Silicon Valley Tech News Roundup – July 11th
The 2021 World Artificial Intelligence (AI) Conference opens in Shanghai – 7/8
On July 8th, The 2021 World Artificial Intelligence (AI) Conference opened in Shanghai. The event is in its fourth year. Apart from the primary exhibition, the conference will also hold forums on topics like 5G applications and chips. Towards the end of 2020, more than 1100 companies were dealing with the development of AI applications in Shanghai. Despite the pandemic, the industry recorded a 50% increase in the total industrial value.
The product that gathered the most interest is an oracle bone inscriptions detector developed by IntSig Information. It scans the oracle bone inscriptions and decodes their meaning. The company is already implementing the technology and working with museums in China. The companies are developing AI applications for numerous industry including health care, automotive industry, and education (among others).
Li Chen, the general manager of OSChina Community, stated at the event: “China has a large population. Every day we create so much data here. We can use the data to train our business models and learning models. Using these models, we can create so many applications and products to help our businesses better understand the people.”
Biden tells Putin to act over Russian ransomware attacks, promises US action – 7/9
In an hour-long call on Friday, President Biden told Russian President Putin he expects him to crack on the cyber attacks coming from Russia.
In a statement to the media after the call, President Biden said: “I made it very clear to him that the United States expects when a ransomware operation is coming from his soil, even though it’s not sponsored by the state, we expect them to act if we give them enough information to act on who that is.” Answering the question of whether Russia will face consequences, he said: “Yes.”
The latest ransomware attack happened this past weekend and affected more than 1500 companies in both the US and globally. The cybersecurity company dealing with the ransomware attack believes the Russian ransomware gang REvil is behind it.
Meanwhile, after the call, Kremlin issued a statement saying the US wasn’t in contact about the cyber attacks. The statement reads: “Despite readiness from the Russian side to jointly clamp down on criminal activity in the informational sphere, over the past month, no requests have been received from the relevant US departments.” AFP news agency spoke to a senior US official who denied the claims and said the Biden administration made multiple requests for action.
Kaseya was aware of the system vulnerabilities in April – 7/8
Kaseya, the Miami-based IT company that was a victim of a ransomware attack this past weekend, was aware of the vulnerabilities in their system back in April. The ransomware attack on Kaseya impacted more than 1500 businesses in the US and globally and is considered one of the biggest in history.
According to the Dutch Institute for Vulnerability Disclosure (DIVD), their experts found seven potentially catastrophic vulnerabilities in the company’s Virtual System Administrator (VSA). They presented their findings to Kaseya, and the company fixed four out of seven issues. The remaining three were unresolved.
The ransomware gang REvil (believed to be behind the attack) exploited one of the vulnerabilities and launched their attack. The experts from DIVD stated Kaseya worked on the issues. However, they took too long to remedy them.
Victor Gevers, the head of DIVD, stated: “I really believe they were making their best effort… They were posting job listings, hiring new security specialists, hiring outside security companies, doing source code review, checking their perimeters, really working on their security posture. But it was a lot at once.”
The company still has not released the patches to remedy the issues. However, they quickly responded to the attack by shutting down their cloud offerings and warning the customers with VSA servers on their premises to do the same.
Supercomputer to use AI for medical breakthroughs – 7/7
Nvidia, a US-based computing company, unveiled its $100 million investment. Cambridge-1 is the UK’s most powerful supercomputer whose primary objective is to help diagnose, treat, and prevent diseases better and faster. The computer uses AI (Artificial Intelligence). It combines computer science with big data to find solutions to problems in healthcare.
The company already lined up projects with AstraZeneca, GSK, and King’s College London (among others). Cambridge-1 will help scientists get a better understanding of various diseases and improve the process of finding disease-causing variations in the human genome. Likewise, the plan is to use the supercomputer to create and design new medications and offer more personalized patient treatment.
In the United Kingdom, both larger pharmaceutical companies and smaller startups are working on projects that involve Artificial Intelligence in healthcare. While the technology is still in its early stages, it shows great promise. Time will tell if its potential will be fully realized.
