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Justice Department indicts 7 accused in 14-year hack campaign by Chinese gov

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INDICTED —

Hacks allegedly targeted US officials and politicians, their spouses and dozens of companies.

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Justice Department indicts 7 accused in 14-year hack campaign by Chinese gov

peterschreiber.media | Getty Images

The US Justice Department on Monday unsealed an indictment charging seven men with hacking or attempting to hack dozens of US companies in a 14-year campaign furthering an economic espionage and foreign intelligence gathering by the Chinese government.

All seven defendants, federal prosecutors alleged, were associated with Wuhan Xiaoruizhi Science & Technology Co., Ltd. a front company created by the Hubei State Security Department, an outpost of the Ministry of State Security located in Wuhan province. The MSS, in turn, has funded an advanced persistent threat group tracked under names including APT31, Zirconium Violet Typhoon, Judgment Panda, and Altaire.

Relentless 14-year campaign

“Since at least 2010, the defendants … engaged in computer network intrusion activity on behalf of the HSSD targeting numerous US government officials, various US economic and defense industries and a variety of private industry officials, foreign democracy activists, academics and parliamentarians in response to geopolitical events affecting the PRC,” federal prosecutors alleged. “These computer network intrusion activities resulted in the confirmed and potential compromise of work and personal email accounts, cloud storage accounts and telephone call records belonging to millions of Americans, including at least some information that could be released in support of malign influence targeting democratic processes and institutions, and economic plans, intellectual property, and trade secrets belonging to American businesses, and contributed to the estimated billions of dollars lost every year as a result of the PRC’s state-sponsored apparatus to transfer US technology to the PRC.”

The relentless, 14-year campaign targeted thousands of individuals and dozens of companies through the use of zero-day attacks, website vulnerability exploitation, and the targeting of home routers and personal devices of high-ranking US government officials and politicians and election campaign staff from both major US political parties.

“The targeted US government officials included individuals working in the White House, at the Departments of Justice, Commerce, Treasury and State, and US Senators and Representatives of both political parties,” Justice Department officials said. “The defendants and others in the APT31 Group targeted these individuals at both professional and personal email addresses. Additionally in some cases, the defendants also targeted victims’ spouses, including the spouses of a high-ranking Department of Justice official, high-ranking White House officials and multiple United States Senators. Targets also included election campaign staff from both major US political parties in advance of the 2020 election.”

One technique the defendants allegedly used was the sending of emails to journalists, political officials, and companies. The messages, which were made to appear as originating from news outlets or journalists, contained hidden tracking links, which, when activated, gave APT31 members information about the locations, IP addresses, network schematics, and specific devices of the targets for use in follow-on attacks. Some of the targets of these emails included foreign government officials who were part of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, a group formed after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre that’s critical of the Chinese government; every European Union member of that’s a member of that group; and 43 UK parliamentary accounts part of the group or critical of the People’s Republic of China.

APT31 used a variety of methods to infect networks of interest with custom malware such as RAWDOOR, Trochilus, EvilOSX, DropDoor/DropCa, and later the widely available Cobalt Strike Beacon security testing tool. In late 2016, the hacking group exploited what was then a zero-day vulnerability in unnamed software to gain access to an unidentified defense contractor. In their indictment, prosecutors wrote:

Using the zero-day privilege escalation exploit, the Conspirators first obtained administrator access to a subsidiary’s network before ultimately pivoting into the Defense Contractor’s core corporate network,” prosecutors wrote in the indictment. “The Conspirators used a SQL injection, in which they entered malicious code into a web form input box to gain access to information that was not intended to be displayed, to create an account on the subsidiary’s network with the username “testdew23.” The Conspirators used malicious software to grant administrator privileges to the “testdew23” user account. Next, the Conspirators uploaded a web shell, or a script that enables remote administration of the computer, named “Welcome to Chrome,” onto the subsidiary’s web server. Thereafter, the Conspirators used the web shell to upload and execute at least two malicious files on the web server, which were configured to open a connection between the victim’s network and computers outside that network that were controlled by the Conspirators. Through this method, the Conspirators successfully gained unauthorized access to the Defense Contractor’s network.

Other APT31 targets include military contractors and companies in the aerospace, IT services, software, telecommunications, manufacturing, and financial services industries. APT31 has long been known to target not only individuals and entities with information of primary interest but also companies or services that the primary targets rely on. Primary targets were dissidents and critics of the PRC and Western companies in possession of technical information of value to the PRC.

Prosecutors said targets successfully hacked by APT31 include:

  • a cleared defense contractor based in Oklahoma that designed and manufactured military flight simulators for the US military
  • a cleared aerospace and defense contractor based in Tennessee
  • an Alabama-based research corporation in the aerospace and defense industries
  • a Maryland-based professional support services company that serviced the Department of Defense and other government agencies
  • a leading American manufacturer of software and computer services based in California
  • a leading global provider of wireless technology based in Illinois; a technology company based in New York
  • a software company servicing the industrial controls industry based in California
  • an IT consulting company based in California; an IT services and spatial processing company based in Colorado
  • a multifactor authentication company; an American trade association
  • multiple information technology training and support companies
  • a leading provider of 5G network equipment in the United States
  • an IT solutions and 5G integration service company based in Idaho
  • a telecommunications company based in Illinois
  • a voice technology company headquartered in California;
  • a prominent trade organization with offices in New York and elsewhere
  • a manufacturing association based in Washington, DC
  • a steel company
  • an apparel company based in New York
  • an engineering company based in California
  • an energy company based in Texas
  • a finance company headquartered in New York
  • A US multi-national management consulting company with offices in Washington, DC, and elsewhere
  • a financial ratings company based in New York
  • an advertising agency based in New York
  • a consulting company based in Virginia;
  • multiple global law firms based in New York and throughout the United States
  • a law firm software provider
  • a machine learning laboratory based in Virginia
  • a university based in California
  • multiple research hospitals and institutes located in New York and Massachusetts
  • an international non-profit organization headquartered in Washington, DC.

