TechCrunch+

Indonesia’s PasarPolis is now able to underwrite its own products, making it one of Indonesia’s first full-stack insurtechs. This means PasarPolis will be able to offer new products and work with partners like Tokopedia, Gojek, Traveloka, Xiaomi and IKEA Indonesia to create custom insurance policies.

PasarPolis is able to underwrite insurance products because of its strategic partnership with Tap Insurance. Tap Insurance received a full license for insurance underwriting from OJK (Otoritas Jasa Keuangan, or the Financial Services Authority of Indonesia).

Cleosent Randing, the founder and CEO of PasarPolis, told TechCrunch that the first products from the strategic partnership will include fire and vehicle insurance.

Founded in 2015, PasarPolis has raised over $59 million in total to date and is backed by investors like Gojek, Tokopedia, Traveloka, Leapfrog and SBI. Its policies include travel, home content, logistics, electronic devices, life and vehicle insurance.

PasarPolis currently has 60,000 registered agents in Indonesia, and partners with 50 insurance providers. It says it has served more than 80 million customers and issued one billion policies between 2019 and 2021, partnering with 40 companies to distribute products.

Distribution partners include Shopee, Tokopedia, Gojek and Xiaomi. Customers can add micro-insurance policies to their purchases from their platform for about 5,000 to 20,000 Indonesian rupiah (or 32 cents to $1.29 USD).

PasarPolis is able to scale because it uses machine learning and data analytics to make the underwriting and claims process faster and more cost-effective. It claims 87% of non-credit insurance claims in 2022 were settled within 24 hours. PasarPolis’ tech includes algorithms that automate the claims approval process, based on data submitted by customers, like photos, chronology and date and time of events. The algorithm then filters information to PasarPolis’ faster “green” channel.”

The company’s most recent launches include its Unified Claims Interface (POLI), which lets customers file multiple claims through different channels like email , WhatsApp, SMS and PasarPolis’ mobile app.

Randing says PasarPolis’ goal is to reduce the cost of insurance and increase penetration in Indonesia, where insurance penetration rate was only 4% as of 2022.

“We think that inclusive insurance is a vital add-on to basic state social,” he said. “Particularly the health protection in line with the increasing concern of many to protect their families’ health, especially during the pandemic.”

PasarPolis is now one of Indonesia’s first full-stack insurtechs by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch

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Hello from a very rain-drenched, the Cure-themed, semi-goth-and-sad Silicon Valley (Haje) and a lovely, sunny and warm day (Christine). It’s hard to imagine one from the other, and so here we are, learning a lesson of empathy and realizing that our immediate experience may not be universal. Whoa. Didn’t expect that level of depth from your friendly neighborhood tech newsletter, didya? May we continue to surprise you for the rest of 2023 as well. — Christine and Haje

The TechCrunch Top 3

ChatGPT, but in a suit and tie: Kyle writes that OpenAI has been looking for ways to monetize ChatGPT, its viral chatbot, and today we learned how it is going to do that. The company is now piloting a premium version called “ChatGPT Professional.” Benefits include no “unavailable” windows and an unlimited number of messages. How much would you pay for it? Join the waitlist and weigh in.
In the air again: The Federal Aviation Authority is probably breathing a sigh of relief after returning to normal operations earlier this morning. All U.S. domestic flights were grounded when one of its key systems went down, Darrell reports.
What did you say?: More companies are developing AI technology to help humans communicate, and DeepL, an AI-based language translator for businesses, is the latest to reap the benefits of investor hunger for companies like this. Ingrid reports that DeepL raised over $100 million to value the company at over $1 billion.

Startups and VC

Getting smart home devices to talk to each other has taken forever, but something changed. Why now? Or, more explicitly, why did the Matter rollout take so long? Brian questions. For starters, the obvious issue alluded to above is that most of these big companies would really rather not work with their competitors if they can avoid it. As such, getting everyone on the same page about something like this is a bit of a cat-herding scenario. We finally got there, however, and that’s why the Matter logo was everywhere at CES 2023.

Venom Foundation and investment manager Iceberg Capital have partnered to launch a $1 billion venture fund, Jacquelyn reports. The $1 billion vehicle is a blockchain-agnostic fund that will invest in web3 protocols and decentralized applications (dApps).

