Maskot Investment Thesis I recommend holding The Communication Services Select Sector SPDR® ETF Fund (NYSEARCA: XLC ). The ETF has been showing strong momentum since the Fed's first rate cut in September. However, when we look at the track record for the Analyst’s Disclosure: I/we have no stock, option or similar derivative position in any of the companies mentioned, and no plans to initiate any such positions within the next 72 hours. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article. Seeking Alpha's Disclosure: Past performance is no guarantee of future results. No recommendation or advice is being given as to whether any investment is suitable for a particular investor. Any views or opinions expressed above may not reflect those of Seeking Alpha as a whole. Seeking Alpha is not a licensed securities dealer, broker or US investment adviser or investment bank. Our analysts are third party authors that include both professional investors and individual investors who may not be licensed or certified by any institute or regulatory body.Americans worried about Social Security’s futureUS Salon Faces Backlash After Owner Labels Trump Voters 'Racists, Homophobes, Misogynists'
In a major decision, the house of Chandigarh Municipal Corporation (MC) on Tuesday decided to impose penalty equal to 7.5% of their total water bill, on city residents living in houses/institutions having an area of one kanal and above, for not taking tertiary treated (TT) water connection despite repeated notices. As per the Chandigarh water supply bylaws, 2015, the use of TT water is compulsory in all houses/institutions having an area of one kanal and above. The bylaws made TT water connections compulsory for consumers within three months from the date of issuance of notification, but the civic body has found that only 2,906 of the total 7,385 one kanal houses in Chandigarh have complied with the bylaws. Similarly, out of the total 414 institutions, only 150 have the connections. The penalty will be imposed on 4479 houses and 264 institutions in the city. The house also decided to sell the TT water for commercial use at ₹ 7 per kilolitre on the lines of Delhi Jal Board. At present, the MC charges ₹ 2.50 per kilolitre for commercial TT water connection. However, no change in rates has been made for residential houses or institutions, who have already taken the TT water, and the flat rate stands same at ₹ 50 per kanal area per month. During the general House meeting, the agenda was tabled, saying, “The MC is now proposing to sell the TT water at ₹ 7 per kilolitre on the lines of Delhi Jal Board. At present, the MC charges ₹ 2.50 per kilolitre for TT water. To ensure compliance, the MC is proposing to levy a penalty equal to 7.5% of the total water bill on one kanal house owners who have not taken TT water connections despite availability. The MC is also proposing to make TT water available for other purposes of fulfilling norms, such as construction purposes, chilling plants, AC cooling units after softening and other industrial purposes for washing, etc.” The agenda was approved after city councillors across party lines raised multiple complaints about TT water’s availability and quality. BJP councillor Mahesh Inder Singh Sidhu, representing city’s sectors from 1 to 10 having most of the entire city’s one kanal and above houses, said, “Though the quality of TT water has improved, residents still complain about smelly water and erratic supply. The MC does not act for months to repair the pipes of TT water in case of breakage and if penalty and rates have been increased, the MC must ensure proper supply.” BJP councillor Harpreet Kaur Babla said, “TT water supply is very erratic in summers, especially in May and June, when plants require a good amount of water. The MC must ensure timely supply.” More services set to get dearer now With its fiscal crisis worsening, the Chandigarh MC revised the rates for various services to boost its revenue, impacting services such as the issuance of birth and death certificates, charges for using mobile toilet vans for private events, rent for telecom infrastructure, monthly rent of Verka milk booths among others. The registrar birth and death department of the Chandigarh MC covers 29 private hospitals and nursing homes, and registration units are working on the online software by the Centre. MC approved revision of the fee/charges related to issuance of certificates. The MC will now rent out mobile toilet vans for private events in the city. For a private event up to 5 km, the MC will charge ₹ 6,500, which will include ₹ 2,000 as refundable security and the rent will increase to ₹ 7,000 if event is scheduled beyond 5 km. Scuffle breaks out in MC House Tensions ran high during the Chandigarh MC’s general House meeting on Tuesday as nominated councillor Anil Masih, involved in the vote rigging case in the controversial mayoral election this year, and who got SC rap for the same, stormed into the well of the House and accused senior political leaders of Congress and AAP of corruption. Masih said, “Rahul Gandhi and Sanjay Singh are involved in corruption and are presently out on bail. If they can come out and speak, why can’t I speak when the case against me is still pending for a decision in the Supreme Court.” The remarks triggered a heated response from the INDIA bloc councillors, who retaliated by highlighting Masih’s vote rigging incident earlier this year. Congress councillor Gurpreet Singh Gabi displayed posters depicting Masih’s vote-tampering scandal, prompting an uproar in the House. Senior deputy mayor and BJP councillor Kuljeet Singh Sandhu, along with leader of Opposition Kanwarjeet Singh Rana, attempted to seize the posters from Gabi, leading to a physical scuffle between members of the House. The chaotic scenes forced a brief adjournment of the House proceedings.
