1. Russian spies have developed an artificial intelligence tool that Moscow is using to meddle in elections in Britain and the United States on a scale “exponentially greater” than ever before, Ukraine’s national security adviser has warned. In an interview with The Times, Oleksiy Danilov said that AI had enabled Russia to substantially ramp up its disinformation campaigns, designed to sow division and influence public opinion, and that Moscow now had specific units dedicated to every country holding an election in Europe.He said: “Artificial intelligence is a huge step forward for Russia and it makes the impact [of their meddling] exponentially greater.”
2. Ransomware groups are bouncing back faster from law enforcement busts. Six days before Christmas, the US Department of Justice loudly announced a win in the ongoing fight against the scourge of ransomware: An FBI-led, international operation had targeted the notorious hacking group known as BlackCat or AlphV, releasing decryption keys to foil its ransom attempts against hundreds of victims and seizing the dark web sites it had used to threaten and extort them. “In disrupting the BlackCat ransomware group, the Justice Department has once again hacked the hackers,” deputy attorney general Lisa Monaco declared in a statement. Two months and one week later, however, those hackers don't appear particularly “disrupted.” For the last seven days and counting, BlackCat has held hostage the medical firm Change Healthcare, crippling its software in hospitals and pharmacies across the United States, leading to delays in drug prescriptions for an untold number of patients. The ongoing outage at Change Healthcare, first reported to be a BlackCat attack by Reuters, represents a particularly grim incident in the ransomware epidemic not just due to its severity, its length, and the potential toll on victims' health. Ransomware-tracking analysts say it also illustrates how even law enforcement's wins against ransomware groups appear to be increasingly short-lived, as the hackers that law enforcement target in carefully coordinated busts simply rebuild and restart their attacks with impunity. (Source: wired.com)
3. Vladimir Putin’s forces have rehearsed using tactical nuclear weapons at an early stage of conflict with a major world power, according to leaked Russian military files that include training scenarios for an invasion by China. The classified papers, seen by the Financial Times, describe a threshold for using tactical nuclear weapons that is lower than Russia has ever publicly admitted, according to experts who reviewed and verified the documents. The cache consists of 29 secret Russian military files drawn up between 2008 and 2014, including scenarios for war-gaming and presentations for naval officers, which discuss operating principles for the use of nuclear weapons. Criteria for a potential nuclear response range from an enemy incursion on Russian territory to more specific triggers, such as the destruction of 20 per cent of Russia’s strategic ballistic missile submarines. (Source: ft.com)
4. Russia’s defensive plans expose deeply held suspicions of China among Moscow’s security elite even as Putin began forging an alliance with Beijing, which as early as 2001 included a nuclear no-first-strike agreement. In the years since, Russia and China have deepened their partnership, particularly since Xi Jinping took power in Beijing in 2012. The war in Ukraine has cemented Russia’s status as a junior partner in their relationship, with China throwing Moscow a vital economic lifeline to help stave off western sanctions. Yet even as the countries became closer, the training materials show Russia’s eastern military district was rehearsing multiple scenarios depicting a Chinese invasion. (Source: ft.com)
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