Month: November 2016

(credit: Aurich Lawson)

A low-tech but cunning malware program is worrying security researchers after it started spreading rapidly in the past week through a new attack vector: by forcibly exploiting vulnerabilities in Facebook and LinkedIn.

According to the Israeli security firm Check Point, security flaws in the two social networks allow a maliciously coded image file to download itself to a user's computer. Users who notice the download, and who then access the file, cause malicious code to install "Locky" ransomware onto their computers.

Locky has been around since early this year, and works by encrypting victims' files and demands a payment of around half a bitcoin (currently £294; $365) for the key. Previously, it had relied on a malicious macro in Word documents and spam e-mails, but Check Point says that in the past week there has been a "massive spread of the Locky ransomware via social media, particularly in its Facebook-based campaign."

Enlarge / Block G is one of the largest wartime structures at the site. (credit: Qufaro)

Bletchley Park—the home of codebreakers whose pioneering work helped Britain and its allies win the Second World—could be the site for a College of National Security, with plans for it to open in 2018.

The new sixth-form boarding school will, we're told, be run by a private non-profit consortium of tech firms, venture capitalists, and entrepreneurs, with rumoured input from GCHQ. It will enrol 500 teenagers (aged 16 to 19) who will be taught cybersecurity skills—which could, it's hoped, go some way to addressing the shortfall in UK talent.

The outfit behind the college, which would apparently be free for its pupils to attend, says at least part of the syllabus would be set by infosec experts focusing mostly on cybersecurity (roughly 40 percent of the curriculum), with additional modules on maths, computer science, economics, and physics also taught over a three-year period of study. Applicants won't be selected on the basis of specific academic qualifications, so much as through aptitude tests set by the college, or even on the basis of previously demonstrated skills, such as self-taught coding.

Enlarge / Those giant jacks aren't merely artistic. (credit: Sarah Baird)

SENDAI, Japan—It’s a blustery day and I’m standing on a giant concrete seawall, staring over the water.

The seawall, as you might imagine, is a tall, sloped structure intended to keep the sea and the land somewhat apart. It stops the waves from beating down on the shore, whether during a gales of a tsunami or the daily lap of erosion. But the wall itself holds less interest to me than its supporting cast members a few hundred yards out into the water.

A stone’s throw off the coastline, dozens of gigantic, 10-ton concrete structures known as Tetrapods form a long row and look—if we’re being honest—as if a giant dumped a behemoth box of jacks into the sea. It is simultaneously majestic and odd.