The Hacker News - Cybersecurity News and Analysis: artificial intelligence

What could be more exciting than seeing yourself starring alongside your favorite actor in a movie, music video, or TV program? Yes, that's possible—well, kind of, by using a new AI-based deepfake app that has gone viral in China over this weekend, climbing to the top of the free apps list in the Chinese iOS App Store in just three days. Dubbed ZAO , the app is yet another deepfake app for iPhone that lets you superimpose your face onto actors like Leonardo DiCaprio, Kit Harrington from "Game of Thrones," and many others in video clips from their popular movies and TV shows with just a selfie uploaded by you. Developed by Chinese developer MoMo, one of China's most popular dating apps, ZAO was released on Friday (August 30) and rapidly got downloaded millions of times with users being excited about the experience for the app's realistic face-swapping videos that last for as little as 8 seconds. ZAO Deepfake Face Swap App Sparks Privacy Outcry Howeve

FaceApp—the AI-powered photo-morphing app that recently gone viral for its age filter but hit the headlines for its controversial privacy policy—has been found collecting the list of your Facebook friends for no reason. The Russian-made FaceApp has been around since the spring of 2017 but taken social media by storm over the course of the past few weeks as millions of people downloaded the app to see how they would look when they are older or younger, or swap genders. The app also contains a feature that allows users to download and edit photos from their Facebook accounts, which only works when a user enables FaceApp to access the social media account via the 'Login with Facebook' option. As you can see in the screenshot above, besides requesting for access to your basic profile information and photos, FaceApp also fetches the list of your Facebook friends "who also use and have shared their friends' lists with FaceApp." Have you yet asked yourself why

Looking for an automated malware analysis software? Something like a 1-click solution that doesn't require any installation or configuration…a platform that can scale up your research time… technology that can provide data-driven explanations… well, your search is over! Israeli cybersecurity and malware researchers today at Black Hat conference launch a revolutionary machine learning and artificial intelligence-powered malware researcher platform that aims to help users identify unknown malware samples before they strike. Dubbed SNDBOX , the free online automated malware analysis system allows anyone to upload a file and access its static, dynamic and network analysis in an easy-to-understand graphical interface. The loss due to malware attacks is reported to be more than $10 billion every year, and it's increasing. Despite the significant improvement of cyber security mechanisms, malware is still a powerful and effective tool used by hackers to compromise systems because of

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been seen as a potential solution for automatically detecting and combating malware, and stop cyber attacks before they affect any organization. However, the same technology can also be weaponized by threat actors to power a new generation of malware that can evade even the best cyber-security defenses and infects a computer network or launch an attack only when the target's face is detected by the camera. To demonstrate this scenario, security researchers at IBM Research came up with DeepLocker —a new breed of "highly targeted and evasive" attack tool powered by AI," which conceals its malicious intent until it reached a specific victim. According to the IBM researcher, DeepLocker flies under the radar without being detected and "unleashes its malicious action as soon as the AI model identifies the target through indicators like facial recognition, geolocation and voice recognition." Describing it as the "sp

Global entertainment ticketing service Ticketmaster has admitted that the company has suffered a security breach, warning customers that their personal and payment information may have been accessed by an unknown third-party. The company has blamed a third-party support customer service chat application for the data breach that believed to affect tens of thousands of its customers. The customer support chat application, made by Inbenta Technologies—a third-party artificial intelligence tech supplier—used to help major websites interact with their customers. In its statement , Ticketmaster said it discovered malicious software on the customer support application hosted on its UK website that allowed attackers to extract the personal and payment information from its customers buying tickets. Ticketmaster disabled the Inbenta product across all of its websites as soon as it recognized the malicious code. However, Inbenta Technologies turned away blame back to Ticketmaster, sa

Remember BlueBorne? A series of recently disclosed critical Bluetooth flaws that affect billions of Android, iOS, Windows and Linux devices have now been discovered in millions of AI-based voice-activated personal assistants, including Google Home and Amazon Echo . As estimated during the discovery of this devastating threat, several IoT and smart devices whose operating systems are often updated less frequently than smartphones and desktops are also vulnerable to BlueBorne. BlueBorne is the name given to the sophisticated attack exploiting a total of eight Bluetooth implementation vulnerabilities that allow attackers within the range of the targeted devices to run malicious code, steal sensitive information, take complete control, and launch man-in-the-middle attacks. What's worse? Triggering the BlueBorne exploit doesn't require victims to click any link or open any file—all without requiring user interaction. Also, most security products would likely not be abl

Microsoft is making every effort to make its Windows operating system more secure and advanced than ever before by beefing up its security practices and hardening it against hackers and cyber attacks in its next release. With the launch of its Windows 10 Creator Update (also known as RedStone 3), which is expected to release sometime between September and October 2017, Microsoft is planning to release lots of security features in an effort to prevent major global malware crisis. Just a few days ago, we reported about Microsoft's plan to build its EMET or Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit into the kernel of the upcoming Windows 10 to boost the security of your computer against complex threats such as zero-day vulnerabilities. Also, the tech giant has planned to remove the SMBv1 (Server Message Block version 1) — a 30-year-old file sharing protocol which came to light last month after the devastating WannaCry outbreak — from the upcoming Windows 10 (1709) Redstone 3

