A Canadian university is partnering with Ukraine for a pilot program to train up to 100 Ukrainians to become cybersecurity professionals.

The Brampton, Ont.-based Rogers Cybersecure Catalyst, a centre for training, innovation and collaboration in cybersecurity that is part of Toronto Metropolitan University, said today the program will be delivered online in collaboration with Ukraine’s Information Systems Security Partners (ISSP), a cyber company, and the country’s Ministry of Digital Transformation.

The program will provide foundational cybersecurity training to Ukrainians who have been displaced from previous employment by the war, the university said in a news release. Program participants will graduate with an internationally recognized cybersecurity certification.

Recruitment for the program will start soon. Once complete, the pilot training program will be evaluated for potential expansion to a larger cohort of Ukrainian learners.

“We believe this program will have a positive impact on the Ukrainian economy as well as contribute to the long-term development of Ukraine’s cybersecurity sector,” Charles Finlay, the Catalyst’s founding executive director, said in a statement. “We are committed to helping make this project a success and hope we can grow this program in the future.”

“The Catalyst answered the call to support the economic reconstruction of Ukraine through its expertise and leadership in cybersecurity training,” said Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs Melanie Joly. “We all have a duty to think of the future of Ukraine, and our Government looks forward to this pilot program’s success.”

Related content: Ukraine deputy cyber leader speaks to BlackBerry conference 

Ukraine has developed considerable cybersecurity expertise after facing Russian-based cyber attacks for at least eight years. In December 2015, and again almost exactly a year later, the country’s power grid was temporarily knocked out by cyber attacks.

Cyber attacks on Ukrainian websites in January 2022 were a prelude to the February 2022 invasion by Russian forces. Since then, a number of tech companies have been helping Ukraine, including Google, Microsoft and SpaceX.

The country has asked the International Criminal Court to investigate whether certain Russian cyberattacks could constitute war crimes.

Still, Ukrainian organizations face daily cyber attacks, many of which involve wiperware. Attackers are sending tempting — and infected — email messages to Ukrainians, with links to applications or supposedly official Ukrainian government documents.

Last month, a Ukrainian cybersecurity official was quoted as saying the country has suffered a threefold growth in cyberattacks over the past year.

The post Toronto university to help train Ukrainians in cybersecurity first appeared on IT World Canada.

Welcome to Cyber Security Today. This is the Week in Review edition for the week ending Friday, February 10th, 2023. I’m Howard Solomon, contributing reporter on cybersecurity for ITWorldCanada.com and TechNewsday.com in the U.S.

In a few minutes Terry Cutler of Montreal’s Cyology Labs will be here to discuss recent news. But first a look back at some of the headlines from the past seven days:

A security researcher discovered several vulnerabilities in Toyota’s supplier website that gave access to … everything. Terry and I will talk about how this happened.

We’ll delve into the rush to protect servers running unpatched and outdated versions of VMware’s ESXi hypervisor from ransomware, and ask why are companies running old applications.

Lists of some 20 million customers who used two U.S. companies for background checks of employers and individuals are being pedalled by crooks. Terry and I will have something to say about that.

And we’ll look at a suggestion the Canadian government offer tax breaks to encourage small businesses to spend more on cybersecurity.

In other news, IT administrators whose firms use open-source and free versions of certain document management systems were warned of vulnerabilities. Researchers at Rapid7 say the problems are in on-premise versions of OnlyOffice Workspace, OpenKM, Logical-IDOC and Mayan EDMS. At the time of the recording of this podcast the vendors hadn’t patched the holes. So administrators have to take precautions, some of which are outlined in the Rapid7 report.

The U.S. and the United Kingdom have sanctioned seven people who they say are members of the Trickbot cybercrime group. The Trickbot malware is widely distributed through botnets and email campaigns. Sometimes its also used to help deploy ransomware. The U.S. says current members of the gang are associated with Russia’s intelligence service. The sanctions mean the seven can’t access any assets they have in the U.S.

A British member of Parliament says he fell for a phishing scam. Stewart McDonald admitted he opened a message sent to his personal email account with a supposed military update on Ukraine. Clicking on the document opened a form where he filled in his email address and password. The suspicion is a Russian-based group dubbed Seaborgium was behind this attack.

Another DDoS-as-a-service provider has sprung up in Russia. Researchers at Radware say the Passion group is offering denial of service capabilities to Russian hacktivists. The botnet was seen last month attacking hospitals in the U.S., the United Kingdom and several European countries that support Ukraine. It’s another reason for companies in NATO countries to beef up their cybersecurity.

