Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 185

Threat actors on X are exploiting the news around Ross Ulbricht to direct unsuspecting users to a Telegram channel that tricks them into run PowerShell code that infects them with malware.

The attack, spotted by vx-underground, is a new variant of the “Click-Fix” tactic that has become very popular among threat actors to distribute malware over the past year.

However, instead of being fixes for common errors, this variant pretends to be a captcha or verification system that users must run to join the channel.

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The RealHome theme and the Easy Real Estate plugins for WordPress are vulnerable to two critical severity flaws that allow unauthenticated users to gain administrative privileges.

Although the two flaws were discovered in September 2024 by Patchstack, and multiple attempts were made to contact the vendor (InspiryThemes), the researchers say they have not received a response.

Also, Patchstack says the vendor released three versions since September, but no security fixes to address the critical issues were introduced. Hence, the issues remain unfixed and exploitable.

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A security researcher discovered a flaw in Cloudflare’s content delivery network (CDN), which could expose a person’s general location by simply sending them an image on platforms like Signal and Discord.

While the geo-locating capability of the attack is not precise enough for street-level tracking, it can provide enough data to infer what geographic region a person lives in and monitor their movements.

Daniel’s finding is particularly concerning for people who are highly concerned about their privacy, like journalists, activists, dissidents, and even cybercriminals.

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In a new Nature Communications study, scientists have demonstrated the quantum version of the strong Mpemba effect (sME) in a single trapped ion system.

The Mpemba effect is a counterintuitive phenomenon in which—under certain conditions—hotter water cools faster than colder water.

It was first described by Tanzanian high school student Erasto Bartholomeo Mpemba in 1963. However, according to early scientific literature, it was observed much earlier, as far as Aristotelian times.

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A research team led by scientists at Northwestern University has developed the first-ever two-dimensional mechanically interlocked material with high flexibility and strength. In the future, this could be used to develop lightweight yet high-performance body armor and other such tough materials, a press release said.

It was in the 1980s that Fraser Stoddart, then a chemist at Northwestern University, first introduced the concept of mechanical bonds. Stoddart then expanded the role of these bonds into molecular machines by enabling functions like switching, rotating, contracting, and expanding in multiple ways and using them to develop interlocked structures, which also won him the Nobel Prize in 2016.

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Xenon gas might one day be used as a treatment for Alzheimer’s disease, according to researchers from Mass General Brigham and Washington University. Don’t let its alien-sounding name frighten you. Xenon gas is commonly used as a medical aesthetic.

The researchers found that mice suffering from Alzheimer’s-like conditions saw reduced brain inflammation and a slowing of brain atrophy after inhaling xenon gas.

One of the biggest signs that xenon gas might actually be doing some good is that they even saw a reduction in amyloid plaque in the brain. These are deposits of proteins called beta-amyloids in the brain that are a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease. The researchers think xenon is activating the brain’s immune cells to protect the brain from neurodegeneration.

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