North Korean-linked actors were behind the theft of $100 million through the hack of a crypto product last year, the Federal Bureau of Investigation said.
The FBI said it was “able to confirm” that Lazarus Group, a hacking group linked to Pyongyang also known as APT38, was responsible for the attack on the so-called Horizon bridge in 2022.
Traders use a bridge to swap cryptocurrencies between different blockchain networks.
The FBI also said that the North Korean cyber actors this month used the Railgun system to launder over $60 million worth of the token ether stolen during the June 2022 heist. Railgun is a system designed to help preserve the anonymity of people moving cryptocurrency.
A portion of the stolen ether was sent to several virtual asset service providers and converted to bitcoin, the FBI said.
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At the time of the hack, blockchain analytics firm Elliptic said that there were “strong indications” that Lazarus was behind the attack. Almost immediately, the hackers were attempting to move the funds around through means to obfuscate their identity.
The FBI said it continues “to identify and disrupt North Korea’s theft and laundering of virtual currency, which is used to support North Korea’s ballistic missile and Weapons of Mass Destruction programs.”
North Korean-linked attackers have been pinned to other crypto hacks.
Last year, the U.S. Treasury Department blamed Lazarus for a $600 million heist on Ronin Network, a so-called “sidechain” for popular crypto game Axie Infinity.
– CNBC’s Ryan Browne contributed to this report
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Correction: This story was updated to reflect that Lazarus Group is also known as APT38. They are not separate groups.
WhatsApp is now an inch closer to becoming like Instagram. The Meta-owned chat app — which has over 2.24 billion active users globally — introduced five new features that have been in testing for a long time. One of them is the ability to post voice notes as WhatsApp Status — an Instagram Story-like feature that was introduced back in 2017. Also Read – WhatsApp may soon let users schedule calls within group chats
Voice notes are an important way to communicate through chat apps, especially for people who do not prefer typing messages. According to WhatsApp, an average of 7 billion voice messages are exchanged on the platform daily. The WhatsApp Status feature is used by over half a billion people every day, according to the dropshipping app Oberlo’s data. The newly-announced WhatsApp voice status feature would let users record and share voice messages of up to 30 seconds as their status updates. A microphone will appear on the status screen. Also Read – WhatsApp might soon let you schedule calls within group chats
— Open WhatsApp and swipe left to navigate to the Status screen on Android. On iOS, tap the Status tab on the top left corner at the bottom of the WhatsApp app.
— Tap the pencil icon appearing on the bottom, right above the camera icon on Android. On iOS, tap the pencil icon next to the Camera icon in the My Status bar at the top of the section.
— You will see a microphone icon on the screen, in addition to a blank field where you can type what you want to post as your Status.
— Tap and hold the microphone icon to record your voice. The functions of the recording work similarly to its counterpart available for WhatsApp chats. That means swiping left while recording will trash your recording.
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— Record your message while holding the icon. Remember your voice note cannot be longer than 30 seconds.
— After you have recorded your voice message, it will be displayed in the form of waves with the option to play and delete the recording. If you think the message is good to go, tap the paper plane icon that represents sending.
“Most standard functions of Tweeting still apply, whether you want to post a picture, use a hashtag, or create a poll. But now you can type all the way up to 4,000 characters.” Also Read – Realme GT 3 global launch confirmed, India launch signaled
However, for now, longer tweets on the web cannot be saved as drafts or scheduled to be sent later.
“We know longer tweets could mean a lot of scrolling, so they’ll be capped at 280 characters on your timeline and you’ll see a ‘Show more’ prompt to click and read the whole tweet,” it added.
Only Blue subscribers can post longer Tweets, but non-subscribers can read, reply, retweet, and quote Tweet to them.
Moreover, Blue users will be able to reply and quote a longer tweet with up to 4,000 characters, the platform mentioned.
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Earlier, tweets were limited to only 280 characters, which still applies to non-subscribers.
