Half a century ago, the pioneers of chaos theory discovered that the “butterfly effect” makes long-term prediction impossible. Even the smallest perturbation to a complex system (like the weather, the economy or just about anything else) can touch off a concatenation of events that leads to a dramatically divergent future. Unable to pin down the state of these systems precisely enough to predict how they’ll play out, we live under a veil of uncertainty. But now the robots are here to help. In a series of results reported in the journals Physical Review Letters and Chaos, scientists have used machine learning — the same computational technique behind recent successes in artificial intelligence — to predict the future evolution of chaotic systems out to stunningly distant horizons. The approach is being lauded by outside experts as groundbreaking and likely to find wide application. [text] “I find it really amazing how far into the future they predict” a system’s chaotic evolution, said Herbert Jaeger, a professor of computational science at Jacobs University in Bremen, Germany. The findings come from veteran chaos theorist Edward Ott and four collaborators at the University of Maryland. They employed a machine-learning algorithm called reservoir computing to “learn” the dynamics of an archetypal chaotic system called the Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation. The evolving solution to this equation behaves like a flame front, flickering as it advances through a combustible medium. The equation also describes drift waves in plasmas and other phenomena, and serves as “a test bed for studying turbulence and spatiotemporal chaos,” said Jaideep Pathak, Ott’s graduate student and the lead author of the new papers. [image] After...
In brief: With data breaches and ransomware attacks seemingly occurring weekly, Iowa state officials thought it would be an opportune time to have professionals test the security at government facilities around the state. So it hired cybersecurity firm Coalfire to conduct penetration testing (pen testing) on both infrastructure components like servers and physical building access. Then something else happened… In one of its tests back in September, two Coalfire employees found a door at the Dallas County Courthouse wide open. They entered the building and intentionally set off an alarm to test law enforcement response, which was part of the job. As per the company’s policy, the security workers waited for the police to show up to show them their paperwork proving they were hired to check the security of the building. Initially, the first deputies on the scene checked their documentation and said they were “good to go.” However, the local sheriff arrived within minutes and arrested them. The employees were charged with third-degree felony burglary and possession of burglary tools. They spent the night in jail, and Coalfire posted their excessive $100,000 bail the next day. The company and its workers expected the state to drop the charges quickly since it had a contract to do pen testing at the courthouse, but it has boiled in to what appears to be a dispute between jurisdictional officials. “Failing to de-escalate the issue and bring in State/County politics, Sheriff Leonard communicated in an email ‘that this building belonged to the taxpayers of Dallas County and the State had no authority to authorize a break-in.'” According to Coalfire, the incident...
Not just the Kudankulam plant of the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited (NPCIL), the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), too, was alerted of a possible breach by suspected malware, The Indian Express has learnt. On September 3, the National Cyber Coordination Centre, set up under a classified project “to generate necessary situational awareness of existing and potential cyber security threats and enable timely information sharing,” received intelligence from a US-based cybersecurity company that a “threat actor” had breached master “domain controllers” at the Kudankulam plant and at ISRO with a malware, later identified as a “Dtrack.” Sources said both NPCIL and ISRO were alerted on September 4. The breach at the Kudankulam plant became public on October 28 after some of the plant’s data showed up on virustotal.com, an online malware scanning service. How malware hits the system The malware targeting Kudankulam and ISRO in early September was identified as Dtrack. Designed to steal data, a Dtrack can give the “threat actor” complete control over all infected devices. In this case, it targeted domain controllers — the server computer that responds to security authentication requests. On October 29, Kudankulam Nuclear Power Project (KKNPP) said that no cyber-attack was possible on the plant’s standalone control system. The next day, however, NPCIL admitted there had been an infection “in the internet connected network used for administrative purposes” and that “the matter was immediately investigated by DAE specialists.” It added: “This (network) is isolated from the critical internal network. The networks are being continuously monitored. Investigation also confirms that the plant systems are not affected.” But there has been no word...
