Month: September 2019

(credit: Lance Kidwell / Free Images)

A Russian national has admitted to carrying out the largest-known computer hack on a US bank. His 2014 breach of JPMorgan Chase generated hundreds of millions of dollars in illicit revenue and stole the data of more than 80 million JPMorgan clients.

Andrei Tyurin, 35, whose last name is also spelled Tiurin, also pleaded guilty to hacks against other US financial institutions, brokerage firms, and other companies. In all, he pleaded guilty in federal court to computer intrusion, wire fraud, bank fraud, and illegal online gambling as part of a securities-fraud scheme carried out by co-conspirators.

Prosecutors said that the from 2012 to mid-2015, Tyurin carried out a massive computer-hacking campaign that stole data belonging to more than 100 million customers of the targeted companies. The 2014 intrusion on JPMorgan alone resulted in the theft of more than 80 million customer records, making it the largest—or at least one of the largest—data hacks against a US financial institution.

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  The (new and improved) Galaxy Fold. [credit: Samsung ]

The Galaxy Fold is finally launching in the United States this Friday. After a launch failure the company CEO called "embarrassing," Samsung's futuristic foldable smartphone will come to the US after a five-month delay. The company made the news official in a press release today.

The Galaxy Fold was supposed to be a triumph of Samsung engineering. The company spent six years and over a hundred million dollars to leverage its OLED display leadership into a new smartphone form factor: the foldable smartphone. The idea was a phone with a flexible OLED display stretched over top of a hinge, allowing the phone to actually fold in half. The device would be smartphone-sized when you wanted a phone and a tablet when you wanted a bigger device.

Once Samsung's early reviewers got their hands on the device though, numerous dead screens popped up. The causes ranged from dust ingress destroying the screen from the inside to reviewers peeling off the top layer of the screen. Samsung took the device back to the drawing board, and after a few tweaks, it thinks the Fold is ready for the general market.

Enlarge (credit: Michael Theis / Flickr)

Microsoft has released two unscheduled security updates, one of which patches a critical Internet Explorer vulnerability that attackers are actively exploiting in the wild.

The IE vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2019-1367, is a remote code execution flaw in the way that Microsoft’s scripting engine handles objects in memory in IE. The vulnerability was found by Clément Lecigne of Google’s Threat Analysis Group, which is the same group that recently detected an advanced hacking campaign that targeted iPhone users. Researchers from security firm Volexity later said the the attackers behind the campaign also targeted users of Windows and Android devices. It’s not clear if the IE vulnerabilities Microsoft is fixing now have any connection to that campaign.

Monday’s advisory said attackers could exploit the vulnerability by luring targets to use IE to visit a booby-trapped website.

Enlarge / The patient had blueish fingernails and dark brown blood. (credit: Warren, Blackwood, NEJM)

A 25-year-old woman showed up at an emergency room in Providence, Rhode Island, with fatigue, shortness of breath, and—most concerning—an obvious blueish hue.

The skin discoloration suggested that her body wasn’t getting enough oxygen. When doctors drew some of her blood, it appeared as a dark, chocolate-brown color rather than the usual vibrant red.

The doctors figured out what had happened after the woman noted that she had had a toothache the night before—and had used a common over-the-counter anesthetic to ease her pain.

Enlarge / A SolarCity employee checks solar panels on the roof during installation at a home in New Jersey on July 28, 2015. (credit: Bloomberg | Getty Images)

Back in 2016, Tesla acquired solar panel manufacturer SolarCity, billing the $2.6 billion deal as an opportunity to create "the world's only vertically integrated sustainable energy company." From a SolarCity solar panel to a Tesla battery, the company promised, the in-house supply chain would scale up clean energy for all and provide cost synergies to the businesses and shareholders.

But SolarCity, of which Tesla CEO Elon Musk was chairman, was deeply in debt at the time. Now, newly unsealed documents in an investor lawsuit say the situation was far worse than that. They allege that SolarCity wasn't just carrying a heavy debt load: it was completely insolvent.

The upshot of reams of law surrounding mergers and acquisitions is that C-suite executives and company boards of directors are supposed to make sure shareholders get the most money possible out of their investment. If they're going to sell the company, they have to make sure they're accepting the most-valuable reasonable offer. Companies doing the acquiring, meanwhile, are supposed to do their homework to make sure they're not wasting their resources on a bad deal—and Tesla shareholders say the SolarCity acquisition was exactly that.

Enlarge / The Russian rescue tug Altai launches a boat like the one sunk by a walrus off Franz Jozef Land. (credit: Russian Northern Fleet)

Last week, a Russian Navy rescue tug—the Altai from the Northern Fleet—dispatched a rigid inflatable boat to Wilczek Island in the Franz Josef Land archipelago, which is an Arctic island chain occupied only by wildlife and Russian military personnel. Aboard the boat were sailors and scientists from the Russian Geographic Society, and as they attempted a landing at Cape Geller, their boat was attacked and sunk by a female walrus, "[which] she probably did fearing for her cubs," an RGO news release noted.

While the boat sank, the crew leader managed to get the boat close enough to land for everyone to get ashore safely, according to the RGO's spokesperson. The Northern Fleet reports the story slightly differently: "A group of researchers had to flee from a female walrus, which, protecting its cubs, attacked an expedition boat. Serious troubles were avoided thanks to the clear and well-coordinated actions of the Northern Fleet servicemen."

The RGO/Northern Fleet expedition was exploring the routes of previous Arctic expeditions in the archipelago and conducting glacial and biological surveys of the islands. The researchers also recovered artifacts from the Austro-Hungarian expedition of 1874 that first mapped the archipelago and an 1898-1899 expedition by American journalist Walter Wellman (who would later attempt to fly to the North Pole by airship. They also searched for the grave of Russian polar explorer Georgy Sedov, who died en route to the Pole in 1914.

Enlarge / Apple CEO Tim Cook and chief design officer Jony Ive look at the new Mac Pro on June 03, 2019. (credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Apple will continue manufacturing the Mac Pro in Austin, Texas, the company announced on Monday. Media reports had suggested that the new Mac Pro, which was announced in June, might be manufactured in China. The Mac Pro has been assembled in Austin since 2013, while most other Apple products are made in China.

Apple credited the federal government with helping make the announcement possible. "The US manufacturing of Mac Pro is made possible following a federal product exclusion Apple is receiving for certain necessary components," Apple said in its announcement.

Apple doesn't say so specifically, but other news outlets are reporting that this refers to Apple getting a break on tariffs on Chinese-made components. In recent months, the Trump administration has been slapping hefty across-the-board tariffs on Chinese-made goods as part of President Trump's ongoing trade war with China.