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Caitlin Clark honored as AP Female Athlete of the Year following her impact on women's sports Caitlin Clark has been named the AP Female Athlete of the Year after raising the profile of women’s basketball to unprecedented levels in both college and the WNBA. She led Iowa to the national championship game, was the top pick in the WNBA draft and captured rookie of the year honors in the league. Fans packed sold-out arenas and millions of television viewers followed her journey on and off the court. Clark's exploits also put other women's sports leagues in the spotlight. A group of 74 sports journalists from AP and its members voted on the award. Other athletes who received votes included Olympic gold medalist Simone Biles and boxer Imane Khelif. Clark’s only the fourth women’s basketball player to win the award since it was first given in 1931. Javascript is required for you to be able to read premium content. Please enable it in your browser settings. Get our free email newsletters — latest headlines and e-edition notifications.
Weekend recap: Blondin leads Canada's medal winnersNone
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Dorgu 70′.
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ATA Creativity Global (NASDAQ:AACG) Sees Large Drop in Short InterestBill Belichick: The greatest football coach of all time, who accounts for eight Super Bowl rings and is a sure-fire, first-ballot Hall of Famer. That is, until he hangs up the whistle, which might not be just yet. His last season in New England wasn’t a great one, with the Patriots winning just four games and picking third in the 2024 NFL Draft. After a year of being unemployed, I thought Belichick would use this time to lay low and enjoy a break from football. Boy, was I wrong. From appearing on nearly every Monday Night Football game to join “ManningCast,” to being a weekly contributor on “The Pat McAfee Show,” and even showing up to “The Roast of Tom Brady,” Belichick has done everything but take a break, it seems. Now, we’re at the point of the NFL season when rumors are starting to swirl about future landing spots for coaches. There are many prominent names that will be available beyond Belichick, like Detroit Lions offensive coordinator Ben Johnson, and former Titans head coach Mike Vrabel, among others. And this past week or so, rumors came to light that Belichick has been in contact with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to become its next football coach. My immediate reaction: UNC?! I’ll state my bias now: I like Duke (because of Coach K), so I automatically hate UNC. Funny how that works... My second thought was, man, NFL teams just don’t think Belichick is worth the risk. Listen, he’s the greatest coach ever. There’s no denying that, says a 20-something year old living in New England. However, he’s 72 years old and after Tom Brady left for Tampa Bay, it’s not like Belichick left the Patriots in the best of conditions. He’s going to want full control and most programs don’t want to give coaches that. Ugh, Bill wearing light blue, as opposed to New England navy. I’m still shocked. I never thought he’d go the college route, unless he was a general manager or something. But love him or hate him, Belichick in the world of college football would be some spectacle. Reports suggest that Belichick would want to turn North Carolina into an NFL pathway, where players who choose to go there will be coached like NFL players, train like professionals, and live a day-to-day life, balancing school and their “profession.” Now, the question is, would it work? I’m hesitant to believe it would. I’m sure UNC will get a lot of high-end recruits who want to learn from Belichick, but if Nick Saban got tired of coaching because of NIL, I can’t see how Belichick would like it either. Like a talented director dealing with Hollywood producers, If UNC gives Belichick complete control of his project, then maybe – just maybe – it could work. After all, I guess we shouldn’t be too surprised that Belichick has an interest in UNC. His favorite defensive player of all time, Lawrence Taylor, went there. Personally, I want to see Belichick break the NFL wins record, but if teams don’t want to hire him, then I guess I can secretly root for UNC football to do well.None
