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Category: futurism – Page 48

Golden Chickens Resurfaces With Four New Malware Families and Modular Implants

The threat actors behind the Golden Chickens malware-as-a-service (MaaS) ecosystem have resurfaced with four new malware families, indicating that the operators are showing no signs of stopping despite extensive public disclosures into their inner workings.

The malware families in question are: TinyEgg, ChonkyChicken, a modularized variant of ChonkyChicken, and a modified web browser credential theft utility codenamed ChromEggscalator. Recorded Future’s Insikt Group is tracking the group under the moniker TAG-195.

TAG-195 is a financially motivated malware-as-a-service (MaaS) developer whose tooling has been previously linked to TAG-127 as an operator and customer. The threat intelligence company said it has also observed TAG-127 deploying TinyEgg via ClickFix-style social engineering campaigns that trick unsuspecting users into manually executing malicious commands.

Microsoft blames massive Microsoft 365 outage on maintenance bug

Microsoft says a bug in its automated network maintenance request system caused Thursday’s massive outage by mistakenly removing IP routes from more devices than intended, disrupting Azure and Microsoft 365 services.

The outage began at 10:44 AM ET on Thursday, July 23, and mostly affected customers accessing Microsoft 365 services through network infrastructure connected to Microsoft’s West US Azure region.

At 11:11 AM ET, Downdetector had recorded 2,403 outage reports, sharply above its normal baseline of 29. SharePoint accounted for 78% of the complaints, followed by Excel at 11% and the Microsoft 365 Admin Center at 6%.

Do animals use names? Conceptual and empirical criteria

In recent years, several claims have been put forth suggesting that animals of different species address each other using receiver-specific calls that function as individual names. If accurate, this would demonstrate a capacity for symbolic social reference that has rarely been documented in nonhuman communication systems. To evaluate such claims, we propose three minimal criteria for identifying names: individual reference, symbolic represent ation, and shared meaning. We then review the evidence relevant to these criteria in the species for which name-like calls have been suggested: spectacled parrotlets, common marmosets, African elephants, and bottlenose dolphins. Together, these criteria provide a clear and theoretically grounded framework for exploring the use of name-like calls in nonhuman animals.

Simple circuit brings topological insulators closer to practical electrical measurement standards

Researchers at the University of Würzburg have succeeded in detecting exceptionally robust electrical transport in a topological insulator. This could lead to new metrological applications. The work is published in the journal Nature Communications.

Metrology is the science of measurement. Its aim is to ensure that measurement results are comparable and reliable worldwide, for example, in industry or scientific experiments. So-called fundamental constants, or unchanging physical quantities such as the speed of light or Planck’s constant, play an increasingly important role in this context.

As their values are universal, i.e., independent of place and time, they enable the definition of highly stable units and ensure highly reproducible measurement results. Since 2019, the International System of Units, SI (short for Système international d’unités), has been based entirely on these constants.