Month: April 2022

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Security vendor WatchGuard quietly fixed a critical vulnerability in a line of its firewall devices and didn’t explicitly disclose the flaw until Wednesday, following revelations hackers from Russia’s military apparatus exploited it en masse to assemble a massive botnet.

Law enforcement agencies in the US and UK on February 23 warned that members of Sandworm—among the Russian government’s most aggressive and elite hacker groups—were infecting WatchGuard firewalls with malware that made the firewalls part of a vast botnet. On the same day, WatchGuard released a software tool and instructions for identifying and locking down infected devices. Among the instructions was ensuring appliances were running the latest version of the company’s Fireware OS.

Putting customers at unnecessary risk

In court documents unsealed on Wednesday, an FBI agent wrote that the WatchGuard firewalls hacked by Sandworm were “vulnerable to an exploit that allows unauthorized remote access to the management panels of those devices.” It wasn't until after the court document was public that WatchGuard published this FAQ, which for the first time made reference to CVE-2022-23176, a vulnerability with a severity rating of 8.8 out of a possible 10.

Enlarge / Image of the AB Aurigae system, with details of the object shown at the right. (credit: NASA, ESA, Thayne Currie)

On some levels, forming stars and planets is simple: They form where there's more stuff. So, while the raw material for a star may be a diffuse cloud of gas, the distribution of that gas isn't entirely even. Over time, the gravitational pull of areas that had somewhat more material will pull ever more material in, eventually resulting in enough matter to form a star. Or two—in many cases, more than one concentration of matter will form; in other cases, a single concentration will split into two. Planets also form where the matter is, being generated by the disk of material that feeds the forming star.

While this might generally be true, there are a couple of problems with it. For one, there's no clear dividing line between small stars like brown dwarfs and enormous planets we've put in a category called super-Jupiters. And the handful of planets we've been able to image directly appear to be orbiting far from their host star, where there should not be much matter around to drive their formation.

This week, astronomers announced the imaging of a super-Jupiter in the process of forming, far from the star it appears to be orbiting. This suggests the planet is likely forming via a process that typically produces stars and not through the one that produces gas giants like Jupiter.

Enlarge / Max is back. (credit: Take Two / Remedy)

Remedy Entertainment and Max Payne are back together again—and the reunion is coming in the form of a full-blown remake of the hard-boiled series' first two action games.

The news arrived on Wednesday in the form of a press release signed off by both Remedy, the series' creators, and Rockstar Games, the franchise's current rightsholder after the license passed between companies in the early '00s. The two companies have entered a publishing partnership that will see Rockstar finance a remaster of both Max Payne and Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne as a single, combined gameplay package.

Both games will be remade using Remedy's proprietary Northlight game engine, which was most recently used in Ars Technica's 2019 Game of the Year, Control. The resulting two-game package may very well flex Northlight's ray-tracing prowess, as it will be a current-gen console exclusive on Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5 as well as appearing on PC. No date for the project has yet been announced, and "The project is currently in the concept development stage," according to the press release.

Enlarge / Illustration of a Oestrus ovis, sheep botfly (credit: Getty | Nastasic)

On Wednesday, doctors in France reported a rare case of tiny sheep bot fly larvae—aka maggots—infesting the outer surface of a man's eyeball.

The small, spiky larvae were seen slithering around the man's peeper, explaining the redness and itchiness he was experiencing. Doctors counted more than a dozen of the disturbing grub-like critters outside the eyeball and surrounding tissue. To clear out the bloodsuckers, doctors had no choice but to pluck them out, one by one, using forceps. The doctors also prescribed topical antibiotic treatments in case they missed any bugs.

Sheep bot flies, or Oestrus ovis, are found worldwide in areas with sheep. They typically deliver their squirmy offspring to the nostrils of sheep and goats. The larvae mature in their nasal nurseries, then fall to the ground and pupate in the environment before transforming into parasitic pests. But, on rare occasions, adult female flies become bleary-eyed and lay festering broods in a human eyeball, causing a disease called ophthalmomyiasis. This is typically a dead end for the flies; the larvae generally don't make it to adulthood in the human eye. But if you think the unfortunate infestation is nothing to wince at, you'd be incorrect.