Authorities in the Netherlands, Germany and Poland have dealt another blow to the communication lines of crooks. They did it by dismantling the Exclus encrypted messaging system, which had an estimated 3,000 users. Forty-five people, including the service’s administrators and owners, were arrested. Two drug laboratories were dismantled and 200 smart phones were also seized. In the past two years European police also shut the Sky ECC and EncroChat encryption services used by crooks.

Atlassian has released fixes to patch a critical vulnerability in Jira Service Management Server and Data Center. Versions 5.3 and above have to be patched.

And a 20-year-old man in Australia was sentenced to community service for taking advantage of last year’s theft of data from telecom provider Optus. For a brief time that data was publicly available, and this man got hold of some of it. Then he tried to extort people out of money or their personal information would be sold to hackers.

(The following is a transcript of one part of our discussion. To hear the entire conversation play the podcast)

Howard: France and Italy sparked a worldwide ransomware alert about attacks on vulnerable VMware ESXi servers. They include version 7.0, which is supported. But also versions 6.7 and 6.5 which are no longer supported by VMware. Unpatched versions of ESXi are at risk from a targeted ransomware strain dubbed ‘ESXiArgs.’ The thing is, a patch for the vulnerability was issued two years ago. In theory, no one should be running versions 6.7 and 6.5, let alone unpatched servers. However, the SANS Institute says there are some 300 unsupported or unpatched versions of ESXi out there. Another source says the number is more like 2,400. Terry, what’s worse: Organizations running unpatched severs or running non-supported software?

Terry Cutler: I think the problem is more around how critical the guests that are running on these [virtual] hosts. As you know, we do a lot of work in health care and a lot of these guests have to be up 24/7, 365 days a year. If you try to update the VMware host it usually requires a reboot, which would shut down all the guests that are running on the host. Gawd forbid there’s a problem with with upgrade and the host doesn’t come back up, that means the company is down. Most IT admins are scared of this. I’ve been there. I know the pressure when a system doesn’t come back online and management is breathing down your neck and all you could tell them is, “10 more minutes! Ten more minutes, I promise it’ll be up!” Also, the fact that it ] is on the Linux operating system, most IT managers believe that Linux is never going to get hacked, so they leave it unpatched.

Howard: The good news is the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued a recovery script for victims of this strain of ransomware. The bad news is, according to a story on the Bleeping Computer news site, is that the crooks behind this particular ransomware strain quickly issued a new version that apparently gets around the fix that. The recovery script works for the original strain of ransomware, but not version two.

Terry: It is some great news. But then again I think a lot of this could be prevented by running some free vulnerability tools that will help discover what assets are on your network and what’s vulnerable. As I mentioned countless times, if your systems are exposed to the internet and they’re vulnerable they will be exploited. The biggest concern that I see is that most companies don’t even know what assets they have or what’s exposed, and that’s why they need to team up with cyber security experts that will come in and assess that for them and give their risk level.

The post Cyber Security Today, Week in Review for Friday, February 10, 2023 first appeared on IT World Canada.

North Korean state-sponsored ransomware groups are targeting hospitals and other critical infrastructure organizations, U.S. and South Korean law enforcement and intelligence agencies are warning.

“The authoring agencies assess that an unspecified amount of revenue from these cryptocurrency operations supports DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) national-level priorities and objectives, including cyber operations targeting the United States and South Korea governments,” the alert issued Thursday says.

“Specific targets include Department of Defense Information Networks and Defense Industrial Base member networks. The IOCs [indicators of compromise] in this product should be useful to sectors previously targeted by DPRK cyber operations (e.g., U.S. government, Department of Defense, and Defense Industrial Base). The authoring agencies highly discourage paying ransoms as doing so does not guarantee files and records will be recovered and may pose sanctions risks.”

The report includes the latest tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) and indicators of compromise (IOCs) used by North Korean-based attackers. Among the more recent weapons are attempts to exploit unpatched applications with the Apache Log4J2 vulnerability and unpatched SonicWall appliances.

North Korean attackers are known for hiding where they are coming from, the report adds, including sometimes pretending to be other ransomware groups, such as the REvil gang.

The alert is an update to a July 6, 2022 warning by American intelligence and law enforcement agencies, including the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the FBI and the NSA.

That report noted the use by North Korean groups of the Maui strain of ransomware. The new report adds that these groups are also using a strain called H0lyGhost, described by Microsoft in a July 14, 2022 report.

