Weekly News Highlights | Apple clashes with UK gov, AI companies commit to regulation, hackers backed by North Korea target cryptocurrency

July 24th

Apple clashes with UK government

Having only recently been in the news for publicly pushing back against the UK's new Online Safety Bill, Apple have now torpedoed proposals to update the Investigatory Powers Act.

Under the act, the UK Government currently has powers to demand that security features are disabled without telling the public. As it is now, there have to be reviews and tech companies can appeal the request before taking action. Under the new proposals, any request to disable security features must be complied with immediately.

Apple have responded saying that they would not make specific changes to security features in one country that would weaken security for people around the world and have stated that they will remove services such as FaceTime and iMessage before complying with new proposals.

Read more here.

AI companies commit to regulation

Working with the US government, seven major tech organisations have committed themselves to new regulations aimed at managing the risks around AI security.

Representatives from Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI have all signed an agreement laying out a number of major stipulations:

They must have the security of their AI systems internally and externally tested by experts before any release
They must implement watermarks to ensure that people can spot AI generated content
The capabilities and limitations of their AI products must be regularly and publicly reported on
Research into the risks of bias, discrimination, and privacy must be carried out

Read more here.

Hackers backed by North Korea target cryptocurrency

North Korean backed hackers have been flagged as responsible for an attack on US software company JumpCloud targeting their cryptocurrency clients.

The attack on JumpCloud took place last month and forced them to reset their customer's API keys. At the time the attack was not attributed to anyone, but last week researchers from CrowdStrike and SentinelOne flagged North Korea-backed hacking group, Lazarus, as the culprits.