Tomáš Foltýn

The experts urge policy-makers to work closely with technical researchers, computer scientists and the cybersecurity community to investigate, understand and prepare for possible malicious uses of AI.

The blinding server randomly adds some nonsense code to every webpage. This ‘code obfuscation’, according to the academics, has no effect on what the actual page looks like, but it drastically changes the appearance of the underlying source file.

Only one in seven organizations have put in place all four basic cybersecurity practices specified by Verizon – changing all default passwords, encrypting data transmitted over public networks, granting employee access on a need-to-know basis, and testing security systems regularly.

Bots that traverse the internet on behalf of their human operators can fulfill both legitimate and malicious automated tasks. Statistics indicate that bot-driven internet traffic, by helper and harmful bots combined, surpasses human traffic.

Young people were singled out as increasingly likely victims of internet-borne fraud, including because of their penchant for liberal sharing of personal information.

A number of text-based apps crashed, became unresponsive or entered an endless bootloop when attempting to show the otherwise little-used character from a language that is spoken by some 75 million people.

A further breakdown of the overall figures shows that, in all, the actual cost hinges on a number of variables. The factors that enter heavily into the equation include attack types and their frequency, along with the organization’s size and even the country in which an organization is based.

This hack is said to be reminiscent of a particularly brazen bank cyber-heist from February 2016, in which hackers successfully pilfered $81 million from the account of the central bank of Bangladesh at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

The vulnerability of critical infrastructure, including energy grids, to cyberattacks has been a growing concern worldwide. Many nations have been scrambling to improve their defenses vis-à-vis threats faced by services that are critical to the continuity of our daily lives.