UL NO. 442: Crowdstrike Analysis, Cannabis=Soma?, NK Github SE, AI Weaponry

Chinese Solar Builds, DOJ Domain Seizures, Scattered Spider Arrest, Kaiser AI, and more…

Author

Daniel Miessler
July 22, 2024

SECURITY | AI | MEANING :: Unsupervised Learning is my continuous stream of original ideas, story analysis, tooling, and mental models designed to help humans lead successful and meaningful lives in a world full of AI.

TOC

NOTES

Hey there!

  • Legend post by Leigh Honeywell 👆

  • Had a wonderful couple days celebrating my best bud’s birthday in Colorado! Happy Birthday, Jason! MORE

  • I did a presentation for a UN group on the future of AI and employability, and it should be coming out soon on YouTube.

  • We’re doing another UL Dinner in Vegas. Stay tuned in chat for the deets.

  • Mad props to all the people who had to hustle and grind this weekend after Blue Friday 👏

Ok, let’s get to it…

MY WORK

Heads-down on the AI class, which is on the 26th, 9AM PST. SIGN-UPS CLOSING WEDNESDAY

SECURITY

The Crowdstrike Outage — Banks, airlines, hospitals, media companies, and tens of thousands of other businesses got hit with a global IT outage that locked workers out of their devices. The issue was a bad update to the Crowdstrike client, which prevented bootup and required someone to physically interact with the machine in safe mode. | MORE

💡It appears that this might have been the largest IT outage ever—ironically, even bigger than Y2K, which did mostly nothing.

I’m trying to come up with lessons-learned here, but perhaps the biggest is around PR. The CEO came out and said—basically—”Don’t worry, this isn’t a security problem” (Paraphrasing)

Which is a really bad thing to say when the internet has been turned off. It’s like, I don’t care what you call this thing that’s happening, but it’s definitely bad.

He later apologized fully and put out better language, but I liked my buddy Chris Hoff’s proposed language better, which was something like, “This was not a security attack against Crowdstrike or its customers, but an outage caused by a bad software update.”

Another thought I had was that this would be less likely to happen if Microsoft was performing the EDR function, because—presumably—they would be more familiar with all the moving parts, have more integrated testing, etc.

It just seems to me like the natural evolution here is a lot like Defender, where the platform eventually catches up to the quality of the standalone, and it gets less and less smart to use something not part of the OS.

🔧A new threat actor called CrystalRay is using an open-source tool called SSH-Snake to move laterally across networks, exfiltrate credentials, and deploy cryptomining malware. The malware can modify itself to remain fileless and self-propagating. MORE

GitHub has warned developers about a social engineering campaign by the Lazarus Group (North Korean) targeting developers in cryptocurrency, gambling, and cybersecurity. They gain trust over time and then start submitting malware. MORE

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So by the end you have a fully documented set of steps that were taken to research an alert, and a conclusion on whether or not it was malicious—all with full documentation.

I’m so impressed with it that I’m now an advisor as well.

Palmer Luckey, the guy who created Oculus, is now making AI weapons for Ukraine through his company Anduril. He started Anduril to build AI-driven weapons like drones and submarines, which are now being used by the Pentagon and sent to Ukraine. MORE

China is installing record amounts of solar and wind energy, adding 10 gigawatts of wind and solar capacity every two weeks, which is like building five large nuclear power plants weekly. This really makes me mad. I want the US to do this, and more. MORE

Iran and China are increasing their foreign influence efforts, using social media to stoke discord and promote anti-U.S. narratives. Google blocked over 10,000 instances of Chinese influence activity in Q1 2024 alone. MORE

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The U.S. Department of Justice seized two domains and searched nearly 1,000 social media accounts used by Russian actors to spread pro-Kremlin disinformation. MORE

Cloudflare says nearly 7% of all internet traffic is malicious, with DDoS attacks making up over 37% of all mitigated traffic. In Q1 2024 alone, they blocked 4.5 million unique DDoS attacks, and the sophistication of these attacks is increasing. MORE

UK police arrested a 17-year-old suspected of being part of the Scattered Spider hacking group and involved in the 2023 MGM Resorts ransomware attack. AKA: The reason DEFCON is way further North in Vegas this year. MORE

AI / TECH

Realtime Video Transcription With Timestamps (Whisper Diarization) MORE

Beijing's support has seen China make up ground in the AI race, but it has also handcuffed AI companies with some of the world’s tightest restrictions, many of them political. This dual approach could end up stifling innovation in the long run. MORE

💡I think barring them stealing some pinnacle AI tech that gets them advanced AGI or ASI, their model will ultimately hurt them for two reasons:

  1. When you have to filter everything, you just move slower.

  2. The people who want to move fastest will leave China for the US / Canada / EU.

Kaiser Permanente is using AI, wearables, and other tech to bring healthcare directly to patients. Very AI-forward approach from them. I like it. MORE

Sam Altman revealed that OpenAI’s Voice Mode alpha release is coming later this month.

💡I’m with my bud Matthew Berman on this one:

Andrej Karpathy is launching Eureka Labs to create AI teaching assistants for education. The startup aims to leverage generative AI to help students through course materials, starting with an AI course called LLM101n. MORE

Google has launched its Project Oscar, an open-source platform that enables development teams to create AI agents that monitor issues, manage bugs, and handle various aspects of the software lifecycle—all through natural language interactions. MORE

Omega’s AI Will Map How Olympic Athletes Win — Omega is using AI to map out how Olympic athletes win by analyzing their full performance, not just the start and finish times. This includes using motion sensors on athletes' clothing to capture every detail of their movements. MORE

The U.S. is thinking about new trade restrictions that could stop Nvidia from selling its HGX-H20 AI GPUs to China, which might cost Nvidia around $12 billion in revenue. MORE

💡This would hurt me in the stocks for sure, but I’m thinking that’d be temporary. Hopefully. ← Not financial advice.

