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Two Black Holes Locked in a Death Spiral Imaged in Stunning First

The complex dance of two black holes locked in a doomed orbit has been revealed in a first-of-its-kind direct radio image.

It’s the first time astronomers have directly imaged the distinct jets of both black holes in a known binary – finally confirming the model of the double core of a galaxy called OJ 287.

In OJ 287, located some 3.5 billion light-years away, the intricate, extreme interplay between the two central supermassive black holes has been documented for decades. This is the first image to capture smoking-gun signatures of both objects, however.

Astaroth Banking Trojan Abuses GitHub to Remain Operational After Takedowns

Cybersecurity researchers are calling attention to a new campaign that delivers the Astaroth banking trojan that employs GitHub as a backbone for its operations to stay resilient in the face of infrastructure takedowns.

“Instead of relying solely on traditional command-and-control (C2) servers that can be taken down, these attackers are leveraging GitHub repositories to host malware configurations,” McAfee Labs researchers Harshil Patel and Prabudh Chakravorty said in a report.

“When law enforcement or security researchers shut down their C2 infrastructure, Astaroth simply pulls fresh configurations from GitHub and keeps running.”

Massive multi-country botnet targets RDP services in the US

A large-scale botnet is targeting Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) services in the United States from more than 100,000 IP addresses.

The campaign started on October 8 and based on the source of the IPs, researchers believe the attacks are launched by a multi-country botnet.

RDP is a network protocol that enables remote connection and control of Windows systems. It is typically used by administrators, helpdesk staff, and remote workers.

Google Chrome to revoke browser notifications for inactive sites

Google is updating the Chrome web browser to automatically revoke notification permissions for websites that haven’t been visited recently, to reduce alert overload.

While Google Chrome’s Safety Check tool already removes access to other permissions, such as location and camera, this new feature will extend this functionality to notifications on both desktop and Android versions of the browser.

The company said the new feature is designed to target sites that send frequent notifications that get little to no user interaction. According to Chrome product manager Archit Agarwal, although users receive a high volume of alerts, fewer than 1% of these notifications actually generate any engagement.

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