Industry News

Voice ID is slowly rolling out across various banks worldwide as a way to perform user authentication over the phone. However, questions remain about just how secure it is. Now that we have freely available artificial intelligence (AI) happily replicating people’s voices, could it be a security risk?

Some recent research suggests that it could. Vice reporter Joseph Cox put it to the test, with surprising results. All it took was five minutes of recorded speech and a site that can learn to synthesise the voice in the recording.

Huawei has claimed its new Cyber Engine database security system is “the best in the world” with a 99.9% detection rate for ransomware.

The system, which was launched on the opening day of the 2023 Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona, is described as a “last line of defence” by the Chinese conglomerate.

The US Marshals Service (USMS) says it's suffered a ransomware attack in which a threat actor managed to get hold of sensitive information about staff and fugitives.

On February 17, 2023, the attacker infiltrated a system that held information about ongoing investigations, including personally identifiable information (PII) of fugitives, staff, and third parties.

On Tuesday, Google made client-side encryption available to a limited set of Gmail and Calendar users in a move designed to give them more control over who sees sensitive communications and schedules.

Idemia correctly matched 99.88 percent of 12 million faces in the mugshot category of the latest 1:N test by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Other developers topping individual performance categories include CloudWalk (mugshot profile, visa border, visa kiosk, border at 10+ years, Sensetime (mugshot n=16 million, mugshot webcam), NEC (mugshot at 12+ years). Algorithms from those developers and Paravision make up the top 12 in the corresponding leaderboard update.

More engineers, product managers, and data scientists are out at Twitter, as another round of layoffs has slashed 10 percent of the remaining staff, The New York Times reported. Multiple sources familiar with the matter told the Times that 200 employees were affected.

On Saturday night—just as it happened during Twitter’s November layoffs—some employees discovered they were about to lose their jobs when they were abruptly logged out of corporate email accounts and laptops. Now there are fewer than 2,000 employees left, it’s estimated.

With Starlink speeds slowing due to a growing capacity crunch, SpaceX said a launch happening as soon as today will deploy the first "V2 Mini" satellites that provide four times more per-satellite capacity than earlier versions.

Starlink's second-generation satellites include the V2 Minis and the larger V2. The larger V2s are designed for the SpaceX Starship, which isn't quite ready to launch yet, but the V2 Minis are slimmed-down versions that can be deployed from the Falcon 9 rocket.

Already smarting from a breach that put partially encrypted login data into a threat actor’s hands, LastPass on Monday said that the same attacker hacked an employee’s home computer and obtained an unencrypted vault available to only a handful of company developers.

Maia Sandu, the pro-European president of Moldova who last week warned of an active Russian plot to overthrow her country’s government, told the Munich Security Conference on Saturday that she needed a range of support from other European nations to defend the integrity of her state.

Her calls for support come at a moment of crisis for Moldova, with Prime Minister Natalia Gavrilita resigning last week due to domestic challenges, including inflation and energy security issues exacerbated by Russian activity.

Apple continues to tighten iOS security, and iOS 16.3 (and iPadOS 16.3, and macOS Ventura 13.2) includes support for physical security keys. In other words, a physical device can verify your Apple ID login in place of a passcode. It’s a great way to boost your security, and here’s how it works.