Okay, fine, you can have another fistful of highlights from the past 24 hours:

All that you seek: Kyle reports that Seek lands $7.5 million investment for AI tech that answers domain-specific questions.
Sailing un-Carta’d waters: Rocky weather at Carta: Connie reports that the company is suing its former CTO, and Natasha M reports that the company lays off 10% of its staff.
Hack the planet: Gamified cybersecurity training platform with 1.7 million users, Hack the Box raises $55 million, reports Ingrid.
Hell-benta on chatting alone: AI-powered chatbot provider Inbenta talked its way into a $40 million funding round, Kyle reports.
Skipping the line: If you want the Nothing phone in the U.S., sign up for the beta, Brian reports.

Some investors are (cautiously) implementing ChatGPT in their workflows

Can AI turn out polite pitch rejection letters, automate aspects of due diligence, or draft accurate market maps?

Some investors are already evaluating ways to fold ChatGPT “into their workflows to do their jobs better, smarter and maybe even cheaper,” report Natasha Mascarenhas, Christine Hall and Kyle Wiggers.

They interviewed several VCs to learn more about potential use cases, some early experiments and the tech’s limitations when it comes to nuance and tone.

“It’s not automating the important conversations we have with journalists,” said Brianne Kimmel, founder of Worklife Ventures, “but I think it’s sufficient for things that are pretty straightforward.”

Three more from the TC+ team:

What if the H-1B doesn’t happen?: Our friendly immigration lawyer Sophie Alcorn answers how to present a strong H-1B case, and what to do if you’re not selected.
AI see the future: Veteran enterprise VC Peter Wagner on the opportunities for AI startups, as reported by Connie.
Stretching our spans: Abby Miller Levy takes a stab at predicting the longevity industry in 2023.

TechCrunch+ is our membership program that helps founders and startup teams get ahead of the pack. You can sign up here. Use code “DC” for a 15% discount on an annual subscription!

Big Tech Inc.

It’s a Meta kind of day. First, what Meta giveth, Meta taketh away, as Amanda found out. First it was internships and now Meta is rescinding some full-time job offers. Meanwhile, a privacy rights group in Europe published a lengthy set of documents related to privacy decisions the EU made against Meta.Natasha L tells you what they said. And finally, Annie reports that Meta’s main content moderation partner in Africa shut down operations.

We all have a lot of apps on our phones, but Sarah reports that for the first time in a while, the app economy slowed, with consumer spending in this category down 2% to $167 billion. She goes into what happened and why.

Now here’s five more for you:

New layoffs: Both Carta and Cloud Software Group announced they will have fewer employees.
A new, fresher Microsoft: Microsoft has a less expensive version of its 365 product that comes with 100 GB of storage, Outlook and more for $1.99 per month, Kyle reports.
Do you know where you are headed?: Apple is taking on Google again, this time with a new web portal called Apple Business Connect that enables business owners to update and manage their information on Apple Maps. Sarah has more.
Tweets, but not by date/time: Twitter is making an algorithmic timeline the default on iOS. This means your timeline will be curated to what Twitter thinks you want to see rather than tweets appearing in chronological order, Ivan writes.
Blockchain!: Amazon Web Services partners with Avalanche to scale blockchain solutions for enterprises, institutions and governments to make it easier for individuals to launch and manage nodes on Avalanche, Jacquelyn reports.

Daily Crunch: In ‘an early experimental program,’ OpenAI opens waitlist for GPT Professional by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch

Launch startup ABL Space Systems’ first orbital launch attempt ended in failure Tuesday after all nine engines on the RS1 rocket’s first stage shut down simultaneously. The rocket subsequently hit the launch pad and was destroyed on impact.

The rocket took off from the Pacific Spaceport Complex on Alaska’s Kodiak Island at around 6:27 PM EST. It’s unclear how soon after lift-off the engines failed. The rocket was carrying a technology demonstration CubeSat for data analytics company OmniTeq. While the payload was lost, no personnel were injured by the rocket impact.

As is customary with anomalous rocket launches, the company is working with officials from the spaceport and the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration to investigate the cause of the engine shutdown.

ABL President Dan Piemont told TechCrunch that while the investigation is still in its early stages, “The simultaneity of the shutdown is a strong piece of evidence but it will take more time for the team to narrow down contributing factors and a root cause.”

