Best Infosec-Related Long Reads of the Week, 1/21/23
Infiltrating the LockBit gang, That funny feeling online chatbots can pass the Turing test, Time to start protecting submarine cables from threats, The meaningless advice to not pay ransoms
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OpenAI disrupted an elaborate Russian influence operation
Russian operators used ChatGPT to promote a fabricated Israel-based institute that laundered pro-Kremlin narratives through stolen academic research and a bogus “sovereignty index.”
Chinese state-linked hackers use DeepSeek to scale attacks
State-affiliated groups are using low-cost, lightly guarded AI models for reconnaissance, exploit development and other routine work—helping them more than double their attack volume, researchers say.
Iran-linked UK power generator attack exposes a cybersecurity blind spot
A suspected Iranian-linked cyberattack took a small UK power generator offline for four days, exposing a potential blind spot: energy assets too small to threaten the grid may also fall below the cybersecurity rules designed to protect it.
Alibaba’s Qwen races past Meta, Google with 3 billion AI model downloads
Alibaba’s Qwen family of open-weight AI models has surpassed 3 billion downloads in six months, making it the world’s most-downloaded open model ecosystem, ahead of Google and Meta. Qwen, has open-sourced more than 460 models, and its ecosystem has spawned 300l-plus derivatives/