Daily Digest on AI and Emerging Technologies (6 January 2025)

TOP OF THE DAY

Governance and Legislation

Why AI Did Not Upend the Super Year of Elections

(Kevin Frazier – Lawfare – 2 January 2025) How AI labs and public policies helped safeguard the 2024 elections—and what to learn in order to protect democracy from future threats. – https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/why-ai-did-not-upend-the-super-year-of-elections

Border Technologies Under Trump 2.0

(Petra Molnar – Just Security – 2 January 2025) The day after Donald Trump was reelected U.S. president, stocks in private prison firms soared. These firms may soon expand prisons to house detainees awaiting deportation and propel an increase in surveillance and artificial intelligence-driven technologies to accomplish this task. – https://www.justsecurity.org/105662/border-technologies-under-second-trump-administration/

Security

Atos, contractor for French military and intelligence agencies, dismisses ransomware attack claims

(Alexander Martin – The Record – 3 January 2025) Atos, the struggling French technology company that secures communications for France’s military and intelligence services, on Friday dismissed as “unfounded” a ransomware group’s claims to have compromised an internal company database. The extortion attempt comes as Atos, which employs around 90,000 people, is in negotiations to sell off its advanced computing division to the French State as the company attempts to restructure and avoid financial collapse. – https://therecord.media/atos-dismisses-ransomware-claims

DDoS Disrupts Japanese Mobile Giant Docomo

(Phil Muncaster – Infosecurity Magazine – 3 January 2025) Japan’s largest mobile operator has revealed that a DDoS attack on Thursday disrupted some services for nearly 12 hours. NTT Docomo has around 90 million subscribers in the East Asian country and boasts the fastest download speeds of any major provider there. – https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/ddos-disrupts-japanese-mobile/

Web3 Attacks Result in $2.3Bn in Cryptocurrency Losses

(James Coker – Infosecurity Magazine – 3 January 2025) Web3 security incidents resulted in over $2.3bn worth of cryptocurrency in losses in 2024, a 31.6% increase in the value stolen compared to 2023, according to new figures from blockchain security firm Certik. These losses took place across 760 incidents, 29 less than in 2023. The average amount stolen per hack was $3.1m in 2024, a 23% increase from 2023. – https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/web3-attacks-cryptocurrency-losses/

New AI Jailbreak Method ‘Bad Likert Judge’ Boosts Attack Success Rates by Over 60%

(Ravie Lakshmanan – The Hacker News – 3 January 2025) Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on a new jailbreak technique that could be used to get past a large language model’s (LLM) safety guardrails and produce potentially harmful or malicious responses. The multi-turn (aka many-shot) attack strategy has been codenamed Bad Likert Judge by Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 researchers Yongzhe Huang, Yang Ji, Wenjun Hu, Jay Chen, Akshata Rao, and Danny Tsechansky. “The technique asks the target LLM to act as a judge scoring the harmfulness of a given response using the Likert scale, a rating scale measuring a respondent’s agreement or disagreement with a statement,” the Unit 42 team said. – https://thehackernews.com/2025/01/new-ai-jailbreak-method-bad-likert.html

6 AI-Related Security Trends to Watch in 2025

(Jai Vijayan – Dark Reading – 31 December 2024) Most industry analysts expect organizations will accelerate efforts to harness generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) and large language models (LLMs) in a variety of use cases over the next year. Typical examples include customer support, fraud detection, content creation, data analytics, knowledge management, and, increasingly, software development. A recent survey of 1,700 IT professionals conducted by Centient on behalf of OutSystems had 81% of respondents describing their organizations as currently using GenAI to assist with coding and software development. Nearly three-quarters (74%) plan on building 10 or more apps over the next 12 months using AI-powered development approaches. – https://www.darkreading.com/cyber-risk/6-ai-related-security-trends-watch-2025

Frontiers

KoBold Metals Raises $537M to Accelerate AI-Driven Critical Mineral Exploration

(James Dargan – AI Insider – 4 January 2025) Silicon Valley-based KoBold Metals, an AI-powered mining company backed by Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and other prominent investors, has raised $537 million in equity funding. The round was led by Durable Capital Partners and two T. Rowe Price funds, with continued support from existing backers like Andreessen Horowitz and Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures. The latest funding values KoBold at $2.96 billion. Founded in 2018, KoBold combines machine learning with geological data to streamline the search for critical minerals like copper, lithium, and nickel. – https://theaiinsider.tech/2025/01/04/kobold-metals-raises-537m-to-accelerate-ai-driven-critical-mineral-exploration/

Swave Photonics Closes $28.27M Series A Funding for Introduction of Dynamic 3D Holographic Display Products

(James Dargan – AI Insider – 4 January 2025) Swave Photonics secured €27M ($28.27M) in Series A funding, co-led by imec.xpand and SFPIM Relaunch, to advance its Holographic eXtended Reality (HXR) platform for AI-powered AR smartglasses and heads-up displays, delivering a natural, high-resolution viewing experience. The company’s patented technology, leveraging nano-pixels and DynamicDepth, addresses key challenges of AR devices like high cost, size, power consumption, and user discomfort, eliminating the need for costly components like waveguides. Swave plans to introduce product development kits and production devices soon, showcasing its innovations at CES 2025, where its HXR platform has been recognized with a CES Innovation Award. – https://theaiinsider.tech/2025/01/04/swave-photonics-closes-28-27m-series-a-funding-for-introduction-of-dynamic-3d-holographic-display-products/

Against the Corporate Capture of Human Connection

(Susie Alegre – Centre for International Governance Innovation – 30 December 2024) The dream of a synthetic idealized partner to avoid the mess of dealing with a real person has captured the human imagination for millennia. In the ancient Greek myth, the king Pygmalion found his happily ever after with the statue Galatea that the goddess Aphrodite obligingly breathed life into so that he could have children without engaging with an actual woman’s form, which he found repulsive. The 2013 film Her saw Joaquin Phoenix falling for his chatbot assistant, Samantha, in a clear reflection that these myths live on. In the era of generative and emotional artificial intelligence (AI), such phenomena are no longer the stuff of myths or science fiction. Anyone can have their own synthetic, personalized AI relationship in their pocket. But a lawsuit filed this month about the potential manipulative powers of AI chatbots, and their impact on children in particular, is the latest evidence that we should think carefully about the impact of emotional AI on human interactions. – https://www.cigionline.org/articles/against-the-corporate-capture-of-human-connection/

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