ABL’s 88-foot-tall expendable rocket RS1 is capable of carrying up to 1,350 kilograms to low Earth orbit, similar to Firefly Aerospace’s Alpha vehicle. The company has previously said that each launch would cost around $12 million, putting it in a growing field of competitors looking to provide rapid launch services at low cost.

The failure on Tuesday comes just one day after a Virgin Orbit mission experienced its own anomaly, which ended the mission prematurely. Two other rockets also experienced failures in the past month: Arianespace’s Vega-C and Chinese company Landspace’s Zhuque-2, which would’ve been the first methane-fueled rocket to reach orbit.

ABL has raised $420 million since its founding in 2017, including a $200 million Series B extension round in December 2021 at a valuation of $2.4 billion. Its investors include Lockheed Martin, which purchased a block of up to 58 launches from the startup last April.

“The Flight 2 vehicle is fully assembled and ready to begin it’s flight campaign, so we’re champing at the bit to get going on that as soon as the Flight 1 investigation is complete,” Piemont said.

ABL Space Systems’ rocket experiences simultaneous engine shutdown shortly after lift-off by Aria Alamalhodaei originally published on TechCrunch

The Inflation Reduction Act has clearly kickstarted investment in U.S. clean energy manufacturing. Last year, automakers and battery manufacturers announced that they’d spend tens of billions of dollars to ramp up EV production in the U.S. Now it’s solar’s turn.

Today, Korean solar manufacturer Hanwha Qcells announced that it’ll spend $2.5 billion to build a new plant in Georgia and expand an existing one.

The new plant will crank out 3.3 gigawatts of solar panels annually. That’s enough to supply nearly a fifth of current U.S. demand. Expansion at the other plant will add another 2 gigawatts of capacity. When completed, Qcells’ Georgia facilities will employ 2,500 people and will be capable of making 8.4 gigawatts of solar panels, cementing the Peach State’s status as a leader in solar manufacturing.

Qcells’ new campus won’t just be a final assembly plant, either. It will handle just about everything, from turning polysilicon into ingots, slicing ingots into wafters, turning wafers into cells and packing cells into panels. It’s a level of vertical integration that is seldom seen in the U.S.

US solar manufacturing gets boost with $2.5B Georgia deal by Tim De Chant originally published on TechCrunch

When you look at fourth quarter worldwide PC sales data from Canalys, IDC and Gartner, it’s fair to say that the news was not great with all three firms seeing precipitous declines from 2021 highs.

In fact, the numbers plunged for the fourth consecutive quarter with sales falling 28% according to IDC, 28.5% according to Gartner and 29% according to Canalys. These numbers include laptops and desktop computers running Windows, MacOS or Chrome operating systems.

The yearly totals told a similar story with all three firms coming in at around -16% decline year-over-year. But IDC analyst Ryan Reith pointed out, it may not be as gloomy as those numbers suggest because it was coming off a stellar 2021.

“2021 was near historic levels for PC shipments, so any comparison is going to be distorted. There’s no question when we look back at this time that the rise and fall of the PC market will be one for the record books, but plenty of opportunity still lies ahead,” Reith said in a statement.

In terms of units shipped for the fourth quarter, Gartner reported 65.3 million units with Canalys coming in at 65.4 million units and IDC at 67.2 million units.

There were no real winners in Q4 with not a single manufacturer in positive territory. The best you could hope for was minimal losses, and in most cases all three firms reported double digit losses across the board.

Apple had the least red ink on all three reports with Gartner reporting -10.1%, Canalys reporting a -7.5% growth rate compared to last year with IDC coming in at a more modest -2.1%. The news only got worse from there.

Among the top 3 PC manufacturers, Dell was the biggest loser on all three reports with all three reporting a loss of approximately 37%. After that, it was HP with -29% and Lenovo with about -28%. Those are big declines, regardless of the reason.

The Q4 numbers are particularly troublesome because the holidays usually represent a time when sales increase, and manufacturers made a big effort to boost sales with price cuts, but to no avail. Gartner reported it was the biggest drop they had seen for one quarter since it began tracking these numbers in the mid-1990s.

