A vulnerability classified as critical has been found in ale7714 sigeprosi. This affects an unknown part. The manipulation leads to sql injection. The name of the patch is 5291886f6c992316407c376145d331169c55f25b. It is recommended to apply a patch to fix this issue. The identifier VDB-218493 was assigned to this vulnerability.
A vulnerability was found in iamdroppy phoenixcf. It has been declared as critical. Affected by this vulnerability is an unknown functionality of the file content/2-Community/articles.cfm. The manipulation leads to sql injection. The name of the patch is d156faf8bc36cd49c3b10d3697ef14167ad451d8. It is recommended to apply a patch to fix this issue. The associated identifier of this vulnerability is VDB-218491.
The first step to creating the malware was to bypass ChatGPT content filters
Graham Cluley Security News is sponsored this week by the folks at SecurEnvoy. Thanks to the great team there for their support! We are often approached by organisations that depend on on-premise applications and data storage, who are looking for a multi-factor authentication solution, but are unable to move to a cloud-based solution for authentication. … Continue reading “Does your MFA solution secure access to your on-premise apps as well as those in the cloud?”
The World Economic Forum launched its latest cybersecurity report, the Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2023
Threat protection company Perception Point has launched Advanced Threat Protection for Zendesk to provide detection and remediation services for Zendesk customers. Perception Point said that customers can now protect customer service software Zendesk a single, consolidated platform alongside their email, web browsers and other cloud collaboration apps. Advanced Threat Protection for Zendesk has been built to help secure vulnerable help desks and customer support teams from external threats such as malicious content within tickets, the firm stated.
In organizations, help desk and customer support staff often have access to workstations, mobile devices, routers, and servers, as well as the complete digital workplace system and the data associated with it. They also typically communicate regularly with people outside of the organization. These factors make them attractive attack targets and particularly vulnerable to external threats originating from malicious content. Content uploaded externally can potentially be used as a vehicle for cyberattacks, allowing malicious payloads to enter an organization’s system, Perception Point noted in its announcement.
Cybersecurity vendor Trustwave has announced the relaunch of its Advanced Continual Threat Hunting platform with new, patent-pending human-led threat hunting methodology. The firm claimed the enhancement will allow its SpiderLabs threat hunting teams to conduct increased human-led threat hunts and discover more behavior-based findings that could go undetected by traditional endpoint detection and response (EDR) tools.
In a press release, Trustwave stated that its security teams regularly perform advanced threat hunting to study the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) of sophisticated threat actors. Trustwave’s new intellectual property (IP) goes beyond indicators of compromise (IoC) to uncover new or unknown threats by hunting for indicators of behavior (IoB) associated with specific attackers.
Multiple vulnerabilities have been discovered in Mozilla Firefox and Firefox Extended Support Release (ESR), the most severe of which could allow for arbitrary code execution.
Mozilla Firefox is a web browser used to access the Internet.
Mozilla Firefox ESR is a version of the web browser intended to be deployed in large organizations.
Successful exploitation of the most severe of these vulnerabilities could allow for arbitrary code execution. Depending on the privileges associated with the user an attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights. Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less impacted than those who operate with administrative user rights.
Launched just weeks ago, ChatGPT is already threatening to upend how we draft everyday communications like emails, college essays and myriad other forms of writing.
Created by the company OpenAI, ChatGPT is a chatbot that can automatically respond to written prompts in a manner that is sometimes eerily close to human.
But for all the consternation over the potential for humans to be replaced by machines in formats like poetry and sitcom scripts, a far greater threat looms: artificial intelligence replacing humans in the democratic processes—not through voting, but through lobbying.
ChatGPT could automatically compose comments submitted in regulatory processes. It could write letters to the editor for publication in local newspapers. It could comment on news articles, blog entries and social media posts millions of times every day. It could mimic the work that the Russian Internet Research Agency did in its attempt to influence our 2016 elections, but without the agency’s reported multimillion-dollar budget and hundreds of employees.
Automatically generated comments aren’t a new problem. For some time, we have struggled with bots, machines that automatically post content. Five years ago, at least a million automatically drafted comments were believed to have been submitted to the Federal Communications Commission regarding proposed regulations on net neutrality. In 2019, a Harvard undergraduate, as a test, used a text-generation program to submit 1,001 comments in response to a government request for public input on a Medicaid issue. Back then, submitting comments was just a game of overwhelming numbers.
Platforms have gotten better at removing “coordinated inauthentic behavior.” Facebook, for example, has been removing over a billion fake accounts a year. But such messages are just the beginning. Rather than flooding legislators’ inboxes with supportive emails, or dominating the Capitol switchboard with synthetic voice calls, an AI system with the sophistication of ChatGPT but trained on relevant data could selectively target key legislators and influencers to identify the weakest points in the policymaking system and ruthlessly exploit them through direct communication, public relations campaigns, horse trading or other points of leverage.
