UN cybercrime treaty passes unanimous vote | Trump campaign says internal messages hacked by Iran

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The United Nations passed its first cybercrime treaty on Thursday in a unanimous vote supporting an agreement first put forward by Russia. The passage of the treaty is significant and establishes for the first time a global-level cybercrime and data access-enabling legal framework. The Record by Recorded Future
Donald Trump’s campaign has said some of its internal communications have been hacked and suggested it was targeted by Iranian operatives. US news website Politico reported on Saturday that it had been emailed campaign documents including internal research carried out on Trump’s running mate, Ohio Senator JD Vance. BBC
Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro is trying to accomplish something that seems impossible in the South American country: steer people away from WhatsApp and X. Associated Press

Southeast Asia needs more cybersecurity collaboration, with Australian help
The Strategist
Fitriani
While Southeast Asia was fortunate to avoid the worst effects of the global CrowdStrike outage in July, ASEAN is actively working to improve resilience for future cybersecurity risks. However, it must do more to build a rapid response mechanism that can immediately mitigate the damage from cyber incidents, and Australia must be more proactive in lending its expertise and resources to support ASEAN’s cybersecurity initiatives.

In Manila, how China set up an influence, espionage network
Rappler
Bea Cupin
As COVID-19 restrictions were slowly easing around the world, a man identified by Philippine intelligence operatives as an agent of China’s Ministry of State Security quietly slipped into the country, settling into a comfy, high-end condominium complex in one of Metro Manila’s posh enclaves. Canberra-based Australian Strategic Policy Institute, in a 2020 report, noted that the “Ministry of State Security, which is China’s civilian intelligence agency, is involved in and benefits from united front work.” China’s “strategic infiltration,” the same intelligence report noted, could limit the Philippines’ autonomy and could undermine its independence in the international sphere.

UN cybercrime treaty passes in unanimous vote
The Record by Recorded Future
Suzanne Smalley
The United Nations passed its first cybercrime treaty on Thursday in a unanimous vote supporting an agreement first put forward by Russia. The passage of the treaty is significant and establishes for the first time a global-level cybercrime and data access-enabling legal framework. The treaty was adopted late Thursday by the body’s Ad Hoc Committee on Cybercrime and will next go to the General Assembly for a vote in the fall. It is expected to sail through the General Assembly since the same states will be voting on it there. The agreement follows three years of negotiations capped by the final two-week session that has been underway.

New UN cybercrime treaty could threaten human rights
Scientific American
Kate Graham-Shaw
Experts from these human rights organisations and technology companies say that the treaty undermines the global human rights of freedom of speech and expression because it contains clauses that countries could interpret to internationally prosecute any perceived crime that takes place on a computer system.

How online hatred toward migrants spurs real-world violence
The New York Times
Steven Lee Myers, Adam Satariano, Leo Dominguez and Rumsey Taylor
Social media posts have been linked to a global network of agitators who have seized on the influx of migrants seeking political asylum or economic opportunity to build seething followings online. Ideas like this once festered on the fringes of the internet but are now increasingly breaking through to the mainstream on social media platforms like X and Telegram, which have done little to moderate the content. The ability to clip and share videos and to instantly translate foreign languages has also helped make it easier to spread hateful material across geographic and cultural divides.

Consumer data right ‘reset’ to reduce compliance costs, lift uptake
InnovationAus
Justin Hendry
Australia’s consumer data sharing regime will be simplified in a bid to reduce compliance costs for banks and energy providers while lifting uptake among consumers, under a series of reforms proposed by the federal government. The proposed changes confirm that the expansion of the consumer data right will resume from mid-2026, with non-bank lenders the first new sector to be brought into the scheme. But a ban on screen scraping – a practice that involves customers giving up their bank account log-in details and passwords to service providers – also remains a work in process, with Treasury given a further 12 months to advise on a path forward.

How China built tech prowess: chemistry classes and research labs
The New York Times
Keith Bradsher
China’s domination of electric cars, which is threatening to start a trade war, was born decades ago in university laboratories in Texas, when researchers discovered how to make batteries with minerals that were abundant and cheap. Companies from China have recently built on those early discoveries, figuring out how to make the batteries hold a powerful charge and endure more than a decade of daily recharges. They are inexpensively and reliably manufacturing vast numbers of these batteries, producing most of the world’s electric cars and many other clean energy systems.

Temu’s billionaire founder becomes China’s richest person
Bloomberg
Venus Feng, Diana Li, and Zheping Huang
After several moderately successful ventures in gaming and e-commerce, Colin Huang got sick and retired. At one point, the young entrepreneur stayed home for a year thinking about his next move. The former Google engineer eventually started Pinduoduo, an e-commerce platform known for selling dirt-cheap products with massive promotions, in 2015. He quickly ascended the ranks of the world’s richest people, with his net worth peaking at $71.5 billion in early 2021.

