Month: February 2020

Hard-boiled mercenary Takeshi Kovacs is back on a new case back and in a new body (or "sleeve") in the trailer for season two of Altered Carbon, the Netflix adaptation of Richard K. Morgan's 2002 cyberpunk novel of the same name.

(Some spoilers for S1 below.)

Like the novel, the series is set in a world more than 360 years in the future, where a person's memories and consciousness can be uploaded into a device—based on alien technology—known as a cortical stack. The stack can be implanted at the back of the neck of any human body (known as a "sleeve"), whether natural or synthetic, so an individual consciousness can be transferred between bodies. Income equality still exists, however, so only the very rich can afford true immortality, storing their consciousness in remote backups and maintaining a steady supply of clones. Those people are called "Meths" (a reference to the biblical Methuselah, who supposedly lived for 969 years).

Enlarge (credit: Huawei)

US officials say they have evidence that Huawei has backdoor access to mobile-phone networks around the world, according to a Wall Street Journal article published today.

"We have evidence that Huawei has the capability secretly to access sensitive and personal information in systems it maintains and sells around the world," US National Security Adviser Robert O'Brien told the Journal.

The United States has long claimed that Huawei can secretly access networks through the networking gear it sells to telcos, but the goverment previously argued that it doesn't need to show any proof. US officials still are not providing such evidence publicly but have begun sharing their intelligence with other countries, the Journal report said.

Enlarge (credit: Marco Verch / Flickr)

Over the past half decade, the Emotet malware has emerged as a top Internet threat that pillages people’s bank accounts and installs other types of malware. The sophistication of its code base and its regularly evolving methods for tricking targets into clicking on malicious links—in September, for instance, it began a spam run that addresses recipients by name and quotes past emails they sent or received—has allowed it to spread widely. Now, Emotet is adopting yet another way to spread: using already compromised devices to infect devices connected to nearby Wi-Fi networks.

Last month, Emotet operators were caught using an updated version that uses infected devices to enumerate all nearby Wi-Fi networks. It uses a programming interface called wlanAPI to profile the SSID, signal strength, and use of WPA or other encryption methods for password-protecting access. Then, the malware uses one of two password lists to guess commonly used default username and password combinations.

After successfully gaining access to a new Wi-Fi network, the infected device enumerates all non-hidden devices that are connected to it. Using a second password list, the malware then tries to guess credentials for each user connected to the drive. In the event no connected users are infected, the malware tries to guess the password for the administrator of the shared resource.