Author Archives: John Brandon

News about the iPhone 8 featuring a wider bezel and OLED technology landed with a thud recently. More tweaks to the existing design, baby steps forward in the overall design.

We’ve been living with smartphones for about 10 years now — a bit more if you count the earliest Windows models and those made by BlackBerry and Nokia. (Note: I don’t.) The first iPhone came out in 2007, and the first Android model shipped in 2008. If you didn’t notice, it might have something to do with the economic crisis at the time. The smartphone became a major trend in society around 2010, and it wasn’t until around 2013 or 2014 — around the launch of the iPhone 6 — that you would see people hunched over their phones at airports.

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You may have run into these bots a few times. What looks like an actual human being could have been a bot sending you Twitter spam…or even worse.

During the last election cycle and over the past few months in particular, it’s now widely known that Twitter bots — many with zero followers — promoted fake news stories. Often, the goal was to stir up dissension among voters, influence political viewpoints, and (more importantly) generate revenue when people viewed banner ads. Some would argue these bots helped elect President Trump or at least influenced people on social media to vote one way or another.

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Almost every day, there’s news about a massive data leak — a breach at Yahoo that reveals millions of user accounts, a compromise involving Gmail phishing scams. Security professionals are constantly moving the chess pieces around, but it can be a losing battle.

Yet, there is one ally that has emerged in recent years. Artificial intelligence can stay vigilant at all times, looking for patterns in behavior and alerting you to a new threat.

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Almost every day, there’s news about a massive data leak — a breach at Yahoo that reveals millions of user accounts, a compromise involving Gmail phishing scams. Security professionals are constantly moving the chess pieces around, but it can be a losing battle.

Yet, there is one ally that has emerged in recent years. Artificial intelligence can stay vigilant at all times, looking for patterns in behavior and alerting you to a new threat.

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Want to make a cool $20,000?

All you have to do is hack the Nintendo 3DS, a handheld console that’s been out for a few years already. A listing on HackerOne spells everything out: Hackers will receive a cash payment for discovering a vulnerability in the system, which does let gamers make purchases and stores private information like your age and gender. There’s a range for this, of course — some discoveries will pay $100. Also, anyone who files a report must follow the exact template.

It makes you wonder — why would a major Japanese corporation offer a reward like this? Why is it even worth the expense, especially when you know they have internal security researchers?

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A product marketing manager at your company just posted a photo on LinkedIn. The problem? In the background of the image, there’s a Post-It note that contains his network passwords. You can barely see it, but using artificial intelligence algorithms, hackers can scan for the publicly available image, determine there are network passwords, and use them for data theft.

According to data security expert David Maynor, this is not rocket science. In fact, the AI program is easier to use than a search engine. “The AI can identify objects in an image and the environment of the photo, guess at a description of the image contents as well as your likely age, gender, facial expression, and more,” says Maynor. “And these tools are becoming increasingly powerful with every image they scan, learning and becoming more accurate.”

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They have blinking lights and tend to chirp constantly. One of them can vacuum your living room carpet on a schedule. Another can play games with the kids using artificial intelligence.

Yet, for homeowners (and security professionals) there’s a question about whether home robots could become an attack vector for hackers. Tapping into a live webcam feed and recording it? Stealing Wi-Fi information from an unprotected signal so you can transmit illegal wares? What makes a home robot such an ingenious ploy is that few of us think a vacuum could possibly become anything remotely viable for criminal use. Yet, that’s exactly the danger.

“Homeowners never change the default passwords or use simple passwords which can be broken thus allowing hackers to leverage their way onto a home network and use the robot as a pivot point for further exfiltration of sensitive data or plant malware,” says Kevin Curran, a senior lecturer in computer science at the University of Ulster and IEEE member.

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