The latest report comes the same week as the Associated Press reported that a United Nations panel concluded North Korean hackers working for the government stole virtual assets, including cryptocurrency and intellectual property, estimated to be worth between US$630 million and more than US$1 billion.

“2022 was a record-breaking year for DPRK virtual asset theft,” the AP quoted the report saying. In April, 2022, the U.S. linked North Korean-backed hackers to the US$615 million crypto heist on the popular online game Axie Infinity.

The AP said the panel identified three groups – Kimsuky, Lazarus Group and Andariel — as the main North Korean attackers.

Between February and July 2022, AP quoted the panel as saying the Lazarus Group “reportedly targeted energy providers in multiple member states using a vulnerability” to install malware and gain long-term access. It said this “aligns with historical Lazarus intrusions targeting critical infrastructure and energy companies … to siphon off proprietary intellectual property.”

The U.S./South Korea alert urges IT and security departments to

limit access to data by authenticating and encrypting connections with network services (e.g., using public key infrastructure certificates in virtual private network (VPN) and transport layer security (TLS) connections), Internet of Things (IoT) medical devices, and the electronic health record system;
implement the principle of least privilege by using standard user accounts on internal systems instead of administrative accounts, which grant excessive system administration privileges.
turn off weak or unnecessary network device management interfaces, such as Telnet, SSH, Winbox, and HTTP, for wide area networks (WANs), and secure with strong passwords and encryption when enabled;
protect stored data by masking the permanent account number (PAN) when displayed and rendering it unreadable when stored — through cryptography, for example;
secure the collection, storage, and processing practices for personally identifiable information (PII) and protected health information (PHI) at rest and in transit using technologies such as TLS. Only store personal patient data on internal systems that are protected by firewalls, and ensure extensive backups are available;
implement and enforce multi-layer network segmentation, with the most critical communications and data resting on the most secure and reliable layer;
and use monitoring tools to observe whether IoT devices are behaving erratically due to a compromise.
The post U.S., South Korea issue alert on North Korean-based ransomware groups first appeared on IT World Canada.

Cyber threats against executives are increasing, the latest on email scams and more.

Welcome to Cyber Security Today. It’s Friday, February 10th, 2023. I’m Howard Solomon, contributing reporter on cybersecurity for ITWorldCanada.com and TechNewsday.com in the U.S.

Threat actors are increasingly targeting executives and board members. According to researchers at BlackCloak, there’s been a recent surge in doxing and swatting of these people. Doxxing is the threat to release personal information on victims. Swatting is getting police to respond to a fake threat at a victim’s office or home. Infosec leaders should have their executives remove any mention of where their residences are on corporate websites or in social media. As an extra precaution homes should be registered in an anonymous trust or corporation to keep strangers from finding out where they live.

Hackers are increasingly using HTML email attachments to deliver malware. This is called HTML smuggling, according to researchers at Trustwave. It works because the malware is in a blob of data within JavaScript code that gets decoded when opened in a web browser. Email scanners may miss these packages. Ever since Microsoft last year started blocking macros in Office documents sent over the internet by default hackers have shifted to HTML smuggling. Tricks include crafting documents that look like they came from Google Drive, Dropbox or are Adobe Acrobat PDFs. Employees need to be warned — again — to be wary of attachments.

Here’s another warning about phishing emails from crooks: Researchers at Proofpoint are seeing attachments or URLs that lead to the installation of a tool that takes screenshots of victims’ computers. A common message to targets is a request to check the attached business presentation. Clicking on the document or the URL downloads the malware. With a screenshot of the victim’s machine the attacker hopes to see passwords and get information on the victim. Then the attacker will download more malware. Targets have been seen in the U.S. and Germany. Again, employee education is a good way to fight this attack.

Finally, the Super Bowl is this Sunday. It’s available on cable and over the air, but some people want to use illegal internet streaming websites for supposed high-definition viewing. Don’t. Researchers at OpenText note that these services have to make money somehow. Usually they do it by getting victims to download software to help them see the game. That software has malware for stealing passwords. —

Later today the Week in Review podcast will be available. Guest commentator Terry Cutler of Cyology Labs and I will discuss the new ransomware strain going after unpatched installments of VWware’s ESXi hypervisor, holes found in Toyota’s supplier website and more.

Follow Cyber Security Today on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts or add us to your Flash Briefing on your smart speaker.

The post Cyber Security Today, Feb. 10, 2023 – Cyber threats against executives are increasing, the latest on email scams and more first appeared on IT World Canada.

