Month: February 2018

Enlarge / White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders issued a statement today declaring that Russia would face "international consequences" for releasing the NotPetya malware worm. (credit: Getty Images)

Following form with a finding by the government of the United Kingdom, the White House issued a statement formally blaming Russia's military for unleashing NotPetya, the destructive "wiper" worm that spread across much of the world last June.

NotPetya, which at first appeared to be yet another crypto-ransomware attack similar to WannaCry, was instead designed to simply destroy data. There have been suggestions in the past that the malware was launched as part of a state-sponsored attack against Ukraine, likely by Russian attackers connected to the military. Multiple security research companies have, with relatively high confidence, previously attributed NotPetya to a Russia-based attacker.

But that's different from governments formally stating attribution as fact. Today, the UK's National Cyber Security Centre issued a report stating that "the Russian military was almost certainly responsible for the 'NotPetya' cyber attack of June 2017." The UK Foreign Office Minister for Cyber Security, Lord Tariq Ahmad, said NotPetya "showed a continued disregard for Ukrainian sovereignty... Its reckless release disrupted organizations across Europe costing hundreds of millions of pounds. We call upon Russia to be the responsible member of the international community it claims to be, rather than secretly trying to undermine it."

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Mario Tama)

Irish drug company Horizon Pharma has hiked the price of a two-in-one painkiller by more than 2,000 percent in the past five years, according to a report in Financial Times

A 60-pill bottle of the drug combo, Vimovo, cost $138 in 2013 when AstraZeneca sold it to Horizon. The bottle now costs $2,979 after Horizon raised the price on 11 occasions.

Vimovo is a combination of the common painkiller naproxen and esomeprazole. Naproxen is the active ingredient in Bayer’s over-the-counter painkiller Aleve. A side effect of naproxen is gastrointestinal issues, including stomach pain and heartburns. As such, Vimovo combines it with esomeprazole, a proton-pump inhibitor that treats heartburn. Esomeprazole is sold over the counter by AstraZeneca as Nexium.

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our friends at TechBargains, we have another round of deals to share. But not just any deals: Presidents Day deals. Ooooooh.

OK, so Washington's Birthday isn't the biggest holiday—the Dealmaster doesn't even have the day off—but it still brings a decent assortment of sales to this otherwise slow portion of the shopping year.

So to help you sort through it all, we've rounded up a choice selection of these discounts, which include sales on a number of Lenovo ThinkPad laptops, Dell PCs, Bose and Beats headphones, DJI drones, Samsung SSDs, and an assortment of 4K TVs, among other gadget goodies. We've updated the list since it was initially published last week, and we'll be sure to keep an eye out for additional deals as they come along.

Enlarge (credit: Thomas Trutschel / Photothek via Getty Images)

Two Russian men convicted of their involvement in a massive hack of the Nasdaq stock exchange, Citibank, and other major companies have been given hefty sentences.

The two men, Vladimir Drinkman and Dmitriy Smilianets, pleaded guilty in 2015. On Wednesday, Drinkman was sentenced to 144 months, while Smilianets was given 51 months.

Back in 2013, five men were indicted on federal charges. They were accused of, among other things, trading text strings that exploited SQL-injection vulnerabilities in the victim companies' websites to obtain login credentials and other sensitive data and installing malware that gave them persistent backdoor access to the networks. The breaches resulted in losses worth hundreds of millions of dollars via fraudulent ATM withdrawals. The scheme lasted from 2005 until 2012.

Enlarge (credit: York Museums Trust staff)

A thousand years ago, gigantic 12-foot-high flightless birds roamed New Zealand, snacking peacefully on plants and fungi. Then humans came along. Within two hundred years, the giant moa—along with a host of their close cousins—were dead at our species’ hands.

What did the world of the moa look like? Even though New Zealand has lots of well-preserved wilderness, studying that won't give us an answer. When a species disappears, it takes a chunk of its ecosystem with it, so understanding the ramifications of the moa extinction can help us better understand the environment that many surviving species—some of them critically endangered—evolved in.

Some important answers lie in something the moa left behind: ancient bird poop. It tells us that the moa were probably instrumental in spreading the fungi that play a critical role in New Zealand’s forests.

Enlarge / Zap! (credit: Wikipedia)

In the wake of a shooting that left at least 17 dead on Wednesday in a high school outside Boca Raton, Florida, Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin (R) focused on violent video games as part of a "culture of death that is being celebrated" and leading to these kinds of incidents.

"There are video games that, yes, are listed for mature audiences, but kids play them and everybody knows it, and there's nothing to prevent the child from playing them," Bevin said in an interview on WHAS' Leland Conway show Thursday morning. "They celebrate the slaughtering of people. There are games that literally replicate and give people the ability to score points for doing the very same thing that these students are doing inside of schools, where you get extra points for finishing someone off who's lying there begging for their life."

"These are quote-unquote video games, and they're forced down our throats under the guise of protected speech," Conway continued, seemingly referring to a 2011 Supreme Court decision that prevents content-based restrictions on games. "It's garbage. It's the same as pornography. They have desensitized people to the value of human life, to the dignity of women, to the dignity of human decency. We're reaping what we've sown here."

Enlarge / A visual representation of bitcoin is displayed in front of the Coinbase cryptocurrency exchange website on February 12, 2018 in Paris. (credit: Chesnot / Getty Images)

After a recent dip down below $7,000, the price of bitcoin has now jumped to over $10,000 again, according to trading figures on Coinbase and Blockchain.info.

The rally comes as top European central bankers, among other high-level members of the world’s monied elite, have recently been publicly expressing skepticism in bitcoin.

Similarly, Charles Munger, the vice-chairman of Warren Buffett’s investment firm Berkshire Hathaway, said Wednesday's that he considered the bitcoin craze to be “totally asinine,” according to The Guardian.