The emergency call comes in just before midnight. In the driver's seat of a battered Toyota Hilux pickup truck, 29-year-old Chamunolwa Jimayi chats briefly with the caller. He hangs up the phone and shouts to his two colleagues in the back to hold on tight, then shoots off at high speed through the city center, careening around the traffic. Jimayi's job is not your regular 9-to-5. He's a member of a three-man Elephant Response Team fighting to keep the peace amid a worsening and at times deadly conflict between humans and the world's largest land animal. His hometown of Livingstone, Zambia, lies on the edge of the Mosi-oa-Tunya National Park and has long witnessed incidents of human-wildlife conflict. But the combination of recent urban expansion and successive poor rainy seasons has led to a dramatic escalation. "Sometimes we get more than 30 calls in a day," says Jimayi, who receives only a stipend of around $140 a month. "The game park is almost completely dry. So the elephants are just coming into the community to feed. We've been receiving a huge number." As he drives, signs of elephant incursions are visible all around: cinderblock walls with gaping holes, splintered mango, acacia and mopane trees, freshly deposited piles of dung. Strings of old beer cans and potato chip packets, designed to scare away elephants, adorn the walls of roadside homes. With his favorite reggae playlist straining the vehicle's dust-choked sound system, Jimayi heads for the suburb of Linda, where he's learned that a pair of elephants are wreaking havoc in a residential area. Tensions there are high after a string of deaths caused by elephants. If the community responds with aggression, the situation could become volatile, putting both people and elephants in danger. "They're friendly animals. They don't come to harm anyone," says Jimayi, who has a deep appreciation and respect for elephants. "But not everyone understands what I see in them. The community is really scared of these animals. And some are angry. People have lost their loved ones. Our goal is to keep the community and the elephants safe." By the time Jimayi and his colleagues arrive at the scene, one of the elephants has disappeared back into the bush. He finds the other walking along a residential street and maneuvers the truck to try and cut it off. A brief standoff ensues as Jimayi and the elephant size each other up, neither willing to back down. "Easy boy, back you go," he shouts through the open window. A few moments later, the elephant starts to run. Revving his engine, Jimayi pursues it through the streets of Linda, turning this way and that to channel it away from the settlement until eventually it ducks beneath a footbridge and disappears into the darkness in the direction of the national park. The Elephant Response Team gets going This has been Jimayi's life since 2019 when the Elephant Response Team was launched by a small Livingstone-based nonprofit, the Conservation and Tourism Society, in response to what was already, long before the drought began, a growing problem of human-wildlife conflict. With a total budget of barely $40,000 per year, CATS also helps search the national park for snares set by bushmeat poachers and carries out an extensive conservation education program designed primarily to teach people how to stay safe around elephants. The advice includes tips such as: always stay at least 300 feet from an elephant, never confront them and don't expect to outrun them: elephants can hit 28 mph. They also teach residents about the different forms of elephant deterrents available to protect their homes and gardens, like reflector fences and "chili bricks" — a potent mix of elephant dung, used engine oil and fresh chili peppers that produces a noxious smoke when burned. The Elephant Response Team is based in Dambwa South, a neighborhood of single-story brick homes set in a maze of dusty streets on the edge of the National Park and one of the areas worst affected by human-wildlife conflict. Every evening through the long months of the dry season – typically between May and October -- children gather along the park perimeter to watch the daily exodus of wildlife crossing into town in search of food. Crocodiles hunt for prey in sewage ponds, hippos lumber past industrial buildings, and zebras and buffalo graze contentedly by the roadside, seemingly oblivious to their human audience. From about 7 p.m. onward, elephants take over the streets. The park was once ringed by a fence but maintaining it has proved a challenge. Either it succumbs to elephant damage or is looted by residents looking to make a few dollars from the scrap metal. What remains are lines of empty fence poles and, here and there, a section of mangled wire flattened by the passage of animals. Park authorities say they are currently building a new one, with additional electric fencing in some areas, but Dominic Chiinda, director of the Department of National Parks and Wildlife, admits that a fence is unlikely to prove a lasting solution. Since 1990, Zambia's population has nearly tripled from 7.68 million to over 21 million. In that time, Dambwa South has sprawled outward to the point where, today, the outermost houses lie no more than 16 feet from the boundary of the national park. "When we were growing up, there were no houses here," says