Cisco WiFi Routers Attacked After Code Hack Posted

SDxCentral | March 05, 2019

Hackers this week took advantage of online instructions to target some Cisco WiFi routers. The attacks come on the heels of the vendor issuing a software patch for the critical security vulnerabilities. The attacks occurred after security research firm Pen Test Partners posted a blog containing demonstration code on how to exploit the routers. The firm was involved in initially finding the vulnerability. Cisco noted that the vulnerability occurs in the web-based management interface of three routers: RV110W, RV130W and RV215W. It reportedly impacts about 12,000 devices in the U.S., Canada, India, Argentina, Poland, and Romania. The vulnerability, known as a Remote Command Execution (RCE) vulnerability, was ranked as “critical” by Cisco, with a 9.8 score (out of a possible 10) on the Common Vulnerability Scoring System. The high rating reflects the ease in attacking the devices remotely over the internet by hackers who also don’t need advanced coding skills. An unauthenticated remote attacker could use the vulnerability to execute arbitrary code, Cisco explained. It isn’t clear from Cisco’s report how attackers might take advantage of such access, but they presumably would be able to monitor secure personal data including passwords. Known Vulnerability: Three security researchers, including one from Pen Test Partners, announced the vulnerability at the GeekPwn Shanghai conference in late October. They didn’t provide technical details or mention the impacted products at the time, although Cisco thanked them for their work. In its blog post, Pen Test Partners criticized Cisco coders for using an insecure function in the C programminglanguage known as strcpy (shorthand for “string copy”) when the routers were first designed. Using strcpy left the authentication process in the routers open to a buffer overflow, allowing attackers to flood the password field and attach malicious commands. “It is well known – notorious even – that strcpy is a dangerous function to use,” the blog said. That blog entry, which was posted on Feb. 28, included code describing how an attack could happen.

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Amazon DevOps Guru is a powerful tool that helps organizations unlock the full potential of AI in DevOps. With automated monitoring, troubleshooting and remediation capabilities, DevOps Guru helps to detect abnormalities and potential issues, quickly identify the source of any issue, and automatically suggest remediation steps. This helps to streamline the process of deploying applications and services, reduce the time and effort required, and guarantee that the application or service is running optimally.

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INNOVATION,SOFTWARE,FUTURE TECH

Picsart Announces SketchAI App, a New Image-to-image AI Art Generator

Picsart | January 09, 2023

Picsart, the popular digital creation platform, introduced SketchAI, a new standalone application that allows anyone to turn a sketch or image into a new picture created by AI. With the rapid growth of generative AI in recent months, millions of users adopt the technology daily to create unique pictures. SketchAI broadens the possibilities further by providing users with a fun and quick experience of creating art from sketches or images. "Picsart began as a simple drawing app, so this feels like a full circle moment for the platform," said Picsart's VP of Product, Lusine Harutyunyan. He further added, "The evolution of AI technology from then until now is incredible, the ability to not only draw anything you want on a mobile device, but now turn that into a completely new work of art is something I never would have thought was possible. We're hoping to reach a new set of creators with this app, and can't wait to see what users make!" Source-Businesswire In addition to drawing a sketch or uploading an existing image, users can enhance the results by adding text describing the image. SketchAI also offers several artistic styles that users can apply to their creations, such as ink drawing, pencil sketching, da Vinci, Van Gogh, and others. SketchAI is the latest addition to Picsart's rapid innovation in the field of generative AI, released just after AI Avatar, which uses AI to transform user selfies into custom avatars. Picsart has also released additional features, such as AI Replace, AI Background, AI Writer, and AI Image Generator. About Picsart Headquartered in Miami, Picsart is a digital all-in-one platform for creating, customizing, and sharing photos and videos. With an ecosystem of free content, advanced tools, and ideas from other producers, it is used for personal and professional design by consumers, marketers, content providers, and businesses. It is the world's largest creative platform, with a billion downloads and over 150 million monthly active creators. The company is available on mobile and the web, providing world-class image editing and processing tools to businesses via APIs and an SDK. With offices in various locations worldwide, it is backed by Sequoia, SoftBank, Capital, Insight Partners, DCM Ventures, and others.