The defendants are:

  • Ni Gaobin (倪高彬), age 38
  • Weng Ming (翁明), 37
  • Cheng Feng (程锋), 34
  • Peng Yaowen (彭耀文), 38
  • Sun Xiaohui (孙小辉), 38
  • Xiong Wang (熊旺), 35
  • Zhao Guangzong (赵光宗), 38

The men were charged with conspiracy to commit computer intrusions and conspiracy to commit wire fraud. While none of the men are in US custody or likely to face prosecution, the US Department of Treasury on Monday sanctioned Wuhan Xiaoruizhi Science and Technology Company, Limited. The department also designated Zhao Guangzong and Ni Gaobin for their roles in hacks targeting US critical infrastructure.

“As a result of today’s action, all property and interests in property of the designated persons and entity described above that are in the United States or in the possession or control of US persons are blocked and must be reported to OFAC,” Treasury officials wrote. “In addition, any entities that are owned, directly or indirectly, individually or in the aggregate, 50 percent or more by one or more blocked persons are also blocked. Unless authorized by a general or specific license issued by OFAC, or exempt, OFAC’s regulations generally prohibit all transactions by US persons or within (or transiting) the United States that involve any property or interests in property of designated or otherwise blocked persons.”

The US State Department is offering $10 million for information leading to the identification or location of any of the defendants or others associated with the campaign.

Justice Department indicts 7 accused in 14-year hack campaign by Chinese gov Read More »

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Never-before-seen data wiper may have been used by Russia against Ukraine

Biz & IT, data wipers, russia, Security, Ukraine / /

KREMLIN FINGERPRINTS —

AcidRain, discovered in 2022, is tied to AcidPour. Both are attributed to Russia.

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Never-before-seen data wiper may have been used by Russia against Ukraine

Getty Images

Researchers have unearthed never-before-seen wiper malware tied to the Kremlin and an operation two years ago that took out more than 10,000 satellite modems located mainly in Ukraine on the eve of Russia’s invasion of its neighboring country.

AcidPour, as researchers from security firm Sentinel One have named the new malware, has stark similarities to AcidRain, a wiper discovered in March 2022 that Viasat has confirmed was used in the attack on its modems earlier that month. Wipers are malicious applications designed to destroy stored data or render devices inoperable. Viasat said AcidRain was installed on more than 10,000 Eutelsat KA-SAT modems used by the broadband provider seven days prior to the March 2022 discovery of the wiper. AcidRain was installed on the devices after attackers gained access to the company’s private network.

Sentinel One, which also discovered AcidRain, said at the time that the earlier wiper had enough technical overlaps with malware the US government attributed to the Russian government in 2018 to make it likely that AcidRain and the 2018 malware, known as VPNFilter, were closely linked to the same team of developers. In turn, Sentinel One’s report Thursday noting the similarities between AcidRain and AcidPour provides evidence that AcidPour was also created by developers working on behalf of the Kremlin.

Technical similarities include:

  • Use of the same reboot mechanism
  • The exact logic of recursive directory wiping
  • The same IOCTL-based wiping mechanism.

AcidPour also shares programming similarities with another piece of malware attributed to Sandworm: CaddyWiper, which was used against various targets in Ukraine.

“AcidPour is programmed in C without relying on statically compiled libraries or imports,” Thursday’s report noted. “Most functionality is implemented via direct syscalls, many called through the use of inline assembly and opcodes.” Developers of CaddyWiper used the same approach.

Bolstering the theory that AcidPour was created by the same Russian threat group behind previous attacks on Ukraine, a representative with Ukraine’s State Service of Special Communications and Information Protection told Cyberscoop that AcidPour was linked to UAC-0165, a splinter group associated with Sandworm (a much larger threat group run by Russia’s military intelligence unit, GRU). Representatives with the State Service of Special Communications and Information Protection of Ukraine didn’t immediately answer an email seeking comment for this post.

Sandworm has a long history of targeting Ukrainian critical infrastructure. Ukrainian officials said last September that UAC-0165 regularly props up fake hacktivist personas to take credit for attacks the group carries out.

Sentinel One researchers Juan Andrés Guerrero-Saade and Tom Hegel went on to speculate that AcidPour was used to disrupt multiple Ukrainian telecommunications networks, which have been down since March 13, three days before the researchers discovered the new wiper. They point to statements a persona known as SolntsepekZ made on Telegram that took responsibility for hacks that took out Triangulum, a consortium providing telephone and Internet services under the Triacom brand, and Misto TV.

A message a persona known as SolntsepekZ posted to Telegram.

A message a persona known as SolntsepekZ posted to Telegram.

Sentinel One

The weeklong outage has been confirmed anecdotally and by Network intelligence firm Kentik and content delivery network Cloudflare, with the latter indicating the sites remained inoperable at the time this post went live on Ars. As of Thursday afternoon California time, Misto-TV’s website displayed the following network outage notice:

Outage notice displayed on Misto-TV's website.

Enlarge / Outage notice displayed on Misto-TV’s website.

“At this time, we cannot confirm that AcidPour was used to disrupt these ISPs,” Guerrero-Saade and Hegel wrote in Thursday’s post. “The longevity of the disruption suggests a more complex attack than a simple DDoS or nuisance disruption. AcidPour, uploaded 3 days after this disruption started, would fit the bill for the requisite toolkit. If that’s the case, it could serve as another link between this hacktivist persona and specific GRU operations.”

The researchers added:

“The transition from AcidRain to AcidPour, with its expanded capabilities, underscores the strategic intent to inflict significant operational impact. This progression reveals not only a refinement in the technical capabilities of these threat actors but also their calculated approach to select targets that maximize follow-on effects, disrupting critical infrastructure and communications.”