China wrestles with ‘quantity over quality’ in generative AI patents
Al Jazeera
Erin Hale
China has emerged as the world’s top producer of generative AI patents, but it is struggling to turn many of its ideas into action thanks to US export controls and longstanding struggles with its innovation culture at home. In July, the UN’s intellectual property agency reported that China had filed more than 38,000 generative AI patents over the past decade, more than all other countries combined.

Trump campaign says its internal messages hacked by Iran
BBC
Mike Wendling
Donald Trump’s campaign has said some of its internal communications have been hacked and suggested it was targeted by Iranian operatives. US news website Politico reported on Saturday that it had been emailed campaign documents including internal research carried out on Trump’s running mate, Ohio Senator JD Vance. A Trump campaign spokesman told the BBC the documents were illegally obtained by “foreign sources hostile to the United States”. In a statement to US media, Iranian officials denied any connection to the hack.

Trump falsely accuses Harris of using AI for massive crowd at rally
Huffington Post
Taiyler S. Mitchell
Former President Donald Trump on Sunday falsely accused his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, of using artificial intelligence to give the appearance of a more extensive crowd during a Wednesday campaign rally near Detroit, Michigan. The twice-impeached Republican presidential candidate, who is seemingly obsessed with the concept of crowd sizes, was echoing conservative commentator Chuck Callesto ― who has 37.5k followers on Truth social and 760.5K followers on X, formerly Twitter. Callesto previously made false claims online that have gone viral.

With US Chips Act money mostly divvied up, the real test begins
Bloomberg
Mackenzie Hawkins
The Biden administration is nearly finished divvying up $39 billion in grants under the Chips and Science Act, the landmark bipartisan legislation aimed at revitalizing the domestic semiconductor industry. The bigger test still lies ahead. The Chips Act, enacted two years ago Friday, is the nation’s most audacious foray into industrial policy since World War II. It’s essentially a bet that four companies — Intel Corp., Micron Technology Inc., Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and Samsung Electronics Co. — can bring sophisticated chip production back to the US.

While Silicon Valley is divided, hackers give the Harris campaign a $150,000 boost
Politico
Joseph Gedeon and Maggie Miller
Vice President Kamala Harris wasn’t at the world’s largest hacking conference this week, but her presidential ambitions received an unexpected boost when cybersecurity professionals and hackers — rallied by former Biden administration officials — raised over $150,000 for her campaign at a sideline event. The “Hackers for Harris” fundraiser on Thursday afternoon drew an estimated 150 attendees to the Las Vegas Convention Center, where the DEF CON event is being held.

Maduro goes after X and WhatsApp as pressure mounts to back up his claim to victory in Venezuela
Associated Press
Regina Garcia Cano
Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro is trying to accomplish something that seems impossible in the South American country: steer people away from WhatsApp and X. Maduro’s announcement last week that he had ordered a 10-day block on access to X in Venezuela is the latest in a series of efforts by his government to try to suppress information sharing among people voicing doubts about his claim to victory in the July 28 presidential election.

Myanmar junta’s VPN ban, internet controls expose citizens to more cyber threats
South China Morning Post
Surachanee Sriyai
For Myanmar, access to online information has always been limited even during the relatively open political period of around 2016 to 2021, in part due to the slow digital infrastructure development compared to the rest of Southeast Asia. In 2023, Myanmar registered a 44 per cent internet penetration rate and 15 million social media users, whereas its immediate neighbour Thailand had reached 85 per cent internet penetration and over 52 million social media users. However, since the coup d’etat of 2021, cyberspace has been further constricted by regulation.

The cyberspace impact of a maritime crisis in Southeast Asia
The Diplomat
Muhammad Faizal Bin Abdul Rahman
In defense scenario planning, a plausible feared future may comprise the coalescence of three geostrategic issues: unchecked tensions between China and the United States, armed conflict over Taiwan, and an escalating gray-zone contest between China and claimant states in the South China Sea. This triumvirate could result in a maritime crisis, characterized by a situation on the precipice of regional conflict, in Southeast Asia.

Europe’s auto chipmakers have a deepening China habit
Bloomberg
Alan Crawford
As advanced semiconductor companies in the US and allied countries pull back from China, a less glamorous sector of the chip market is turning even more into the world’s second-biggest economy. This season’s earnings show just how important China is to the largest players in automotive chipmaking at a moment when sales are suffering due to inventory gluts and slowing adoption in the West for electric vehicles, a key driver of demand.

Video doorbells, CCTV, facial recognition: how the police tracked UK rioters
The Guardian
James Tapper and Shanti Das
The hunt to find the rioters and the people who incited them began the moment the first brick was thrown. But the efforts to catch them will last weeks or months, and involve super-recognisers, specialist software, video doorbells and, in a few cases, criminal stupidity. A dizzying number of newly convicted rioters and online agitators were this weekend waking up in a prison cell on the first day of their sentence. Of the more than 700 arrests made so far, about 300 people had been charged by Friday night, with more arrests and court appearances on Saturday.

