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Category: cybercrime/malcode – Page 246

Futurists predict how we’ll one day eat, vacation and work

Forget about Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook and all the talk about a metaverse. The real future will be a world that is convenient and scary and fantastical — at least according to futurologists. As this year ends, here’s a glimpse at what life might be like … one day.

Facial recognition is already common for phones, but “In 30 years it’s quite possible that you will not use a key or even a credit card. You’ll use your face or iris to make purchases and open locks. Recognition will be that good,” said Martin Ford, author of “Rule of the Robots: How Artificial Intelligence will Transform Everything.”

“The scary thing, though, will be if someone hacks your biometric data. Right now you can call the bank to change your pin or cancel a credit card. But you can’t cancel your biometrics.”

Pegasus maker probes reports its spyware targeted US diplomats

The Israeli spyware maker in the Pegasus surveillance scandal said Friday it was investigating reports the firm’s technology was used to target iPhones of some US diplomats in Africa.

Apple has begun alerting people whose phones were hacked by NSO’s spyware, which essentially turns handsets into pocket spying devices and sparked controversy this year after reportedly being used on activists, journalists and politicians.

“On top of the independent investigation, NSO will cooperate with any relevant government authority and present the full information we will have,” the firm said in a statement.

Rogue Miners Are Using Google Cloud Servers to Mine Cryptocurrencies

Google’s cybersecurity team warns that this is neither the first nor the last time.

Cryptomining is a very energy-intensive process with analysis by the University of Cambridge showing that Bitcoin consumes more electricity than the entire country of Argentina. Now, Google has released a new report stating that malicious cryptocurrency miners are using hacked Google Cloud accounts for mining purposes.

The report is called “Threat Horizons” and it aims to help organizations keep their cloud environments secure.

“While cloud customers continue to face a variety of threats across applications and infrastructure, many successful attacks are due to poor hygiene and a lack of basic control implementation. Most recently, our team has responded to cryptocurrency mining abuse, phishing campaigns, and ransomware,” wrote Google in an executive summary of the report.

“Given these specific observations and general threats, organizations that put emphasis on secure implementation, monitoring, and ongoing assurance will be more successful in mitigating these threats or at the very least reduce their overall impact.”

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Creating deeper defense against cyber attacks

To address the growing threat of cyberattacks on industrial control systems, a KAUST team including Fouzi Harrou, Wu Wang and led by Ying Sun has developed an improved method for detecting malicious intrusions.

Internet-based are widely used to monitor and operate factories and critical infrastructure. In the past, these systems relied on expensive dedicated networks; however, moving them online has made them cheaper and easier to access. But it has also made them more vulnerable to attack, a danger that is growing alongside the increasing adoption of internet of things (IoT) technology.

Conventional security solutions such as firewalls and are not appropriate for protecting industrial control systems because of their distinct specifications. Their sheer complexity also makes it hard for even the best algorithms to pick out abnormal occurrences that might spell invasion.

This Synthetic DNA Factory Is Building New Forms of Life

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.

Biologists, software engineers, and automated robots are working side by side to accelerate the speed of nature by taking synthetic DNA, remixing it, and programming microbes, turning custom organisms into mini-factories that could one day pump out new foods, fuels, and medicines.

While there are possibly numerous positive and exciting outcomes from this research, like engineering gut bacteria to produce drugs inside the human body on demand or building self-fertilizing plants, the threat of potential DNA sequences harnessing a pathological function still exists.

That’s why Ginkgo Bioworks is developing a malware software to effectively stomp out the global threat of biological weapons, ensuring that synthetic biology can’t be used for evil.

Learn more about synthetic DNA and this biological assembly line on this episode of Focal Point.

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

Microsoft Exchange servers hacked in internal reply-chain attacks

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.

Can Time Be Hacked? Here’s How One Hacker Demonstrated It Can

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.

Just go and search for a definition, and you’ll see what I mean. However, from the broader technological perspective, time depends on how we measure it: it is what those measurements tell us. So, what if those measurements, even ones from the most accurate atomic clock sources around the planet, could be manipulated?

Welcome to the world of hacking time. Welcome to the world of Adam Laurie, the lead hardware hacker with the veteran hacking team that is IBM X-Force Red. It’s worth remembering at this point that hacking is not a crime, and this story serves well to illustrate the fact.

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