Never-before-seen data wiper may have been used by Russia against Ukraine Read More »

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World’s first global AI resolution unanimously adopted by United Nations

AI, AI ethics, AI harms, AI policy, AI regulation, AI safety, Biz & IT, Bletchley Declaration, brad smith, Britain, machine learning, microsoft, Policy, Reuters, UK, UN, United Nations, united states, US government / /

We hold these seeds to be self-evident —

Nonbinding agreement seeks to protect personal data and safeguard human rights.

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The United Nations building in New York.

Enlarge / The United Nations building in New York.

On Thursday, the United Nations General Assembly unanimously consented to adopt what some call the first global resolution on AI, reports Reuters. The resolution aims to foster the protection of personal data, enhance privacy policies, ensure close monitoring of AI for potential risks, and uphold human rights. It emerged from a proposal by the United States and received backing from China and 121 other countries.

Being a nonbinding agreement and thus effectively toothless, the resolution seems broadly popular in the AI industry. On X, Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith wrote, “We fully support the @UN’s adoption of the comprehensive AI resolution. The consensus reached today marks a critical step towards establishing international guardrails for the ethical and sustainable development of AI, ensuring this technology serves the needs of everyone.”

The resolution, titled “Seizing the opportunities of safe, secure and trustworthy artificial intelligence systems for sustainable development,” resulted from three months of negotiation, and the stakeholders involved seem pleased at the level of international cooperation. “We’re sailing in choppy waters with the fast-changing technology, which means that it’s more important than ever to steer by the light of our values,” one senior US administration official told Reuters, highlighting the significance of this “first-ever truly global consensus document on AI.”

In the UN, adoption by consensus means that all members agree to adopt the resolution without a vote. “Consensus is reached when all Member States agree on a text, but it does not mean that they all agree on every element of a draft document,” writes the UN in a FAQ found online. “They can agree to adopt a draft resolution without a vote, but still have reservations about certain parts of the text.”

The initiative joins a series of efforts by governments worldwide to influence the trajectory of AI development following the launch of ChatGPT and GPT-4, and the enormous hype raised by certain members of the tech industry in a public worldwide campaign waged last year. Critics fear that AI may undermine democratic processes, amplify fraudulent activities, or contribute to significant job displacement, among other issues. The resolution seeks to address the dangers associated with the irresponsible or malicious application of AI systems, which the UN says could jeopardize human rights and fundamental freedoms.

Resistance from nations such as Russia and China was anticipated, and US officials acknowledged the presence of “lots of heated conversations” during the negotiation process, according to Reuters. However, they also emphasized successful engagement with these countries and others typically at odds with the US on various issues, agreeing on a draft resolution that sought to maintain a delicate balance between promoting development and safeguarding human rights.

The new UN agreement may be the first “global” agreement, in the sense of having the participation of every UN country, but it wasn’t the first multi-state international AI agreement. That honor seems to fall to the Bletchley Declaration signed in November by the 28 nations attending the UK’s first AI Summit.

Also in November, the US, Britain, and other nations unveiled an agreement focusing on the creation of AI systems that are “secure by design” to protect against misuse by rogue actors. Europe is slowly moving forward with provisional agreements to regulate AI and is close to implementing the world’s first comprehensive AI regulations. Meanwhile, the US government still lacks consensus on legislative action related to AI regulation, with the Biden administration advocating for measures to mitigate AI risks while enhancing national security.

World’s first global AI resolution unanimously adopted by United Nations Read More »

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Nvidia announces “moonshot” to create embodied human-level AI in robot form

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Here come the robots —

As companies race to pair AI with general-purpose humanoid robots, Nvidia’s GR00T emerges.

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An illustration of a humanoid robot created by Nvidia.

Enlarge / An illustration of a humanoid robot created by Nvidia.

Nvidia

In sci-fi films, the rise of humanlike artificial intelligence often comes hand in hand with a physical platform, such as an android or robot. While the most advanced AI language models so far seem mostly like disembodied voices echoing from an anonymous data center, they might not remain that way for long. Some companies like Google, Figure, Microsoft, Tesla, Boston Dynamics, and others are working toward giving AI models a body. This is called “embodiment,” and AI chipmaker Nvidia wants to accelerate the process.

“Building foundation models for general humanoid robots is one of the most exciting problems to solve in AI today,” said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in a statement. Huang spent a portion of Nvidia’s annual GTC conference keynote on Monday going over Nvidia’s robotics efforts. “The next generation of robotics will likely be humanoid robotics,” Huang said. “We now have the necessary technology to imagine generalized human robotics.”

To that end, Nvidia announced Project GR00T, a general-purpose foundation model for humanoid robots. As a type of AI model itself, Nvidia hopes GR00T (which stands for “Generalist Robot 00 Technology” but sounds a lot like a famous Marvel character) will serve as an AI mind for robots, enabling them to learn skills and solve various tasks on the fly. In a tweet, Nvidia researcher Linxi “Jim” Fan called the project “our moonshot to solve embodied AGI in the physical world.”

AGI, or artificial general intelligence, is a poorly defined term that usually refers to hypothetical human-level AI (or beyond) that can learn any task a human could without specialized training. Given a capable enough humanoid body driven by AGI, one could imagine fully autonomous robotic assistants or workers. Of course, some experts think that true AGI is long way off, so it’s possible that Nvidia’s goal is more aspirational than realistic. But that’s also what makes Nvidia’s plan a moonshot.

NVIDIA Robotics: A Journey From AVs to Humanoids.

“The GR00T model will enable a robot to understand multimodal instructions, such as language, video, and demonstration, and perform a variety of useful tasks,” wrote Fan on X. “We are collaborating with many leading humanoid companies around the world, so that GR00T may transfer across embodiments and help the ecosystem thrive.” We reached out to Nvidia researchers, including Fan, for comment but did not hear back by press time.

Nvidia is designing GR00T to understand natural language and emulate human movements, potentially allowing robots to learn coordination, dexterity, and other skills necessary for navigating and interacting with the real world like a person. And as it turns out, Nvidia says that making robots shaped like humans might be the key to creating functional robot assistants.

