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Category: quantum physics – Page 457

The Quantum ransomware, a strain first discovered in August 2021, were seen carrying out speedy attacks that escalate quickly, leaving defenders little time to react.

The threat actors are using the IcedID malware as one of their initial access vectors, which deploys Cobalt Strike for remote access and leads to data theft and encryption using Quantum Locker.

The technical details of a Quantum ransomware attack were analyzed by security researchers at The DFIR Report, who says the attack lasted only 3 hours and 44 minutes from initial infection to the completion of encrypting devices.

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If true, we started out as a “baby universe.” Cute.

Could our universe have been created in a petri dish? Avi Loeb seems to think so. The Harvard astronomer posits that a higher “class” of civilization may have conjured up our universe in a laboratory far, far away.

“Since our universe has a flat geometry with a zero net energy, an advanced civilization could have developed a technology that created a baby universe out of nothing through quantum tunneling,” Loeb writes in an op-ed published by Scientific American last year.

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What if we could use a hydrogen molecule as a quantum sensor in a terahertz laser-equipped scanning tunneling microscope? This would allow us to measure the chemical properties of materials at unprecedented time and spatial resolutions.

This new technique has now been developed by physicists at the University of California, Irvine, according to a statement released by the institution on Friday.

“This project represents an advance in both the measurement technique and the scientific question the approach allowed us to explore,” said in the press release co-author of the new study Wilson Ho, Donald Bren Professor of physics & astronomy and chemistry.

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PsiQuantum, founded in 2016 by four researchers with roots at Bristol University, Stanford University, and York University, is one of a few quantum computing startups that’s kept a moderately low PR profile. (That’s if you disregard the roughly $700 million in funding it has attracted.) The main reason is PsiQuantum has eschewed the clamorous public chase for NISQ (near-term intermediate scale quantum) computers and set out to develop a million-qubit system the company says will deliver big gains on big problems as soon as it arrives.

When will that be?

PsiQuantum says it will have all the manufacturing processes in place “by the middle of the decade” and it’s working closely with GlobalFoundries (GF) to turn its vision into reality. The generous size of its funding suggests many think it will succeed. PsiQuantum is betting on a photonics-based approach called fusion-based quantum computing (paper) that relies mostly on well-understood optical technology but requires extremely precise manufacturing tolerances to scale up. It also relies on managing individual photons, something that has proven difficult for others.

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