Month: October 2017

Enlarge (credit: Royal Australian Air Force)

The Australian Cyber Security Centre noted in its just-issued 2017 Threat Report that a small Australian defense company "with contracting links to national security projects" had been the victim of a cyber-espionage attack detected last November. "ACSC analysis confirmed that the adversary had sustained access to the network for an extended period of time and had stolen a significant amount of data," the ACSC report stated. "The adversary remained active on the network at the time."

More details of the breach were revealed on Wednesday at an IT conference in Sydney. ASD Incident Response Manager Mitchell Clarke said, "The compromise was extensive and extreme." The attacker behind the breach has been internally referred to at the Australian Signals Directorate as "APT Alf" (named for a character in Australia's long-running television show Home and Away, not the US television furry alien). Alf stole approximately 30 gigabytes of data, including data related to Australia's involvement in the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program, as well as data on the P-8 Poseidon patrol plane, planned future Australian Navy ships, the C-130 Hercules cargo plane, and the Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) bomb. The breach began in July of 2016.

A spokesperson for the US Department of Defense's F-35 Joint Program Office confirmed the breach to Defense News, stating that the Office "is aware" of the breach. The spokesperson reiterated that no classified data was exposed.

Enlarge (credit: Bloomberg/Getty Images)

Last week we brought news that the Internal Revenue Service awarded a $7.2 million contract to Equifax to allow Equifax to "verify taxpayer identity." The contract was awarded days after Equifax announced it had exposed the personal data, including Social Security Numbers, of about 145 million people.

The tax-collecting agency is now temporarily suspending the contract because of another Equifax snafu. The Equifax site was maliciously manipulated again, this time to deliver fraudulent Adobe Flash updates, which when clicked, infected visitors' computers with adware that was detected by just three of 65 antivirus providers. The development means that at least for now, taxpayers cannot open new Secure Access accounts with the IRS. Secure Access allows taxpayers to retrieve various online tax records and provides other "tax account tools" to those who have signed up.

An "alert" on the IRS website says the Secure Access service "is unavailable for new users at this time." The alert notes that taxpayers who already have an account can "continue the login process."

Christopher Moore, Georgia Tech

Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Stanford, and Purdue University have built a ceramic mechanical pump that can move liquid metal as hot as 1,673K (that is, about 1,400 degrees Celsius). Usually, the temperature of liquid metals that you can pump tends to cap out at 1,300K (1,027 degrees Celsius) because there are few pump-building materials that will stay solid and chemically stable beyond that. Those materials that exist tend to crack or break quickly under the stress of such heat.

But this new pump, made of carefully engineered ceramic, could be good news for concentrated solar power, as well as accompanying thermal energy storage.

Enlarge (credit: Waymo)

Waymo just dropped a 43-page white paper called the Waymo Safety Report that provides a wealth of new details about Waymo's vision for the self-driving car product the company is getting ready to launch.

Officially, the document is a regulatory filing with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which has encouraged—but not yet required—the makers of self-driving cars to file a report describing how they expect to deal with a variety of safety issues. But the document is also another part of the public education campaign the company has been running to convince Americans of the benefits of its technology.

It's fundamentally a marketing document rather than a technical one, so it leaves a lot of unanswered questions about exactly how Waymo's technology will work. Still, it provides a lot of new information—and publicly confirms a lot of rumors and educated guesswork—about how Waymo envisions the self-driving car product that Waymo could launch as soon as this year.