Bard’s mistake costs Google shareholders $100 billion, GitHub and GoDaddy lay off thousands and the chaos at Twitter continues.

Welcome to Hashtag Trending for Friday, February 10th, 2023. I’m your host Jim Love.

Google had an undeniably tough week. The tech giant’s AI offerings were overshadowed by a mistake we covered yesterday.

Google desperately needs a win as Open AI integration into Microsoft’s Bing search engine captivated the public attention and for the first time gave Google a credible competitor. 

Google generates on average an annual revenue of around 250 billion dollars US. The majority of that revenue comes from search ads. That revenue is threatened by AI that changes the nature of how search is displayed, possibly making profitable search ads irrelevant.  Then came the other shoe dropping, with Microsoft’s AI powered search. 

These threats forced Google to issue a ‘code red’ to fast-track AI innovation.  But did they make a critical mistake in this rush to market?

Google’s AI chatbot Bard, that was supposed to help restore Google’s AI credentials, gave an inaccurate answer to a simple factual question, in its Google’s own promotional piece.  That one wrong answer, in the public spotlight, may have wiped $100 billion in Alphabet’s market value, with the company’s shares dropping as much as 9 per cent.

Inaccuracies with AI language models are not unique to Bard. Bing has also acknowledged that there will be factually inaccurate information with the budding technology, but for the error to appear in Google’s own advertisement, right after Google’s launch event was a tough blow for the search giant.

Source: Reuters

Another day, another regretful statement from a CEO apologizing for layoffs

The reasons are starting to sound repetitious– sorry we overhired during the pandemic, you were essential in helping us build the company, but now we don’t need you anymore. 

Github and GoDaddy are the latest tech companies to announce thousands of layoffs. Github slashed 10 per cent of its workforce and GoDaddy 8 per cent.

GoDaddy said impacted employees will receive a meeting invite to learn the details of their transition, in line with local employment processes.

Github also announced other cost cutting measures.  It will not be renewing its office leases to go fully remote. Not surprisingly, it is moving to Microsoft’s Teams for all its videoconferencing needs. 

Source: TechCrunch & GoDaddy

Yahoo also announced plans to cut 1600 employees today, but, for a change, not because of economic conditions. 

Plus, Yahoo, in general, is profitable, with about $8 billion in yearly revenue. But its advertising business, where it had hoped to take on rivals like Google and Meta, simply never achieved what the company hoped it would, so the company has decided to shut down that part of its business.

Resulting layoffs will impact more than 50% of Yahoo’s ad tech employees. 

These changes will be “tremendously beneficial for the profitability of Yahoo overall, “said Yahoo’s CEO Jim Lanzone , which will allow the company “to go on offense” and invest more in other parts of its business that are profitable.

____

Low profits and a bleak economic outlook have been synonymous with layoffs. But not all companies have the same response. Nintendo, the Japanese video game company announced it will give 10 per cent raises to employees, despite a slump in profit. 

“It’s important for our long-term growth to secure our workforce,” Nintendo’s President Shuntaro Furukawa said during an earnings call this week, according to Reuters.

Nintendo’s net profit in the first nine months of the fiscal year through March was 346 billion yen ($2.6 billion dollars US), down 5.8 per cent from 367 billion yen in the same period of the previous year.

Source: TechCrunch, Axios and  Global News

The crypto market has seen better days. Crypto amateurs, fanatics, miners, lending platforms are all feeling the pressure as the value of their altcoins plummet. 

It turns out that crypto ATMs could also take a hit.

Unlike regular ATM machines connected to bank accounts, these kiosks take cash and then transfer bitcoin to a digital wallet. Some also allow the customer to sell their bitcoin.

These crypto access points have appeared in bars, corner stores and truck stops across the world after the rise of the crypto fad between September 2020 to September 2022.

They’ve had their fun, enjoying fat profit margins at the height of the market, imposing exorbitant fees, sometimes as much as 20 per cent per transaction.

According to howmanybitcoinatms.com, a site run by academic researchers and volunteers interested in measuring bitcoin adoption, there were around 63,000 of them in the U.S. as of September 2022.

But, amid the market downturn, they are now kind of useless. 

As a matter of fact, Top-5 bitcoin ATM operator Coin Cloud filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in Nevada on Tuesday, just steps behind its lender, Genesis Global. They have also cut their headcount and will inevitably shrink their ATM operations.

Source: Axios

____

So called Direct Messages have always been less private than people may have thought they were.

Direct messages on Twitter are not end-to-end encrypted which puts personal messages and information, at risk, if Twitter suffers a data breach. The company’s staff, with the right permissions, can also access your DMs.

