Month: July 2021

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

China state hackers are compromising large numbers of home and office routers for use in a vast and ongoing attack against organizations in France, authorities from that county said.

The hacking group—known in security circles as APT31, Zirconium, Panda, and other names—has historically conducted espionage campaigns targeting government, financial, aerospace and defense organizations as well as businesses in the technology, construction, engineering, telecommunications, media, and insurance industries, security firm FireEye has said. APT31 is also one of three hacker groups sponsored by the Chinese government that participated in a recent hacking spree of Microsoft Exchange servers, the UK’s National Cyber Security Center said on Monday.

Stealth recon and intrusion

On Wednesday, France’s National Agency for Information Systems Security—abbreviated as ANSSI—warned national businesses and organizations that the group was behind a massive attack campaign that was using hacked routers prior to carrying out reconnaissance and attacks as a means to cover up the intrusions.

Enlarge / Highest-resolution image of Centaurus A obtained with the Event Horizon Telescope on top of a color composite image of the entire galaxy. (credit: Radboud University/ESO/WFI/MPIfR//APEX/NASA/CXC/CfA/EHT/M. Janssen et al.)

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration made headlines in 2019 by capturing the very first direct image of a black hole at the center of galaxy. Now, the EHT is back with another exciting breakthrough: images of the "dark heart" of a radio galaxy known as Centaurus A that enable the EHT to pinpoint the location of the supermassive black hole at the galaxy's center, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature Astronomy. The image also captures the birth of a powerful jet emitting from the black hole. The jet's unusual characteristics could help astronomers answer a few nagging questions about how such jets are produced in the first place.

"This allows us for the first time to see and study an extragalactic radio jet on scales smaller than the distance light travels in one day," said co-author Michael Janssen, an astronomer at Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn and Radboud University Nijmegen. "We see up close and personally how a monstrously gigantic jet launched by a supermassive black hole is being born."

Centaurus A (aka NGC 5128) is one of the largest and brightest objects in the night sky, making it especially popular with amateur stargazers, although it is only visible from the Southern Hemisphere and low northern latitudes. Located in the constellation Centaurus, the galaxy was discovered in 1826 by James Dunlop. John Herschel noted its peculiar shape—it looks elliptical when viewed from Earth, with a lane of dust superimposed across it—in 1847.

Enlarge / A bloody pig mask mailed to cyberstalking victims by then-eBay employees. (credit: FBI)

A former eBay security official who pleaded guilty for his role in a cyberstalking conspiracy has asked for leniency in sentencing while blaming his actions in part on a "drinking culture" at eBay that contributed to his alcoholism.

"eBay had a bar on campus that opened at 3:00 p.m., and drinking was part of the culture, with alcohol present throughout the office space where it was typical to take morning shots of alcohol with co-workers," a sentencing memorandum for 56-year-old defendant Philip Cooke said yesterday. It was filed in US District Court for the District of Massachusetts.

Cooke was senior manager of security operations for eBay's Global Security Team, making an annual salary of $185,000, when he played a role in the harassment of a couple that operated a news website. The harassment—in response to news coverage that eBay executives did not like—involved sending threatening messages and deliveries of live cockroaches, a funeral wreath, and a bloody pig mask to the couple's home in Natick, Massachusetts. Cooke was promoted by eBay to Director of Security Operations and given a raise to $205,000 in June 2020, about 10 months after the cyberstalking campaign began and just before it became public.

Enlarge / Blue Origin’s New Shepard crew, Oliver Daemen, Mark Bezos, Jeff Bezos, and Wally Funk hold a press conference after flying into space in the Blue Origin New Shepard on July 20, 2021 in Van Horn, Texas. (credit: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

LAUNCH SITE ONE, Texas—Jeff Bezos burst from his spacecraft with a smile on his face as wide as the brim of the cowboy hat atop his head.

The founder of Amazon fulfilled a lifelong dream of flying into space Tuesday morning aboard a rocket and capsule he personally funded. During a few minutes of weightlessness, Bezos and his brother Mark had floated around the New Shepard capsule alongside aviation pioneer Wally Funk and an 18-year-old customer, Oliver Daemen. They tossed Skittles candy into one another’s mouths and enjoyed the view.

“Best day ever,” said Bezos, 57, after landing safely beneath three parachutes. “My expectations were high, and they were dramatically exceeded.”

Enlarge

Today, Google announced a major expansion of its ability to warn users of crowded mass transit ahead of time. The feature originally launched in June 2019 and covered roughly 200 cities globally, using user-reported data similar to Waze to discover and predict overcrowded trains and buses. Google is expanding that 200-city initial rollout to (eventually) over 10,000 transit agencies in 100 countries, according to today's announcement.

Unsurprisingly, Google Maps' mass transit predictions don't just rely on direct user-reported data. They utilize AI models trained on that data.

"We apply world-class anonymization technology and differential privacy techniques to Location History Data to make sure your data remains private and secure," the announcement declares—although we must point out that attempts to anonymize location data frequently fail.

Enlarge (credit: Biggs, et. al.)

Wearable electronics, like watches and fitness trackers, represent the next logical step after computing went to portable and mobile devices. They've sparked an interest in the development of flexible electronics, which could enable wearables to include the things like clothing and backpacks.

Flexible electronics, however, run into a problem: our processing hardware is anything but flexible. Most efforts at dealing with that have involved splitting up processors into a collection of smaller units, linking them with flexible wiring, and then embedding all the components in a flexible polymer. To an extent, it's a throwback to the early days of computing, when a floating point unit might reside on a separate chip.

But a group within ARM has now managed to implement one of the company's smaller embedded designs using flexible silicon. The design works and executes all the instructions you'd expect from it, but it also illustrates the compromises we have to make for truly flexible electronics.

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  The 2020 iPhone SE. [credit: Samuel Axon ]

Multiple recent reports from Apple's supply chain have indicated that a new, greatly upgraded iPhone SE is on the way.

According to Nikkei, the new iPhone SE is expected to launch in early 2022. The device will feature the same iPhone 8-style design as the existing iPhone—home button included.

But the new SE will have what will be the most recent iPhone system-on-a-chip, the A15, which is expected to debut with Apple's new flagship phones this fall.