Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) In the world of AI, what might be called "small language models" have been growing in popularity recently because they can be run on a local device instead of requiring data center-grade computers in the cloud. On Wednesday, Apple introduced a set of tiny source-available AI language models called OpenELM that are small enough to run directly on a smartphone. They're mostly proof-of-concept research models for now, but they could form the basis of future on-device AI offerings from Apple. Apple's new AI models, collectively named OpenELM for "Open-source Effici ..read more

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) A now-abandoned USB worm that backdoors connected devices has continued to self-replicate for years since its creators lost control of it and remains active on thousands, possibly millions, of machines, researchers said Thursday. The worm—which first came to light in a 2023 post published by security firm Sophos—became active in 2019 when a variant of malware known as PlugX added functionality that allowed it to infect USB drives automatically. In turn, those drives would infect any new machine they connected to, a capability that allowed the malware to spread ..read more

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) On Thursday, Baltimore County Police arrested Pikesville High School's former athletic director, Dazhon Darien, and charged him with using AI to impersonate Principal Eric Eiswert, according to a report by The Baltimore Banner. Police say Darien used AI voice synthesis software to simulate Eiswert's voice, leading the public to believe the principal made racist and antisemitic comments. The audio clip, posted on a popular Instagram account, contained offensive remarks about "ungrateful Black kids" and their academic performance, as well as a threat to "join the ..read more

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) Hackers backed by a powerful nation-state have been exploiting two zero-day vulnerabilities in Cisco firewalls in a five-month-long campaign that breaks into government networks around the world, researchers reported Wednesday. The attacks against Cisco’s Adaptive Security Appliances firewalls are the latest in a rash of network compromises that target firewalls, VPNs, and network-perimeter devices, which are designed to provide a moated gate of sorts that keeps remote hackers out. Over the past 18 months, threat actors—mainly backed by the Chinese government—h ..read more

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) On Friday, a federal judicial panel convened in Washington, DC, to discuss the challenges of policing AI-generated evidence in court trials, according to a Reuters report. The US Judicial Conference's Advisory Committee on Evidence Rules, an eight-member panel responsible for drafting evidence-related amendments to the Federal Rules of Evidence, heard from computer scientists and academics about the potential risks of AI being used to manipulate images and videos or create deepfakes that could disrupt a trial. The meeting took place amid broader efforts by fede ..read more

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) Hackers abused an antivirus service for five years in order to infect end users with malware. The attack worked because the service delivered updates over HTTP, a protocol vulnerable to attacks that corrupt or tamper with data as it travels over the Internet. The unknown hackers, who may have ties to the North Korean government, pulled off this feat by performing a man-in-the-middle (MiitM) attack that replaced the genuine update with a file that installed an advanced backdoor instead, said researchers from security firm Avast today. eScan, an AV service headqu ..read more

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) On Tuesday, Microsoft announced a new, freely available lightweight AI language model named Phi-3-mini, which is simpler and less expensive to operate than traditional large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI's GPT-4 Turbo. Its small size is ideal for running locally, which could bring an AI model of similar capability to the free version of ChatGPT to a smartphone without needing an Internet connection to run it. The AI field typically measures AI language model size by parameter count. Parameters are numerical values in a neural network that determine how the ..read more

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) Kremlin-backed hackers have been exploiting a critical Microsoft vulnerability for four years in attacks that targeted a vast array of organizations with a previously undocumented backdoor, the software maker disclosed Monday. When Microsoft patched the vulnerability in October 2022—at least two years after it came under attack by the Russian hackers—the company made no mention that it was under active exploitation. As of publication, the company’s advisory still made no mention of the in-the-wild targeting. Windows users frequently prioritize the installation ..read more

Enlarge / A sample image from Microsoft for "VASA-1: Lifelike Audio-Driven Talking Faces Generated in Real Time." (credit: Microsoft) On Tuesday, Microsoft Research Asia unveiled VASA-1, an AI model that can create a synchronized animated video of a person talking or singing from a single photo and an existing audio track. In the future, it could power virtual avatars that render locally and don't require video feeds—or allow anyone with similar tools to take a photo of a person found online and make them appear to say whatever they want. "It paves the way for real-time engagements with life ..read more

Enlarge (credit: Getty ImagesBenj Edwards) On Thursday, Meta unveiled early versions of its Llama 3 open-weights AI model that can be used to power text composition, code generation, or chatbots. It also announced that its Meta AI Assistant is now available on a website and is going to be integrated into its major social media apps, intensifying the company's efforts to position its products against other AI assistants like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Microsoft's Copilot, and Google's Gemini. Like its predecessor, Llama 2, Llama 3 is notable for being a freely available, open-weights large language mo ..read more