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Theory for aerosol droplets from contaminated bubbles may shed light on spread of pollution, microplastics, and more

Bubbles burst when their caps rupture. Children discover this phenomenon every summer day, but it also underpins key mechanisms for the spread of pollutants, contaminants, and even infectious disease through the generation of aerosol droplets. While bubble bursting has been extensively studied in pure substances, the impact of contaminants on bursting dynamics has not received widespread attention.

Researchers in The Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have conducted a systematic study to investigate bubble-bursting jets—aerosol particles sprayed when bubble surfaces rupture—when surface contaminants are present. The laboratory of mechanical science and engineering professor Jie Feng developed a model predicting the influence of contaminants on jet size and experimentally confirmed it.

The study is published in the journal Physical Review Letters, where it was selected as an Editors’ Suggestion.

Hyper-Volumetric DDoS Attacks Reach Record 7.3 Tbps, Targeting Key Global Sectors

Cloudflare on Tuesday said it mitigated 7.3 million distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks in the second quarter of 2025, a significant drop from 20.5 million DDoS attacks it fended off the previous quarter.

“Overall, in Q2 2025, hyper-volumetric DDoS attacks skyrocketed,” Omer Yoachimik and Jorge Pacheco said. “Cloudflare blocked over 6,500 hyper-volumetric DDoS attacks, an average of 71 per day.”

In Q1 2025, the company said an 18-day sustained campaign against its own and other critical infrastructure protected by Cloudflare was responsible for 13.5 million of the attacks observed during the time period. Cumulatively, Cloudflare has blocked nearly 28 million DDoS attacks, surpassing the number of attacks it mitigated in all of 2024.

Abacus dark web drug market goes offline in suspected exit scam

Abacus Market, the largest Western darknet marketplace supporting Bitcoin payments, has shut down its public infrastructure in a move suspected to be an exit scam.

Exit scams occur when the operator of a marketplace decides to vanish with the money they hold in escrow for various transactions between platform users.

Blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs reports that Abacus shutting down so abruptly has all the indications of either an exit scam or a covert law enforcement operation dismantling the activity.

Windows KB5064489 emergency update fixes Azure VM launch issues

Microsoft has released an emergency update to fix a bug that prevents Azure virtual machines from launching when the Trusted Launch setting is disabled and Virtualization-Based Security (VBS) is enabled.

The bug impacted Windows Server 2025 and Windows 11 24H2 and was introduced during the July Patch Tuesday security updates.

“This update addresses an issue that prevented some virtual machines (VMs) from starting when Virtualization-Based Security (VBS) was enabled,” explains Microsoft.

Police disrupt “Diskstation” ransomware gang attacking NAS devices

An international law enforcement action dismantled a Romanian ransomware gang known as ‘Diskstation,’ which encrypted the systems of several companies in the Lombardy region, paralyzing their businesses.

The law enforcement operation codenamed ‘Operation Elicius’ was coordinated by Europol and also involved police forces in France and Romania.

Diskstation is a ransomware operation that targets Synology Network-Attached Storage (NAS) devices, which are commonly used by companies for centralized file storage and sharing, data backup and recovery, and general content hosting.

Android malware Konfety uses malformed APKs to evade detection

A new variant of the Konfety Android malware emerged with a malformed ZIP structure along with other obfuscation methods that allow it to evade analysis and detection.

Konfety poses as a legitimate app, mimicking innocuous products available on Google Play, but features none of the promised functionality.

The capabilities of the malware include redirecting users to malicious sites, pushing unwanted app installs, and fake browser notifications.

Terabytes of data in a tiny crystal

From punch card-operated looms in the 1800s to modern cellphones, if an object has “on” and “off” states, it can be used to store information.

In a laptop computer, the ones and zeroes that make up the binary language are actually transistors either running at low or high voltage. On a compact disc, the one is a spot where a tiny indented “pit” turns to a flat “land” or vice versa, while a zero represents no change.

Historically, the size of the object cycling through those states has put a limit on the size of the storage device. But now, researchers from the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering have explored a technique to make the metaphorical ones and zeroes out of crystal defects, each the size of an individual atom, for classical computer memory applications.

UChicago researchers created a ‘quantum-inspired’ revolution in microelectronics, storing classical computer memory in crystal gaps where atoms should be.