Google’s AutoML Back in May, Google revealed its AutoML project; artificial intelligence (AI) designed to help them create other AIs. Now, Google has announced that AutoML has beaten the human AI engineers at their own game by building machine-learning software that’s more efficient and powerful than the best human-designed systems. An AutoML system recently broke a record for categorizing images by their content, scoring 82 percent. While that’s a relatively simple task, AutoML also beat the human-built system at a more complex task integral to autonomous robots and augmented reality: marking the location of multiple objects in an image. For that task, AutoML scored 43 percent versus the human-built system’s 39 percent. These results are meaningful because even at Google, few people have the requisite expertise to build next generation AI systems. It takes a rarified skill set to automate this area, but once it is achieved, it will change the industry. “Today these are handcrafted by machine learning scientists and literally only a few thousands of scientists around the world can do this,”WIRED reports Google CEO Sundar Pichai said. “We want to enable hundreds of thousands of developers to be able to do it.” Image Credit: Google Much of metalearning is about imitating human neural networks and trying to feed more and more data through those networks. This isn’t — to use an old saw — rocket science. Rather, it’s a lot of plug and chug work that machines are actually well-suited to do once they’ve been trained. The hard part is imitating the brain structure in the first place, and at scales appropriate to take on more complex problems. The Future...
The month after Rudy Giuliani was named the US president’s cybersecurity adviser, the former mayor of New York queued up outside an Apple Store in San Francisco to get staff to reset his iPhone because he couldn’t remember the passcode. Giuliani had typed into the wrong code more than 10 times, seizing up the phone and an Apple staffer reset and restored the iPhone 6 using his iCloud backup, according to NBC News which today saw and posted a picture of the internal Apple memo concerning the visit. The yarn – which has not been disputed – has left security experts stunned. As an adviser on cybersecurity to President Trump and more recently as his personal lawyer, Giuliani has direct access to the White House and, if reports are to be believed, is in charge of a parallel foreign policy effort involving a range of countries, most notably Ukraine. Or, in other words, Giuliani’s phone is a prime target for surveillance efforts and he simply handed it over to a random Apple employee. Not only that but he couldn’t remember his own passcode, and has backed everything up to Apple’s iCloud. He is a walking security risk. A pic of the internal Apple memo on Giuliani’s visit, as obtained by NBC. The news that Giuliani has absolutely zero recognition of the risks associated with such behavior comes just days after it was revealed that he had twice butt-dialed a telly journalist this month, and left potentially incriminating voicemails. In one, he was heard discussing presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son – a topic that become the focus of...
National Cyber Security Strategy Canada’s Vision for Security and Prosperity in the Digital Age Virtually everything Canadians do is touched by technology in some way – on a per capita basis, we spend the most time online of any country in the world, at 43.5 hours per Canadian per month. We are heavily inter-connected and networked, a fact that enhances our quality of life, but also creates vulnerabilities. From commercial supply chains to the critical infrastructure that underpins our economy and our society, the risks in the cyber world have multiplied, accelerated, and grown increasingly malicious. Major corporations, industries and our international allies and partners are engaged in the global cyber challenge. But many others are not — representing a significant risk, but also a missed opportunity in this rapidly growing global industry. While it is important to be keenly aware of cyber threats, Canada’s cyber security policy cannot be driven by fear and defensiveness. With this in mind, the renewal of the existing Cyber Security Strategy has been undertaken with an emphasis on the enormous potential of Canada’s increased leadership in this field. In partnership with the Ministers of Defence, Innovation, Infrastructure, Public Services and the Treasury Board, we consulted directly with Canadians and key stakeholders about how the new strategy could best serve their security needs, while allowing them to benefit from the opportunities that the digital economy offers. Informed by over 2,000 submissions to our public consultation, the Strategy directly addresses the gaps and areas for improvement in Canada’s current cyber security climate. The Strategy’s core goals are reflected in Budget 2018’s substantial investments in cyber...
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