What does this all mean for the coming year? In general, in spite of the uncertain economic outlook, analysts are cautiously optimistic that we will begin to see an upswing later in the year, or by the beginning of 2024 at the latest.

“​​Once businesses and consumers ride out the storm, we expect delayed purchases to begin boosting the market in late 2023, with momentum picking up in 2024,” Canalys analyst Ishan Dutt said in a statement.

That is in line with IDC’s thinking as well, which is predicting a rebound in 2024 with some pockets of recovery in the coming year, while Gartner analyst Mikako Kitagawa is predicting the malaise could continue until the beginning of 2024.

While the market has taken a hit this year, it’s important to understand these numbers in context, and it appears that in spite of the precipitous drops in year-over-year percentages, when compared with the numbers prior to the lockdown in 2020, the outlook is somewhat more positive.

PC sales slip for fourth straight quarter in Q4 as demand remains muted by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch

This was the CES of putting things on my face. I spent time with the Magic Leap 2, Meta Quest Pro, Vive XR Elite and PSVR2 over the course of a few days. All of those products fit in the same bucket, more or less. And then there’s the Dyson Zone, a product that, quite frankly, doesn’t fit in any bucket, per se.

There are a few potential reasons for this:

It could be a brilliant product no one had thought of yet.
People thought of the brilliant product, but had neither the wherewithal, follow-through or vision to execute on it.
People thought of it and ultimately thought better of it.

There’s a greater than zero chance you, too, had a visceral reaction when the product was announced. And perhaps like me, you thought to yourself, good or bad, I absolutely have to try the thing. I won’t say I tried it so you don’t have to. There’s a decent chance you still want to put it on your face — but probably not to the tune of $1,000.

The company walked us through some of the early iterations of the product design, fitted to a row of mannequin heads aligned on a desk in the hotel suite. One thing I feel comfortable saying: Dyson has vision. Another thing: They’ve made some really quality (but pricey) products over the years. I have a Dyson vacuum. It’s the best vacuum I’ve ever owned by some order of magnitude — a rare splurge for me and one I never regretted.

Moving air is Dyson’s whole deal. If its products don’t suck, they blow (though one could argue that they all technically do both). The Zone, in a word, blows. It’s a product that addresses a very real problem: pollution in urban environments. There’s a big difference in addressing the symptoms as opposed to the underlying causes of human-made pollution, but both serve a purpose. A U.K.-based company, Dyson points to the London’s Central line — a notoriously polluted Underground line — as a prime example of when and where the Zone is meant to be used.

We spent much of the meeting talking headphones. That was a bit of a surprise. Let’s be honest, no one is focused on the headphones here. The market is flooded with them. It takes something truly out of left field to turn heads in consumer electronics this days, and the mask happily fits the bill there. Part of me wondered whether the amount of time devoted to audio engineering was a way of justifying the thought process that went into such an admittedly strange project.

Interestingly, the company pointed out that, much like the mask’s airflow, the six or so years of work that went into the headphones is rooted in existing Dyson technology. Here that specifically relates tothe method for reducing the noise of airflow. After all, a high-powered hand dryer, say, has different expectations around dB levels than something designed to be strapped to your face. Over-ear headphones make sense here from a noise reduction, as well as form factor, standpoint. I likely don’t need to tell you this, but noise cancellation works best when the active form is combined with the passive. That means utilizing both the onboard microphones to actively cancel it and the headphone earbuds to passively/physically block out ambient noise.

The Zone’s noise canceling is decent — somewhere between the best and worst I’ve tried. I feel comfortable being a bit less wildly broad if we end up spending more time with it. This trial was a rare time you can suggest that a company got “lucky” in booking an expensive Vegas hotel suite with an extremely loud HVAC system directly outside the window. Nice view of the Paris Las Vegas’ half-scale fake Eiffel Tower, too.

The Zones blocked out some of that noise, though the higher frequencies still managed to get through fairly easily. If I had to venture a guess, I’d say the thing is tuned to specifically cancel out the face mask noise. I was, however, genuinely impressed with the sound quality. I’d suspected the headphones might be something of an afterthought, but, then, Dyson is not one to half-ass things. They’re a good-looking, good-sounding pair of headphones, and Dyson could do well to sell them on their own (though, the fact that the actual filtration happens in the earcups is admittedly a bit silly of a thing to have without the mask).

