Lifeboat Foundation

Developing Next Generation Artificial Intelligence To Serve Humanity — Dr. Patrick Bangert, Vice President of AI, Samsung SDS.

Dr. Patrick D. Bangert, is Vice President of AI, and heads the AI Engineering and AI Sciences teams, at Samsung SDS is a subsidiary of the Samsung Group, which provides information technology (IT) services, and are active in research and development of emerging IT technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, Internet of things (IoT) and Engineering Outsourcing.

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A team of researchers from QuTech in the Netherlands reports realization of the first multi-node quantum network, connecting three quantum processors. In addition, they achieved a proof-of-principle demonstration of key quantum network protocols. Their findings mark an important milestone toward the future quantum internet and have now been published in Science.

The power of the internet is that it allows any two computers on Earth to connect. Today, researchers in many labs around the world are working toward first versions of a quantum internet—a network that can connect any two quantum devices, such as quantum computers or sensors, over large distances. Whereas today’s internet distributes information in bits that can be either 0 or 1, a future quantum internet will make use of quantum bits that can be 0 and 1 at the same time.

“A quantum internet will open up a range of novel applications, from unhackable communication and cloud computing with complete user privacy to high-precision time-keeping,” says Matteo Pompili, Ph.D. student and a member of the research team. “And like with the internet 40 years ago, there are probably many applications we cannot foresee right now.”

Multiple one-click vulnerabilities have been discovered across a variety of popular software applications, allowing an attacker to potentially execute arbitrary code on target systems.

The issues were discovered by Positive Security researchers Fabian Bräunlein and Lukas Euler and affect apps like Telegram, Nextcloud, VLC, LibreOffice, OpenOffice, Bitcoin/Dogecoin Wallets, Wireshark, and Mumble.

“Desktop applications which pass user supplied URLs to be opened by the operating system are frequently vulnerable to code execution with user interaction,” the researchers said. “Code execution can be achieved either when a URL pointing to a malicious executable (.desktop,.jar,.exe, …) hosted on an internet accessible file share (nfs, webdav, smb, …) is opened, or an additional vulnerability in the opened application’s URI handler is exploited.”

Hackers Flood the Internet With 100000 Malicious PDF Documents.

In 2003, Lyon was just finishing school and working as a hired hacker. Companies tasked him with rooting out vulnerabilities in their systems, and he’d developed mapping tools for the job. His electronic sniffers would trace a network’s lines and nodes and report back what they found. Why not set them loose on the mother of all networks, he thought? So he did.

The resulting visualization recalled grand natural patterns, like networks of neurons or the large-scale structure of the universe. But it was at once more mundane and mind-boggling—representing, as it did, both a collection of mostly standard laptop and desktop computers connected to servers in run-of-the-mill office parks and an emerging technological force that was far more than the sum of it parts.

Continue reading “This Wild Video Maps the Entire Internet and Its Evolution Since 1997” »

Take my micro-transaction.

We may be on track to our own version of the Oasis after an announcement yesterday from Epic Games that it has raised $1 billion to put towards building “the metaverse.”

Epic Games has created multiple hugely popular video games, including Fortnite, Assassin’s Creed, and Godfall. An eye-popping demo released last May shows off Epic’s Unreal Engine 5, its next-gen computer program for making video games, interactive experiences, and augmented and virtual reality apps, set to be released later this year. The graphics are so advanced that the demo doesn’t look terribly different from a really high-quality video camera following someone around in real life—except it’s even cooler. In February Epic unveiled its MetaHuman Creator, an app that creates highly realistic “digital humans” in a fraction of the time it used to take.

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With full court approval.

In what’s believed to be an unprecedented move, the FBI is trying to protect hundreds of computers infected by the Hafnium hack by hacking them itself, using the original hackers’ own tools (via TechCrunch).

The hack, which affected tens of thousands of Microsoft Exchange Server customers around the world and triggered a “whole of government response” from the White House, reportedly left a number of backdoors that could let any number of hackers right into those systems again. Now, the FBI has taken advantage of this by using those same web shells / backdoors to remotely delete themselves, an operation that the agency is calling a success.

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Elon Musk’s SpaceX added more money to its February equity raise, with the amended total reaching nearly $1.2 billion.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX added more money to its most recent equity raise, according to a securities filing on Wednesday.

SpaceX held a second close of about $314 million, adding to the $850 million that CNBC reported the company raised in February. The amendment brings the round’s new total equity raised to $1.16 billion, which the company raised at a valuation of about $74 billion.

Continue reading “SpaceX adds to previous equity round, pushing Elon Musk’s last raise total to nearly $1.2 billion” »

In real-world attacks, “a simple scenario… would have an attacker infiltrating a manufacturing network via an RCE on an exposed IoT device then causing a production line to stop by causing a DoS on an industrial controller,” Daniel dos Santos, research manager at Forescout Research Labs, said. “Similarly, the attacker could switch off the lights of a target company by leveraging a vulnerable building automation controller.”

Many of the Name: Wreck vulnerabilities stem from DNS implementations of a protocol feature called message compression. Message compression reduces the size of DNS messages, due to DNS response packets often including the same domain name. This compression mechanism has been problematic to implement on products for 20 years, said researchers, causing issues on DNS servers, enterprise devices and, more recently, TCP/IP stacks. Forescout researchers disclosed three flaws relating to message compression during previous research into TCP/IP vulnerabilities (particularly the Ripple20 and AMNESIA:33 sets of flaws). Consequently, they hunted for other similar types of flaws in other protocol stacks.

As part of the ensuing Name: Wreck research, researchers found DNS message compression vulnerabilities in four popular TCP/IP stacks, including FreeBSD (version 12.1), IPnet (version VxWorks 6.6), NetX (version 6.0.1) and Nucleus Net (version 4.3). The most critical flaws exist in FreeBSD, popular IT software used by high-performance servers in millions of IT networks, including major websites such as Netflix and Yahoo; and in Siemens’ Nucleus NET firmware, which has been used for decades by critical OT and Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices.