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North Korea and Iran using AI for hacking, Microsoft says

US tech giant says it has detected threats from foreign countries that used or attempted to exploit generative AI it had developed

Microsoft has invested billions of dollars in OpenAI, and Wednesday’s announcement coincided with its release of a report noting that generative AI is expected to enhance malicious social engineering, leading to more sophisticated deepfakes and voice cloning. The Chinese cyber-espionage group known as Aquatic Panda – which targets a broad range of industries, higher education and governments from France to Malaysia – has interacted with the models “in ways that suggest a limited exploration of how LLMs can augment their technical operations”. The Chinese group Maverick Panda, which has targeted US defense contractors among other sectors for more than a decade, had interactions with large-language models suggesting it was evaluating their effectiveness as a source of information “on potentially sensitive topics, high profile individuals, regional geopolitics, US influence, and internal affairs”.

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