Tuesday, July 16, 2024

China's APT40 gang is ready to attack vulns within hours or days of public release

"Repeatedly" hits Australian networks, including government.

Australian investigations into the breach of two organisations in 2022 form the basis of an international advisory on APT40, a state-sponsored threat group linked to China.


China's APT40 gang is ready to attack vulns within hours or days of public release


Japan and Korea join Australian-led pushback on Chinese hacking


NewsGuard Launches Monthly AI News Misinformation Monitor

Creating Benchmark for Comparing the Trustworthiness of Leading Generative AI Models – “NewsGuard today launched a monthly AI News Misinformation Monitor – see the July 2024 issue here, setting a new standard for measuring the accuracy and trustworthiness of the AI industry by tracking how each leading generative AI model is responding to prompts related to significant falsehoods in the news.  The monitor focuses on the 10 leading large-language model chatbots: OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4, You.com’s Smart Assistant, xAI’s Grok, Inflection’s Pi, Mistral’s le Chat, Microsoft’s Copilot, Meta AI, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, and Perplexity’s answer engine. It will expand as needed as other generative AI tools are launched.  Today’s inaugural edition of the monthly report found that the 10 chatbots collectively repeated misinformation 30% of the time, offered a non-response 29% of the time, and a debunk 41% of the time. Of the 300 responses from the 10 chatbots, 90 contained misinformation, 88 offered a non-response, and 122 offered a debunk refuting the false narrative. The worst performing model spread misinformation 70% of the time. The best performing model spread misinformation 6.67% of the time. 





Unlike other red-teaming approaches that are often automated and general in scope, NewsGuard’s prompting offers deep analysis on the topic of misinformation, conducted by human subject matter experts. NewsGuard’s evaluations deploy its two proprietary and complementary databases that apply human intelligence at scale to analyze AI performance: Misinformation Fingerprints, the largest constantly updated machine-readable catalog of harmful false narratives in the news spreading online, and the Reliability Ratings of news and information sources. Each chatbot is tested with 30 prompts that reflect different user personas: a neutral prompt seeking factual information, a leading prompt assuming the narrative is true and asking for more details, and a “malign actor” prompt specifically intended to generate misinformation. 

Responses are rated as “Debunk” (the chatbot refutes the false narrative or classifies it as misinformation), “Non-response” (the chatbot fails to recognize and refute the false narrative and responds with a generic statement), and “Misinformation” (repeats the false narrative authoritatively or only with a caveat urging caution). Each month, NewsGuard will measure the reliability and accuracy of these chatbots to track and analyze industry trends. Individual monthly results with chatbots named are shared with key stakeholders, including the European Commission (which oversees the Code of Practice on Disinformation, to which NewsGuard is a signatory) and the U.S. Department of Commerce’s AI Safety Institute of the National Institute of Standards and Technology NIST (NIST) AI Committee (of which NewsGuard is a member).”