Month: March 2017

Enlarge (credit: Abraxas3d)

Researchers at Cisco's Talos threat research group are publishing research today on a targeted attack delivered by a malicious Microsoft Word document that goes to great lengths to conceal its operations. Based entirely on Windows PowerShell scripts, the remote access tool communicates with the attacker behind it through a service that is nearly never blocked: the Domain Name Service.

The malware was first discovered by a security researcher (@simpo13) who alerted Talos because of one peculiar feature of the code that he discovered: it called out Cisco's SourceFire security appliances in particular with the encoded text, "SourceFireSux."

Welp, someone doesn't like SourceFire pic.twitter.com/NzuGXZ0WgC

— simpo (@Simpo13) February 24, 2017

Delivered as an e-mail attachment, the malicious Word document was crafted "to appear as if it were associated with a secure e-mail service that is secured by McAfee," wrote Talos researchers Edmund Brumaghin and Colin Grady in a blog post to be published later today.

Enlarge (credit: Mooganic)

Neural networks were all the rage for a while, but progress eventually slowed and interest cooled. Then, as computing power increased, the field experienced a renaissance, and deep learning was the new big thing.

Throughout this ebb and flow of interest, there has been an underlying, annoying fact: neural networks as currently implemented are not that great. Especially when you compare them with the brain of, well, pretty much any creature. Researchers have been trying to make neural networks that have all the advantages of the brain (and none of the disadvantages) for as long as the field has existed. And it may be that they've gone about it wrong. Now, some new work is suggesting that the only way to get the advantages of the brain is to accept the disadvantages as well.

Brains vs. memristors

The brain has two features that no inorganic computer has. One is that it is highly interconnected. Each neuron may be connected to a vast number of other neurons—not just neighbors, but also neurons that are well separated spatially. This natural interconnectedness is what makes the brain such a powerful computational tool. The brain is also highly efficient. A synapse—the connection between two neurons—consumes at most 100 femtoJoules per event. Once you realize that the entire human body is about the equivalent of an 120W light bulb, you can see that the efficiency of the brain is just astounding.

When you think "big tech trade show at the beginning of the year," you probably think of CES. That's a big show for desktop and laptop PCs, PC and gaming accessories, home appliances, TVs, and an ever-increasing number of "smart" doodads. But if you're looking for news about smartphones and tablets and the chips that make them tick, the bigger show is February's Mobile World Congress.

We saw a bunch of things on the show floor at MWC this year, but there were a handful of devices that stood out from the crowd. The list below represents our favorite announcements from the show, and they're the devices you should keep an eye on as they begin to roll out to consumers in the coming months.

Best flagship smartphone: The LG G6

Ron Amadeo

Enlarge (credit: YouTube, Casey Neistat)

At the end of 2016, CNN purchased YouTube celeb Casey Neistat's company Beme for a reported $25 million. At the time, plans on how to integrate Neistat and Beme with the news company were vague, but now it's becoming a little less vague thanks to an interview Neistat did with The Hollywood Reporter. According to the interview, Neistat wants to make his own news network, and will start by creating a new YouTube channel where he will host a daily news show. The channel has yet to be named, but is slated to launch sometime in March.

"I want to build a news company. It's going to be video exclusive," Neistat told The Hollywood Reporter. "It's going to be done in a way that penetrates the thick, strong, solid-steel bullshit shield that this generation cautiously holds up in between them and everything being thrown at them. We want to push that aside by speaking to them frankly and by having it be something that's extraordinarily transparent."

This builds upon the notion that Neistat brought up in a New York Times interview that he believes his YouTube audience, largely composed of millennials and young people, don't trust the media in the same way that other generations do. He goes on to describe a very YouTube-like approach to media and news delivery.