Jimayi, as he warms his hands over a campfire at the team's base in Dambwa South. "This whole place was just full of trees. The elephants know this used to be their land." Tough life for the locals For the residents of the homes nearest the park perimeter, life has become a daily struggle. "This was the only house we could find," says Janet Sikabonga, 36, who recently moved to the area with her husband and four children. "We didn't know there would be elephants here. We thought they would be inside the national park." The previous night, Sikabonga had watched through her window as four elephants entered her front yard, destroying her water tap and her clothes line. Over the past few weeks, elephants had also destroyed her guava tree and her vegetable patch, prompting the family to abandon efforts to grow their own food. They no longer venture outside after dark. "I don't know what to do," says Sikabonga, whose family relies on the money her husband earns doing odd-jobs for a Livingstone hotel, and who lacks the means to move again. "They destroy everything. Last night I was so scared I didn't even sleep". Most incidents of human-wildlife conflict don't result in physical injury, but deaths still occur on a regular basis. So far this year, the DNPW has reported 10 people killed by elephants in the town. One evening in August, 91-year-old tobacco trader Luka Chiyesu was on his way back from the market, following the same route he'd taken every day for years, when he encountered a herd of elephants. "I found my father's body just lying there in the bush," recalls his son, also called Luka, as he sits on a plastic chair in the yard of his home in the Nakatindi neighborhood. "He died on the spot." Luka Jr, who grew up around elephants, always held them in great esteem, seeing them as "the mother of all animals." Now, he feels conflicted. "We used to live peacefully. Nobody was ever attacked by elephants," he says. "Things have changed a lot. When they see us, they see an enemy. When we see them, we see an enemy. That day, if I had a gun, I'd have shot two or three." The death of Luka Chiyesu triggered anger in the community not only toward elephants but also toward the Department of National Parks and Wildlife over their perceived failure to protect communities living near the national park. After the old man's death, it took hours for a DNPW vehicle to arrive on the scene. When one eventually turned up, an angry mob stoned it. None of those spoken to by NPR said they were aware of the Department carrying out elephant patrols in the area. "They don't care about the people anymore -- they only care about the animals," said Luka Jr, echoing a widely held perception in the town. "They say this is a corridor of elephants. They say it's a wildlife area." Dominic Chiinda said the department does have a vehicle assigned to elephant patrols in Livingstone but that more are needed to effectively cover such a large area. He also said many of the "unfortunate incidents" of deaths and injuries caused by elephants were "self-inflicted," alleging that some of the victims may have been drunk, and that villagers were planting their crops too close to elephant corridors. Chiinda said the department was trying to teach people about elephant safety, as well as distributing fireworks to affected communities to help them scare off elephants. They're also providing supplementary food for wildlife in the National park. Livingstone sits within the Kavango Zambezi Conservation Area (KAZA), the world's largest terrestrial conservation area, which is home to more than half of Africa's savannah elephants and more than 2 million people. Spanning five countries, it contains a kaleidoscope of protected areas connected by so-called wildlife corridors that allow animals to move between one national park or reserve and another along traditional migration routes. The pachyderm puzzle The approach has helped to sustain elephant numbers in the KAZA at a time when, elsewhere on the continent, they are in decline. Yet for people living in the corridors, the regular passage of elephants poses numerous challenges. "This is a village, not a national park," complained David Mweetwa, a 35-year-old schoolteacher in the village of Simoonga, a few miles from Livingstone, whose sister was killed by an elephant in April. "The authorities should put up a wire to prevent animals coming in. If they did that, it would save lives." Another fraught issue is that of compensation. There's currently no government policy in place to provide assistance for the victims of elephant attacks or damage, yet such events can be ruinous for those involved. Many rely heavily on their vegetable patches or fruit trees. And in the case of a death, funeral costs are a heavy burden. Namukolo Kabuki was a successful market trader until her