Month: February 2018

Enlarge / The King County courthouse, circa 2007. (credit: Joe Mabel / Wikimedia)

SEATTLE—Counter-Strike video game co-creator Jess Cliffe appeared in a King County courtroom on Friday, where his bail was set for $150,000 following his booking in a King County jail on Thursday over allegations of sexual exploitation of a minor.

The bail figure was set following a request by the King County Prosecuting Attorney's office to set bail at $250,000 "for the community's safety and the victim's safety." The office, represented by Nyoko Maraire, described its findings of probable cause when requesting that bail figure: Cliffe allegedly contacted at least one minor via a website, who he paid for sex "multiple times." In one encounter, Cliffe purportedly videotaped his sexual contact with this unnamed witness "against her will." After that encounter, the unnamed witness "stopped contact between the parties," the prosecutor alleged.

Maraire did not provide further details about the witness, how exactly the two parties met, or whether Cliffe was specifically made aware of her status as a minor.

Enlarge / A screenshot of the malicious Excel document spreading a Flash zeroday. (credit: Talos)

An increasingly sophisticated hacking group is exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in Adobe's Flash Player that lets them take full control of infected machines, researchers said Friday.

The critical, use-after-free vulnerability, which is indexed as CVE-2018-4877, resides in the latest version of the widely installed Flash, researchers from Cisco Systems' Talos group said in a blog post. Adobe said separately that versions earlier than current Flash 28.0.0.137 are also susceptible. The vulnerability came to light on Wednesday when South Korea's CERT issued an advisory warning that attack code was circulating in the wild that exploited the zeroday flaw.

Talos said the exploit is being distributed through a Microsoft Excel document that has a malicious Flash object embedded into it. Once the SWF object is triggered, it installs ROKRAT, a remote administration tool Talos has been tracking since January 2017. Until now, the group behind ROKRAT—which Talos calls Group 123—has relied on social engineering or exploits of older, previously known vulnerabilities that targets hadn't yet patched. This is the first time the group has used a zeroday exploit.

Enlarge (credit: Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Is using a cell phone safe? While it's ostensibly a simple yes-or-no question, the answers have turned out to be more of a rorschach test: people see what they want to in them. The vast majority of cell phone safety research indicates there's no problem with regular exposure to the radiofrequency radiation that cell phones use to communicate with towers. But enough show various health effects that fears of health risks have persisted—even though different studies often identify unrelated risks.

The US government's National Toxicology Program designed what could have been a definitive study, using long-term exposure of large rodent populations. But even that's caused more problems than it has solved as the NTP decided to release incomplete results from the study that seemed to find some links to cancer, but the work had problems with weak statistical significance and unexplained deaths in the control animals.

Today, a draft of a more complete version of the NTP study was released, and it's even more of a mess. An original risk disappeared into the statistical noise, a new one emerged, and the strange death of control animals remains unexplained.

Enlarge (credit: Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Is using a cell phone safe? While it's ostensibly a simple yes-or-no question, the answers have turned out to be more of a rorschach test: people see what they want to in them. The vast majority of cell phone safety research indicates there's no problem with regular exposure to the radiofrequency radiation that cell phones use to communicate with towers. But enough show various health effects that fears of health risks have persisted—even though different studies often identify unrelated risks.

The US government's National Toxicology Program designed what could have been a definitive study, using long-term exposure of large rodent populations. But even that's caused more problems than it has solved as the NTP decided to release incomplete results from the study that seemed to find some links to cancer, but the work had problems with weak statistical significance and unexplained deaths in the control animals.

Today, a draft of a more complete version of the NTP study was released, and it's even more of a mess. An original risk disappeared into the statistical noise, a new one emerged, and the strange death of control animals remains unexplained.