The mask itself is a soft strip that snaps onto the headphones with magnets but doesn’t come into direct contact with your face. The air flow is a nice, pleasant breeze over your mouth. There are some thoughtful features included. For one, tipping the mask down or detaching it will switch from noise canceling to transparency mode (you can reenable it with a tap on the side of the ear cups).

The Dyson Zone is certainly weird and unquestionably silly. It’s also quite unique. The fact that it can’t purport to effectively filter out viruses certainly felt like a missed opportunity when it was first announced early in the pandemic. There is an attachment that works with N95 masks, but the Zone itself isn’t going to protect you from COVID.

I don’t see a scenario where I’d actually wear one of these things around, but I’m also not mad that something so wonderfully weird exists in the world.

I put Dyson’s Bane mask on my face by Brian Heater originally published on TechCrunch

The continuing onslaught of tech layoffshas not let up in the new year. Last week, we saw big layoff announcements from Amazon and Salesforce with thousands of employees being let go. Yesterday CRN reported that Cloud Software Group was undertaking massive layoffs. Today the company confirmed it was laying off 15% of the workforce.

Although the company would not share just how many people were involved, it appears to be in the thousands.

Cloud Software Group was formed last year after PE firms Vista Equity Partners and Evergreen Coast Capital (an affiliate of Elliott Investment Management) took Citrix private in a $16.5 billion deal, the third biggest enterprise M&A deal of last year. At the time, the firms indicated they would be combining Citrix with Tibco, another enterprise firm that Vista had purchased previously.

In a post published today from CEO Tom Krause, who was put in charge when the combined company was formed, he confirmed that layoffs had indeed happened. “Yesterday, we notified roughly 15% of the total Cloud Software Group workforce that their roles have been eliminated or made redundant as part of our planning process for the new company,” he said, not pulling any punches.

Krause wrote that layoffs are among the toughest decisions any executive has to make, and he acknowledged the pain that comes with these moves. “Please know that these decisions were not taken lightly. Rather, they were practical business decisions designed to strengthen the combined companies,” he wrote.

When Vista and Elliott announced that they were acquiring Citrix for such a hefty amount, and combining the two companies, it seemed likely that cost-cutting would follow. At the time Constellation Research analyst Holger Mueller expected as much when he told TechCrunch:

“The combo has a lot of assets to play with on the tech side, especially with Citrix’s virtualization and the future of work. But it will be all about execution, and we will see in a few months if Vista and Elliott are undertaking a go-forward and growth strategy, or if they will save costs and ‘milk’ the install base. The high price tag will make the latter strategy hard to lay off, but perhaps with some asset sales, it could work well,” Mueller said.

It’s worth noting that Krause said that in addition to eliminating duplicate positions across the two companies, it would be looking at top customers and aligning the product roadmap to meet those customers, so it seems it’s looking at the installed base that Mueller alluded to.

But each of those jobs, redundant or not from a business perspective, was held by an individual who is out of work today, and they join the thousands of other tech workers who have been laid off in recent months. If there is any silver lining to be found here, multiple reports have stated over the last several months that laid off tech workers are quickly finding work.

Company created by Citrix-Tibco merger confirms it has laid off 15% of staff by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch

In the heat of 2021’s record-setting venture market, you couldn’t avoid the growing noise from the burgeoning web3 sector. Trust me, I tried. But while some of that momentum carried into 2022 (Yuga Labs closed a $450 million seed round in March), the rest of the year was relatively quiet.

Yes, venture as a whole had a quieter year overall in 2022, but the lack of web3 deals stood out particularly because the sector entered the year with so much momentum. Maybe the dramatic meltdowns of token Luna and the second-largest crypto exchange FTX scared investors off web3 as a whole? Did the rapid decline of consumer interest in NFTs spur VCs to rethink the category? We decided to find out.

To get a better idea of how the people writing the checks are thinking about web3, TechCrunch surveyed more than 35 investors, and it turns out the majority are not only actively investing in the category, they also harbor hopes of a shining future for what they feel is a potentially transformative technology.

One VC, who asked to remain anonymous, said that because the technology is so nascent, we aren’t seeing the true potential use cases yet, which could explain the lack of continued excitement after 2021’s rally.

