Lastly, MyCert (The Malaysia Computer Emergency Response Team) has identified vulnerabilities in the AI module of Drupal CMS. Update, you know the drill (link).
Zero-Day-Vuln in Windows being exploited since 2023. Again, patience is key! (link)
In 2024, Google paid 11.8 million dollars in bug bounties to 660 researchers discovering vulnerabilities in Google products. That is roughly in line with what Microsoft paid out, and definitely more than Meta (link)
Google kills the Google Assistant and replaces it with Gemini AI (link)
Cybercriminals are using malicious apps masquerading as Adobe and DocuSign apps to gain access to Microsoft 365 accounts (link)
There was a massive DDoS attack against X and Elon quickly blamed Ukraine, with little evidence or understanding how such distributed attacks work (link)
Firmware update bricks HP printers, makes them unable to use HP cartridges. Personally, we find HP printers generally unusable and brick-like, but your opinion might differ (link)
Update your Firefox Browser: there’s a root certificate expiring in March, and if it is not updated, you might run into a few annoying issues like security updates might not work anymore (link)
Academia
The surveillance studies journal has a timely special issue: on authoritarian surveillance trends (link) and surveillance in Trump’s America (link)