The humanoid key

Robotics startup figure, an Nvidia partner, recently showed off its humanoid

Enlarge / Robotics startup figure, an Nvidia partner, recently showed off its humanoid “Figure 01” robot.

Figure

So far, we’ve seen plenty of robotics platforms that aren’t human-shaped, including robot vacuum cleaners, autonomous weed pullers, industrial units used in automobile manufacturing, and even research arms that can fold laundry. So why focus on imitating the human form? “In a way, human robotics is likely easier,” said Huang in his GTC keynote. “And the reason for that is because we have a lot more imitation training data that we can provide robots, because we are constructed in a very similar way.”

That means that researchers can feed samples of training data captured from human movement into AI models that control robot movement, teaching them how to better move and balance themselves. Also, humanoid robots are particularly convenient because they can fit anywhere a person can, and we’ve designed a world of physical objects and interfaces (such as tools, furniture, stairs, and appliances) to be used or manipulated by the human form.

Along with GR00T, Nvidia also debuted a new computer platform called Jetson Thor, based on NVIDIA’s Thor system-on-a-chip (SoC), as part of the new Blackwell GPU architecture, which it hopes will power this new generation of humanoid robots. The SoC reportedly includes a transformer engine capable of 800 teraflops of 8-bit floating point AI computation for running models like GR00T.

Nvidia announces “moonshot” to create embodied human-level AI in robot form Read More »

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Formula 1 chief appalled to find team using Excel to manage 20,000 car parts

Biz & IT, Cars, Excel, Microsoft Excel, Tech / /

Dark matter strikes again —

Williams team leader may only be shocked because he hasn’t worked IT.

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A pit stop during the Bahrain Formula One Grand Prix in early March evokes how the team's manager was feeling when looking at the Excel sheet that managed the car's build components.

Enlarge / A pit stop during the Bahrain Formula One Grand Prix in early March evokes how the team’s manager was feeling when looking at the Excel sheet that managed the car’s build components.

ALI HAIDER/POOL/AFP via Getty Images

There’s a new boss at a storied 47-year-old Formula 1 team, and he’s eager to shake things up. He’s been saying that the team is far behind its competition in technology and coordination. And Excel is a big part of it.

Starting in early 2023, Williams team principal James Vowles and chief technical officer Pat Fry started reworking the F1 team’s systems for designing and building its car. It would be painful, but the pain would keep the team from falling even further behind. As they started figuring out new processes and systems, they encountered what they considered a core issue: Microsoft Excel.

The Williams car build workbook, with roughly 20,000 individual parts, was “a joke,” Vowles recently told The Race. “Impossible to navigate and impossible to update.” This colossal Excel file lacked information on how much each of those parts cost and the time it took to produce them, along with whether the parts were already on order. Prioritizing one car section over another, from manufacture through inspection, was impossible, Vowles suggested.

“When you start tracking now hundreds of thousands of components through your organization moving around, an Excel spreadsheet is useless,” Vowles told The Race. Because of the multiple states each part could be in—ordered, backordered, inspected, returned—humans are often left to work out the details. “And once you start putting that level of complexity in, which is where modern Formula 1 is, the Excel spreadsheet falls over, and humans fall over. And that’s exactly where we are.”

The consequences of this row/column chaos, and the resulting hiccups, were many. Williams missed early pre-season testing in 2019. Workers sometimes had to physically search the team’s factory for parts. The wrong parts got priority, other parts came late, and some piled up. And yet transitioning to a modern tracking system was “viciously expensive,” Fry told The Race, and making up for the painful process required “humans pushing themselves to the absolute limits and breaking.”

Williams' driver Alexander Albon drives during the qualifying session of the Saudi Arabian Formula One Grand Prix at the Jeddah Corniche Circuit in Jeddah on March 8, 2024.

Williams’ driver Alexander Albon drives during the qualifying session of the Saudi Arabian Formula One Grand Prix at the Jeddah Corniche Circuit in Jeddah on March 8, 2024.

Joseph Eid/AFP via Getty Images

The devil you know strikes again

The idea that a modern Formula 1 team, building some of the most fantastically advanced and efficient machines on Earth, would be using Excel to build those machines might strike you as odd. F1 cars cost an estimated $12–$16 million each, with resource cap of about $145 million. But none of this really matters, and it actually makes sense, if you’ve ever worked IT at nearly any decent-sized organization.

Then again, it’s not even uncommon in Formula 1. When Sebastian Anthony embedded with the Renault team, he reported back for Ars in 2017 that Renault Sport Formula One’s Excel design and build spreadsheet was 77,000 lines long—more than three times as large as the Williams setup that spurred an internal revolution in 2023.

Every F1 team has its own software setup, Anthony wrote, but they have to integrate with a lot of other systems: Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and wind tunnel results, rapid prototyping and manufacturing, and inventory. This leaves F1 teams “susceptible to the plague of legacy software,” Anthony wrote, though he noted that Renault had moved on to a more dynamic cloud-based system that year. (Renault was also “a big Microsoft shop” in other areas, like email and file sharing, at the time.)

One year prior to Anthony’s excavation, Adam Banks wrote for Ars about the benefits of adopting cloud-based tools for enterprise resource planning (ERP). You adopt a cloud-based business management software to go “Beyond Excel.” “If PowerPoint is the universal language businesses use to talk to one another, their internal monologue is Excel,” Banks wrote. The issue is that all the systems and processes a business touches are complex and generate all kinds of data, but Excel is totally cool with taking in all of it. Or at least 1,048,576 rows of it.

Banks cited Tim Worstall’s 2013 contention that Excel could be “the most dangerous software on the planet.” Back then, international investment bankers were found manually copying and pasting Excel between Excel sheets to do their work, and it raised alarm.

But spreadsheets continue to show up where they ought not. Spreadsheet errors in recent years have led to police doxxing, false trainee test failures, an accidental $10 million crypto transfer, and bank shares sold at sorely undervalued prices. Spreadsheets are sometimes called the “dark matter” of large organizations, being ever-present and far too relied upon despite 90 percent of larger sheets being likely to have a major error.

