Security News Bites for the Week Ending July 14, 2023
OpenAI and Meta Both Sued for Copyright Infringement Over AI Tools
Even though the courts, with minor exception, are technologically uneducated, they are going to have to make some very important decisions. Law.com is reporting that OpenAI is being sued by book authors, including comedian Sarah Silverman over misappropriation of their copyrighted works to be used to train ChatGPT and separately, Meta is being sued for the same reason over LLaMA, their large language model AI tool. These are plaintiffs that are well connected and can afford to spend money, both for fame and to make a point. The courts, on the other hand, are not well prepared for this. Credit: Law.com. Note: I asked my browser for a link to this and the BROWSER’S AI AGENT gave me a link.
IBM Joins the GPT Biz
IBM is joining the GPT business in a big way. Watsonx.ai is a tool for building foundation AI models, generative AI and machine learning and includes a data store, watsonx.data, available now, and watsonx.governance, which will be a toolkit for responsibly, transparently and explainably building AI workflows, available later this year. Given this is IBM, we are talking BIG AI. They say that over 150 companies already have access to the tools. Credit: SD Times
State Bill Would Prohibit Selling Cell Location Data to Third Parties
In light of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, some people are concerned that widely sold cell phone location data could be used to target people visiting abortion clinics, even those people coming from other states. Massachusetts legislators are considering a bill that would ban selling, leasing, trading or renting cell phone location data, such as travel paths of people coming to Massachusetts for reproductive healthcare. While abortion is front and center there, there are many other potential misuses of location data. Industry, of course, doesn’t like this since selling your data for many companies is a major source of revenue. Stay tuned, other states are doing similar things. Credit: Commonwealth Magazine
Another Form of Credit Score – Your Cell Data
Everyone know about the scores that credit bureaus create. They determine if you can open a credit account, buy a house or even rent an apartment. The allegation here is that BISC partners with over 500 mobile operators in 200+ countries to collect your cell phone data. They share the data with Telesign who uses software to create a trust score based on things like the frequency of activity and the duration of calls. These scores are then sold to companies who use them to decide if you can open an account with them. They are now being sued in Europe. Credit: The Record
ChatGPT for Crooks – WormGPT
No surprise, the cyber crooks have their own “version” of ChatGPT. WormGPT is used to aid and launch business email compromise attacks. It is a large language model that is trained on malware-related data. And the hackers are also using the actual ChatGPT. WormGPT even creates instructions on how to deploy the malware you created with it. One description of WormGPT is “think of ChatGPT without any ethics or guardrails”. Not great. Credit: Dark Reading
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