Month: October 2020

Enlarge / Software security concept. Errors in the program. Bugs in the program. The presence of a backdoor, rootkit. (credit: sasha85ru | Getty Imates)

For only the second time in the annals of cybersecurity, researchers have found real-world malware lurking in the UEFI, the low-level and highly opaque firmware required to boot up nearly every modern computer.

As software that bridges a PC’s device firmware with its operating system, the UEFI—short for Unified Extensible Firmware Interface—is an operating system in its own right. It’s located in a SPI-connected flash storage chip soldered onto the computer motherboard, making it difficult to inspect or patch the code. And it’s the first thing to be run when a computer is turned on, allowing it influence or even control the OS, security apps, and all other software that follows.

Those characteristics make the UEFI the perfect place to stash malware, and that’s just what an unknown attack group has done, according to new research presented on Monday by security firm Kaspersky Lab.

Enlarge / Teams at NASA's Michoud Assembly Facility move the Core Stage toward a barge in January that will carry it to a test stand in Mississippi. (credit: NASA)

An independent panel that assesses the safety of NASA activities has raised serious questions about the space agency's plan to test flight software for its Moon missions.

During a Thursday meeting of the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, one of its members, former NASA Flight Director Paul Hill, outlined the panel's concerns after speaking with managers for NASA's first three Artemis missions. This includes a test flight of the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft for Artemis I, and then human flights on the Artemis II and III missions.

Hill said the safety panel was apprehensive about the lack of "end-to-end" testing of the software and hardware used during these missions, from launch through landing. Such comprehensive testing ensures that the flight software is compatible across different vehicles and in a number of different environments, including the turbulence of launch and maneuvers in space.

Enlarge / Using scanning electron microscopy (SEM), forensic archaeologists have found evidence of human neurons in the remains of one of the victims of the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in AD 79. (credit: Pier Paolo Patrone)

Remember when we told you that the extreme heat produced during the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 AD may have been sufficient to vaporize body fluids and explode skulls—possibly even turning one victim's brain into glass? We now have fresh evidence that this might, indeed, have been the case, according to a new paper in PLOS ONE, reporting the discovery of preserved human neurons in the victim with the "glassified" brain.

"The discovery of brain tissue in ancient human remains is an unusual event," said co-author Pier Paulo Petrone of the University Federico II of Naples. "But what is extremely rare is the integral preservation of neuronal structures of a 2,000-years-ago central nervous system, in our case at an unprecedented resolution. These and other results of the bioanthropological and volcanological investigations underway at Herculaneum are gradually bringing to light details never before highlighted, which enrich the complex picture of events of the most famous of the Vesuvius eruptions."

According to Tim Thompson, a forensic anthropologist at Teesside University in the UK, brains don't typically survive for long after death. "It's one of the earliest things to decompose in a standard decompositional context," he told Ars. But it is not unprecedented.