So, Excel sheets catch a lot of blame, even if they’re just a symptom of a larger issue. Still, it’s good to see one no longer connected to the safety of a human heading into a turn at more than 200 miles per hour.

Formula 1 chief appalled to find team using Excel to manage 20,000 car parts Read More »

nvidia-unveils-blackwell-b200,-the-“world’s-most-powerful-chip”-designed-for-ai

Nvidia unveils Blackwell B200, the “world’s most powerful chip” designed for AI

AI, AI inference, Biz & IT, chatgpt, chatgtp, GPU, GPUs, Jensen Huang, large language models, LLMs, machine learning, NVIDIA, openai, supercomputers / /

There’s no knowing where we’re rowing —

208B transistor chip can reportedly reduce AI cost and energy consumption by up to 25x.

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The GB200

Enlarge / The GB200 “superchip” covered with a fanciful blue explosion.

Nvidia / Benj Edwards

On Monday, Nvidia unveiled the Blackwell B200 tensor core chip—the company’s most powerful single-chip GPU, with 208 billion transistors—which Nvidia claims can reduce AI inference operating costs (such as running ChatGPT) and energy consumption by up to 25 times compared to the H100. The company also unveiled the GB200, a “superchip” that combines two B200 chips and a Grace CPU for even more performance.

The news came as part of Nvidia’s annual GTC conference, which is taking place this week at the San Jose Convention Center. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang delivered the keynote Monday afternoon. “We need bigger GPUs,” Huang said during his keynote. The Blackwell platform will allow the training of trillion-parameter AI models that will make today’s generative AI models look rudimentary in comparison, he said. For reference, OpenAI’s GPT-3, launched in 2020, included 175 billion parameters. Parameter count is a rough indicator of AI model complexity.

Nvidia named the Blackwell architecture after David Harold Blackwell, a mathematician who specialized in game theory and statistics and was the first Black scholar inducted into the National Academy of Sciences. The platform introduces six technologies for accelerated computing, including a second-generation Transformer Engine, fifth-generation NVLink, RAS Engine, secure AI capabilities, and a decompression engine for accelerated database queries.

Press photo of the Grace Blackwell GB200 chip, which combines two B200 GPUs with a Grace CPU into one chip.

Enlarge / Press photo of the Grace Blackwell GB200 chip, which combines two B200 GPUs with a Grace CPU into one chip.

Several major organizations, such as Amazon Web Services, Dell Technologies, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle, Tesla, and xAI, are expected to adopt the Blackwell platform, and Nvidia’s press release is replete with canned quotes from tech CEOs (key Nvidia customers) like Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman praising the platform.

GPUs, once only designed for gaming acceleration, are especially well suited for AI tasks because their massively parallel architecture accelerates the immense number of matrix multiplication tasks necessary to run today’s neural networks. With the dawn of new deep learning architectures in the 2010s, Nvidia found itself in an ideal position to capitalize on the AI revolution and began designing specialized GPUs just for the task of accelerating AI models.

Nvidia’s data center focus has made the company wildly rich and valuable, and these new chips continue the trend. Nvidia’s gaming GPU revenue ($2.9 billion in the last quarter) is dwarfed in comparison to data center revenue (at $18.4 billion), and that shows no signs of stopping.

A beast within a beast

Press photo of the Nvidia GB200 NVL72 data center computer system.

Enlarge / Press photo of the Nvidia GB200 NVL72 data center computer system.

The aforementioned Grace Blackwell GB200 chip arrives as a key part of the new NVIDIA GB200 NVL72, a multi-node, liquid-cooled data center computer system designed specifically for AI training and inference tasks. It combines 36 GB200s (that’s 72 B200 GPUs and 36 Grace CPUs total), interconnected by fifth-generation NVLink, which links chips together to multiply performance.

A specification chart for the Nvidia GB200 NVL72 system.

Enlarge / A specification chart for the Nvidia GB200 NVL72 system.

“The GB200 NVL72 provides up to a 30x performance increase compared to the same number of NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs for LLM inference workloads and reduces cost and energy consumption by up to 25x,” Nvidia said.

That kind of speed-up could potentially save money and time while running today’s AI models, but it will also allow for more complex AI models to be built. Generative AI models—like the kind that power Google Gemini and AI image generators—are famously computationally hungry. Shortages of compute power have widely been cited as holding back progress and research in the AI field, and the search for more compute has led to figures like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman trying to broker deals to create new chip foundries.

While Nvidia’s claims about the Blackwell platform’s capabilities are significant, it’s worth noting that its real-world performance and adoption of the technology remain to be seen as organizations begin to implement and utilize the platform themselves. Competitors like Intel and AMD are also looking to grab a piece of Nvidia’s AI pie.

Nvidia says that Blackwell-based products will be available from various partners starting later this year.

Nvidia unveils Blackwell B200, the “world’s most powerful chip” designed for AI Read More »

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Apple may hire Google to power new iPhone AI features using Gemini—report

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Bake a cake as fast as you can —

With Apple’s own AI tech lagging behind, the firm looks for a fallback solution.

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A Google

Benj Edwards

On Monday, Bloomberg reported that Apple is in talks to license Google’s Gemini model to power AI features like Siri in a future iPhone software update coming later in 2024, according to people familiar with the situation. Apple has also reportedly conducted similar talks with ChatGPT maker OpenAI.

The potential integration of Google Gemini into iOS 18 could bring a range of new cloud-based (off-device) AI-powered features to Apple’s smartphone, including image creation or essay writing based on simple prompts. However, the terms and branding of the agreement have not yet been finalized, and the implementation details remain unclear. The companies are unlikely to announce any deal until Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference in June.

Gemini could also bring new capabilities to Apple’s widely criticized voice assistant, Siri, which trails newer AI assistants powered by large language models (LLMs) in understanding and responding to complex questions. Rumors of Apple’s own internal frustration with Siri—and potential remedies—have been kicking around for some time. In January, 9to5Mac revealed that Apple had been conducting tests with a beta version of iOS 17.4 that used OpenAI’s ChatGPT API to power Siri.

