As Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella emphasized on keeping Azure Cloud secure with integrated end-to-end identity, security and compliance solutions, cybersecurity firm Check Point on Thursday revealed that it identified two major security flaws in Microsoft Azure last year which have now been fixed.

The researchers at Israel-based Check Point discovered that a user on the Azure network could have potentially taken control over the entire server, opening a path to business code theft and manipulation.

The first security flaw was found in Azure Stack and the second security flaw was found in Azure App Service.

“The Azure Stack Flaw would have enabled a hacker to gain screenshots and sensitive information of machines running on Azure. The Azure App Flaw would have enabled a hacker to take control over the entire Azure server, and consequently take control over an enterprises’ business code,” the firm said in a statement.

Check Point said it worked closely with Microsoft to solve these issues, making the cloud more secure. The first security flaw was disclosed by Check Point on January 19 last year while the second security flaw was disclosed on June 27. Full patches for both security flaws in Azure were issued to the public by the end of 2019.

In the Azure Stack flaw, Check Point researchers were able to take screenshots and lift sensitive information of Azure tenants and infrastructure machines. “This security flaw would enable a hacker to get sensitive information of any business that has its machine running on Azure,” the researchers said.

In the Azure App flaw, an attacker could take control over server and business code. Researchers at Check Point were able to prove that a hacker could compromise tenant applications, data, and accounts by creating a free user in Azure Cloud and running malicious Azure functions.

“The end result would be that a hacker could potentially take control over the entire Azure server, and consequently take control over all your business code,” the Check Point report said. The disclosure came as Nadella, during an earnings call on Wednesday, said that now to security, cybercrime will cost businesses, governments and individuals $1 trillion this year.

“We are the only company that offers integrated end-to-end identity, security and compliance solutions to protect people and organizations, spanning identity management, devices, cloud apps, data and infrastructure,” Nadella emphasized.

He said that Azure is the only Cloud that offers consistency across operating models, development environments, and infrastructure stack, enabling customers to bring cloud compute and intelligence to any connected or disconnected environment.

“Azure Stack Edge brings rapid Machine Learning inferencing closer to where data is generated and the new ruggedized Azure Stack form factors provide cloud capabilities in even the harshest of conditions like disaster response,” he explained.

“Our differentiated approach across the cloud and edge is winning customers. The US Department of Defense chose Azure to support our men and women in uniform at home, abroad, and at their tactical edge,” Nadella asserted. There will be 175 zettabytes of data by 2025, up from 40 zettabytes today.

“Processing this data in real-time will be an operational imperative for every organization. Azure Synapse is our limitless analytics service. It brings together big data analytics and data warehousing with unmatched performance, scale and security,” the Microsoft CEO said. (IANS).

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Brussels — Alphabet’s CEO has urged the US and EU to co-ordinate regulatory approaches on artificial intelligence (AI), calling their alignment “critical”.

In a rare public speech in Brussels on Monday at an event hosted by European economic think-tank Bruegel, Sundar Pichai, who is also CEO of Google, said “there is no question in my mind that artificial intelligence needs to be regulated”, but that “we don’t have to start from scratch” with entirely new rules in some cases.

His comments come weeks before the EU is set to unveil its plans to legislate the technology, which could include new legally binding requirements for AI developers in “high-risk sectors”, such as health care and transport, according to an early draft obtained by Bloomberg.

The new rules could require companies to be transparent about how they build their systems.

While in Brussels, Pichai was also due to meet Margrethe Vestager, the competition chief responsible for more than €8bn of antitrust fines levied against Google. In addition to competition, she now also oversees the bloc’s digital policies, including the plans to legislate AI.

Alphabet has battled intense regulatory pressure in Europe for years. The search giant is challenging the EU’s multibillion-dollar antitrust fines and has sought to fight off copyright and other forms of platform regulation emanating from Brussels in recent years.

The Google chief cautiously welcomed plans for rules that take “a proportionate approach, balancing potential harms with social opportunities”.

Facial recognition technology and so-called deep fakes — or manipulated audio and video clips — are two areas where AI could be used destructively, and companies have a responsibility “to get this right”, Pichai said.

