Lifeboat Foundation

In this DNA factory, organism engineers are using robots and automation to build completely new forms of life.
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Ginkgo Bioworks, a Boston company specializing in “engineering custom organisms,” aims to reinvent manufacturing, agriculture, biodesign, and more.

Continue reading “This Synthetic DNA Factory Is Building New Forms of Life” »

More than 9 million Android phones are infected with malware distributed through Huawei’s AppGallery Store.

Apple has filed a federal lawsuit against Israeli spyware firm NSO Group for illegally targeting users with the Pegasus malware.

Threat actors are hacking Microsoft Exchange servers using ProxyShell and ProxyLogon exploits to distribute malware and bypass detection using stolen internal reply-chain emails.

When threat actors conduct malicious email campaigns, the hardest part is to trick users into trusting the sender enough so that they open up linked to or included malware-distributing attachments.

TrendMicro researchers have discovered an interesting tactic used of distributing malicious email to a company’s internal users using the victim’s compromised Microsoft exchange servers.

Cher sang about manipulating it while Doctor Who dramatized it. This hacker went one better and did it. Here’s how time got hacked.

During a 1961 address to the National Association of Manufacturers in New York City, John F. Kennedy said that “we must use time as a tool, not as a couch.” Fast forward fifty years, and one hacker has demonstrated exactly how to do that: by hacking time.

What is time anyway? What is time? That’s not an easy question to answer definitively.

Continue reading “Can Time Be Hacked? Here’s How One Hacker Demonstrated It Can” »

Researchers at ETH Zurich have discovered major vulnerabilities in DRAM memory devices, which are widely used in computers, tablets and smartphones. The vulnerabilities have now been published together with the National Cyber Security Centre, which for the first time has assigned an identification number for it.

When browsing the internet on a laptop computer or writing messages on a smartphone, we all like to think that we are reasonably safe from hacker attacks as long as we have installed the latest software updates and anti-virus software. But what if the problem lies not with the software, but with the hardware? A team of researchers led by Kaveh Razavi at ETH Zurich, together with colleagues at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Qualcomm Technologies, have recently discovered fundamental vulnerabilities affecting the memory component called DRAM at the heart of all modern computer systems.

The results of their research have now been accepted for publication at a flagship IT security conference, and the Swiss National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has issued a Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) number. This is the first time that a CVE identification has been issued by the NCSC in Switzerland (see box below). On a scale of 0 to 10, the severity of the vulnerability has been rated as 9.

Researchers demonstrated new way to catch advanced MITM phishing toolkits in the wild.

The notorious Emotet malware is staging a comeback of sorts nearly 10 months after a coordinated law enforcement operation dismantled its command-and-control infrastructure in late January 2021.

According to a new report from security researcher Luca Ebach, the infamous TrickBot malware is being used as an entry point to distribute what appears to be a new version of Emotet on systems previously infected by the former. The latest variant takes the form of a DLL file, with the first occurrence of the deployment being detected on November 14.

And it can be hacked.

The authors of a new study in Nature Catalysis reprogrammed these blobs—called exosomes—into an army of living nanobioreactors. It’s a seemingly simple process of mix and match: each blob is filled with a different chemical that’s involved in a biological reaction. By bringing two together, the blobs merge into a single squishy container, allowing the two chemicals to react.

The results were explosive. The tiny bioreactors pumped out energy molecules, called ATP, inside living cells. The burst of energy saved injured cells, providing them with a boost of power to fight back against dangerous molecules that otherwise lead to cell death.