As we have previously reported, Apple has also been developing its own AI models, including a large language model codenamed Ajax and a basic chatbot called Apple GPT. However, the company’s LLM technology is said to lag behind that of its competitors, making a partnership with Google or another AI provider a more attractive option.

Google launched Gemini, a language-based AI assistant similar to ChatGPT, in December and has updated it several times since. Many industry experts consider the larger Gemini models to be roughly as capable as OpenAI’s GPT-4 Turbo, which powers the subscription versions of ChatGPT. Until just recently, with the emergence of Gemini Ultra and Claude 3, OpenAI’s top model held a fairly wide lead in perceived LLM capability.

The potential partnership between Apple and Google could significantly impact the AI industry, as Apple’s platform represents more than 2 billion active devices worldwide. If the agreement gets finalized, it would build upon the existing search partnership between the two companies, which has seen Google pay Apple billions of dollars annually to make its search engine the default option on iPhones and other Apple devices.

However, Bloomberg reports that the potential partnership between Apple and Google is likely to draw scrutiny from regulators, as the companies’ current search deal is already the subject of a lawsuit by the US Department of Justice. The European Union is also pressuring Apple to make it easier for consumers to change their default search engine away from Google.

With so much potential money on the line, selecting Google for Apple’s cloud AI job could potentially be a major loss for OpenAI in terms of bringing its technology widely into the mainstream—with a market representing billions of users. Even so, any deal with Google or OpenAI may be a temporary fix until Apple can get its own LLM-based AI technology up to speed.

Apple may hire Google to power new iPhone AI features using Gemini—report Read More »

fujitsu-says-it-found-malware-on-its-corporate-network,-warns-of-possible-data-breach

Fujitsu says it found malware on its corporate network, warns of possible data breach

Biz & IT, data breach, Fujitsu, malware, Security / /

HACKED —

Company apologizes for the presence of malware on company computers.

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Fujitsu says it found malware on its corporate network, warns of possible data breach

Getty Images

Japan-based IT behemoth Fujitsu said it has discovered malware on its corporate network that may have allowed the people responsible to steal personal information from customers or other parties.

“We confirmed the presence of malware on several of our company’s work computers, and as a result of an internal investigation, it was discovered that files containing personal information and customer information could be illegally taken out,” company officials wrote in a March 15 notification that went largely unnoticed until Monday. The company said it continued to “investigate the circumstances surrounding the malware’s intrusion and whether information has been leaked.” There was no indication how many records were exposed or how many people may be affected.

Fujitsu employs 124,000 people worldwide and reported about $25 billion in its fiscal 2023, which ended at the end of last March. The company operates in 100 countries. Past customers include the Japanese government. Fujitsu’s revenue comes from sales of hardware such as computers, servers, and telecommunications gear, storage systems, software, and IT services.

In 2021, Fujitsu took ProjectWEB, the company’s enterprise software-as-a-service platform, offline following the discovery of a hack that breached multiple Japanese government agencies, including the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport, and Tourism; the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; and the Cabinet Secretariat. Japan’s Narita Airport was also affected.

Last July, Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications reportedly rebuked Fujitsu over a security failing that led to a separate breach of Fenics, another of the company’s cloud services, which is used by both government agencies and corporations. Earlier this year, the company apologized for playing a leading role in the wrongful conviction of more than 900 sub-postmasters and postmistresses who were accused of theft or fraud when the software wrongly made it appear that money was missing from their branches. A company executive said some of the software bugs responsible for the mistakes had been known since 1999.

Fujitsu representatives didn’t respond to requests for comment about last week’s breach disclosure. The company said it reported the incident to Japan’s data protection authority. “We deeply apologize for the great concern and inconvenience this has caused to everyone involved,” last week’s statement said. So far, the company has found no evidence of any affected customer data being misused.

Fujitsu says it found malware on its corporate network, warns of possible data breach Read More »

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Dell tells remote workers that they won’t be eligible for promotion

Biz & IT, dell, Policy, remote work, return-to-office, work from home / /

Decisions, decisions —

Report highlights big turnaround from Dell’s previous pro-WFH stance.

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A woman in a bright yellow jacket is sitting in front of a laptop in emotional tension.

Starting in May, Dell employees who are fully remote will not be eligible for promotion, Business Insider (BI) reported Saturday. The upcoming policy update represents a dramatic reversal from Dell’s prior stance on work from home (WFH), which included CEO Michael Dell saying: “If you are counting on forced hours spent in a traditional office to create collaboration and provide a feeling of belonging within your organization, you’re doing it wrong.”

Dell employees will mostly all be considered “remote” or “hybrid” starting in May, BI reported. Hybrid workers have to come into the office at least 39 days per quarter, Dell confirmed to Ars Technica, which equates to approximately three times a week. Those who would prefer to never commute to an office will not “be considered for promotion, or be able to change roles,” BI reported.

“For remote team members, it is important to understand the trade-offs: Career advancement, including applying to new roles in the company, will require a team member to reclassify as hybrid onsite,” Dell’s memo to workers said, per BI.

Dell didn’t respond to specific questions Ars Technica sent about the changes but sent a statement saying: “In today’s global technology revolution, we believe in-person connections paired with a flexible approach are critical to drive innovation and value differentiation.”

BI said it saw a promotion offer that a remote worker received that said that accepting the position would require coming into an “approved” office, which would mean that the employee would need to move out of their state.

Dell used to be pro-WFH

Dell’s history with remote workers started before the COVID-19 pandemic, over 10 years ago. Before 2020, 65 percent of Dell workers were already working remotely at least one day per week, per a blog that CEO Michael Dell penned via LinkedIn in September 2022. An anonymous Dell worker who reportedly has been remote for over 10 years and that BI spoke with estimated that 10 to 15 percent “of every team was remote” at Dell.

