Is ChatGPT a cyber threat? Here’s a few items covering its use, for bad and good: Techcrunch (phishing emails, code); Dark Reading (business email compromise); CPO Magazine (testing smart contracts), and Cosive blog (writing defence analysis). And, yes, ChatGPT is a target, too.

Is ChatGPT a threat to comic writers? Not quite yet.

Not ChatGPT but a variety of AI platforms are being used to plagiarise online work. And AI-generated plagiarism is hard to detect in scientific abstracts.

Thirty-one CISO share their thoughts for the year ahead. Nothing really unexpected–social engineering, security culture, the ever-increasing attack surface, the effects of AI, specific attacks (eg credential stuffing) and defences (eg MFA, authentication, automation), and regulatory issues. I am starting to notice CISOs, and others, raise more often the sheer complexity of the technology, the interface with society and economy, complicated further by geopolitics.

Russia’s largest hacking conference showing the signs of techno-isolation.

Chris Patten, Chancellor of Oxford University, on the role of universities in democracy: ‘Universities should be bastions of freedom in any society: free from government interference in their teaching and research, while promoting the clash of ideas. Freedom of speech is fundamental to the identity of universities, enabling them to sustain a sense of common humanity and to uphold the tolerance and understanding that underpins any free society.’  

South Korea could rapidly acquire nuclear weapons if the North Korea threat intensifies.

The world needs more nuclear power, at least ‘235 new reactors in the next eight years alone just to hit net zero by 2050’. Australian refusal to consider a civilian nuclear industry risks leaving it behind in technological terms, again.

And that takes me to Donald Horne, The Lucky Country: ‘…there are two fields where reliance on luck and last-minute adjustment are not going to work; these are the fields of Australia’s strategic environment and of reactions to the demands of technology.’