He said that Google has released open data sets to help researchers build better tools to detect fakes and that it has chosen not to offer general-purpose facial recognition application programming interfaces.

Pichai touted the company’s recent developments in AI, including a Google Health algorithm that can spot breast cancer more accurately than doctors, and other research for accurately predicting the weather as well as advancements by its self-driving car unit, Waymo.

The Google chief said that existing rules like Europe’s privacy legislation, known as GDPR, and regulation for medical devices like AI-assisted heart monitors would serve as strong foundations for governing AI in some areas, but that for self-driving cars, governments would need to establish regulations.

But Google has also come under intense criticism over how it handles users’ privacy with some of its AI projects. Google faces a US federal inquiry after the Wall Street Journal in November reported how it collects the health-care data from millions of Americans to design new AI software. It’s also facing scrutiny over the methods it uses for training algorithms that run Google Assistant.

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I recently received an email from the folks over at Medium, an online publication I subscribe to. Here’s what it said:

“Hello! It looks like you’re into artificial intelligence, so we rounded up a few of our favorites for you this week. Because you’re a member and an avid reader, we want to make sure you are getting the best stories in the topics that interest you.”

The email went on to give me a list of articles I might be interested in. And they were right, I was interested.

CREEPED OUT

But here’s the thing: that email was certainly not sent by “folks” — at least not in the way we used to think about them. That was a message about AI — sent by AI! An algorithm was studying my reading patterns, decided I was interested in articles about algorithms like itself and sent me a mail recommending that I read more about its brethren…

Are you enthused or creeped out? Reactions vary …

Meanwhile, over at Google, CEO Sundar Pichai was showcasing their own breakthroughs in AI. Specifically, their Google Duplex virtual assistant, which can impersonate human beings to make calls on our behalf. If you haven’t seen the demo, stroll over to YouTube and do so.

ANOTHER HUMAN

The AI assistant calls a salon to make an appointment. In the demo, it is able to talk exactly like a human (complete with pauses and verbal ticks) — and think on its feet when the desired time is not available. In a second instance, the voice bot calls to make a restaurant booking. In this case, the human being on the other side does not understand the question well — but the bot steers the conversation remarkably effectively towards a satisfactory conclusion. More effectively than the human being.

According to Google, those were actual calls made by bots. And it was pretty much impossible for the humans on the other side of the call to realise they were not talking to another human.

Wow. Even if Google might be gaming this a little and only showing us the best recorded calls, I trust you understand the implications: we are not that far from a situation when bots will be engaging with us on a regular basis, and none of us will be able to tell the difference. What happens in such a world?

DARK SIDE

There is, of course, the displacement of human beings to think about. If bots are already this good at talking and deciding, what happens to the armies of humans we have been employing to do these tasks?

Remember AI bots can be designed to learn as they go, and get better and better, with little human supervision eventually needed.

And is it just low-level jobs at risk? Not so long ago a computer science professor at Georgia Tech designed an artificial teaching assistant called “Jill Watson” to answer students’ questions online.

The students could not tell the difference between Jill and human assistants, and were only brought into the secret at the end of the semester.

There’s another dark side to this revolution. The world is already infested with social-media bots that spread fake news and influence entire elections by swaying gullible voters. They can create not just fake news and images, but fake video as well.

EXPERIMENT NOW

And so great caution is needed. If flawless human impersonation is possible, then will we all soon be taken in by scams where bots sound like they are our trusted friends or organisations.

The human race needs to be ready to embrace this remarkable technology — but also to regulate and harness it. We need a plan for jobs, and a plan to prevent abuses before they spiral out of control.

For those running businesses and institutions, I trust a specific thought has occurred to you upon reading this column: AI is no longer a bit of science fiction you can afford to ignore; it’s right here, right now. It will transform the economics of business, and change the way you think about a “workforce”.

Work on earth will soon be done by a mixture of humans, humanoids and lines of code. You need to be thinking hard about the opportunities and the dangers. Don’t wait until it’s over and others have won the race. Get thinking and experimenting now.

And what if this very column warning you about AI was written by AI? That too is coming.

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