Michael Dell used to be a WFH advocate. In his 2022 blog post, he addressed the question of whether working in an office created “an advantage when it comes to promotion, performance, engagement or rewards,” determining:

At Dell, we found no meaningful differences for team members working remotely or office-based even before the pandemic forced everyone home. And when we asked our team members again this year, 90 percent of them said everyone has the opportunity to develop and learn new skills in our organization. The perception of unequal opportunity is just one of the myths of hybrid work …

At the time, Dell’s chief described the company as “committed to allow team members around the globe to choose the work style that best fits their lifestyle—whether that is remote or in an office or a blend of the two.” But the upcoming limitations for fully remote workers could be interpreted as Dell discouraging workers from working from home.

“We’re being forced into a position where either we’re going to be staying as the low man on the totem pole, first on the chopping block when it comes to workforce reduction, or we can be hybrid and go in multiple days a week, which really affects a lot of us,” an anonymous employee told BI.

Dell’s new WFH policy follows the February 2023 layoffs of about 6,650 workers, or around 5 percent of employees. Unnamed employees that BI spoke with showed concerns that the upcoming policy is an attempt to get people to quit so that Dell can save money on human resources without the severance costs of layoffs. Others are concerned that the rule changes will disproportionately affect women.

Meanwhile, the idea of return-to-office mandates helping businesses is being challenged. For example, a study by University of Pittsburgh researchers of some S&P 500 businesses found that return-to-office directives hurt employee morale and do not boost company finances.

Dell tells remote workers that they won’t be eligible for promotion Read More »

after-114-days-of-change,-broadcom-ceo-acknowledges-vmware-related-“unease”

After 114 days of change, Broadcom CEO acknowledges VMware-related “unease”

Biz & IT, Broadcom, vmware / /

M&A pains —

“There’s more to come.”

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A Broadcom sign outside one of its offices.

Broadcom CEO and President Hock Tan has acknowledged the discomfort VMware customers and partners have experienced after the sweeping changes that Broadcom has instituted since it acquired the virtualization company 114 days ago.

In a blog post Thursday, Tan noted that Broadcom spent 18 months evaluating and buying VMware. He said that while there’s still a lot of work to do, the company has made “substantial progress.”

That so-called progress, though, has worried some of Broadcom’s customers and partners.

Tan wrote:

Of course, we recognize that this level of change has understandably created some unease among our customers and partners. But all of these moves have been with the goals of innovating faster, meeting our customers’ needs more effectively, and making it easier to do business with us.

Tan believes that the changes will ultimately “provide greater profitability and improved market opportunities” for channel partners. However, many IT solution provider businesses that were working with VMware have already been disrupted.

For example, after buying VMware, Broadcom took over the top 2,000 VMware accounts from VMware channel partners. In a March earnings call, Tan said that Broadcom has been focused on upselling those customers. He also said Broadcom expects VMware revenue to grow double-digits quarter over quarter for the rest of the fiscal year.

Beyond that, Broadcom ended the VMware channel partner program, making the primary path to reselling VMware an invite-only Broadcom program.

Additionally, Broadcom killing VMware perpetual licensing has reportedly upended financials for numerous businesses. In a March “User Group Town Hall,” attendees complained about “price rises of 500 and 600 percent,” The Register reported. In February, ServetheHome reported that “smaller” managed service providers focusing on cloud services were reporting seeing the price of working with VMware increase tenfold. “They do not have the revenue nor ability to charge for that kind of price increase, especially this rapidly,” ServeTheHome reported.

By contrast, Tan recently saw a financial windfall, making the equivalent of more than double his 2022 salary in 2023. A US Securities and Exchange Commission filing showed that Broadcom paid Tan $161.8 million, including $160.5 million in stock that will vest over the next five years (Tan isn’t eligible for more bonus payouts until 2028). Broadcom announced its VMware acquisition in May 2022 and closed in late November for $69 billion.

In his blog post, Tan defended the subscription-only licensing model, calling it “the industry standard.” He said VMware started accelerating its transition to this strategy in 2019, (which is before Broadcom bought VMware). He also linked to a February blog post from VMware’s Prashanth Shenoy, VP of product and technical marketing for the Cloud, Infrastructure, Platforms, and Solutions group at VMware, that also noted acquisition-related “concerns” but claimed the evolution would be fiscally prudent.

Other Broadcom-led changes to VMware over the past 114 days include at least 2,800 VMware jobs cut, shuttering the free version of ESXi, and plans to sell VMware’s End User Computing business to KKR, as well as spend $1 billion on VMware R&D.

After 114 days of change, Broadcom CEO acknowledges VMware-related “unease” Read More »

hackers-can-read-private-ai-assistant-chats-even-though-they’re-encrypted

Hackers can read private AI-assistant chats even though they’re encrypted

AI, Artificial Intelligence, Biz & IT, Encryption, Features, gpt, privacy, Security, side channel / /

CHATBOT KEYLOGGING —

All non-Google chat GPTs affected by side channel that leaks responses sent to users.

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Hackers can read private AI-assistant chats even though they’re encrypted

Aurich Lawson | Getty Images

AI assistants have been widely available for a little more than a year, and they already have access to our most private thoughts and business secrets. People ask them about becoming pregnant or terminating or preventing pregnancy, consult them when considering a divorce, seek information about drug addiction, or ask for edits in emails containing proprietary trade secrets. The providers of these AI-powered chat services are keenly aware of the sensitivity of these discussions and take active steps—mainly in the form of encrypting them—to prevent potential snoops from reading other people’s interactions.

But now, researchers have devised an attack that deciphers AI assistant responses with surprising accuracy. The technique exploits a side channel present in all of the major AI assistants, with the exception of Google Gemini. It then refines the fairly raw results through large language models specially trained for the task. The result: Someone with a passive adversary-in-the-middle position—meaning an adversary who can monitor the data packets passing between an AI assistant and the user—can infer the specific topic of 55 percent of all captured responses, usually with high word accuracy. The attack can deduce responses with perfect word accuracy 29 percent of the time.