Beijing scientists have developed the world’s smallest and lightest solar-powered drone, weighing just 4.21g with a 200mm wingspan. It can fly non-stop during daylight thanks to its electrostatic motor, which is 200-300% more efficient than traditional electromagnetic motors. I wants it. MORE

A Florida (it’s either Florida man or DNS) man got arrested for shooting down a Walmart delivery drone, claiming it was spying on him. Shooting at drones is treated as a felony, similar to firing at a passenger aircraft, with penalties up to 20 years in prison. MORE

Waymo Wants to Bring Robotaxis to SFO — Waymo is pushing to get approval for robotaxi pickups and drop-offs at San Francisco International Airport. MORE

Microsoft Lays Off DEI Team — Microsoft laid off its diversity, equity, and inclusion team, saying DEI is "no longer business critical." MORE

Andreessen Horowitz argues that bad government policies are now the biggest threat to tech startups, which they call "Little Tech." They believe American technology supremacy depends on these startups and that the government should support them rather than favoring big incumbents. MORE

Google is shutting down its URL shortening service, so any links created with it will stop working. If you have any important links using this service, you'll need to update them soon. MORE

💡I’m pretty sure Google will soon sell YouTube to Johnson & Johnson and GMail to Luxotica, and then go full speed into the “wtf are we doing” business.

It’s the single most perplexing business I’ve ever seen.

They were first on GenAI. They wrote the paper. And now they’re completely lapped by not just OpenAI but Anthropic as well. How are you in like 5th place when you have all the people and all the money?

They’re like the opposite of Cloudflare, which does small things really well that add up. Google is slowly getting rid of all the best things it has.

The main thing Google is growing is its graveyard.

Such a colossal waste of money and talent. Their failures should be studied for centuries as an example of what happens when you don’t lead with UX-focused product management, rather than “throw shit at wall”-focused engineering.

HUMANS

Iran-backed Houthi rebels say they were behind a drone attack on Tel Aviv that killed one person and injured several others. MORE

USA Household Income Distribution by State — A Reddit user shared a detailed visualization of household income distribution across different states in the USA. MORE

A new meta-analysis shows that toothbrushing can significantly reduce hospital-acquired pneumonia (HAP) in ICU patients. This simple intervention could lead to 17,000 fewer deaths each year from ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP). MORE

Young Adulthood Is No Longer One of Life's Happiest Times — Research shows that young adulthood is now one of the most unhappy times in life, with a significant rise in despair among young people, especially women aged 18 to 25. MORE

Most of Gen Z Using TikTok for Health Advice — A new survey found that 56% of Gen Z are using TikTok for wellness, diet, and fitness advice, with 34% relying on it as their main source of health information. MORE

Ask HN: Every day feels like prison — A mid-thirties guy in tech feels trapped in a 9-5 job he no longer cares about and is struggling to build a business on the side. Despite making major life changes, he still feels stuck and unhappy, fearing this might be his life for the next 30-40 years. MORE

IDEAS

Sam Altman is simultaneously building AGI and doing big studies on UBI. It’s super obvious what he’s doing, and I think it’s mostly the right thing.

I mean, all you have to believe for this to be a good thing is that:

  1. AGI will remove a lot of jobs

  2. People will need money to survive while they figure out what else to do

And I think those are really safe bets.

DISCOVERY

Llema — A new recon/security tool that runs via Llamda in your browser. MORE

Respotter — A honeypot for Responder that tricks attackers into revealing their presence. | by C.J. May | MORE

Exo — Run your own AI cluster at home on everyday devices. | by ExoLabs | MORE

Why Aren't We Using SSH for Everything? | by Shazow | MORE

Gray Swan AI — Specializes in AI safety and security tools to assess and safeguard AI deployments. | by Gray Swan AI | MORE

Costco's Apocalypse Bucket — Costco is selling a 25-year shelf-life emergency food kit called the "apocalypse bucket" for $79.99. It includes 150 freeze-dried and dehydrated meal servings, ranging from teriyaki rice to apple cinnamon cereal. MORE

RECOMMENDATION OF THE WEEK

Don’t ask what someone’s politics are. Ask them what their ideal world looks like, including questions like these:

  • Are there multiple religions?

  • Are there multiple ethnic groups?

  • Are people free to love whoever they want?

  • Do they all live together?

  • Who are the most famous people in that world?

  • Who gets paid the least?

  • Who gets paid the most?

  • What happens to someone if they’re truly disabled and can’t work?

  • What happens to someone if they’re too lazy to work?

  • What happens to someone who is addicted to drugs?

I think many of our disagreements are about how and not what. I know a lot of people who support Trump, for example, who would say:

  • You can be gay

  • There can be other religions

  • All the ethnic groups should live together

  • There should be a social safety net

  • Etc.

So if you are on the left, and you hear someone on the right say those things, that’s an opportunity for a REAL conversation. A conversation about how. Not what. And vice versa.

Bottom line: I think we all in the roughly 80% center agree about a lot more than it feels like right now.

As we go into this election cycle, try to use this exercise to realize this with more people.

APHORISM OF THE WEEK

❝

Silence is a fence around wisdom.

German Proverb