Month: December 2018

The US Attorney's Office for the District of Northern Georgia announced today that a federal grand jury had returned indictments against two Iranian nationals charged with executing the March 2018 ransomware attack that paralyzed Atlanta city government services for over a week. Faramarz Shahi Savandi and Mohammed Mehdi Shah Mansouri are accused of using the Samsam ransomware to encrypt files on 3,789 City of Atlanta computers, including servers and workstations, in an attempt to extort Bitcoin from Atlanta officials.

Details leaked by City of Atlanta employees during the ransomware attack, including screenshots of the demand message posted on city computers, indicated that Samsam-based malware was used. A Samsam variant was used in a number of ransomware attacks on hospitals in 2016, with attackers using vulnerable Java Web services to gain entry in several cases. In more recent attacks, including one on the health industry companies Hancock Health and Allscripts, other methods were used to gain access, including Remote Desktop Protocol hacks that gave the attackers direct access to Windows systems on the victims' networks.

The Atlanta attack was not a targeted state-sponsored attack. The attackers likely chose Atlanta based on a vulnerability scan. According to the indictment, the attackers offered the city the option of paying six Bitcoin (currently the equivalent of $22,500) to get keys to unlock all the affected systems or 0.8 Bitcoin (about $3,000) for individual systems. "The ransom note directed the City of Atlanta to a particular Bitcoin address to pay the ransom and supplied a web domain that was only accessible using a Tor browser," a Department of Justice spokesperson said in a statement. "The note suggested that the City of Atlanta could download the decryption key from that website." But within days of the attack, the Tor page became unreachable, and the City of Atlanta did not pay the ransom.

Most lasers are either friendly tabletop devices or so small that you don’t even notice them. But if you want to do something special like image the structure of a delicate protein, you need a very short wavelength and very high-power laser. That means a free electron laser (FEL).

I love FELs, but they're expensive. A laser produces one beam, and that beam is usually limited to one or two users at a time. So competition for beam time at FELs is fierce. That may be about to change, though. An unexpected experimental result at the Linac Coherent Light Source may be the key to making multiple beams from a single FEL undulator line.

Enough gibberish

OK, time for some physics-to-almost-English translation. Let’s start with some FEL goodness.

Enlarge / FCC Chairman Ajit Pai testifying at a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on May 17, 2018 in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty Images | Win McNamee )

The Federal Communications Commission yesterday released broadband speed test data for the first time in two years, after ignoring months of inquiries about why the annual speed test reports hadn't been released since Ajit Pai became chairman.

As we reported last month, the FCC's Measuring Broadband Program hadn't issued a new report since December 1, 2016.

Pai's office ignored questions from Ars about the lack of new data, and his commission never provided documents in response to a public records request we made in August. But now, the FCC has released a draft of two Measuring Broadband America reports, one for 2017 and one for 2018.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich / Simpsons)

Rudy Giuliani, who briefly advised Donald Trump on cybersecurity before taking a role as his personal attorney, doesn't understand how domain names work. And that lack of understanding led him to invent a ludicrous conspiracy theory about Twitter.

It all started when Giuliani tweeted about special counsel Robert Mueller:

If someone tweets out a valid URL, Twitter automatically converts it into a hyperlink. In this case, .in is the country code top-level domain for India, so Twitter interpreted "G-20.In" as a URL, linking it to http://g-20.in/.

Enlarge / When AI is doing the driving, what we call a "car" may look and act like something else entirely. (credit: Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Welcome to Ars UNITE, our week-long virtual conference on the ways that innovation brings unusual pairings together. Each day this week from Wednesday through Friday, we're bringing you a pair of stories about facing the future. Today's focus is on AI in transportation—buckle up!

As artificial intelligence technology becomes more integrated into our daily lives, it may have a profound effect on how everyday objects look and behave. That's especially true of autonomous vehicles. While the first self-driving cars in development have built upon human-controlled designs, AI will steer vehicle design past traditional shapes and features. With fewer human factors to worry about, the shape and behavior of vehicles could change radically. And it could all start with something as simple as headlights.

“As vehicles shift from drivers to autonomy, the importance of lights will diminish while the importance of sensors will increase,” explained Adam Rodnitzky, the vice president of marketing at Occipital, a spatial computing company. “Therefore, we’ll start to see common design features like headlights, tail lights and turn signals go from prominent styling features to vestigial and diminished design elements.”

Enlarge / Wednesday's launch of a Falcon 9 rocket went well. The landing? Not so much. (credit: NASA)

Something unexpected happened after the launch of a Falcon 9 rocket to the International Space Station—the first-stage booster did not come back to Earth as intended. Instead, it made an unscheduled landing in the Atlantic Ocean, just off the Florida coast.

At about 7 minutes and 25 seconds after the launch, the first stage began spinning out of control as it descended back toward Kennedy Space Center along the Florida coast. There was a problem with one of the grid fins that are used to stabilize the first stage during its return to Earth through the thickening atmosphere.

"Grid fin hydraulic pump stalled, so Falcon landed just out to sea," SpaceX founder and lead designer Elon Musk tweeted shortly after the rocket landed. "Appears to be undamaged & is transmitting data. Recovery ship dispatched." Later, in response to a question about redundancy of this system, Musk added, "Pump is single string. Some landing systems are not redundant, as landing is considered ground safety critical, but not mission critical. Given this event, we will likely add a backup pump & lines."