When we humans do these things, we call it lobbying. Successful agents in this sphere pair precision message writing with smart targeting strategies. Right now, the only thing stopping a ChatGPT-equipped lobbyist from executing something resembling a rhetorical drone warfare campaign is a lack of precision targeting. AI could provide techniques for that as well.
A system that can understand political networks, if paired with the textual-generation capabilities of ChatGPT, could identify the member of Congress with the most leverage over a particular policy area—say, corporate taxation or military spending. Like human lobbyists, such a system could target undecided representatives sitting on committees controlling the policy of interest and then focus resources on members of the majority party when a bill moves toward a floor vote.
Once individuals and strategies are identified, an AI chatbot like ChatGPT could craft written messages to be used in letters, comments—anywhere text is useful. Human lobbyists could also target those individuals directly. It’s the combination that’s important: Editorial and social media comments only get you so far, and knowing which legislators to target isn’t itself enough.
This ability to understand and target actors within a network would create a tool for AI hacking, exploiting vulnerabilities in social, economic and political systems with incredible speed and scope. Legislative systems would be a particular target, because the motive for attacking policymaking systems is so strong, because the data for training such systems is so widely available and because the use of AI may be so hard to detect—particularly if it is being used strategically to guide human actors.
The data necessary to train such strategic targeting systems will only grow with time. Open societies generally make their democratic processes a matter of public record, and most legislators are eager—at least, performatively so—to accept and respond to messages that appear to be from their constituents.
Maybe an AI system could uncover which members of Congress have significant sway over leadership but still have low enough public profiles that there is only modest competition for their attention. It could then pinpoint the SuperPAC or public interest group with the greatest impact on that legislator’s public positions. Perhaps it could even calibrate the size of donation needed to influence that organization or direct targeted online advertisements carrying a strategic message to its members. For each policy end, the right audience; and for each audience, the right message at the right time.
What makes the threat of AI-powered lobbyists greater than the threat already posed by the high-priced lobbying firms on K Street is their potential for acceleration. Human lobbyists rely on decades of experience to find strategic solutions to achieve a policy outcome. That expertise is limited, and therefore expensive.
AI could, theoretically, do the same thing much more quickly and cheaply. Speed out of the gate is a huge advantage in an ecosystem in which public opinion and media narratives can become entrenched quickly, as is being nimble enough to shift rapidly in response to chaotic world events.
Moreover, the flexibility of AI could help achieve influence across many policies and jurisdictions simultaneously. Imagine an AI-assisted lobbying firm that can attempt to place legislation in every single bill moving in the US Congress, or even across all state legislatures. Lobbying firms tend to work within one state only, because there are such complex variations in law, procedure and political structure. With AI assistance in navigating these variations, it may become easier to exert power across political boundaries.
Just as teachers will have to change how they give students exams and essay assignments in light of ChatGPT, governments will have to change how they relate to lobbyists.
To be sure, there may also be benefits to this technology in the democracy space; the biggest one is accessibility. Not everyone can afford an experienced lobbyist, but a software interface to an AI system could be made available to anyone. If we’re lucky, maybe this kind of strategy-generating AI could revitalize the democratization of democracy by giving this kind of lobbying power to the powerless.
However, the biggest and most powerful institutions will likely use any AI lobbying techniques most successfully. After all, executing the best lobbying strategy still requires insiders—people who can walk the halls of the legislature—and money. Lobbying isn’t just about giving the right message to the right person at the right time; it’s also about giving money to the right person at the right time. And while an AI chatbot can identify who should be on the receiving end of those campaign contributions, humans will, for the foreseeable future, need to supply the cash. So while it’s impossible to predict what a future filled with AI lobbyists will look like, it will probably make the already influential and powerful even more so.
This essay was written with Nathan Sanders, and previously appeared in the New York Times.
Edited to Add: After writing this, we discovered that a research group is researching AI and lobbying:
We used autoregressive large language models (LLMs, the same type of model behind the now wildly popular ChatGPT) to systematically conduct the following steps. (The full code is available at this GitHub link: https://github.com/JohnNay/llm-lobbyist.)
Summarize official U.S. Congressional bill summaries that are too long to fit into the context window of the LLM so the LLM can conduct steps 2 and 3.
Using either the original official bill summary (if it was not too long), or the summarized version:
Assess whether the bill may be relevant to a company based on a company’s description in its SEC 10K filing.
Provide an explanation for why the bill is relevant or not.
Provide a confidence level to the overall answer.
If the bill is deemed relevant to the company by the LLM, draft a letter to the sponsor of the bill arguing for changes to the proposed legislation.
Here is the paper.
Critical manufacturing experienced an increase in severe vulnerabilities and malware infections in 2022