With the departure of important security and data staff after Musk’s takeover, the security outlook of Twitter’s messages was even more precarious.

To make matters worse, it appears you cannot even delete your direct messages from Twitter’s servers. 

That puts Twitter at odds European privacy legislation, GDPR, that seeks to give users rights over how their information is collected, stored, and used, including their right to have their data deleted. One of the fundamental rights under GDPR is the right to be forgotten.

People have complained and Twitter seems to be ignoring the requests of users, by pointing them to a generic guidance that fails to explain whether Twitter deletes your DMs from its servers or not.

Twitter’s help center says messages and conversations are “deleted from your account only.” They don’t say messages are deleted from its systems or servers.

Previous research has shown that that deleted DMs are held within Twitter’s servers for years. In 2022, Twitter whistleblower and former security chief Peiter “Mudge” Zatko claimed it was not possible in some cases for Twitter to delete data.

Source: Ars Technica

And that’s the top tech stories for today.  Hashtag Trending is produced by the ITWC podcast network and is heard Monday to Friday with a special weekend edition hosted by me where we feature interviews on key subjects in technology.

Follow us on Apple Podcasts, Google, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.  

If you follow stories about cybersecurity, why not check out our sister podcast CyberSecurityToday.

You can find all our podcasts and the text versions, as well as more in-depth coverage itworldcanada.com  and on technewsday.com in the US. You can also find instructions on how to get us on your smart speaker.

I’m Jim Love and I’ll be back later today with our weekend edition interview. Hope you can join us then. And I’ll be back on Monday morning with a new lineup of the top tech news stories on Hashtag Trending.

The post Hashtag Trending Feb 10th- Bard costs Google $100 billion in market value; GitHub and GoDaddy announce layoffs; Twitter chaos continues first appeared on IT World Canada.

Can AI make Microsoft’s search engine a real competitor to Google?  Google unveils search capabilities based on AI enablement and can AI have more ethics than we do?   

Welcome to Hashtag Trending – today’s top tech news stories for Thursday, February 9, 2023. 

I’m your host, Jim Love.

Can AI bring some real competition to the search business?

Google, has for years dominated search.  As of December 2022, Google held 84 per cent and Microsoft, with it’s Bing search engine was the second biggest, some might say the only competitor, but with only a miniscule 9 per cent of the search market. 

Today, as Microsoft announced plans to revamp its search engine to include the popular ChatGPT AI, Bing is emerging as a viable competitor to threaten Google’s search engine dominance.

When you are the big kid on the block, it’s fair to see others nibbling away at your market share.  Neeva, the new search engine from former Google executive Sridhar Ramaswamy recently came to market with an ad free alternative.  But in our interview with Neeva on Hashtag Trending’s weekend edition, Ramaswamy acknowledged that Neeva wasn’t trying to dominate search, but to take a relatively small niche market, at least initially. 

But Microsoft’s recent fusion of Bing and OpenAI creates a product that threatens Google’s dominance in the search domain.  

Microsoft’s plan is to offer their AI engine as part of Bing’s search capability. It claims that about 50 percent of almost 10 billion search queries go unanswered today, or at least without very good answers,” according to Microsoft executive Yusuf Mehdi in an interview with Axios today.

Microsoft is betting big that they can address that missing 50 per cent, investing US$10 billion using AI tools to improve standard Bing results. Additionally, the Edge browser will offer new AI-powered features including summaries of web pages and new tools to employ those results, including a writing assistant.

Mehdi told Axios that this shift to AI enabled search is profound and can disrupt the market.  For anyone who has experimented with ChatGPT you will see that while classic search might generate a list of links to hundreds or even tens of thousands of articles, AI delivers a concise summary that answers natural language questions with seemingly intelligent answers.

“We can afford to be more innovative and disruptive on experience,” Mehdi said.

Microsoft is already reaping the benefits of this shake-up. According to an article in Tech Crunch, the Bing app saw a 10 times increase in downloads after the announcement. In fact, users who want to try out the new AI features must join a waitlist of millions of users.

With Google, for instance, paying Apple billions of dollars per year to be the default search engine in Safari, a large number of users moving to the Edge browser with Bing as the search engine is a real threat to Google’s dominance in this area.

__________

Google’s claim to accuracy of their AI has an embarrassing set back

Microsoft has acknowledged that despite safeguards, its AI may still produce factually inaccurate information, known as a hallucination, but hopes that users’ feedback will gradually improve the technology.