son was killed by an elephant in Linda last year. To pay for the funeral, she had to sell her entire stock of plastic kitchenware, charcoal and goats. A year later, she still hasn't been able to raise the capital to restart her business. Dominic Chiinda of the DNPW said the department is currently reviewing legislation to introduce a system of compensation by the start of the next dry season, yet he acknowledged that implementing it will be complicated. "Every night, families are losing their fruit trees, their gardens, their fences," said Brighton Manongo, a farmer and community leader in Dambwa South, who once lost 1,000 heads of cabbage to elephants in a single incident. "Who would you even compensate? There'd be a claim every day. And you can't buy back a life." In human-wildlife conflict hotspots across Southern Africa, several organizations have put in place measures to try to protect people from elephant raids. These include building "beehive fences", planting fields of chilli as a "buffer crop" and the practice of "cluster fencing" -- when groups of farmers with adjacent fields cooperate to build a fence around their properties. "There's a lot of optimism that humans and elephants will be able to co-exist in close proximity," said Chris Thouless, director of the Kenya-based conservation organisation, the Elephant Crisis Fund. "But there hasn't been enough discussion about precisely what we mean when we talk about coexistence. The mitigation measures are good up to a certain point, but none of them is a silver bullet if the underlying issues are still there." Burning chili bricks With the human population increasing across the region, Thouless believes we must adopt a "triaged approach" to addressing human-elephant conflict: accepting that in some areas, where the population density of people and elephants has reached a certain threshold, efforts toward mitigation may be unsustainable. In these instances, he says, separation may be the only solution. Thouless believes we should focus instead on areas where some form of long-term coexistence may be achievable. In Livingstone, Manongo does his best to mitigate the danger. After the loss of his cabbage harvest, he abandoned growing vegetables in favor of keeping fish and goats. And every night he burns chilli bricks in the four corners of his yard. Yet the bricks only last a few hours; new ones must be lit throughout the night. Three days earlier, Manongo had failed to get out of bed to light the next round of chilli bricks. In the morning he woke to find a section of his fence destroyed. "If you make a mistake, you're going to suffer damage," he said. "We're on the frontline here". Part of the hostility toward elephants stems from the fact that few people in communities like Dambwa South see any tangible benefit from the wildlife tourism they bring. To address this, Manongo runs a series of urban elephant safari tours to bring in tourist dollars – the fee is $50 per person -- and to demonstrate the advantages of living with elephants. The tour guides preach "co-existence," but it's an uneasy balance. As soon as the tourists have wrapped up their elephant viewing, the Elephant Response Team is sent in to herd the animals back to the park before they can cause any damage. "Here, coexistence would mean keeping the elephants on one side of a fence and the humans on the other," Manongo acknowledges. As the night wears on, the members of the Elephant Response Team continue with a mix of patrols and callouts. From time to time they come across people walking alone in the darkness and stop to give them a ride. They spot one man, who appears to be inebriated, staggering along a road directly toward a herd of buffalo grazing near a conference center. Elephants are also nearby. "Life is precious," admonishes Jimayi, as the team drop the man safely at his destination. "If you want to get drunk, do it at home." At one point, the team are confronted with a breeding herd of over 40 elephants. They attempt to corral them back toward the park. Jimayi skillfully maneuvers the vehicle back and forth through dense bush, clattering over shrubs and tree stumps, issuing a stream of orders and pleas to the herd through the open window. They say they think the strategy works. But no sooner do some of the elephants start to head back toward the park than others break off in the opposite direction. At the same time, other groups of elephants are being reported elsewhere in the town. "As soon as we try to park the car we get a call --Come to Linda, then come to Nakatindi, then come somewhere else," says Gift Ngandu, at 21, the youngest member of the team. "It goes on like that all night." The work is exhausting, and by the end of the dry season, when food in the park is scarcest and human-wildlife conflict peaks, the volunteers are getting