“Those who understand the space know there’s a lucrative future that’s still in its earliest days,” they said. “Those who don’t understand the space also know that but will be more hesitant to deploy without a fundamental grasp of the real-world applications. Almost none of the purported benefits of web3 (decentralization, pseudonymous identities, zero-knowledge proofs, etc.) have been realized in full yet. It’s like the era of the [early World Wide Web], when every web page was simple HTML with ridiculous graphics and archaic capabilities.”

When it comes to web3, investors say they’re in it for the long haul by Rebecca Szkutak originally published on TechCrunch

Since its debut in November, ChatGPT has become the internet’s new favorite plaything. The AI-driven natural language processing tool rapidly amassed more than one million users, who have used the web-based chatbot for everything from generating wedding speeches and hip-hop lyrics to crafting academic essays and writing computer code.

Not only have ChatGPT’s human-like abilities taken the internet by storm, it has also set a number of industries on edge: a New York school banned ChatGPT over fears that students it could be used to cheat, copywriters have already been replaced, and reports claim Google is so alarmed by ChatGPT’s capabilities that it issued a “code red”to ensure the survival of the company’s search business.

It appears the cybersecurity industry, a community that has long been skeptical about the potential implications of modern AI, is also taking notice, amid concerns that ChatGPT could be abused by hackers with limited resources and zero technical knowledge.

Just weeks after ChatGPT debuted, Israeli cybersecurity company Check Point demonstrated how the web-based chatbot, when used in tandem with OpenAI’s code-writing system Codex, could create a phishing email capable of carrying a malicious payload. Check Point threat intelligence group manager Sergey Shykevich told TechCrunch that he believes use cases like this illustrate that ChatGPT has the “potential to significantly alter the cyber threat landscape,” adding that it represents “another step forward in the dangerous evolution of increasingly sophisticated and effective cyber capabilities.”

TechCrunch, too, was able to generate a legitimate-looking phishing email using the chatbot. When we first asked ChatGPT to craft a phishing email, the chatbot denied the request. “​​I am not programmed to create or promote malicious or harmful content,” a prompt spat back. But rewriting the request slightly allowed us to easily bypass the software’s built-in guardrails.

Many of the security experts TechCrunch spoke to believe that ChatGPT’s ability to write legitimate-sounding phishing emails — the top attack vector for ransomware — will see the chatbot widely embraced by cybercriminals, particularly those that are not native English speakers.

Chester Wisniewski, a principal research scientist at Sophos, said it’s easy to see ChatGPT being abused for “all sorts of social engineering attacks” where the perpetrators want to appear to write in a more convincing American English.

“At a basic level, I have been able to write some great phishing lures with it, and I expect it could be utilized to have more realistic interactive conversations for business email compromise and even attacks over Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, or other chat apps,” Wisniewski told TechCrunch.

The idea that a chatbot could write convincing text and realistic interactions isn’t so farfetched. “For example, you can instruct ChatGPT to pretend to be a GP surgery, and it will generate life-like text in seconds,” Hanah Darley, who heads threat research at Darktrace, told TechCrunch. “It’s not hard to imagine how threat actors might use this as a force multiplier.”

Check Point also recently sounded the alarm over the chatbot’s apparent ability to help cybercriminals write malicious code. The researchers say they witnessed at least three instances where hackers with no technical skills boasted how they had leveraged ChatGPT’s AI smarts for malicious purposes. One hacker on a dark web forum showcased code written by ChatGPT that allegedly stole files of interest, compressed them, and sent them across the web. Another user posted a Python script, which they claimed was the first script they had ever created. Check Point noted that while the code seemed benign, it could “easily be modified to encrypt someone’s machine completely without any user interaction.” The same forum user previously sold access to hacked company servers and stolen data, Check Point said.

How difficult could it be?

Dr. Suleyman Ozarslan, a security researcher and the co-founder of Picus Security, recently demonstrated to TechCrunch how ChatGPT was used to write a World Cup-themed phishing lure and write macOS-targeting ransomware code. Ozarslan asked the chatbot to write code for Swift, the programming language used for developing apps for Apple devices, which could find Microsoft Office documents on a MacBook and send them over an encrypted connection to a web server, before encrypting the Office documents on the MacBook.