Looking back at the ballot – securing the general election
National Cyber Security Centre (UK)
NCSC CEO Felicity Oswald shares reflections on keeping the 2024 General Election safe. On 4 July 2024, tens of millions of people cast their votes for thousands of candidates across 650 constituencies in the UK general election. Within just 36 hours of the polls opening, the votes had been counted, a new prime minister appointed and a new government was already taking shape. Delivering an election with less than seven weeks’ notice showed hugely impressive agility by the UK Electoral Commission, local authorities and others. And doing so securely at a time of heightened geopolitical tensions, enhanced cyber threats and unprecedented technological change is an even greater feat.

Reform UK tracked private user information without consent
The Guardian
Shanti Das
A hidden tracking tool in the website for Reform UK collected private browsing data about potentially millions of people, often without consent, and shared it with Facebook for use in targeted advertising. An Observer investigation has found that people visiting the website for Nigel Farage’s anti-immigration party had details of their activity captured by a digital surveillance tool known as a Meta pixel.

Children to be taught how to spot extremist content and fake news online
The Guardian
Nadeem Badshah
Children in England will be taught how to spot extremist content and misinformation online under planned changes to the school curriculum, the education secretary has said. Bridget Phillipson said she was launching a review of the curriculum in primary and secondary schools to embed critical thinking across multiple subjects and arm children against “putrid conspiracy theories”. One example may include pupils analysing newspaper articles in English lessons in a way that would help differentiate fabricated stories from true reporting.

What opposition to delivery drones shows about big tech’s disrespect for democracy
The Guardian
John Naughton
Scratch a digital capitalist and you’ll find a technological determinist – someone who believes that technology drives history. These people see themselves as agents of what Joseph Schumpeter famously described as “creative destruction”. They revel in “moving fast and breaking things” as the Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, used to put it until his PR people convinced him it was not a good vibe, not least because it implied leaving taxpayers to pick up the broken pieces.

Security bugs in ransomware leak sites helped save six companies from paying hefty ransoms
Tech Crunch
Zack Whittaker
A security researcher says six companies were saved from having to pay potentially hefty ransom demands, in part thanks to rookie security flaws found in the web infrastructure used by the ransomware gangs themselves. Two companies received the decryption keys to unscramble their data without having to pay the cybercriminals a ransom, and four hacked crypto companies were alerted before the ransomware gang could begin encrypting their files, marking rare wins for the targeted victim organizations.

What lies beneath: the growing threat to the hidden network of cables that power the internet
The Guardian
Jonathan Yerushalmy
It was the opening days of 2022, in the aftermath of a huge volcanic eruption, when Tonga went dark. The strength of the Hunga-Tonga-Hunga-Ha’apai eruption severed internet connectivity with Tonga, causing a communication blackout at just the moment that a crisis was unfolding. The lack of connectivity had hampered recovery efforts, while at the same time devastating businesses and local finances, many of which depend on remittances from abroad. The disaster exposed the extreme vulnerabilities of the infrastructure that underpins the workings of the internet.

The Sydney Dialogue
ASPI
The Sydney Dialogue was created to help bring together governments, businesses and civil society to discuss and progress policy options. We will forecast the technologies of the next decade that will change our societies, economies and national security, prioritising speakers and delegates who are willing to push the envelope. We will promote diverse views that stimulate real conversations about the best ways to seize opportunities and minimise risks.

Stop the World: TSD Summit Sessions: Technology innovation and investment with Gilman Louie
Stop the World
The Sydney Dialogue (TSD) is just weeks away. To help our listeners prepare for the forthcoming discussions at TSD, we are bringing you an interview with Gilman Louie, who was the first CEO of In-Q-Tel— set up in 1999 by the CIA as an independent, not-for-profit strategic investment firm —and Commissioner on the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence from 2018-2021. Gilman is co-founder and partner at Alsop Louie Partners, and he is also a co-founder and CEO of the America’s Frontier Fund, so there is no one better placed to talk about strategic competition, innovation and investment.

Analyst or Researcher – Climate and Security Policy Centre
ASPI
We are seeking a high-performing individual to join our Climate and Security Policy Centre as a Researcher/Analyst. We are looking to recruit individuals to support the assessment of security risks posed by climate change in the Indo-Pacific. The role will involve data and policy analysis. The closing date for applications is 16 August 2024– an early application is advised as we reserve the right to close the vacancy early if suitable applications are received.

Receptionist/Corporate Coordinator
ASPI
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute is looking for an experienced Receptionist/Corporate Coordinator. This is an outstanding opportunity for a highly organised and skilled individual to join our dynamic, positive, and hardworking team. The Receptionist/Corporate Coordinator will handle daily administrative operations at ASPI, serving as the primary contact for visitors and phone inquiries. The role involves a variety of administrative tasks and several corporate responsibilities. The closing date for applications is 16 August 2024– an early application is advised as we reserve the right to close the vacancy early if suitable applications are received.