Month: January 2020

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  The defaced Federal Deposit Library Program website as it appeared on January 5.

On the heels of the killing of Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps General Qassem Soleimani by a US MQ-9 Reaper strike on January 2, the US Department of Homeland Security warned of potential cyberattacks against critical infrastructure by Iran. That warning probably didn't apply to the website of the Federal Deposit Library Program, operated by the US Government Printing Office—which was defaced on January 4 with a pro-Iranian message and an image of a bloodied President Donald Trump being punched by an Iranian fist.

The FDLP website is no stranger to defacement attacks. As a brief analysis of the attack by a security researcher with the Twitter username @sshell_ noted, the site has been defaced twice in the last 10 years—most recently in 2014, when it was replaced with an electronic dance music video featuring a dancing cat. Based on a fingerprint of the site's files, the site—based on the Joomla content management system—had not had its code updated since 2012. And the site had modules that used a version of Joomla's RSForm that had been flagged 11 months ago as being vulnerable to a SQL Injection attack.

While the image depicting Trump had no metadata attached to it, another image with text had Exchangeable Image File Format (EXIF) data indicating it had been created with Adobe Photoshop CS 6 for Windows in 2015. As sshell_ noted, the image was used in a defacement reported to the "cybercrime archive" Zone-H by a user identifying themselves as IRAN-CYBER on December 2, 2015.

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  A cool feature of the forthcoming Fisker Ocean electric crossover is an optional full-length solar roof, which should add some extra watt-hours throughout the course of the year. [credit: Fisker ]

Do you remember Fisker? The brainchild of designer Henrik Fisker, the company was a very high-profile electric vehicle startup that benefited from a $529 million Department of Energy loan in 2010 before it all came tumbling down in 2013. Well, it's back. On the eve of this year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Fisker unveiled its new battery EV, the Fisker Ocean, which is slated for production in 2022.

The car is aimed squarely at the mainstream—Fisker says the Ocean starts at $37,499 (before the $7,500 IRS tax credit), with flexible leases from $379 per month for terms as short as a single month with no long-term contract. (Leases will also require $2,999 down before delivery, but Fisker says it will have a "$0 drive-off" option that finances that $2,999 deposit.) Other improvements to the ownership (or leasing) experience will include having your vehicle picked up and dropped off when it needs maintenance, which is scheduled through a smartphone app, as is (or will be) "hassle-free" insurance.

In common with just about every recent EV that isn't a Tesla, there's a DC fast charging system with Electrify America for those long road trips that everyone cites as a reason they can't have an electric car. By the time the Ocean reaches those chargers, the ISO 15118 "plug-and-charge" protocol should be up and running, meaning the car will handle authentication and payment at the charging station without the user having to swipe a credit card or wave an RFID fob at anything. Although the press kit doesn't say anything about the Ocean's electrical architecture, there's a possibility that it may use an 800V approach like the Porsche Taycan, as Fisker states that the Ocean should be able to use Electrify America's 350kW chargers, which it says will take the battery from a 15 percent state of charge to 80 percent in 30 minutes.

Enlarge / Give a little joy. (credit: Flickr / xJasonRogersx)

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