2017 is the year of Artificial Intelligence (A.I.), Big Data, Virtual Reality (VR) and Cyber Security with major companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, IBM and Salesforce and technology pioneers like SpaceX founder Elon Musk investing in these hot technologies. Since everyone seems to be talking about the hottest trend — artificial intelligence and machine learning — broadly, 62 percent of large enterprises will be using AI technologies by 2018, says a report from Narrative Science. But why AI is considered to be the next big technology? Because it can enhance and change everything about the way we think, interact, manufacture and deliver. Last year, we saw a significant number of high-profile hacks targeting big organizations, governments, small enterprises, and individuals — What's more worrisome? It's going to get worse, and we need help. No doubt, we, the human, can find vulnerabilities but can not analyze millions of programs with billions of lines of codes at o

Cyber security is a major challenge in today's world, as cyber attacks have become more automated and difficult to detect, where traditional cyber security practices and systems are no longer sufficient to protect businesses, governments, and other organizations. In past few years, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning had made a name for itself in the field of cyber security, helping IT and security professionals more efficiently and quickly identify risks and anticipate problems before they occur. The good news is that if you are a Windows 10 user, Microsoft will now offer you a machine learning based threat intelligence feature via its inbuilt Windows security service, which will improve the security capabilities available on Windows 10 devices. But, the bad news is that it is not free. The company is offering this "differentiated intelligence" feature on its newly added service to Windows 10, dubbed Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection (WDAT

Facebook is set to introduce end-to-end encryption for its Messenger app , allowing more than its 900 Million users to send and receive messages that can not be read or intercepted by law enforcement or even the social network itself. However, it's not the kind of end-to-end encrypted chat feature provided by Apple or WhatsApp in which all your conversation are entirely encrypted by default. Instead, the social networking giant will offer an end-to-end encrypted chat mode in Messenger as opt-in, just like Google's Allo smart chat app that provides encrypted chat feature only if users opt for it. Privacy advocates criticized Google for adding its ' incognito ' encrypted chat mode as an opt-in feature, rather than offering end-to-end encryption by default. Now, Facebook Messenger will roll out the same choice for its users in the next few months, when the company will roll out this new encrypted chat mode in Messenger as an opt-in feature, reports  The Guardian.

In Brief What if we could Predict when a cyber attack is going to occur before it actually happens and prevent it? Isn't it revolutionary idea for Internet Security? Security researchers at MIT have developed a new Artificial Intelligence-based cyber security platform, called ' AI2 ,' which has the ability to predict, detect, and stop 85% of Cyber Attacks with high accuracy. Cyber security is a major challenge in today's world, as government agencies, corporations and individuals have increasingly become victims of cyber attacks that are so rapidly finding new ways to threaten the Internet that it's hard for good guys to keep up with them. A group of researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) are working with machine-learning startup PatternEx to develop a line of defense against such cyber threats. The team has already  developed an Artificial Intelligence system that can detect 85 percent of attacks by

Today the Internet has become dominated by images, and it's the major feature that got Facebook to a Billion daily users. We can not imagine Facebook without photos, but for Millions of blind and visually impaired people, Facebook without photos has been the reality since its launch. But not now! Facebook has launched a system, dubbed Automatic Alternative Text , which describes the contents of pictures by telling blind and visually-impaired users what appears in them. Blind and visually-impaired people use sophisticated navigation software known as screen readers to make their computers usable. The software turns the contents of the screen into speech, but it can't "read" pictures. However, Facebook's Automatic Alternative Text or AAT uses object recognition technology that can decode and describe photos uploaded to the social network site using artificial intelligence and then provide them in a form that can be readable by a screen reader. V

After Microsoft's Twitter-based Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbot ' Tay ' badly defeated earlier this week, Microsoft has expressed apology and explained what went wrong. For those unaware, Tay is Millennial-inspired artificial intelligence chatbot unveiled by Microsoft on Wednesday that's supposed to talk with people on social media networks like Twitter, Kik and GroupMe and learn from them. However, in less than 24 hours of its launch, the company pulled Tay down, following incredibly racist and Holocaust comments and tweets praising Hitler and bashing feminists. In a blog post published Friday, Corporate Vice President Peter Lee of Microsoft Research apologized for the disturbing behavior of Tay, though he suggested the bad people might have influenced the AI teenager. "We are deeply sorry for the unintended offensive and hurtful tweets from Tay, which do not represent who we are or what we stand for, nor how we designed Tay," Lee w

Tay, Microsoft's new Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbot on Twitter had to be pulled down a day after it launched, following incredibly racist comments and tweets praising Hitler and bashing feminists. Microsoft had launched the Millennial-inspired artificial intelligence chatbot on Wednesday, claiming that it will become smarter the more people talk to it. The real-world aim of Tay is to allow researchers to "experiment" with conversational understanding, as well as learn how people talk to each other and get progressively "smarter." "The AI chatbot Tay is a machine learning project, designed for human engagement," a Microsoft spokesperson said. "It is as much a social and cultural experiment, as it is technical. Unfortunately, within the first 24 hours of coming online, we became aware of a coordinated effort by some users to abuse Tay's commenting skills to have Tay respond in inappropriate ways. As a result, we have taken Tay offline and are

What's the coolest part of the Iron Man movies? The hyper-intelligent Artificial Intelligence that helps Tony Stark by doing data analysis, charging his armor, presenting information at crucial times and doing other business operations. That's right — we are talking about J.A.R.V.I.S. , Iron Man's personal assistant. We all dream of having one of its kinds, and even Facebook's Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has ambitions to live more like Iron Man's superhero Tony Stark. While disclosing his 2016 resolution via a Facebook post on Sunday, Zuckerberg revealed that he is planning to build his own Artificial Intelligence to help him run his home and assist him at office — similar to Iron Man's digital butler Edwin Jarvis . "You can think of it kind of like Jarvis in Iron Man," Zuckerberg wrote in his Facebook post . "I'll start teaching it to understand my voice to control everything in our home — music, lights, tempe