Alphabet Inc lost $100 billion in market value on Wednesday after its new chatbot shared inaccurate information in a promotional video and a company event failed to dazzle, feeding worries that the Google parent is losing ground to rival Microsoft Corp. Also Read – Google’s VP of labs, Salesforce’s former co-CEO to form AI company
Alphabet shares slid as much as 9 percent during regular trading with volumes nearly three times the 50-day moving average. They pared losses after hours and were roughly flat. The stock had lost 40 percent of its value last year but rallied 15 percent since the beginning of this year, excluding Wednesday’s losses. Also Read – Microsoft Bing gets an even powerful language model than ChatGPT, Edge browser gets AI features
Google has been on its heels after OpenAI, a startup Microsoft is backing with around $10 billion, introduced software in November that has wowed consumers and become a fixation in Silicon Valley circles for its surprisingly accurate and well-written answers to simple prompts.
Google’s live-streamed presentation on Wednesday morning did not include details about how and when it would integrate Bard into its core search function. A day earlier, Microsoft held an event touting that it had already released to the public a version of its Bing search with ChatGPT functions integrated.
Bard’s error was discovered just before the presentation by Google, based in Mountain View, California.
“While Google has been a leader in AI innovation over the last several years, they seemed to have fallen asleep on implementing this technology into their search product,” said Gil Luria, senior software analyst at D.A. Davidson. “Google has been scrambling over the last few weeks to catch up on Search and that caused the announcement yesterday (Tuesday) to be rushed and the embarrassing mess up of posting a wrong answer during their demo.”
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Microsoft shares rose around 3 percent on Wednesday and were flat in post-market trading.
Alphabet posted a short GIF video of Bard in action via Twitter, promising it would help simplify complex topics, but it instead delivered an inaccurate answer.
In the advertisement, Bard is given the prompt: “What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can I tell my 9-year-old about?” Bard responds with a number of answers, including one suggesting the JWST was used to take the very first pictures of a planet outside the Earth’s solar system, or exoplanets. The first pictures of exoplanets were, however, taken by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in 2004, as confirmed by NASA.
Bard is an experimental conversational AI service, powered by LaMDA. Built using our large language models and drawing on information from the web, it’s a launchpad for curiosity and can help simplify complex topics → https://t.co/fSp531xKy3pic.twitter.com/JecHXVmt8l
“This highlights the importance of a rigorous testing process, something that we’re kicking off this week with our Trusted Tester program,” a Google spokesperson said. “We’ll combine external feedback with our own internal testing to make sure Bard’s responses meet a high bar for quality, safety and groundedness in real-world information.”
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Formidable competitor
Alphabet is coming off a disappointing fourth quarter as advertisers cut spending.
The search and advertising giant is moving quickly to keep pace with OpenAI and rivals, reportedly bringing in founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page to accelerate its efforts.
“People are starting to question is Microsoft going to be a formidable competitor now against Google’s really bread-and-butter business,” said King Lip, chief strategist at Baker Avenue Wealth Management, which owns Alphabet and Microsoft shares.
Lip cautioned, though, that concerns about Alphabet may be overblown, saying: “I think still Bing is a far, far cry away from Google’s search capabilities.”
The new ChatGPT software has injected excitement into technology firms after tens of thousands of job cuts in recent weeks and executive pledges to pare back on so-called moonshot projects. AI has become a fixation for tech executives who have mentioned it as much as six times more often on recent earnings calls than in prior quarters, Reuters found.
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The appeal of AI-driven search is that it could spit out results in plain language, rather than in a list of links, which could make browsing faster and more efficient. It remains unclear what impact that might have on targeted advertising, the backbone of search engines like Google.
Chatbot AI systems also carry risks for corporations because of inherent biases in their algorithms that can skew results, sexualize images or even plagiarise, as consumers testing the service have discovered. Microsoft, for instance, released a chatbot on Twitter in 2016 that quickly began generating racist content before being shut down. And an AI used by the news site CNET was found to produce factually incorrect or plagiarized stories.
At the time of writing, the Bard ad had been viewed on Twitter more than a million times.
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