by on barely two or three hours of sleep a night. CATS has repeatedly attempted to hire a second driver to give Jimayi a break, but none of the candidates have returned after their trial shift. "They feel the job is risky," says Jimayi. "And that you could be killed by an animal at any time. But if I thought like that I don't think I'd be able to work. The key is to understand the elephants." A Toyota serves as sheepdog Elephants are not inherently aggressive animals, says Chris Thouless, who first began studying human-elephant conflict in the early 1990s. Yet certain factors can make them more so. The team members know to look out for secretions on the sides of the faces of bull elephants, a sign that they may be in musth -- a testosterone-fueled state that can make them more likely to act aggressively. They are wary of getting between a mother and her calf -- and keep a close eye on any elephants that appear to be sick or wounded. "Elephants are like people," said Thouless. "They can be aggressive when threatened, but they're peaceful when they feel comfortable." "You need to be able to see what mood they're in and be able to tell a real charge from a mock charge," says Gift Ngandu. "You need to understand their behavior. If you talk to them politely they're very friendly. You need to show them that you're not here to harm them." When the team members approach an elephant, they start gently, doing their best to coax and nudge the animal out of harm's way. They talk to the elephants, gently revving their engine and using their spotlight to convey the message that it's time to leave. Some of the elephants now recognize the team and depart of their own accord, knowing that if they don't, they're likely to be chased away with more forceful measures, Ngandu says. When the elephants stand their ground, the team up the ante, bringing their vehicle in close, often within feet of the herd, shouting instructions and revving hard on the engine. Turning this way and that to round up stragglers and keep the animals moving in the right direction, they deploy their ageing Toyota as a farmer might a sheepdog. Shortly before dawn, the team conduct their last routine patrol of the night, rounding up the few elephants left in the town and ushering them back toward the national park, while the residents of Dambwa South emerge to assess the night's damage. Once a safe distance from the nearest houses, Jimayi switches off the engine. For a while, the team sits together in the truck, watching in companionable silence as the lumbering giants disappear, one by one, into the trees. "I feel so privileged to be able to do this job," says Jimayi. "When I see an elephant, I see an animal that's gentle, peaceful and intelligent. I hope that one day we can learn to live together." Tommy Trenchard is an independent photojournalist based in Cape Town, South Africa. He has previously contributed photos and stories to NPR on the Mozambique cyclone of 2019, Indonesian death rituals and illegal miners in abandoned South African diamond mines.Interview Now that criminals have realized there's no need to train their own LLMs for any nefarious purposes - it's much cheaper and easier to steal credentials and then jailbreak existing ones - the threat of a large-scale supply chain attack using generative AI becomes more real. No, we're not talking about a fully AI-generated attack from the initial access to the business operations shutdown. Technologically, the criminals aren't there yet. But one thing LLMs are getting very good at is assisting in social engineering campaigns. And this is why Crystal Morin, former intelligence analyst for the US Air Force and cybersecurity strategist at Sysdig, anticipates seeing highly successful supply chain attacks in 2025 that originated with an LLM-generated spear phish. When it comes to using LLMs, "threat actors are learning and understanding and gaining the lay of the land just the same as we are," Morin told The Register . "We're in a footrace right now. It's machine against machine." Sysdig, along with other researchers, in 2024 documented an uptick in criminals using stolen cloud credentials to access LLMs. In May, the container security firm documented attackers targeting Anthropic's Claude LLM model . While they could have exploited this access to extract LLM training data, their primary goal in this type of attack appeared to be selling access to other criminals. This left the cloud account owner footing the bill — at the hefty price of $46,000 per day related to LLM consumption costs. Digging deeper, the researchers discovered that the broader script used in the attack could check credentials for 10 different AI services: AI21 Labs, Anthropic, AWS Bedrock, Azure, ElevenLabs, MakerSuite, Mistral, OpenAI, OpenRouter, and GCP Vertex AI. We're in a footrace right