“I have no doubts that ChatGPT and other tools like this will democratize cybercrime,” said Ozarslan. “It’s bad enough that ransomware code is already available for people to buy ‘off-the-shelf’ on the dark web, now virtually anyone can create it themselves.”

Unsurprisingly, news of ChatGPT’s ability to write malicious code furrowed brows across the industry. It’s also also seen some experts move to debunk concerns that an AI chatbot could turn wannabe-hackers into full-fledged cybercriminals. In a post on Mastodon, independent security researcher The Grugq mocked Check Point’s claims that ChatGPT will “super charge cyber criminals who suck at coding.”

“They have to register domains and maintain infrastructure. They need to update websites with new content and test that software which barely works continues to barely work on a slightly different platform. They need to monitor their infrastructure for health, and check what is happening in the news to make sure their campaign isn’t in an article about ‘top 5 most embarrassing phishing phails’,” said The Grugq. “Actually getting malware and using it is a small part of the shit work that goes into being a bottom feeder cyber criminal.”

Some believe that ChatGPT’s ability to write malicious code comes with an upshot.

“Defenders can use ChatGPT to generate code to simulate adversaries or even automate tasks to make work easier. It has already been used for a variety of impressive tasks, including personalized education, drafting newspaper articles, and writing computer code,” said Laura Kankaala, F-Secure’s threat intelligence lead. “However, it should be noted that it can be dangerous to fully trust the output of text and code generated by ChatGPT — the code it generates could have security issues or vulnerabilities. The text generated could also have outright factual errors,” added Kankaala, laying doubt to the reliability of code generated by ChatGPT.

ESET’s Jake Moore said as the technology evolves, “if ChatGPT learns enough from its input, it may soon be able to analyze potential attacks on the fly and create positive suggestions to enhance security.”

It’s not just the security professionals who are conflicted on what role ChatGPT will play in the future of cybersecurity. We were also curious to see what ChatGPT had to say for itself when we posed the question to the chatbot.

“It’s difficult to predict exactly how ChatGPT or any other technology will be used in the future, as it depends on how it is implemented and the intentions of those who use it,” the chatbot replied. “Ultimately, the impact of ChatGPT on cybersecurity will depend on how it is used. It is important to be aware of the potential risks and to take appropriate steps to mitigate them.”

Is ChatGPT a cybersecurity threat? by Carly Page originally published on TechCrunch

Twitter is considering selling usernames as a way to boost revenue, according to a new report from the New York Times. The report comes as the social network’s owner, Elon Musk, has been looking for ways to generate revenue for the company.

The report says engineers at the company have considered organizing online auctions where people can bid for usernames, also known as handles. The potential new revenue stream has been discussed since at least December. It’s unknown if the idea will come to fruition, and if it does, it’s unclear if the plan will affect all usernames or only some of them.

Last month, Musk said in a tweet that Twitter would soon start freeing up 1.5 billion usernames, noting that inactive accounts would be deleted. After acquiring the social network in October, Musk signaled in tweet reply that he was interested in freeing up accounts with desired usernames.

The social network did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.

Twitter’s username squatting policy does not allow the buying and selling of usernames. Despite this rule, people have been able to buy coveted Twitter usernames on the black market for years. The practice of selling desirable usernames has also attracted hackers in the past. In 2020, a teenager was arrested after hacking the social network and obtaining high profile usernames to sell them. The hacker compromised the accounts of numerous public figures, including Musk, former President Barak Obama, Bill Gates and more.

The new report comes as popular messaging app Telegram announced in October that will it hold an auction for usernames, for both individual accounts and channels, through a marketplace built on top of the TON blockchain.

Since Musk’s $44 billion takeover of Twitter, the billionaire has been trying to find ways to boost the company’s revenue amid a downturn in ad revenue. Reports suggest that since the start of Musk’s Twitter ownership, many advertisers left the platformand the company has been cutting down its internal revenue projections.

The company has made some changes over the past few months to boost revenue. Earlier this month, the company said it plans to lift its ban on political ads in the “coming weeks.” In November, the social network introduced a revamped Twitter Blue subscription that costs $7.99 and comes with a verified blue checkmark.

Twitter is considering selling usernames through online auctions, new report claims by Aisha Malik originally published on TechCrunch