The Blacklynx Brief - Vol.2

Welcome to the second edition of the Blacklynx Brief.

Our goal is to - like a good sommelier carefully selects a wine to go with your dinner - to select the latest news from the fields of cybersecurity, AI and tech. But mainly cyber and AI - because we believe these two fields will dominate the world we are living in. And as you will read in this letter - both disciplines are intertwined with each other.

There’s one guarantee we’re giving you as well here : the articles are handwritten. There are no large language models involved.

Let’s kick things off with the cybersecurity news for the week of August 14th.
Both the AI and Cyber world held some of their most important conferences last week. And when you say conference - you’re sure to get a lot of new announcements or rumors.

Let’s dive in !

Cybersecurity News

The cybersecurity news was relatively slow this week. Perhaps hackers DO take holidays !

Black Hat USA 2023 Concludes

Every week in August the biggest hacker conference in the world is held in the city of sin. It’s the only place where you see top hackers and FBI agents attend the same talks and it’s a place where you shouldn’t bring your own laptop. This - as an aside. The speakers are top-notch and if you’re interested in offensive security this is your paradise. Presentations are up.

Zoom Terms of Service

The PR department at Zoom is not having a good time as of late. Last week, they asked their employees to come back to the office, which is ironic if you’re Zoom. This week they updated their terms of service. In these terms it appeared that Zoom would train AI models on the content of customer calls. Customer pushback resulted in an update to the terms of service to clarify that “Zoom does not use any of your audio, video, chat, screen sharing, attachments or other communications-like Customer Content (such as poll results, whiteboard and reactions) to train Zoom or third-party artificial intelligence models.”

Magento Webshops Exploited

According to researchers at Akamai - a campaign is underway targeting companies running Magento 2 webshops. Magento is an e-commerce platform. This has been ongoing since January 2023 and all kinds of trouble can be expected at companies that don’t patch their Magento-based webshop.

Ford Infotainment System Vulnerability

There’s a “buffer overflow” vulnerability in the SYNC3 entertainment system that is used in Ford vehicles. In theory the system could be hijacked by an outsider but Ford has stated that the vehicles are safe to drive and are working on a patch.

AI News

Major AI Conferences with relatively major announcements

Last week two very important conferences took place. SIGGRAPH, a conference that delves into the very latest in computer graphics and the AI4 conference in Vegas, dedicated solely in AI. SIGGRAPH saw Jensen Huang - the CEO of NVIDIA take the stage (see below) while the AI4 conference was all about “Generative AI”. Also more below

NVIDIA’s announces the GH-200

NVIDIA introduced a new type of “Superchip”: the Grace Hopper 200 or GH200. I won’t go too deep into the rabbit hole here but a “superchip” is basically a unit containing an NVIDIA Grace CPU (central processing unit) and an NVIDIA Hopper GPU (graphical processing unit). Connected to each other via a chip-to-chip interconnect. It’s designed for use in datacenters specifically for AI applications. It’s able to transfer data at over 5TB per second. Which - if you’re a nerd - will make you giggle at how fast this is.

AI Workbench

NVIDIA also announced the release of ‘AI Workbench’ - a tool for generative AI developers. Normally developing generative AI models involves selecting pre-trained models (like an LLM), it requires an infrastructure that can handle big workloads and it needs to integrate with services like Github or tools like Hugging Face. Plus there’s the aspect of managing credentials, API keys and (here’s a link with our other main topic) data security. AI Workbench promises to facilitate all that.

OpenUSD is the way

It does not stand for US Dollar but for Universal Scene Description. OpenUSD is a file format that was invented by Pixar Studios. It’s an “open and extensible ecosystem for describing, composing, simulating and collaboration between 3D worlds”. NVIDIA also announced at this conference that they want to establish OpenUSD as the only file format for 3D animations and to support it as the open standard that will enable the metaverse. NVIDIA developed their own Large Language Model (aka AI chatbot) called ChatUSD to assist developers in working with the OpenUSD format.

Are Actors in Trouble?

One of the highlights of the AI4 conference - which as we mentioned above was mostly about “Generative AI” - was the rise of consumer-level AI tools that could impact actors. So-called “deepfakes” have become so good that the time where we don’t need human actors anymore isn’t that far away. Very bad moment in time to have an actor’s strike.

Midjourney 5.3 is dropping soon

Midjourney are working on version 6 of their fantastic Generative AI engine. This week - however - we’ll see the release of version 5.3. For this version three exciting options are added : panning, similar to zoom but you can now pan away from your generated image. Inpainting , which allows to remove unwanted objects in an image and what I’m mostly looking forward to : the “Weird” button. This is a new feature that will encourage some unconvential ideas from your initially generated image.

AI and Password Security

Need more proof that AI and cyber can converge? AI researchers have developed a system that can guess your password by listening to the SOUNDS OF YOUR KEYBOARD, which opens up the avenue of all kinds of evil in the future.

ChatGPT-5 and GPTBot

If you’ve used ChatGPT you know the information cut-off is September 2021. OpenAI’s intention with ChatGPT version 5 is clear. Just like Google does with their web crawlers - they have released GPTBot. This is a crawler that will attempt to visit every single webpage on the internet. You can disallow the bot from collecting the information from your website by adding a disallow parameter into the “robots.txt” file on your website. If that sounds like gibberish to you - stick around - you’ll learn stuff ;)

To be honest - there was a LOT of AI news this week. This is what we think is the most significant. Stay tuned for more

That’s it from us for this week - looking forward to serving up Volume 3 next Friday. Keep an eye on your inbox and please share the newsletter.

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