iPad goes into combat in Ukraine fighter jets. Photo: Ukraine Air Force
Ukraine’s Air Force needs to launch modern U.S.-made missiles from Soviet-era fighter jets in combat. The surprise solution to the disconnect? iPad.
Apple tablets are reportedly giving the vintage aircraft the ability to control a variety of weapon systems supplied by Western countries after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
iPad goes into combat in Ukraine
The Ukrainian Air Force gave The Telegraph a video of one of its pilots using an iPad in the cockpit of a Soviet Su-27 fighter.
The tablets are reportedly being used to control U.S. AGM-88 High-speed Anti-Radiation Missiles against Russian radar systems. They also give pilots control of French Hammer precision-guided bombs and U.K. Storm Shadow cruise missiles.
U.S. Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment, William LaPlante, said last week:
“They [the Ukrainians] have a lot of the Russian and Soviet-era aircraft. Working with the Ukrainians, we’ve been able to take many Western weapons and get them to work on their aircraft where it’s basically controlled by an iPad by the pilot. And they’re flying it in conflict like a week after we get it to him.”
Old and new
The Su-27 isn’t a decrepit relic of a bygone past. True, it went into service in 1985, but it’s a twin-engine supersonic, super-maneuverable fighter that’s still in service in Russia, China and elsewhere.
But it wasn’t designed to control missiles and bombs supplied by a range of countries supporting Ukraine’s efforts to defend itself against the Russian invasion. Still, updating older aircraft with modern electronics is a standard practice. The process doesn’t usually involve simply strapping an iPad into the cockpit, though.
Going into air combat in Ukraine is an extreme example of the versatility and capability of iPad.
Artificial intelligence is not new. But rapid innovation in the last year now means consumers and businesses alike are more aware of the technology’s capabilities than ever before, and, are most likely using it themselves in some shape or form.
The AI revolution also has a downside: it empowers fraudsters. This is one of the most significant effects we’re witnessing, rather than more productivity and creativity in the workplace. The evolution of large language models and the use of generative AI is giving fraudsters new tactics to explore for their attacks, which are now of a quality, depth and scale that has the potential for increasingly disastrous consequences.
This increased risk is felt by both consumers and businesses alike. Experian’s 2023 Identity and Fraud Report found that just over half (52%) of UK consumers feel like they’re more of a target for online fraud now than they were a year ago, while over 50% of businesses report a high level of concern about fraud risk. It is vital that both businesses and consumers educate themselves on the types of attack that are happening, and what they can do to combat them.
Eduardo Castro
Managing Director ID&Fraud UK&I, Experian.
Getting familiar with the new types of fraud attack
There are two key trends emerging in the AI fraud space: the hyper-personalization of attacks, and the subsequent increase of biometric attacks. Hyper-personalization means that unsuspecting consumers are increasingly being scammed by targeted attacks that trick them into making instant transfers and real-time payments.
For businesses, email compromise attacks can now use generative AI to copy the voice or writing style of a particular company to make more genuine-looking requests such as encouraging them to carry out financial transactions or share confidential information.
Generative AI makes it easier for anyone to launch these attacks, by allowing them to create and manage many fake bank, ecommerce, healthcare, government, and social media accounts and apps that look real.
These attacks are only set to increase. Historically, generative AI wasn’t powerful enough to be used at scale to create a believable representation of someone else’s voice or a face. But now, it impossible to distinguish with a human eye or ear a deep-fake face or voice from a genuine one.
Sign up to the TechRadar Pro newsletter to get all the top news, opinion, features and guidance your business needs to succeed!
As businesses increasingly adopt additional layers of controls for identity verification, fraudsters will need to exploit these types of attacks.
Types of attack to look out for
Types of attack to look out for include:
Mimicking a human voice: There has been substantial growth in AI-generated voices that mimic real people. These schemes mean consumers can be tricked into thinking they’re speaking to someone they know, while businesses that use voice verification systems for systems such as customer support can be misled.
Fake video or images: AI models can be trained, using deep-learning techniques, to use very large amounts of digital assets like photos, images and videos to produce high quality, authentic videos or images that are virtually indiscernible from the real ones. Once trained, AI models can blend and superimpose images onto other images and within video content at alarming speed.
Chatbots: Friendly, convincing AI chatbots can be used to build relationships with victims to convince them to send money or share personal information. Following a prescribed script, these chatbots can extend a human-like conversation with a victim over long periods of time to deepen an emotional connection.
Text messages: Generative AI enables fraudsters to replicate personal exchanges with someone a victim knows with well-written scripts that appear authentic. They can then conduct multi pronged attacks via text-based conversations with multiple victims at once, manipulating them into carrying out actions that can involve transfers of money, goods, or other fraudulent gains.
