Editor’s Pick

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Voice synthesis has come a long way since 1978’s Speak & Spell toy, which once wowed people with its state-of-the-art ability to read words aloud using an electronic voice. Now, using deep-learning AI models, software can create not only realistic-sounding voices, but also convincingly imitate existing voices using small samples of audio.

Along those lines, OpenAI just announced Voice Engine, a text-to-speech AI model for creating synthetic voices based on a 15-second segment of recorded audio. It has provided audio samples of the Voice Engine in action on its website.

Once a voice is cloned, a user can input text into the Voice Engine and get an AI-generated voice result. But OpenAI is not ready to widely release its technology yet. The company initially planned to launch a pilot program for developers to sign up for the Voice Engine API earlier this month. But after more consideration about ethical implications, the company decided to scale back its ambitions for now.

Enlarge / Supply-chain attacks, like the latest PyPI discovery, insert malicious code into seemingly functional software packages used by developers. They’re becoming increasingly common. (credit: Getty Images)

PyPI, a vital repository for open source developers, temporarily halted new project creation and new user registration following an onslaught of package uploads that executed malicious code on any device that installed them. Ten hours later, it lifted the suspension.

Short for the Python Package Index, PyPI is the go-to source for apps and code libraries written in the Python programming language. Fortune 500 corporations and independent developers alike rely on the repository for obtaining the latest versions of code needed to make their projects run. At a little after 7 pm Wednesday, California time, the site started displaying a banner message informing visitors that the site was temporarily suspending new project creation and new user registration. The message didn’t explain why or provide an estimate of when the suspension would be lifted.

About 10 hours later, PyPI restored new project creation and new user registration. Once again, the site provided no reason for the 10-hour halt.

Enlarge / One thing you can say about this crypto wallet: You can’t confuse it for any other. (credit: Getty Images)

The Snap Store, where containerized Snap apps are distributed for Ubuntu’s Linux distribution, has been attacked for months by fake crypto wallet uploads that seek to steal users’ currencies. As a result, engineers at Ubuntu’s parent firm are now manually reviewing apps uploaded to the store before they are available.

The move follows weeks of reporting by Alan Pope, a former Canonical/Ubuntu staffer on the Snapcraft team, who is still very active in the ecosystem. In February, Pope blogged about how one bitcoin investor lost nine bitcoins (about $490,000 at the time) by using an “Exodus Wallet” app from the Snap store. Exodus is a known cryptocurrency wallet, but this wallet was not from that entity. As detailed by one user wondering what happened on the Snapcraft forums, the wallet immediately transferred his entire balance to an unknown address after a 12-word recovery phrase was entered (which Exodus tells you on support pages never to do).

Pope takes pains to note that cryptocurrency is inherently fraught with loss risk. Still, Ubuntu’s App Center, which presents the Snap Store for desktop users, tagged the “Exodus” app as “Safe,” and the web version of the Snap Store describes Snaps as “safe to run.” While Ubuntu is describing apps as “Safe” in the sense of being an auto-updating container with runtime confinement (or “sandboxed”), a green checkmark with “Safe” next to it could be misread, especially by a newcomer to Ubuntu, Snaps, and Linux generally.

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Broadcom has made sweeping changes to VMware’s business since acquiring the company in November 2023, killing off the perpetually licensed versions of VMware’s software and instituting large-scale layoffs. Broadcom executives have acknowledged the “unease” that all of these changes have created among VMware’s customers and partners but so far haven’t been interested in backtracking.

Among the casualties of the acquisition is the free version of VMware’s vSphere Hypervisor, also known as ESXi. ESXi is “bare-metal hypervisor” software, meaning that it allows users to run multiple operating systems on a single piece of hardware while still allowing those operating systems direct access to disks, GPUs, and other system resources.

One alternative to ESXi for home users and small organizations is Proxmox Virtual Environment, a Debian-based Linux operating system that provides broadly similar functionality and has the benefit of still being an actively developed product. To help jilted ESXi users, the Proxmox team has just added a new “integrated import wizard” to Proxmox that supports importing of ESXi VMs, easing the pain of migrating between platforms.

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Thousands of servers storing AI workloads and network credentials have been hacked in an ongoing attack campaign targeting a reported vulnerability in Ray, a computing framework used by OpenAI, Uber, and Amazon.

The attacks, which have been active for at least seven months, have led to the tampering of AI models. They have also resulted in the compromise of network credentials, allowing access to internal networks and databases and tokens for accessing accounts on platforms including OpenAI, Hugging Face, Stripe, and Azure. Besides corrupting models and stealing credentials, attackers behind the campaign have installed cryptocurrency miners on compromised infrastructure, which typically provides massive amounts of computing power. Attackers have also installed reverse shells, which are text-based interfaces for remotely controlling servers.

Hitting the jackpot

“When attackers get their hands on a Ray production cluster, it is a jackpot,” researchers from Oligo, the security firm that spotted the attacks, wrote in a post. “Valuable company data plus remote code execution makes it easy to monetize attacks—all while remaining in the shadows, totally undetected (and, with static security tools, undetectable).”

