Lifeboat Foundation

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Deepfakes aren’t new, but this AI-powered technology has emerged as a pervasive threat in spreading misinformation and increasing identity fraud. The pandemic made matters worse by creating the ideal conditions for bad actors to take advantage of organizations’ and consumers’ blindspots, further exacerbating fraud and identity theft. Fraud stemming from deepfakes spiked during the pandemic, and poses significant challenges for financial institutions and fintechs that need to accurately authenticate and verify identities.

As cybercriminals continue to use tools like deepfakes to fool identity verification solutions and gain unauthorized access to digital assets and online accounts, it’s essential for organizations to automate the identity verification process to better detect and combat fraud.

Excerpt from an interview by Rich Roll to Peter Diamandis, founder and executive officer of XPrize Foundation, co-founder of Singularity University in Silicon Valley, CA., three-time best selling author, public speaker, philanthropist, and prolific investor.

Peter Diamandis has started over 20 companies in the areas of longevity, space, venture capital and education.

Continue reading “Peter Diamandis on Longevity Escape Velocity (clip from Rich Roll Podcast) (S/T en Español)” »

Researchers have found a spike in ransomware, banking trojans and other cyber-attacks across the globe including in India and as per recent data from Japanese cybersecurity firm, Trend Micro. The data showed that India ranks third in terms of Emotet attacks, a kind of malware originally designed as a banking Trojan and is aimed at stealing financial data.

Data from Trend Micro shows that Emotet has continued to thrive in 2022. The first half of 2022 saw a whopping 976.7% increase in Emotet detections at 148,700, compared to the first half of 2021 which was pegged at 13811.

Japan leads with 107,669, followed by the US (4,937) in the second spot and India occupying the third place (3,729) number of detection. Italy (3,442) and Brazil (3,006) are the other countries with the highest number of Emotet detections in the first half of 2022. These attacks have globally increased by over 10 times in the first half of 2022 compared to the first half of the previous year, likely because of prolific threat actors using it as part of their operations, the research said.

Marketing is one of the areas of business operations where it is widely predicted that artificial intelligence (AI) will drive enormous change. In fact, a McKinsey study found that, along with sales, it is the single business function where it will have the most financial impact. This means that if you’re a marketer and you’re not using AI, you’re missing out on the benefits of what is possibly the most transformational technology.

Actually, though, the chances that there are people out there doing marketing today and not using AI in any shape or form is somewhat unlikely.

Continue reading “Artificial Intelligence And The Future Of Marketing” »

Y Combinator’s latest cohort of founders have opinions on the future of fintech. One-fifth of the accelerator’s Summer 2022 batch, which spans 240 companies, is working on solving issues in the financial space. The pitches range from building the Square for micro-merchants in Latin America to creating a way to angel invest in your favorite athlete.

And while the pitches are diverse, some concentrations show key ways that a group of vetted entrepreneurs are thinking about the landscape’s shift in light of finicky venture markets, a downturn, and some public market meltdowns. The most popular problem area among this batch’s fintech cohort has to do with payments, which is unsurprising. The story really begins with which focus made second place: neobanks.

Circa 2016 face_with_colon_three

The Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft (DPG) with a tradition extending back to 1,845 is the largest physical society in the world with more than 61,000 members. The DPG sees itself as the forum and mouthpiece for physics and is a non-profit organisation that does not pursue financial interests. It supports the sharing of ideas and thoughts within the scientific community, fosters physics teaching and would also like to open a window to physics for all those with a healthy curiosity.

The droppers are designed to drop a new version of SharkBot, dubbed V2 by Dutch security firm ThreatFabric, which features an updated command-and-control (C2) communication mechanism, a domain generation algorithm (DGA), and a fully refactored codebase.

Fox-IT said it discovered a newer version 2.25 on August 22, 2022, that introduces a function to siphon cookies when victims log in to their bank accounts, while also removing the ability to automatically reply to incoming messages with links to the malware for propagation.

When one of China’s biggest celebrities, Simon Gong —also known as Gong Jun—released a new music video in June 2022, it quickly attracted 15 million views on the country’s Twitter-like microblogging site Weibo. But the event also stood out for a different reason—one that only eagle-eyed fans might have noticed. The singer in the video was not Gong himself, but a digital replica created by Baidu, a “digital human” powered by artificial intelligence (AI). Likewise, the lyrics and melody were generated by AI, marking the recording as China’s first AI-generated content music video.

Deloitte defines digital humans as AI-powered virtual beings that can produce a whole range of human body language. In recent years, businesses focused on providing round-the-clock services, as well as the media and entertainment industry, are increasingly adopting this nascent technology, aiming to capture a growing market. And as digital humans increasingly populate other sectors like retail, health care, and finance, Emergen Research forecasts that the global market for digital humans will jump to about $530 billion in 2030, from $10 billion in 2020.

Oxford quantum physicist Nikita Gourianov tore into the quantum computing industry this week, comparing the “fanfare” around the tech to a financial bubble in a searing commentary piece for the Financial Times.

In other words, he wrote, it’s far more hype than substance.

It’s a scathing, but also perhaps insightful, analysis of a burgeoning field that, at the very least, still has a lot to prove.