Snippings

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Boards inside some train stations listed the phone number for the office of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and asked travelers to call for additional details.

From Cyber-attack disrupts Iran’s national railway system – The Record by Recorded Future:

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Lt. Gen. Dennis Crall, who heads the Joint All Domain Command and Control, or JADC2, effort for the Joint Chiefs,

Crall said the military needs to train more rigorously for the likelihood that battlefield networks will fail or be spoofed.

From It’s Time to Wargame Against an AI-Enabled China – Defense One:

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Earlier this year, prosecutors in China accused two people of stealing more than $77 million by setting up a fake shell company purporting to sell leather bags and sending fraudulent tax invoices to their supposed clients. The pair was able to send out official-looking invoices by fooling the local government tax office’s facial-recognition system, which was set up to track payments and crack down on tax evasion, according to prosecutors cited in a March report in the Xinhua Daily Telegraph. Prosecutors said in a posting on the Chinese chat service WeChat that the attackers had hacked the local government’s facial-recognition service with videos they had produced. The Shanghai prosecutors couldn’t be reached for comment.

The pair bought high-definition photographs of faces from an online black market, then used an app to create videos from the photos to make it look like the faces were nodding, blinking and opening their mouths, the report says.

From Faces Are the Next Target for Fraudsters – WSJ:

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Analysts at credit-scoring company Experian PLC said in a March security report that they expect to see fraudsters increasingly create “Frankenstein faces,” using AI to combine facial characteristics from different people to form a new identity to fool facial ID systems.

From Faces Are the Next Target for Fraudsters – WSJ:

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Second, encryption is reversible, which makes it more appealing for the victim to concede. As with kidnapping, it is the prospect of getting the hostage back — in this case, the recovery of data and systems — that makes concessions attractive.

From Opinion | Could Ransomware Become a Geopolitical Weapon? Game Theory Says Yes. – POLITICO:

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Thank goodness all these attackers want is Bitcoin. Jenny Jun of the Atlantic Council’s Cyber Statecraft Initiative (and co-author of North Korea’s Cyber Operations: Strategy and Responses) asks a frightening question: given that ransomware operators can mount these attacks so frequently and extort large sums of money from victims, encryption is a demonstrably successful weapon. What if a hostile state or a terrorist group starts using the same tool to demand something more than money?

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The House of Representative’s Improving Digital Identity Act does not seem to offer much in the way of concrete regulations, but does include a series of initiatives that would update and enhance the government’s outdated identity framework.

Should the Act get passed, the President would need to create a new Improving Digital Identity Task Force with representatives from a number of key agencies, including the Departments of Treasury, State, and Education. It would also include additional members from the local and state government levels.

From US Lawmakers Ask Government to Deliver Better Digital Identity Framework.

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LONDON, July 08, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Today, the biggest report into the growth of mobile wallets ever published, projects that one in two people will use a mobile wallet by 2025. At the end of 2020, there were over 2.8 billion mobile wallets in use. That number is projected to increase by nearly 74% to reach 4.8 billion mobile wallets in use by the end of 2025 – nearly 60% of the world’s population. The fastest growing markets are Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Africa & Middle East where mobile wallets are displacing cash and cards for more convenient digital payments.

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Late-night gaming sessions for Chinese children are going to be much harder now that Tencent, China’s largest tech company, is using facial recognition to stop kids from gaming after bedtime. Announced in a press release yesterday, Tencent said its new technology would require players to confirm their identity via facial recognition algorithm in order to keep playing mobile games past 10 pm.

From Tencent is now using facial recognition to stop children in China from gaming all night | PC Gamer.

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MobileCoin, a cryptocurrency business with close ties to Signal and its founder, Moxie Marlinspike, has raised more than $75 million in venture capital funding at a $1 billion valuation, more than 10 times higher than at its last financing in March, according to two people familiar with the matter.

From MobileCoin, Which Powers Crypto Payments on Signal, Valued at $1 Billion — The Information.

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If you have a MobileCoin wallet, you can link it to your Signal account to send coins to contacts for a vanishingly small fee. I This is the sort of thing that I had expected from Facebook by now (link your Novi wallet to your WhatsApp, Messenger and Facebook apps) but so far they seem a little behind on the obvious and inevitable collision between messaging and money.