Moldovans cast votes to choose president and decide on EU path as Russian interference claims spike

BERLIN (AP) — German authorities said Sunday that they have arrested a Libyan national with suspected ties to the extremist Islamic State group who was allegedly planning a firearms attack on the Israeli Embassy.

Police and other security forces detained the man on Saturday evening in Bernau, a town just outside of Berlin, and searched his home there, the Federal Prosecutor’s Office said in a statement.

The prosecutor’s office said the suspect was a Libyan national whom they identified only as Omar A.

“He intended to carry out a high-profile attack with firearms on the Israeli Embassy in Berlin,” the statement said. In his planning, the statement added, “the accused exchanged information with a member of IS in a messenger chat.”

Security forces also searched the home of another person who is considered a witness and not a suspect, the prosecutor’s statement said.

Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said that German security authorities “struck in time to thwart possible plans to attack the Israeli Embassy in Berlin.”

“This shows that protecting Jewish and Israeli institutions in our country is vital and of the utmost importance to us,” she added.

The suspect brought on Sunday before an investigating judge at the country’s highest court, the Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe.

Israeli Ambassador Ron Prosor thanked the German security authorities “for ensuring the security of our embassy,” German news agency dpa reported.

News of the case first came from the Bild newspaper, which reported that a heavily armed elite police unit stormed the suspect’s home in Bernau. It said German authorities acted after receiving a tipoff from an unspecified foreign intelligence agency.

“We are acting with the utmost vigilance and attention in view of the high threat posed by Islamist, antisemitic and anti-Israel violence,” Faeser said.

According to Bild, the suspect is a 28-year-old who arrived in Germany in November 2022 and applied for asylum. Dpa reported that his asylum request was rejected.

Justice Minister Marco Buschmann also warned Sunday of a “very serious” threat of Islamist terrorism in Germany. “Israeli institutions are particularly often the target of terrorists,” he told dpa.

A sharp increase in antisemitic incidents has been recorded in Germany since Hamas’ attack on Israeli on Oct. 7, 2023, which triggered the ongoing wars in the Middle East.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

TORONTO – Denis Villeneuve has worked in cybersecurity for 15 years but seldom have the threats he’s come across felt as personal as they do these days.

Employees at his workplace, technology firm Kyndryl, have been sent fake videos of CEO Martin Schroeter designed to lure them into handing over their login credentials to fraudsters.

Villeneuve has also seen a pal who runs a small engineering firm be preyed on when his wife was left a voice mail using what sounded like his voice to falsely convey that he was in trouble and needed her to quickly post bail money.

“I was like, ‘Oh my God.’ This hit home close because this is a good friend of mine,” recalled Villeneuve, a cybersecurity and resilience practice leader at Kyndryl Canada.

The attacks were made possible by artificial intelligence-based software, which has become even more affordable, accessible and advanced in recent years.

But despite the cybersecurity threats, Villeneuve — like much of the tech industry — is careful not to frame AI as all bad.

In the fight against cyber attackers, they reason AI can help just as much as it harms.

“It’s a double-edged sword,” Villeneuve explained.

As AI improves, experts feel there will always a bigger or more innovative way of trying to get through a company’s defences, but those defences are getting a boost from the technology, too.

“AI, ultimately, is a much better thing for the defenders than the attackers,” said Peter Smetny, regional vice-president of engineering at cybersecurity firm Fortinet Canada.

His reasoning lies in the sheer number of attacks some companies face and the resources it takes to handle them or ward them off.

A 2023 study from EY Canada of 60 Canadian organizations found that four out of five had seen at least 25 cybersecurity incidents in the past year. Indigo Books & Music, London Drugs and Giant Tiger have all been victims of high-profile incidents.

While not all cyber attacks are successful, Smetny said many companies see thousands of attempts to penetrate their systems every day.

AI makes handling them more efficient.

“You may have only four or five people on your team and there’s only so many alerts they can manually go through, but this allows them to focus and tells them which ones to prioritize,” Smetny said.

Without AI, an analyst would manually have to check if each attack is linked to an internet protocol address, a unique identifier assigned to every device connected to the internet, which can help trace the origins of an attack.

The analyst would also study whether the person behind the address was already known to the company and the extent of their attack.

With AI, an analyst can now query software using simple language to quickly compile and present everything about an attacker and their IP address, including where they were able to enter a system and what actions they carried out.

“It’s able to really, really save you a lot of time and point you in the right direction, so you focus on the things that are important,” Smetny said.

But attackers have the same tools in their arsenal.

Dustin Heywood, the chief architect of IBM’s global intelligence agency X-Force, said anyone with malicious intent can turn to AI to help round up data from several breaches and piece together a profile of a target.

For example, if the data tells them someone shops frequently at Toys “R” Us or at Walmart for kids’ products, it might tell an attacker someone recently had a kid.