One of Google’s key competitive differentiators, and its reason to be late to market is it’s cautious approach it claims produces an AI that is more accurate that Microsoft’s ChatGPT.

So it was a huge blow when Google’s Bard AI gave an inaccurate answer in a recent demonstration.  In answer to the question “What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can I tell my 9-year old about? Bard confidently answered that James Webb was used to photograph the very first pictures of a planet outside the Earth’s solar system (an exoplanet). The first pictures of exoplanets were, in fact, taken by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in 2004, according to NASA.

Google was forced to issue an acknowledgement of the error.  

Source: IT World Canada 

Either playing catchup or an amazing coincidence, Google just announced new AI enabled search capabilities to Google Lens and Maps.

Multisearch, which allows users to search using both text and images at the same time, and is powered by A.I. technology called Multitask Unified Model or MUM, which understands information across text, photos and videos and draws insights and connections between topics, concepts and ideas is a technology that Google originally launched last April, but this week announced the integration of MUM within its Google Lens visual search features to allow users to add text to a visual search query.

Using MUM a user can pull up, for example, a photo of a shirt they liked in Google Search. The can then ask Lens where they can find the same pattern on a different apparel or in a different color. This combination of words and images help Google to process and understand search queries that it couldn’t have previously handled.

Multisearch was made available last October in the U.S. and in December in India. “Multisearch near me” will map stores carrying the goods in the search. 

Google adds to this what they have termed Immersive View. It uses billions of Street Views and aerial images to create a 3D model of a location which might have the searched for items. This can be useful to find a clear and contextual layout of a neighbourhood, a business or the entrance of a building. Immersive view also shows weather and traffic to help users plan their visits.

Google also announced Glanceable directions to allow drivers to view their route before tapping “start” or directly on the lock screen. This feature is available for both Android and iOS and will be launching in the coming months.   

And to appeal to the high-tech segment of the search audience, built-in Google Maps software will enable users to choose the most energy-efficient route for electric vehicles, including suggesting the best charging stop, fast charging stations if the driver is in a rush, or supermarkets that have charging stations in case the user needs to run errands.

Source: TechCrunch & Mashable & IT World Canada

Communications technology company, Zoom has announced plans to lay off 1300 people -15 per cent of its workforce but the CEO will also feel the pain.

Zoom is the latest company to reduce its headcount in response to the slowing demand of remote work technology in the post pandemic world.

Zoom’s CEO, Eric Yuan wrote in a post that the company “didn’t take as much time as we should have to thoroughly analyze our teams or assess if we were growing sustainably, toward the highest priorities.” 

 But Yuan took responsibility, noting that he plans to cut his own salary by 98 per cent for the coming fiscal year and forgo his fiscal year 2023 corporate bonus.

Markets responded favourably – despite the disappointing earnings, the company’s shares closed up nearly 10 per cent after the company made the announcement. 

In contrast,  Paypal also announced plans to reduce its workforce by about 7 per cent or roughly 2000 jobs.  Unlike Zoom, Paypal’s stock declined in today’s trading.  

Source: Axios

I’m afraid I can’t do that Dave….

ChatGPT has raised concerns by educational institutions and others globally for enabling AI plagiarism for  essays, exams and even resumes and cover letters.

But even though Microsoft’s new AI-enabled Bing search engine is based on on OpenAI’s Chat GPT, it seems to have certain built-in ethical boundaries, and refuses prompts which it flags as “unethical”

Business Insider asked the new Bing, now available in trial format, to write a cover letter for a job application.

Bing refused. “I’m sorry, but I cannot write a cover letter for you. That would be unethical and unfair to other applicants.”

It did give the users some tips and links to several cover-letter writing resources.

In fact, Bing also wished the user good luck at the end, with a smiley emoji.

In contrast, ChatGPT generated a 270-word cover letter based on the job description.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said Tuesday at the presentation of the new Bing that it’s important to develop AI that is “more aligned with human values, more aligned with what our preferences are — both individually and as a society.”

It’s important to note that Bing also cites where it got the information from. ChatGPT does not.

Source: Business Insider

And that’s the top tech stories for today.  Hashtag Trending is produced by the ITWC podcast network and is heard Monday to Friday with a special weekend edition hosted by me where we feature interviews on key subjects in technology.

Follow us on Apple Podcasts, Google, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.  

If you follow stories about cybersecurity, why not check out our sister podcast CyberSecurityToday.

You can find all our podcasts and the text versions as well as more in-depth coverage itworldcanada.com  and on technewsday.com in the US. You can also find instructions on how to get us on your smart speaker.

