Hacktivists claim to have stolen more than a terabyte of data from Disney's internal chat platform and are leaking the information online in a protest against what they say is the company's anti-artist stance. The group, which calls itself NullBulge, has been active since at least May. It claims to be motivated by a desire to "protect artists' rights and ensure fair compensation for their work". On Friday, it published the entirety of Disney's internal Slack channel online through the decentralised BitTorrent filesharing platform. Unlike many corporate hackers, NullBulge seems not to be interested in financial rewards.

Cybersecurity, a huge industry worth over $100 billion, is regularly subject to buzzwords. Cybersecurity companies often (pretend) to use new state-of-the-art technologies to attract customers and sell their solutions. Naturally, with artificial intelligence being in one of its craziest hype cycles, we're seeing plenty of solutions that claim to use machine learning, deep learning and other AI-related technologies to automatically secure the networks and digital assets of their clients. But contrary to what many companies profess, machine learning is not a silver bullet that will automatically protect individuals and organizations against security threats, says Ilia Kolochenko, CEO of ImmuniWeb, a company that uses AI to test the security of web and mobile applications. While machine learning and other AI techniques will help improve the speed and quality of cybersecurity solutions, they will not be a replacement for many of the basic practices that companies often neglect.

This article is part of Demystifying AI, a series of posts that (try to) disambiguate the jargon and myths surrounding AI. Cybersecurity, a huge industry worth over $100 billion, is regularly subject to buzzwords. Cybersecurity companies often (pretend) to use new state-of-the-art technologies to attract customers and sell their solutions. Naturally, with artificial intelligence being in one of its craziest hype cycles, we're seeing plenty of solutions that claim to use machine learning, deep learning and other AI-related technologies to automatically secure the networks and digital assets of their clients. But contrary to what many companies profess, machine learning is not a silver bullet that will automatically protect individuals and organizations against security threats, says Ilia Kolochenko, CEO of ImmuniWeb, a company that uses AI to test the security of web and mobile applications.

A new report authored by over two-dozen experts on the implications of emerging technologies is sounding the alarm bells on the ways artificial intelligence could enable new forms of cybercrime, physical attacks, and political disruption over the next five to ten years. The 100-page report, titled "The Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence: Forecasting, Prevention, and Mitigation," boasts 26 experts from 14 different institutions and organizations, including Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute, Cambridge University's Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, Elon Musk's OpenAI, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The report builds upon a two-day workshop held at Oxford University back in February of last year. In the report, the authors detail some of the ways AI could make things generally unpleasant in the next few years, focusing on three security domains of note--the digital, physical, and political arenas--and how the malicious use of AI could upset each of these. "It is often the case that AI systems don't merely reach human levels of performance but significantly surpass it," said Miles Brundage, a Research Fellow at Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute and a co-author of the report, in a statement. "It is troubling, but necessary, to consider the implications of superhuman hacking, surveillance, persuasion, and physical target identification, as well as AI capabilities that are subhuman but nevertheless much more scalable than human labour."

Artificial Intelligence promises many positive developments, but experts have warned that the technology could be exploited for malicious purposes. The warning came in a new report from the Future of Humanity Institute, with the authors drawn from leading universities such as Cambridge, Oxford and Yale, along with privacy advocates and military experts. The report builds on the findings of a two day workshop in Oxford back in February 2017. Among the risks the report highlights are that AI could misused by rogue states, criminals and lone-wolf attackers. The researchers said that artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities are growing at an unprecedented rate, and whilst a lot of attention has focused on its positive developments, "less attention has historically been paid to the ways in which artificial intelligence can be used maliciously."