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GENERAL AI, AI APPLICATIONS, SOFTWARE

Kore.ai Leads Gartner's 2023 Conversational AI Magic Quadrant for Second Year

Kore.ai | March 14, 2023

Kore.ai has been recognized for the second consecutive year as a 2023 leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Conversational AI Platforms. The company has been acknowledged for its ability to execute and completeness of vision. The conversational AI platform and solutions from Kore.ai are used by more than 350 customers and automate billions of interactions every year. This saves global enterprise customers an estimated $1 billion in costs. The company offers a no-code Experience Optimization (XO) platform that allows businesses to easily design, build, test, and process conversational user interfaces, virtual assistants, and deploy apps. The company has a growing portfolio of domain-specific solutions deployed on a subscription basis, and the latest version of its platform integrates with large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI's GPT-3, enabling further simplification of the design, development, and management of intelligent virtual assistants (IVAs). Prasanna Kumar Arikala, Chief Technology Officer at Kore.ai, said, "Our XO Platform is the foundation upon which we unveil all our innovations." He also said, "We believe the recognition from Gartner is a testament to our excellence in some of the capabilities that are critical for an enterprise-grade conversational AI platform." He further said, "From our perspective, Kore.ai stands unmatched when it comes to enterprise administration, natural language understanding, dialog management, back-end integrations, and agent escalations." (Source - PRNewswire) Kore.ai also has offices in the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, Mexico, Australia, Singapore, and Germany. This is in addition to expanding its presence in North America, Japan, and Korea and hiring 850 people. It has announced a freemium model with self-service and do-it-yourself (DIY) features that allow small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), startups, and the wider developer community to get access to the XO platform and enjoy enterprise-grade scalability, security, and NLU sophistication on a pay-as-you-go basis. The company is also one of the few in the market to offer certification through the Kore.ai Academy, which empowers new developers to learn faster and kickstarts their IVA development journey. About Kore.ai Kore.ai provides conversational AI-first platform and solutions for enterprises. Its experience optimization platform is used by more than 350 Fortune 2000 companies. The company's goal is to enable human-like communication with machines through its innovation in NLU. Kore.ai values client success, empathy, innovation, openness, and bold ideas. It encourages employees to have fun while making a difference in digital transformation. The company has been recognized as a Market Leader by reputed analyst firms.

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GENERAL AI, SOFTWARE, FUTURE TECH

Cogito Announces Innovations in Real-time Conversation Intelligence for Contact Centers

Cogito Corp | January 27, 2023

Cogito, a company that helps businesses with real-time coaching and guidance, has announced new products that will make real-time conversation intelligence in call centers better. The new products are made to help agents in the call center answer customer questions more quickly and effectively. Topic-based machine learning models, real-time transcription with emotion AI markup, self-service admin for easy topic generation, and secure redaction of personally identifiable information (PII) during calls are some of the new features. With these new features, contact centers will have a level of intelligence that has never been seen before. This will help them understand customer conversations better and respond quickly to changing customer needs. Joshua Feast, CEO and Co-Founder of Cogito, said, “Contact center agents and their leaders take the brunt of the service experience, with customer interactions becoming increasingly complex." He added, "We view seamless, integrated conversational AI and emotion AI capabilities as necessary to support today’s workforce." Additionally, he said, "With over a decade of advanced R&D, we differentiate based on our ability to go beyond traditional speech analytics." He further commented, "Our unique combination of behavior insights and real-time natural language processing has culminated into a powerful agent assist and coaching platform that we continue to add to and expand upon." Finally, he said, "The conversation AI solutions announced today are another step forward for the company and our ability to deeply assist an industry that needs human-centered support and guidance.” (Source - Businesswire) The solutions can pick up on more than 200 voice and behavior cues in speech and give real-time advice on how to respond to important topics of conversation. With self-service admin portals and the ability to change conversation themes by line of business, team, or skill group, they also make it easy for operations leaders and supervisors to manage and help their staff. About Cogito Cogito is a software company based in Boston that focuses on AI for emotions and conversations to help contact centers and front-line teams get coaching and advice in real time. Their technology analyzes how people talk to each other to give live guidance during calls and real-time feedback on how customers feel. This helps agents improve their effectiveness, empathy, and performance. Many well-known brands, including five of the Fortune 25 companies, use Cogito's technology to improve their connection with customers and elevate their team members' well-being. Cogito is venture-backed by companies such as OpenView Ventures, Romulus Capital, and Salesforce Ventures. They are committed to producing innovative technology, driving customer success, and helping people live more productive lives.

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