I’m Jim Love – talk to you tomorrow with the top tech news stories on Hashtag Trending.

The post Hashtag Trending Feb. 9th- AI brings competition in the search business; Google unveils search capabilities and Canada hates the Metaverse the most first appeared on IT World Canada.

Ottawa should deploy a wide range of strategies, including tax breaks, to encourage small businesses to take cybersecurity more seriously, a member of a think tank told a parliamentary committee this week.

“I think the government should incentivize companies to adopt the latest security measures, such as the cybersecurity standard established by ISED (Innovation, Science and Economic Development) and CSE (the Canadian Security Establishment, the country’s electronic spy agency that also protects federal IT networks) for small and medium organizations,” Aaron Shull, managing director and general counsel of the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) told the House of Commons defence committee.

The standard he referred to is CyberSecure Canada, a program for small and medium-sized firms. Companies that meet certain criteria and pass a security audit can tell customers and partners they have met the certification standard.

Started in 2019, the program hasn’t been widely adopted. A year after the program was announced, IT World Canada found that only three firms had been certified.

“The standard provides a high level of protection,” Shull told the committee, “but its adoption — and this is the problem — has been limited. Implementing a tax benefit system as an incentive to help increase the overall level of cybersecurity in the country and reduce the risk of cyberattacks on businesses would be a way forward.”

Second, the federal government should establish a clear and concise legal framework for  how the private sector can deal with cyber attacks, including guidelines for attribution of attackers, response, and for liability should companies be allowed to hit attackers back. But, he added, the framework should also be “nimble and respond to a fast-changing environment. And the regulations should be driven by “sound policy” and not politics.  The cabinet would set standards, a code of practice and certification programs to act as an integrated compliance program, he said.

Third, Shull said, Ottawa should convene an annual cybersecurity conference for a wide range of stakeholders — companies, the IT industry, provincial, territorial, and municipal governments, academics, Indigenous communities, non-profits — to learn more about cybersecurity and do tabletop exercises. Not all sessions would be open to the general public.

One model, he added, is a “cybersecurity dialogue” that CIGI will host in June in Waterloo, Ont., where it is headquartered.

“In my view, cybersecurity is a whole of society concern for Canada,” Shull explained, “and everyone should do more to address this issue.”

In an interview, Shull noted the CyberSecure Canada program has been put forward by the Standards Council of Canada and the Digital Governance Council (formerly the CIO Strategy Council of Canada). “If you are a small and medium-sized enterprise you will probably be OK” to withstand attacks from unsophisticated threat actors, he said. It’s “relatively rare” for nation-state actors to go after SMEs here, he said.

But the federal government needs to give incentives to the private sector to act, Shull said. “We always wait for the ‘Oops’ moment before we do something.”

He isn’t sure how much of a tax incentive Ottawa should offer, other than “make it big enough that people will actually do it.”

But he added, the economic benefit of having companies spend less on recovering from a cyber attack should increase government revenue, and spur innovation.

The post Give tax break so small Canadian firms can invest in cybersecurity, Parliament told first appeared on IT World Canada.

Canada’s biggest book chain has suffered what it calls a cyber incident that knocked it offline on Wednesday.

“We experienced a cybersecurity incident earlier today and are working with third-party experts to investigate and resolve the situation,” a notice on the Indigo website said.

“Our hope is to have systems back online as soon as possible. In the interim our website will remain unavailable. At this time we look forward to welcoming customers in our stores for cash transactions. We are temporarily unable to process electronic payments, or to accept gift cards or returns.”

Formally known as Indigo Books & Music, the publicly-traded national chain sells books and a wide range of household items such as gloves, scarves, blankets, mugs, toys and stationery. With 8,000 employees, it operates 89 superstores under the Indigo and Chapters banners as well as over 80 small format stores under the names Coles, Indigospirit, SmithBooks, and The Book Company.

At the close of Wednesday’s market the stock was trading at $2.35.

In its latest quarterly results, reported for a 13-week period ending October, 2, 2022, the company said it has revenue of $236.2 million. Merchandise sales, the total of retail and online sales and excluding other revenues, were a record high of any second quarter for the company.

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Microsoft has long used its own rendering engine for displaying PDFs in its Edge browser, but that will change next month.

Microsoft and Adobe have announced that, in March, the Adobe Acrobat PDF engine will be embedded in Edge on Windows 10 and 11 to power its PDF viewer. Edge for MacOS will not be immediately affected, but Microsoft says that the change is coming “in the future”.