Combatting AI by embracing AI
To fight AI, businesses will need to use AI and other tools such as machine learning to ensure they stay one step ahead of criminals.
Key steps to take include:
Identifying fraud with generative AI: Use of generative AI for fraudulent transaction screening or identity theft checks is proving more accurate at spotting fraud, compared to previous generations of AI models
Increasing use of verified biometrics data: Currently generative AI can replicate an individual’s retina, fingerprint, or the way someone uses their computer mouse.
Consolidating fraud-prevention and identity-protection processes: All data and controls must feed systems and teams that can analyze signals and build models that are continuously trained on good and bad traffic. In fact, knowing what a good actor looks like will help businesses prevent impersonation attempts of genuine customers.
Educating customers and consumers: Educating consumers in personalized ways through numerous communication channels proactively can help ensure consumers are aware of the latest fraud attacks and their role in preventing them. This helps enable a seamless, personalized experience for authentic consumers, while blocking attempts from AI-enabled attackers.
Use customer vulnerability data to spot signs of social engineering: Vulnerable customers are much more likely to fall for deep fake scams. Processing and using this data for education and victim protection will enable the industry to help the most at risk
Why now?
The best companies used a multi-layered approach – there is no single silver bullet – to their fraud prevention, minimizing as much as possible the gaps that fraudsters look to exploit. For example, by using fraud data sharing consortiums and data exchanges, fraud teams can share knowledge of new and emerging attacks.
A well layered strategy which incorporates device, behavioral, consortia, document and ID verification, drastically reducing the weaknesses in the system.
Combating AI fraud will now be part of that strategy for all businesses which take fraud prevention seriously. The attacks will become more frequent and sophisticated, requiring a long-term protection strategy – that covers every step in the fraud prevention process, from consumer to attacker – to be implemented. This is the only way for companies to protect themselves and their customers from the growing threat of AI-powered attacks.
This article was produced as part of TechRadarPro’s Expert Insights channel where we feature the best and brightest minds in the technology industry today. The views expressed here are those of the author and are not necessarily those of TechRadarPro or Future plc. If you are interested in contributing find out more here: https://www.techradar.com/news/submit-your-story-to-techradar-pro
JLR has announced that it has invested £10 million to combat the problem of stolen Land Rover and Range Rover vehicles in the UK, this has become a problem on vehicles that were produced from 2018 to 2022.
Range Rover and Land Rover vehicles become some of the most stolen vehicles in 2022, with a total of 5200 cars stolen. This has caused insurance companies to increase premiums significantly and also caused them to stop offering insurance in some areas.
The majority of the vehicles were being stolen in large cities like London and Manchester and many insurance companies are refusing to insure these vehicles in these areas JLR used to offer its own insurance for its vehicles, but it stopped doing this as its partner refused to continue insuring the vehicles.
Its newer vehicles from 2022 onward do not have the same issue due to increased security and it has been updating the security of older vehicles to the same standard via a software update, if you own one of the affected vehicles you should take your car to the dealer for the software update.
While vehicle theft in the UK is affecting the whole car industry, at JLR we understand the negative impact this can have on the ownership experience for our clients. Our investment of more than £10 million demonstrates our ongoing commitment to tackling this issue.
Through our long-standing collaboration with law enforcement and key partners, our expert team will continue to develop and deploy effective anti-theft measures to ensure clients are protected. It is my personal priority.
Patrick McGillycuddy Managing Director, JLR UK
This issue with stolen Land Rover and Range Rover vehicles has seen a negative impact on these vehicles’ second hand values, with the value of many of the vehicles dropping considerably below their previous market values. You can find out more details about the software update over at JLR at the link below, if you have not had the update you should get it done as soon as possible to protect your vehicle.
Source JLR
Filed Under: Auto News
Latest timeswonderful Deals
Disclosure: Some of our articles include affiliate links. If you buy something through one of these links, timeswonderful may earn an affiliate commission. Learn about our Disclosure Policy.
It is clear that coping with a serious illness is one of the most difficult experiences a person will have to endure in their lifetime. It should be a surprise to no one then that anxiety is the most common response to a new or terminal diagnosis. Once the shock and disbelief subside, the residual emotion is anxiety. Neuroscience points not only to a deeper understanding of the neurobiology of anxiety but also to some very effective strategies that can help to relieve it.
In the range of possible emotions anxiety is a normal human experience. Anxiety happens when the amygdala (part of the brain’s limbic system or emotional control center), senses trouble. The amygdala, acts like a smoke detector in your brain. When it senses threat, real or imagined, it floods the body with hormones and chemical to mobilize a response. Once again, this is a normal heathy brain response – the sympathetic “fight or flight” response that keeps us alive.
Make no mistake, being given a complicated diagnosis is perceived by the brain as a serious threat and will trigger the amygdala like a five-alarm fire is taking place. The emergency in your mind is mirrored in your brain and body. Chemicals surge through your body activating immediate physical and emotional responses. In the short term this is a critical and even necessary, response designed to make you react. The problem arises when this fight or flight response persists beyond the temporary into a persistent overactivation.
This state of limbic overactivation, perpetuates the feeling of overwhelm and uneasiness we feel when we are anxious. When the amygdala jams the brain on high alert, flooding it with chemicals and hormones, it triggers a series of changes that send the entire body into a state of unrelenting anxiety. Here’s the thing, when the amygdala predominates, it takes the prefrontal cortex (the rational, thinking, decision making part of your brain) offline, making it hard for you to think straight.
When your emotional brain is constantly signaling threat, no amount of rationalizing will make you feel safe. You are designed to feel anxiety. When perceived danger is high, and perceived can be real or imagined, anxiety levels will be high as we drop into fight or flight mode. Top down models like talk therapy cannot turn off that sympathetic cascade of hormones and neuro chemicals. Why? Because it’s a survival mechanism. Dropping into flight or flight for short bursts is a design feature not a flaw. It’s just not supposed to go and on and on forever.
When the body experiences a threat or severe stressor it’s supposed to go through a sequence of three reactions. The first is your brain and nervous system become activated. This triggers the second response which is you mobilize a response. Finally, once the threat has passed there is a discharge. We see this all the time in the animal kingdom, for example in the dog park once the fight is over, they shake it off and go on their way. The problem arises when the threat fails to dissipate and you never get to discharging the response. You become stuck in a chronic state of fight or flight and when that energy never discharges, it becomes stuck in the body.
Any stressor or traumatic experience that remains unresolved disrupts our biology and our ability to thrive. We now understand better than we ever have how exposure to past or chronic stressors affects our brains, our bodies and our entire lived experience. Neuroscience shows us how traumatic experiences are encoded in the body. Functional MRI studies demonstrate that we don’t remember trauma as a left-brain narrative. It’s NOT stored in explicit memory areas in our brain.
In fact, we remember trauma with our bodies, we encode traumatic memory as a bodily and emotional state, rather than as a narrative. The problem is that when trauma is remembered without words, it is not experienced as an explicit memory. And these implicit physical and emotional memory states do not carry with them the internal sensation that something is being recalled. We act, feel and imagine as though what we are experiencing is our present reality.
Chronic stress maintains the chemical and hormonal reaction in the body. Unresolved this gets trapped in the body and shows up as anxiety, depression, chronic fatigue, chronic pain, etc. Here’s the good news – we now know that you can work from the bottom up, creating our own discharge as it were, signaling the brain to stop the sympathetic chemical onslaught. By working through the body to reset the nervous system, you can facilitate changes that you can’t accomplish through your mind.
We can now say beyond a doubt that “bottom up” or EMBODIED practices are the keystone to self-regulating your physiology and changing your anxiety response. When we employ bottom up strategies – when we engage the body, we can dampen amygdala output, quietening the smoke detector in our brain. This effectively, turns off the stress response, stopping the harmful chemical cascade and restoring ease to the system.
Using these methods to reduce your stress response not only helps to manage anxiety but by limiting the harmful chemical surges in your body, you are also promoting a healthier physiological and immune response. This leads to elevated healing and resilience.
Monique Andrews, MSc, DC, DNM | Embodied Neuroscience cōpe Co-Founder and Community Leader
Climate change and violence, according to the head of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, are hampering these efforts.
According to the Fund’s 2023 results report, which was released on Monday, worldwide efforts to combat the diseases have recovered significantly after being severely hampered by the COVID-19 outbreak.
The Global Fund’s executive director, Peter Sands, has warned that unless “extraordinary steps” are taken, the world would most certainly fail to eliminate AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria by 2030.
He even listed some benefits. In the countries where the Global Fund invests, for example, a record-breaking 6.7 million people got TB treatment in 2022, a 1.4 million increase from the previous year. In addition, the Fund provided 220 million mosquito nets and supported in the treatment of 24.5 million HIV/AIDS patients.
However, the Fund noted in a statement issued with the results that climate change contributed to the difficulties of recovering from the outbreak.
The mosquito that transmits the malaria parasite, for example, may now thrive in cooler parts of Africa’s highlands. Natural catastrophes, such as floods, are placing a burden on healthcare systems throughout the globe, causing people to migrate, spreading illness, and interrupting treatment plans, according to the report. It also said that uncertain situations make reaching vulnerable people in countries such as Sudan, Ukraine, Afghanistan, and Myanmar very challenging.
But, according to Sands, there is still reason to be optimistic, owing in part to cutting-edge diagnostic and preventive measures. This week, the United Nations General Assembly will have a high-level debate on TB, giving advocates hope for more attention to the disease.