Month: December 2019

Enlarge / A BMW X7 navigating an off-road course (credit: Eric Bangeman)

When you buy a new car, you own it. Make the payments, and the car is 100 percent yours, with the only standing relationship between you and the carmaker consisting of scheduled maintenance. BMW broke that model when it decided to sell a software subscription along with its new cars, forcing buyers to pay $80 per year for continued access to CarPlay in cars that support Apple's in-car infotainment interface.

As first reported by Autocar, the German automaker has decided to get rid of the subscription fee and make CarPlay standard across most of its lineup. In addition, BMW will offer support for Android Auto, in a first for the company.

Enlarge (credit: Mighty Travels / Flickr)

Payment card skimmers have hit four online merchants with help from Heroku, a cloud provider owned by Salesforce, a researcher has found.

Heroku is a cloud platform designed to make things easier for users to build, maintain, and deliver online services. It turns out the service also makes things easier for crooks to run skimmers that target third-party sites. On Wednesday, Jérôme Segura, director of threat intelligence at security provider Malwarebytes, said he found a rash of skimmers hosted on Heroku. The hackers behind the scheme not only used the service to host their skimmer infrastructure and deliver it to targeted sites. They also used Heroku to store stolen credit-card data. Heroku administrators suspended the accounts and removed the skimmers within an hour of being notified, Segura told Ars.

This is not the first time cloud services have been abused by payment card skimmers. In April, Malwarebytes documented similar abuse on Github. Two months later, the security provider reported skimmers hosted on Amazon S3 buckets. Abusing a cloud provider makes good sense from a crook's point of view. It's often free, saves the hassle of registering look-alike domain names, and delivers top-notch availability and bandwidth.

Enlarge (credit: Maurizio Pesce / Flickr)

There are people who object to newfangled technologies that address our reliance on dirty energy. For them, claims like this are irresistible catnip: electric vehicles aren't actually cleaner than their gas-burning counterparts. What a delicious I-told-you-so to those naïve environmentalists! The only problem with these claims is that they aren't true.

This particular assertion is based on the idea that the manufacturing of big batteries for these cars generates so much emissions that all later savings are canceled out. Sometimes, this argument requires unfair assumptions, like expecting an internal combustion vehicle to last far longer than an EV. But it always requires cherry-picking a high estimate for battery manufacturing emissions.

One of those estimates came from a 2017 study from the IVL Swedish Environmental Research Institute. Based on the data that it had to work with, the institute's study put the emissions at 150-200 kilograms of CO₂ per kilowatt-hour of lithium-ion battery capacity—one of the highest estimates that has been published.

Cover art for the first Wheel of Time novel. Production on the fantasy series began on September 16 of this year. (credit: Tor Books)

Amazon Studios has announced four new cast members for The Wheel of Time, the long-awaited TV adaptation of the late Robert Jordan's bestselling 14-book series of epic fantasy novels, Deadline Hollywood reports. Clearly, Amazon has joined the hunt for the next Game of Thrones, since within the fantasy genre, Jordan's series is as popular as George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire. The first season of the TV adaption started shooting on September 16—coincidentally, the 12th anniversary of Jordan's death in 2007.

The TV series will center on Moiraine (played by Oscar-nominee Rosamund Pike), a member of a powerful, all-woman organization called the Aes Sedai. (In this world, magic exists, but only certain women can use it—i.e., the members of the Aes Sedai.) She identifies four young people, one of whom could be the reincarnation of a person who, prophecies say, will save or destroy humanity. Together, the youngsters embark on a journey across the world.

As Ars reported earlier this year, the first round of casting included Josha Stradowski as Rand al'Thor, aka The Dragon Reborn, He Who Comes With the Dawn, the Coramoor, Shadowkiller, and who knows how many other monikers. Marcus Rutherford was cast as apprentice blacksmith and dream-walker Perrin Aybara. Zoe Robins plays healer Nynaeve al'Meara, and Madeleine Madden plays the powerful channeler Egwene al'Vere. Finally, Barney Harris was cast as series comic relief Matrim Cauthon.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

IBM X-Force, the company's security unit, has published a report of a new form of "wiper" malware connected to threat groups in Iran and used in a destructive attack against companies in the Middle East. The sample was discovered in a response to an attack on what an IBM spokesperson described as "a new environment in the [Middle East]—not in Saudi Arabia, but another regional rival of Iran."

Dubbed ZeroCleare, the malware is "a likely collaboration between Iranian state-sponsored groups," according to a report by IBM X-Force researchers. The attacks were targeted against specific organizations and used brute-force password attacks to gain access to network resources. The initial phase of the attacks was launched from Amsterdam IP addresses owned by a group tied to what IBM refers to as the "ITG13 Group"—also known as "Oilrig" and APT34. Another Iranian threat group may have used the same addresses to access accounts prior to the wiper campaign.

"While X-Force IRIS cannot attribute the activity observed during the destructive phase of the ZeroCleare campaign," the researchers noted, "we assess that high-level similarities with other Iranian threat actors, including the reliance on ASPX web shells and compromised VPN accounts, the link to ITG13 activity, and the attack aligning with Iranian objectives in the region, make it likely this attack was executed by one or more Iranian threat groups."