Only organizations with managed devices will have the option to opt in to the change via Intune policy – for now. For everyone else, the update will be automatic and irreversible. And the legacy PDF engine will be removed from Edge in March 2024, according to the announcement.

In a blog post, Microsoft noted, “the built-in Microsoft Edge PDF solution will continue to be free. Users who want more advanced digital document features, such as the ability to edit text and images, convert PDFs to other file formats, and combine files, can purchase an Acrobat subscription that enables access to these advanced features inside Microsoft Edge via an extension. Those with an existing Adobe Acrobat subscription can use the Acrobat extension inside Microsoft Edge at no extra cost.”

The announcement also pointed out that it is “part of an ongoing Adobe and Microsoft initiative that is transforming digital work and life by bringing Adobe’s industry-leading PDF, e-signature and document automation tools directly to Microsoft users. This PDF experience in Microsoft Edge joins an already comprehensive set of Adobe PDF and e-sign integrations across Microsoft solutions, including Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint and others.”

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Today, Google unveiled several new search capabilities and a demo of its AI chatbot, known as Bard, a day after Microsoft announced plans to inject AI into its Bing search engine and Edge web browser.

Google’s spate of AI announcements come after the tech giant reportedly issued a ‘code red’ to rapidly accelerate its AI strategy, following the viral success of rival ChatGPT and Microsoft’s US$10 billion investment in the product.

Bard is conceptually similar to ChatGPT, which, since its launch two months ago, has garnered over 100 million active users. Amateurs and experts alike are dazzled by its capabilities that keep extending, going from producing essays and poems to passing MBA exams.

But Google did take the credit for pioneering the technology that ChatGPT relies on and boasted of its ambitions for responsible AI.

“We made significant contributions to the scientific community, like developing the Transformer (Google’s machine learning model), which set the stage for much of the generative AI activity we see today, and we will continue to bring these technologies to the world in a responsible way that benefits everyone,” said Prabhakar Raghavan, senior vice president responsible for search, geo, ads, commerce products and more at Google.

Bard, released currently in a lightweight version to “trusted testers”, is powered by Google’s LaMDA large language model trained on dialogue to allow free-flowing, open-ended conversations. Google also plans to integrate LaMDA into its search results to generate narrative responses to queries that do not have one clear or right answer.

Microsoft’s Bing, which currently occupies only a small fraction of the search engine market, has similar plans to roll out an intelligent chatbot alongside Bing’s search results that summarizes and synthesizes web pages and different sources, as well as composing emails.

With investors flocking to AI stocks right now, Microsoft expects every percentage point of share it gains will bring in another US$2 billion in search advertising revenue, Reuters wrote.

“This technology is going to reshape pretty much every software category,” said Microsoft chief executive officer, Satya Nadella, to reporters during a briefing at the company’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington.

Microsoft’s new Bing search engine is live in limited preview on desktop computers, and will be available for mobile devices in coming weeks.

During the livestream event this morning, Google also sneaked in a few other AI-powered capabilities including:

Addition of 33 new languages, including Corsican, Latin and Yiddish, to Google Translate’s offline mode
New capabilities added to Google Lens to facilitate visual search across the web 
Immersive View AI that uses 2D images and information from Google Maps to generate a 3D representation of the entire context of a location. Rolling out today in London, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco and Tokyo.
APIs that will allow developers, creators and enterprises to build applications using its large language model, starting with LaMDA.
Eco friendly routing in Europe, designed to help users choose the most energy-efficient route for electric vehicles, including suggesting the best charging stop, fast charging stations if the driver is in a rush, or supermarkets that have charging stations in case the user needs to run errands.

With all these announcements, the only limit to search, Google said, is our imagination. But there’s another limit: inaccuracy, and that did not take long to manifest.

This morning, on Twitter, Google published an advertisement for Bard in the form of a short GIF of it being prompted to respond to a query, to which it confidently delivered – a wrong answer.

The prompt was “What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can I tell my 9-year old about?”, to which Bard responded with a number of answers, including the statement that JWST was used to photograph the very first pictures of a planet outside the Earth’s solar system (an exoplanet), which is grossly inaccurate. The first pictures of exoplanets were taken by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in 2004, according to NASA.

The mistake was spotted hours after the livestream event, and the criticisms and derision inevitably flooded in. At the time of writing, the advertisement has been viewed over 1.2 million times. 

Microsoft has also warned that its AI may still produce factually inaccurate information, known as a hallucination, but hopes that users’ feedback will gradually improve the technology.

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