In Iceland, bitcoin mining will soon use more energy than its residents. Eleven people have been arrested in Iceland as a result of what local media are calling the “Big Bitcoin Heist”—600 mining computers were recently stolen from Icelandic data centers in four separate burglaries between December 2017 and January 2018.
Source: arstechnica.com
Attackers have seized on a relatively new method for executing distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks of unprecedented disruptive power, using it to launch record-breaking DDoS assaults over the past week. Now evidence suggests this novel attack method is fueling digital shakedowns in which victims are asked to pay a ransom to call off crippling cyberattacks.
Source: krebsonsecurity.com
A $150 million Lockheed contract will allow destroyers to use Star Wars technology against smaller targets.
Source: bloomberg.com
Big tech platforms — Amazon, Facebook, Google — control a large and growing share of our commerce and communications, and the scope and degree of their dominance poses real hazards. A bipartisan consensus has formed around this idea. Senator Elizabeth Warren has charged tech giants with using their heft to “snuff out competition,” and even Senator Ted Cruz — usually a foe of government regulation — recently warned of their “unprecedented” size and power.
The proof of concept for this exploit can be found on the Chromium bug page. This bug was reported by lokihardt from Google Project Zer0. The bug can be found in Element::setAttributeNodeNS().
Let’s take a look at a code snippet:
Source: github.com
Christian satire site The Babylon Bee received a terse warning from Facebook this week after the ‘independent fact-checkers’ at Snopes reported that one of the site’s humor articles was ‘false.’
Source: pjmedia.com
IOTA is a cryptocurrency that’s been around since 2014 and is designed for micro-transactions between machines in the Internet of Things. IOTA is the tenth-largest cryptocurrency with a roughly $5 billion market cap. It doesn’t use a standard blockchain like most cryptocurrencies, but instead uses a Directed Acylic Graph (DAG) it calls “the Tangle” among other attempts at innovation.
For example, IOTA infamously used an in-house algorithm called Curl instead of the well-studied algorithms that underprin other digital coins.
A slew of newly discovered vulnerabilities can wreak havoc on 4G LTE network users by eavesdropping on phone calls and text messages, knocking devices offline, and even spoofing emergency alerts.
Source: zdnet.com
Often, the best way to get something is to simply ask for it. That’s probably what the Israeli government thought when it sent an email to several American researchers and firms who make so-called zero-days, tools that take advantage of vulnerabilities in software that are unknown to the company that makes the software.
Source: vice.com
The Bank of England has warned that bitcoin faces a regulatory crackdown, warning that “inherently risky” cryptocurrencies are failing to fulfil their most basic function as money.
Source: theguardian.com
The Tor Project, a private non-profit that underpins the dark web and enjoys cult status among privacy activists, is almost 100% funded by the US government.
Source: surveillancevalley.com
The animation, which Putin presented as part of the Russian president’s annual state-of-the-union-style address, features five weapons. The Samrat intercontinental ballistic missile, the Project 4202 hypersonic glide vehicle, a long-range torpedo and the Kinzhal air-to-surface missile have all been in development for years. And the United States is developing, or already possesses, rough analogues to each.
Source: vice.com
Two weeks ago, in a little-noticed presentation at the Offensive Con security conference in Berlin, security researchers Markus Vervier and Michele Orrù detailed a method that exploits a new and obscure feature of Google’s Chrome browser to potentially bypass the account protections of any victim using the Yubikey Neo, one of the most popular of the so-called Universal Two-Factor, or U2F, tokens that security experts recommend as the strongest form of protection against phishing attacks.
The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has issued ‘dozens’ of subpoenas and information requests from companies seeking to jump on the cryptocurrency craze through Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs).
Source: zdnet.com
Researchers have discovered an advertising network which has figured out a way to bypass ad blocking software in order to serve website visitors with cryptojacking scripts.
Source: zdnet.com
This paper presents a detailed and up-to-date security analysis of the voting software used in Brazilian elections. It is based on results obtained by the authors in a recent hacking challenge organized by the Superior Electoral Court (SEC), the national electoral authority. Duri…
Source: researchgate.net
Over the past five months, Camp has been sketching out plans for a brand new cryptocurrency that aims to fix technical and other challenges plaguing existing projects, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. His hope, he told Fortune, is to resuscitate virtual currency’s original promise: an instant, affordable, and borderless means of payment for the masses.
Source: fortune.com
I’ve had a Tobii Eye Tracker sitting among a pile of PC peripherals that I want to cover or give away for a year now. I hate when this happens, but time and sanity is limited. But something came over me this week, and I finally did the work to plug in the eye-tracking device and set it up … and now I’m scared.
Attackers have generated $3,900 so far in an ongoing campaign that’s exploiting the popular rTorrent application to install currency-mining software on computers running Unix-like operating systems, researchers said Thursday.
Source: arstechnica.com
FinFisher is such a complex piece of malware that, like other researchers, we had to devise special methods to crack it. We needed to do this to understand the techniques FinFisher uses to compromise and persist on a machine, and to validate the effectiveness of Office 365 ATP detonation sandbox, Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection (Windows Defender ATP) generic detections, and other Microsoft security solutions.