Month: June 2020

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  General Motors 3D-printed parts for more than 17,000 face shields that were donated to hospitals and first responders. [credit: Jeffrey Sauger for General Motors ]

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way many of us work, and that is certainly true for General Motors. The nation's largest automaker might not be selling nearly as many cars as it hoped and has even pushed back some of its product releases (like a refreshed Bolt EV), but it's been plenty busy. The company has switched gears and is using its resources and expertise to build ventilators and personal protective equipment like face shields to supply the healthcare sector. As it turns out, General Motors' investment in additive manufacturing—3D printing to you and me—has played a big role in getting that effort up and running quickly.

GM is no stranger to 3D printing, having first dipped a toe into the world of additive manufacturing back in the late 1980s. These days, as the technology has matured, GM mostly uses it for rapid prototyping and testing new parts. But it has also been invaluable in making medical supplies.

"The ventilators maybe got a lot of the headlines here," explained Kevin Quinn, GM's director of additive design and manufacturing. But there was also Project O, "as in 'other,' like everything else, right? What else could we do to help support the frontline and support the healthcare workers as they were really battling this tooth and nail every day? And that was where the face shields, the ear savers, some of these other projects were born," he told me.

Enlarge (credit: Microsoft Security Intelligence)

CAPTCHAs, those puzzles with muffled sounds or blurred or squiggly letters that websites use to filter out bots (often unsuccessfully), have been annoying end users for more than a decade. Now, the challenge-and-response tests are likely to vex targets in malware attacks.

Microsoft recently spotted an attack group distributing a malicious Excel document on a site requiring users to complete a CAPTCHA, most likely in an attempt to thwart automated detection by good guys. The Excel file contains macros that, when enabled, install GraceWire, a trojan that steals sensitive information such as passwords. The attacks are the work of a group Microsoft calls Chimborazo, which company researchers have been tracking since at least January.

Previously, Microsoft observed Chimborazo distributing the Excel file in attachments included in phishing messages and later spreading through embedded Web links. In recent weeks, the group has begun sending phishing emails that change things up again. In some cases, the phishes include links that lead to redirector sites (usually legitimate sites that have been compromised). In other cases, the emails have an HTML attachment that contains a malicious iframe tag.

Enlarge / Tom Cruise, at center, poses with NASA astronauts at the 2002 premiere of the IMAX film Space Station 3D at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC. From left to right: Robert Curbeam, Marsha Ivins, Koichi Wakata, Scott Altman, Nancy Currie-Gregg, Bill Shepherd, Susan Helms, IMAX producer Toni Myers, James Voss, Yuri Usachov, Yuri Lonchakov, Jim Newman and Brian Duffy. (credit: collectSPACE.com)

For some in the space community, it sounded like the rehash of an old rumor: “Tom Cruise Plots Movie To Shoot In Space…” read the headline of a Deadline Hollywood article published last month.

The “exclusive"—all three paragraphs of it—was short on details, but the mention of Cruise and space was all that was needed for other publications to want to run with the story and for social media to light up with the news.

But this was not the first time that had happened.