now. It's machine against machine Later in the year, Sysdig spotted attackers attempting to use stolen credentials to enable LLMs. The threat research team calls any attempt to illegally obtain access to a model "LLMjacking," and in September reported that these types of attacks were "on the rise, with a 10x increase in LLM requests during the month of July and 2x the amount of unique IP addresses engaging in these attacks over the first half of 2024." Not only does this cost victims a significant amount of money, according to Sysdig, but this can run more than $100,000 per day when the victim org is using newer models like Claude 3 Opus. Plus, victims are forced to pay for people and technology to stop these attacks. There's also a risk of enterprise LLMs being weaponized, leading to further potential costs. In 2025, "the greatest concern is with spear phishing and social engineering," Morin said. "There's endless ways to get access to an LLM, and they can use this GenAI to craft unique, tailored messages to the individuals that they're targeting based on who your employer is, your shopping preferences, the bank that you use, the region that you live in, restaurants and things like that in the area." In addition to helping attackers overcome language barriers, this can make messages sent via email or social media messaging apps appear even more convincing because they are expressly crafted for the individual victims. "They're going to send you a message from this restaurant that's right down the street, or popular in your town, hoping that you'll click on it," Morin added. "So that will enable their success quite a bit. That's how a lot of successful breaches happen. It's just the person-on-person initial access." She pointed to the Change Healthcare ransomware attack - for which, we should make very clear, there is no evidence suggesting it was assisted by an LLM - as an example of one of 2024's hugely damaging breaches. In this case, a ransomware crew locked up Change Healthcare's systems, disrupting thousands of pharmacies and hospitals across the US and accessing private data belonging to around 100 million people . It took the healthcare payments giant nine months to restore its clearinghouse services following the attack. It will be a very small, simple portion of the attack chain with potentially massive impact "Going back to spear phishing: imagine an employee of Change Healthcare receiving an email and clicking on a link," Morin said. "Now the attacker has access to their credentials, or access to that environment, and the attacker can get in and move laterally." When and if we see this type of GenAI assist, "it will be a very small, simple portion of the attack chain with potentially massive impact," she added. While startups and existing companies are releasing security tools and that also use AI to detect and prevent email phishes, there are some really simple steps that everyone can take to avoid falling for any type of phishing attempt. "Just be careful what you click," Morin advised. Also: pay close attention to the email sender. "It doesn't matter how good the body of the email might be. Did you look at the email address and it's some crazy string of characters or some weird address like name@gmail but it says it's coming from Verizon? That doesn't make sense," she added. LLMs can also help criminals craft a domain with different alphanumerics based on legitimate, well-known company names, and they can use various prompts to make the sender look more believable. Even voice-call phishing will likely become harder to distinguish because of AI used for voice cloning, Morin believes. "I get, like, five spam calls a day from all over the country and I just ignore them because my phone tells me it's spam," she noted. "But they use voice cloning now, too," Morin continued. "And most of the time when people answer your phone, especially if you're driving or something, you're not actively listening, or you're multitasking, and you might not catch that this is a voice clone - especially if it sounds like someone that's familiar, or what they're saying is believable, and they really do sound like they're from your bank." We saw a preview of this during the run-up to the 2024 US presidential election, when AI-generated robocalls impersonating President Biden urged voters not to participate in the state's presidential primary election. Since then, the FTC issued a $25,000 reward to solicit ideas on the best ways to combat AI voice cloning and the FCC declared AI-generated robocalls to be illegal. Morin doesn't expect this to be a deterrent to criminals. "If there's a will, there's a way," she opined. "If it costs money, then they'll figure out a way to get it for free." ®
AP Sports SummaryBrief at 4:53 p.m. EST
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