• The Chinese Military’s Access to AI Chips

    The Chinese military has made rapid progress in artificial intelligence. This progress largely depends on continued access to high-end semiconductors designed by American companies and produced in Taiwan and South Korea. The aggressive moves by the Trump and Biden administrations to limit technology exports to the Chinese military notwithstanding, China continues to order large quantities of American-designed advanced semiconductors from manufacturers in Taiwan and South Korea.

  • Russian Disinformation Campaign Aims to Divide, Weaken Western Coalition

    A new report reviews ongoing Russian influence efforts aimed at undermining and dividing the Western defensive coalition supporting Ukraine, as well as influencing public opinion of Russia’s war against Ukraine favorably toward Russia.

  • NIST Announces First Four Quantum-Resistant Cryptographic Algorithms

    NIST has chosen the first group of encryption tools that are designed to withstand the assault of a future quantum computer, which could potentially crack the security used to protect privacy in the digital systems we rely on every day — such as online banking and email software.

  • Cyberproofing Small and Medium Businesses -- a Small Step with a Big Impact

    Small businesses are not immune to cybersecurity incidents. In fact, they’re often more vulnerable because they lack the time, resources and sometimes the skills to prepare for and defend against an attack, or to mitigate and remedy any consequences. In Australia, they created a tool to help businesses quickly and easily test the security of their websites.

  • How Does the U.S. Power Grid Work?

    Responsible for powering the country and its economy, the U.S. energy grid has come under increasing strain due to climate change, and the threat of cyberattacks looms. The U.S. electric grid brings power to millions of homes and businesses via a vast network of transmission and distribution lines. Experts say the grid is increasingly vulnerable to extreme weather events, such as the February 2021 Texas winter storms, and cyberattacks. President Biden has proposed overhauling the grid, but his plans could face legal and political hurdles.

  • China’s Disinformation Campaign Against Rare Earth Processing Facilities

    China dominates the production and processing of rare-earth elements (REEs). In order to lessen this dependence on the critical minerals, the U.S. government has been supporting the development of U.S. REE sources. China has been trying to prevent this shift by launching a disinformation campaign: China’ intelligence services have created social media accounts of fake local environmentalists who spread disinformation to local communities about the REE facilities being built nearby.

  • I Watched Hundreds of Flat-Earth Videos to Learn How Conspiracy Theories Spread – and What It Could Mean for Fighting Disinformation

    About 11% of Americans believe the Earth might be flat. It is tempting to dismiss “flat Earthers” as mildly amusing, but we ignore their arguments at our peril. Polling shows that there is an overlap between conspiracy theories, some of which can act as gateways for radicalization. QAnon and the great replacement theory, for example, have proved deadly more than once.

  • Technology Can Detect Fake News in Videos

    Social media represent a major channel for the spreading of fake news and disinformation. This situation has been made worse with recent advances in photo and video editing and artificial intelligence tools, which make it easy to tamper with audiovisual files, for example with so-called deepfakes, which combine and superimpose images, audio and video clips to create montages that look like real footage.

  • Hate Sites: Using the Broader Abortion Argument to Spread Racism, Extremism

    Racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists are using the debate around women’s reproductive rights to promote racist and extremist agendas.

  • The Strategic Relevance of Cybersecurity Skills

    Evidence suggests there is a global cybersecurity skills shortage affecting businesses and governments alike, which means that organizations are struggling to fill their cybersecurity vacancies. Tommaso De Zan writes that “the absence of cybersecurity experts protecting national critical infrastructures constitutes a national security threat, a loophole that may be exploited by malicious actors.”

  • Fighting Global Cybercrime

    Cyber threats from across the world⁠—from Russian attempts to influence the war in Ukraine by threatening cyberattacks against the West, to China stealing defense and industrial secrets, to Iran’s 2021 targeting of Children’s Hospital in Boston⁠, thwarted by the FBI — were the focus of recent remarks by FBI Director Christopher Wray.

  • Insights into Blockchain Vulnerabilities

    Distributed ledger technology, such as blockchains, has become more prevalent across a variety of contexts over the past decade. The premise is that blockchains operate securely without any centralized control and that they are immutable or unsusceptible to change. New report details how centralization can be introduced, affecting security.

  • A Simple Tool Curbs Hacking, Makes Websites More Secure

    Researchers have developed a scanning tool to make websites less vulnerable to hacking and cyberattacks. The black box security assessment prototype is more effective than existing web scanners which collectively fail to detect the top 10 weaknesses in web applications.

  • Taking Steps Toward a Secure Quantum Internet

    Scientists with at the University of Chicago have, for the first time, connected the city of Chicago and suburban labs with a quantum network—nearly doubling the length of what was already one of the longest in the country.

  • The Risk of Russian Cyber Retaliation for the United States Sending Rockets to Ukraine

    U.S. rocket shipments to Ukraine will not trigger Russian cyberattacks against the United States. Russian is too focused on attacking Ukrainian systems and defending their own networks to mount a response to the weapons shipments.