Top News- A.I. Act negotiations continue; Big companies to ditch passwords for better privacy & more

A.I. Act potentially in the last weeks of negotiation

The meeting between the E.U. Council, Parliament, and Commission on the proposed Artificial Intelligence Act took place on October 24th, wherein they discussed and agreed on provisions surrounding the classification of high-risk A.I. applications. Powerful foundation models and their supervision were also discussed, and guidance was provided on the same. Prohibitions and law enforcement are yet to be discussed. The next inter-institutional negotiations will take place on December 6th. Read more

Authentication giant Okta suffers security breach

A recent blog published by BeyondTrust reported the recent security breach faced by authentication company Okta, which occurred at the beginning of October. The attackers reportedly stole a session cookie from the Okta support system and were able to access an administrator account; in doing so, they were able to access further customer environments. BeyondTrust was able to prevent any damage from the attacker due to a custom policy configuration for admin console access. The attacker created a backdoor user account but was identified and disabled by BeyondTrust. Read more

Uber paid 412,500 AUD for spamming customers

Uber Australia paid an infringement notice of approximately 412,500 AUD to The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) for their email marketing practices. After receiving multiple complaints from customers about Uber's marketing emails that did not provide an 'unsubscribe' facility and continued to spam customers who had withdrawn their consent, ACMA conducted an investigation on the matter. The results found that over 2 million marketing emails were sent without the ability to unsubscribe to them. It was also found that more than 500,000 emails were sent to customers who had previously unsubscribed to their email marketing. Read more

Amazon announces cloud service for E.U. customers

AMS European Sovereign Cloud, announced by Amazon Web Services, is an independent company that would cater towards E.U. customers to comply with the strict regulations of the European Union. The new cloud service will operate out of Europe and will have the same security, availability, and performance as cloud services in other regions; however, it will contain all metadata created within the E.U. Read more

Companies to shift away from passwords for privacy reasons

More companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and more are looking to stop the use of passwords in favor of 'passkeys,' which are more secure than the former. Passkeys are digital locks that use cryptography and live only on the user's devices like their phones or laptops. Using passkeys is convenient as they involve using a fingerprint or face scan. Read more