Month: September 2020

Enlarge (credit: VGrigas (WMF))

Researchers have developed and published a proof-of-concept exploit for a recently patched Windows vulnerability that can allow access to an organization’s crown jewels—the Active Directory domain controllers that act as an all-powerful gatekeeper for all machines connected to a network.

CVE-2020-1472, as the vulnerability is tracked, carries a critical severity rating from Microsoft as well as a maximum of 10 under the Common Vulnerability Scoring System. Exploits require that an attacker already have a foothold inside a targeted network, either as an unprivileged insider or through the compromise of a connected device.

An “insane” bug with “huge impact”

Such post-compromise exploits have become increasingly valuable to attackers pushing ransomware or espionage spyware. Tricking employees to click on malicious links and attachments in email is relatively easy. Using those compromised computers to pivot to more valuable resources can be much harder.

Enlarge (credit: Facebook / Aurich Lawson)

After being fired by Facebook this month, a data scientist published a 6,600-word memo to the company's internal communication systems breaking down 2.5 years of her experiences on the "fake engagement team." The resulting stories, largely centered on misinformation campaigns with both subtle and clear links to government staffers and political parties around the world, were shared with BuzzFeed News and reprinted with various redactions on Monday, prompting the reporters to describe the memo as "a damning account of Facebook's failures."

Former Facebook data scientist Sophie Zhang pointed to activity across the world in nations such as Azerbaijan, Honduras, India, Ukraine, Spain, Bolivia, and Ecuador. Some of these stories include metrics for how many fake accounts Zhang purged, with one story in particular, about the potential spread of COVID-19 misinformation to United States users, linked to a ring of 672,000 accounts in Spain.

“I was the one who made the decision”

Arguably more egregious than the numbers was the silo that Zhang allegedly operated within, without institutional support, to take responsibility for whether particular rings of accounts were moderated. "Individually, the impact was likely small in each [country's] case, but the world is a vast place," Zhang wrote in her memo. "Although I made the best decision I could based on the knowledge available at the time, ultimately I was the one who made the decision not to push more or prioritize further in each case, and I know that I have blood on my hands by now."

Enlarge / The spectral signature of phosphine superimposed on an image of Venus. (credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), Greaves et al. & JCMT)

Today, researchers are announcing that they've observed a chemical in the atmosphere of Venus that has no right to be there. The chemical, phosphine (a phosphorus atom hooked up to three hydrogens), would be unstable in the conditions found in Venus' atmosphere, and there's no obvious way for the planet's chemistry to create much of it.

That's leading to a lot of speculation about the equally unlikely prospect of life somehow surviving in Venus' upper atmosphere. But a lot about this work requires input from people not involved in the initial study, which today's publication is likely to prompt. While there are definitely reasons to think phosphine is present on Venus, its detection required some pretty involved computer analysis. And there are definitely some creative chemists who are going to want to rethink the possible chemistry of our closest neighbor.

What is phosphine?

Phosphorus is one row below nitrogen on the periodic table. And just as nitrogen can combine with three hydrogen atoms to form the familiar ammonia, phosphorus can bind with three hydrogens to form phosphine. Under Earth-like conditions, phosphine is a gas, but not a pleasant one: it's extremely toxic and has a tendency to spontaneously combust in the presence of oxygen. And that later feature is why we don't see much of it today; it's simply unstable in the presence of any oxygen.

Once an upstart, the Forza franchise is now firmly established within the pantheon of great racing games. The first installment was created as the Xbox's answer to Gran Turismo, but with a healthy helping of online multiplayer racing, too. Since then, it has grown with Microsoft's Xbox consoles, with more realistic graphics and ever-more accurate physics in the track-focused Forza Motorsport series as well as evolving into open-world adventuring (and even a trip to the Lego dimension) for the Forza Horizon games.

If you're one of the millions of people who've played a Forza racing game, you're probably aware of the games' AI opponents, called "Drivatars." When the first Drivatars debuted in Forza Motorsport in 2005, they were a substantial improvement over the NPCs we raced in other driving games, which often just followed the same preprogrammed route around the track. "It was a machine-learning system on a hard drive using a Bayesian Neural Network to record [racing] lines and characteristics of how somebody drove a car," explains Dan Greenawalt, creative director of the Forza franchise at Turn 10 Studios, in our latest War Stories video.

In fact, the technology originated at Microsoft Research's outpost in Cambridge, England, where computer scientists started using neural nets to see if it was possible to get a computer to identify a Formula 1 driver by the way they drove through corners.