Cybernews spotlight: AI craze, Reddit hack, and conspiracies on Twitter

Open AI Twitter Reddit — By Shutterstock

Since ChatGPT has become such a success, other tech companies picked up the AI pace, with a little derailment costing companies like Google billions of dollars.

Chaotic move, a huge mistake

AI enthusiasts eagerly awaited Google's event when the company was anticipated to reveal its ChatGPT rival. Quite unexpectedly, it announced Bard two days prior to the event in a simple press release.

The event itself cost Google dearly – shares took a 9% ($100 billion) nose dive following the news its AI chatbot Bard gave inaccurate answers in a promotional video posted on Twitter and shown during a live press event.

Despite the messy start, tech pundits have reminded that Google currently dominates the search market, and its AI product is likely to become more popular than ChatGPT despite the current spotlight that OpenAI is under.

Reddit breach

"Based on our investigation so far, Reddit user passwords and accounts are safe, but on Sunday night (pacific time), Reddit systems were hacked as a result of a sophisticated and highly-targeted phishing attack. They gained access to some internal documents, code, and some internal business systems," Reddit said on Thursday.

Hackers used a phishing lure targeting the firm's employees with a landing page impersonating its intranet site. After one worker fell victim to the attack, the threat actor was able to breach internal Reddit systems.

Reddit admitted that the grabbed data included a few details about the company's advertisers. But passwords and credit card information were allegedly not accessed.

"Based on several days of initial investigation by security, engineering, and data science (and friends!), we have no evidence to suggest that any of your non-public data has been accessed, or that Reddit's information has been published or distributed online," Reddit said.

Earthquake conspiracy

Turkey blocked Twitter two days after deadly earthquakes as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan condemned the criticism of the government's response to the catastrophe that killed more than 16,000 people in Turkey and Syria.

The restriction was soon lifted; however, Turkish authorities reminded Twitter of its "responsibilities" on content moderation and disinformation.

In parallel to the criticism of the Erdogan government's response to the earthquake, Twitter has been flooded with conspiracy theories claiming the tragedy to be nothing else but fake news.

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Cybernews exclusive

As always, this week, Cybernews brought you some exclusive stories like a popular Android game data leak, a controversial interview about the growing rivalry between the US and China and the quantum computing race, and some dead-serious analysis of the biggest cybersecurity risks in 2023.

One story I'm particularly proud about this week is where the Cybernews team first broke the story about the US-based grocery delivery platform Weee! suffering a security breach. After

attackers posted a database with information on 11 million Weee! customers on a popular hacker forum, exposing delivery-related sensitive information, Cybernews got a confirmation from the company about the breach.

"For customers that placed an order between July 12, 2021, and July 12, 2022, information such as name, address, email addresses, phone number, order number, and order comments may have been impacted," the company's representative told Cybernews.