Sometimes the attackers resort to a practice known as “pig butchering” to fill in any information they are missing.

“You’ll have a bot start talking to somebody, start building a rapport using things like generative AI,” Heywood said. “They’ll make them feel all nice and trusted, then they’ll … start extracting information.”

When attackers gain financial details, a social insurance number or enough personal information to get into an account, the data can be used to falsely apply for a credit card or sold to other criminals.

The potential harm snowballs even further when there’s good enough material to make a deep fake, which is a clip of someone doing or saying something they haven’t. Villeneuve’s example of his friend apparently leaving a message for his wife is an example of this tactic.

For smaller targets, AI does a lot of the heavy lifting, freeing attackers up to focus their attention on high value victims.

“You can have a bot operator talk to 20 people at once,” Heywood said. “Before it used to be a farm of people out in a third nation, typing away at mobile phones.”

He’s also heard of people using augmented reality glasses that instantly pull up information on someone, including their personal data being sold on the dark web, as soon as you look at them, and others working to “jailbreak” AI chatbots intro extracting personal information people have inputted.

The evolution in attacks has convinced him that AI is “changing the game.”

“Back in the ’90s, it used to be teenagers, kids, college students that used to break into websites to deface them,” he said. “And then recently we had the shift over to ransomware where companies would have their computers encrypted.”

Now, the focus has shifted to taking on someone’s identity, a “really big business” Heywood said AI is fuelling further.

The Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre has said the country has counted 15,941 victims of fraud in the first half of the year, with $284 million lost in those incidents. There were 41,988 victims and $569 million lost the year before.

Heywood, Smetny and Villeneuve feel the fight against attackers isn’t futile and companies are taking it seriously.

Their employers are running exercises for businesses such as banks and major retailers, simulating what it would be like if their companies were under attack, and helping them prepare staff to address threats and locate and patch software vulnerabilities.

It’s not hard to get businesses to take action, Heywood said, because a cybersecurity breach can cost companies an average of $6 million and result in a stock slump, fewer sales and a broken relationship with customers.

Anything they can do to stop an attack is worth it, he added because “trust is gained in inches but it’s lost virtually instantly.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 20, 2024.

TOKYO (AP) — The defense ministers of Japan, the U.K. and Italy agreed to accelerate the joint development of a next-generation fighter jet, and announced that a trilateral government organization would be established by the end of this year to work with the parties producing the aircraft, Japanese officials said Sunday.

The three countries agreed in 2022 to jointly produce a new combat aircraft that will be ready for deployment in 2035, under the Global Combat Air Program, or GCAP, to strengthen cooperation in the face of growing threats from China, Russia and North Korea.

The next-generation stealth fighter jet would replace Japan’s retiring F-2s that it jointly developed with the U.S., and Eurofighter Typhoons, which were produced in partnership with the U.K, Italy, Spain and Germany.

On Sunday, Japanese Defense Minister Gen Nakatani, after meeting with his U.K. and Italian counterparts, John Healey and Guido Crosetto, said a joint body called the GCAP International Government Organization, or GIGO, will be set up by the end of this year to oversee the aircraft’s development.

The ministers met on the sidelines of the Group of Seven defense ministers meeting in Naples, Italy.

Several private sector companies, including Japan’s Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Britain’s BAE Systems PLC and Italy’s Leonardo, are taking part in the project.

GIGO, to be based in the U.K. and headed by a Japanese official, will oversee the aircraft’s development.

“We now see the launch of GIGO and a joint venture on track” toward signing their first contract next year, Nakatani said.

Sunday’s agreement addresses concerns over the progress of the project despite changes of leadership in both Japan and the U.K.

Mitsubishi Heavy and their U.K. and Italian counterparts had a 1/10th model of the joint fighter jet on display at their GCAP booth for the first time in Japan at a major aerospace exhibit in Tokyo last week.

Akira Sugimoto, MHI’s Japan program senior representative for GCAP, said that the joint fighter jet development will be meaningful for Japanese suppliers and for the country’s industrial base.

“Our basic position is to bring our strengths together to develop a high quality fighter jet. I believe Japanese suppliers have outstanding technologies and I do hope as many of them as possible would join (GCAP),” Sugimoto said.

“I think it will also help Japanese suppliers to enhance their capacity to develop equipment and contribute to provide a better outlook and business environment and stability,” he said.

Japan, which is rapidly building up its military, hopes to have greater capability to counter China’s rising assertiveness, and the joint fighter jet project would help strengthen Japan’s mostly domestic and underdeveloped defense industry.

Japan has significantly eased its arms export restrictions to allow foreign sales of the future fighter jet and licensing back of weapons, such as surface-to-air PAC-3 missile interceptors produced in Japan to complement U.S. inventory, which has decreased because of its support for Ukraine.

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This story has been corrected to show that the name of one of the retiring jets is Typhoon, not Tempest.

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