Month: August 2022

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At least two security-sensitive companies—Twilio and Cloudflare—were targeted in a phishing attack by an advanced threat actor who had possession of home phone numbers of not just employees but employees' family members as well.

In the case of Twilio, a San Francisco-based provider of two-factor authentication and communication services, the unknown hackers succeeded in phishing the credentials of an undisclosed number of employees and, from there, gained unauthorized access to the company's internal systems, the company said. The threat actor then used that access to data in an undisclosed number of customer accounts.

Two days after Twilio's disclosure, content delivery network Cloudflare, also headquartered in San Francisco, revealed it had also been targeted in a similar manner. Cloudflare said that three of its employees fell for the phishing scam, but that the company's use of hardware-based MFA keys prevented the would-be intruders from accessing its internal network.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson/T. Clements et al.)

Sometimes science can be a messy endeavor—not to mention "disgusting and smelly." That's how British researchers described their experiments monitoring dead sea bass carcasses as they rotted over the course of 70 days. In the process, they gained some fascinating insights into how (and why) the soft tissues of internal organs can be selectively preserved in the fossil record, according to a new paper published in the journal Palaeontology.

Most fossils are bone, shells, teeth, and other forms of "hard" tissue, but occasionally rare fossils are discovered that preserve soft tissues like skin, muscles, organs, or even the occasional eyeball. This can tell scientists much about aspects of the biology, ecology, and evolution of such ancient organisms that skeletons alone can't convey. For instance, earlier this year, researchers created a highly detailed 3D model of a 365-million-year-old ammonite fossil from the Jurassic period by combining advanced imaging techniques, revealing internal muscles that had never been previously observed.

"One of the best ways that soft tissue can turn into rock is when they are replaced by a mineral called calcium phosphate (sometimes called apatite)," said co-author Thomas Clements of the University of Birmingham. "Scientists have been studying calcium phosphate for decades trying to understand how this process happens—but one question we just don’t understand is why some internal organs seem more likely to be preserved than others."

Enlarge / Just a few of the many Google messaging logos. Can you name them all? (credit: Ron Amadeo)

Google has been unable to field a stable, competitive messaging platform for years and has thoroughly lost the messaging war to products with a long-term strategy. At least some divisions inside the company are waking up to how damaging this is to Google as a company, and now Google's latest strategy is to... beg its competition for mercy? Google—which has launched 13 different messaging apps since iMessage launched in 2011—now says, "It's time for Apple to fix texting."

Google launched a new website called "Get the Message"—a public pressure campaign with a call to "tweet at @Apple to #GetTheMessage and fix texting." Google hopes public pressure will get Apple to adopt RCS, a minor upgrade to the SMS standard that Apple uses for non-iMessage users. Google has been pushing this strategy since the beginning of the year, but coming from the company with the world's most dysfunctional messaging strategy, it just comes across as a company tired of reaping what it has been sowing.

Worldwide, iMessage isn't that popular (people tend to like Whatsapp), but in the US, iMessage is enough of a cultural phenomenon to have Billboard Top 100 songs written about how much it sucks to have a green (SMS) iMessage bubble. One of Apple's biggest competitors—especially for online services—is Google, and Google's inability to compete with iMessage has contributed a great deal to the current situation. Google apparently feels iMessage's dominance is damaging to its brand, so now it's asking Apple, nicely, to please stop beating it so badly.