Token privacy

“Currently, anybody can read private chats sent from ChatGPT and other services,” Yisroel Mirsky, head of the Offensive AI Research Lab at Ben-Gurion University in Israel, wrote in an email. “This includes malicious actors on the same Wi-Fi or LAN as a client (e.g., same coffee shop), or even a malicious actor on the Internet—anyone who can observe the traffic. The attack is passive and can happen without OpenAI or their client’s knowledge. OpenAI encrypts their traffic to prevent these kinds of eavesdropping attacks, but our research shows that the way OpenAI is using encryption is flawed, and thus the content of the messages are exposed.”

Mirsky was referring to OpenAI, but with the exception of Google Gemini, all other major chatbots are also affected. As an example, the attack can infer the encrypted ChatGPT response:

  • Yes, there are several important legal considerations that couples should be aware of when considering a divorce, …

as:

  • Yes, there are several potential legal considerations that someone should be aware of when considering a divorce. …

and the Microsoft Copilot encrypted response:

  • Here are some of the latest research findings on effective teaching methods for students with learning disabilities: …

is inferred as:

  • Here are some of the latest research findings on cognitive behavior therapy for children with learning disabilities: …

While the underlined words demonstrate that the precise wording isn’t perfect, the meaning of the inferred sentence is highly accurate.

Attack overview: A packet capture of an AI assistant’s real-time response reveals a token-sequence side-channel. The side-channel is parsed to find text segments that are then reconstructed using sentence-level context and knowledge of the target LLM’s writing style.

Enlarge / Attack overview: A packet capture of an AI assistant’s real-time response reveals a token-sequence side-channel. The side-channel is parsed to find text segments that are then reconstructed using sentence-level context and knowledge of the target LLM’s writing style.

Weiss et al.

The following video demonstrates the attack in action against Microsoft Copilot:

Token-length sequence side-channel attack on Bing.

A side channel is a means of obtaining secret information from a system through indirect or unintended sources, such as physical manifestations or behavioral characteristics, such as the power consumed, the time required, or the sound, light, or electromagnetic radiation produced during a given operation. By carefully monitoring these sources, attackers can assemble enough information to recover encrypted keystrokes or encryption keys from CPUs, browser cookies from HTTPS traffic, or secrets from smartcards. The side channel used in this latest attack resides in tokens that AI assistants use when responding to a user query.

Tokens are akin to words that are encoded so they can be understood by LLMs. To enhance the user experience, most AI assistants send tokens on the fly, as soon as they’re generated, so that end users receive the responses continuously, word by word, as they’re generated rather than all at once much later, once the assistant has generated the entire answer. While the token delivery is encrypted, the real-time, token-by-token transmission exposes a previously unknown side channel, which the researchers call the “token-length sequence.”

Hackers can read private AI-assistant chats even though they’re encrypted Read More »

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Never-before-seen Linux malware gets installed using 1-day exploits

Biz & IT, Security / /
Never-before-seen Linux malware gets installed using 1-day exploits

Getty Images

Researchers have unearthed Linux malware that circulated in the wild for at least two years before being identified as a credential stealer that’s installed by the exploitation of recently patched vulnerabilities.

The newly identified malware is a Linux variant of NerbianRAT, a remote access Trojan first described in 2022 by researchers at security firm Proofpoint. Last Friday, Checkpoint Research revealed that the Linux version has existed since at least the same year, when it was uploaded to the VirusTotal malware identification site. Checkpoint went on to conclude that Magnet Goblin—the name the security firm uses to track the financially motivated threat actor using the malware—has installed it by exploiting “1-days,” which are recently patched vulnerabilities. Attackers in this scenario reverse engineer security updates, or copy associated proof-of-concept exploits, for use against devices that have yet to install the patches.

Checkpoint also identified MiniNerbian, a smaller version of NerbianRAT for Linux that’s used to backdoor servers running the Magento ecommerce server, primarily for use as command-and-control servers that devices infected by NerbianRAT connect to. Researchers elsewhere have reported encountering servers that appear to have been compromised with MiniNerbian, but Checkpoint Research appears to have been the first to identify the underlying binary.

“Magnet Goblin, whose campaigns appear to be financially motivated, has been quick to adopt 1-day vulnerabilities to deliver their custom Linux malware, NerbianRAT and MiniNerbian,” Checkpoint researchers wrote. “Those tools have operated under the radar as they mostly reside on edge-devices. This is part of an ongoing trend for threat actors to target areas which until now have been left unprotected.”

Checkpoint discovered the Linux malware while researching recent attacks that exploit critical vulnerabilities in Ivanti Secure Connect, which have been under mass exploitation since early January. In the past, Magnet Goblin has installed the malware by exploiting one-day vulnerabilities in Magento, Qlink Sense, and possibly Apache ActiveMQ.

In the course of its investigation into the Ivanti exploitation, Checkpoint found the Linux version of NerbianRAT on compromised servers that were under the control of Magnet Goblin. URLs included:

http://94.156.71[.]115/lxrt

http://91.92.240[.]113/aparche2

http://45.9.149[.]215/aparche2

The Linux variants connect back to the attacker-controlled IP 172.86.66[.]165.

Besides deploying NerbianRAT, Magnet Goblin also installed a custom variant of malware tracked as WarpWire, a piece of stealer malware recently reported by security firm Mandiant. The variant Checkpoint encountered stole VPN credentials and sent them to a server at the domain miltonhouse[.]nl.

Checkpoint Research

NerbianRAT Windows featured robust code that took pains to hide itself and to prevent reverse engineering by rivals or researchers.

“Unlike its Windows equivalent, the Linux version barely has any protective measures,” Checkpoint said. “It is sloppily compiled with DWARF debugging information, which allows researchers to view, among other things, function names and global variable names.”

Never-before-seen Linux malware gets installed using 1-day exploits Read More »