Enlarge / Affinity’s photo editor. (credit: Canva)

Online graphic design platform provider Canva announced its acquisition of Affinity on Tuesday. The purchase adds tools for creative professionals to the Australian startup’s repertoire, presenting competition for today’s digital design stronghold, Adobe.

The companies didn’t provide specifics about the deal, but Cliff Obrecht, Canva’s co-founder and COO, told Bloomberg that it consists of cash and stock and is worth “several hundred million pounds.”

Canva, which debuted in 2013, has made numerous acquisitions to date, including Flourish, Kaleido, and Pixabay, but its purchase of Affinity is its biggest yet—by both price and headcount (90). Affinity CEO Ashley Hewson said via a YouTube video that Canva approached Affinity about a potential deal two months ago.

Enlarge / They look like normal notifications, but opening an iPhone with one or more of these stacked up, you won’t be able to do much of anything until you tap “Allow” or “Don’t Allow.” And they’re right next to each other. (credit: Kevin Purdy)

Human weaknesses are a rich target for phishing attacks. Making humans click “Don’t Allow” over and over again in a phone prompt that can’t be skipped is an angle some iCloud attackers are taking—and likely having some success.

Brian Krebs’ at Krebs on Security detailed the attacks in a recent post, noting that “MFA Fatigue Attacks” are a known attack strategy. By repeatedly hitting a potential victim’s device with multifactor authentication requests, the attack fills a device’s screen with prompts that typically have yes/no options, often very close together. Apple’s devices are just the latest rich target for this technique.

Both the Kremlin-backed Fancy Bear advanced persistent threat group and a rag-tag bunch of teenagers known as Lapsus$ have been known to use the technique, also known as MFA prompt bombing, successfully.

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On Tuesday, Anthropic’s Claude 3 Opus large language model (LLM) surpassed OpenAI’s GPT-4 (which powers ChatGPT) for the first time on Chatbot Arena, a popular crowdsourced leaderboard used by AI researchers to gauge the relative capabilities of AI language models. “The king is dead,” tweeted software developer Nick Dobos in a post comparing GPT-4 Turbo and Claude 3 Opus that has been making the rounds on social media. “RIP GPT-4.”

Since GPT-4 was included in Chatbot Arena around May 10, 2023 (the leaderboard launched May 3 of that year), variations of GPT-4 have consistently been on the top of the chart until now, so its defeat in the Arena is a notable moment in the relatively short history of AI language models. One of Anthropic’s smaller models, Haiku, has also been turning heads with its performance on the leaderboard.

“For the first time, the best available models—Opus for advanced tasks, Haiku for cost and efficiency—are from a vendor that isn’t OpenAI,” independent AI researcher Simon Willison told Ars Technica. “That’s reassuring—we all benefit from a diversity of top vendors in this space. But GPT-4 is over a year old at this point, and it took that year for anyone else to catch up.”

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Crooks are working overtime to anonymize their illicit online activities using thousands of devices of unsuspecting users, as evidenced by two unrelated reports published Tuesday.

The first, from security firm Lumen Labs, reports that roughly 40,000 home and office routers have been drafted into a criminal enterprise that anonymizes illicit Internet activities, with another 1,000 new devices being added each day. The malware responsible is a variant of TheMoon, a malicious code family dating back to at least 2014. In its earliest days, TheMoon almost exclusively infected Linksys E1000 series routers. Over the years it branched out to targeting the Asus WRTs, Vivotek Network Cameras, and multiple D-Link models.

In the years following its debut, TheMoon’s self-propagating behavior and growing ability to compromise a broad base of architectures enabled a growth curve that captured attention in security circles. More recently, the visibility of the Internet of Things botnet trailed off, leading many to assume it was inert. To the surprise of researchers in Lumen’s Black Lotus Lab, during a single 72-hour stretch earlier this month, TheMoon added 6,000 ASUS routers to its ranks, an indication that the botnet is as strong as it’s ever been.

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The US Justice Department on Monday unsealed an indictment charging seven men with hacking or attempting to hack dozens of US companies in a 14-year campaign furthering an economic espionage and foreign intelligence gathering by the Chinese government.

All seven defendants, federal prosecutors alleged, were associated with Wuhan Xiaoruizhi Science & Technology Co., Ltd. a front company created by the Hubei State Security Department, an outpost of the Ministry of State Security located in Wuhan province. The MSS, in turn, has funded an advanced persistent threat group tracked under names including APT31, Zirconium Violet Typhoon, Judgment Panda, and Altaire.

Relentless 14-year campaign

“Since at least 2010, the defendants … engaged in computer network intrusion activity on behalf of the HSSD targeting numerous US government officials, various US economic and defense industries and a variety of private industry officials, foreign democracy activists, academics and parliamentarians in response to geopolitical events affecting the PRC,” federal prosecutors alleged. “These computer network intrusion activities resulted in the confirmed and potential compromise of work and personal email accounts, cloud storage accounts and telephone call records belonging to millions of Americans, including at least some information that could be released in support of malign influence targeting democratic processes and institutions, and economic plans, intellectual property, and trade secrets belonging to American businesses, and contributed to the estimated billions of dollars lost every year as a result of the PRC’s state-sponsored apparatus to transfer US technology to the PRC.”