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CISA Alerts Federal Agencies to Patch Actively Exploited Linux Kernel Flaw

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Thursday added a security flaw impacting the Linux kernel to the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation.

Tracked as CVE-2024–1086 (CVSS score: 7.8), the high-severity issue relates to a use-after-free bug in the netfilter component that permits a local attacker to elevate privileges from a regular user to root and possibly execute arbitrary code.

“Linux kernel contains a use-after-free vulnerability in the netfilter: nf_tables component that allows an attacker to achieve local privilege escalation,” CISA said.

Cyber Espionage Alert: LilacSquid Targets IT, Energy, and Pharma Sectors

A previously undocumented cyber espionage-focused threat actor named LilacSquid has been linked to targeted attacks spanning various sectors in the United States (U.S.), Europe, and Asia as part of a data theft campaign since at least 2021.

“The campaign is geared toward establishing long-term access to compromised victim organizations to enable LilacSquid to siphon data of interest to attacker-controlled servers,” Cisco Talos researcher Asheer Malhotra said in a new technical report published today.

Targets include information technology organizations building software for the research and industrial sectors in the U.S, energy companies in Europe, and the pharmaceutical sector in Asia, indicating a broad victimology footprint.

Simulations demonstrate potential mechanisms of intermediate-mass black hole formation in globular clusters

Joint research led by Michiko Fujii of the University of Tokyo demonstrates a possible formation mechanism of intermediate-mass black holes in globular clusters, star clusters that could contain tens of thousands or even millions of tightly packed stars.

Data-driven model generates natural human motions for virtual avatars

Humans can innately perform a wide range of movements, as this allows them to best tackle various tasks in their day-to-day life. Automatically reproducing these motions in virtual avatars and 3D animated human-like characters could be highly advantageous for many applications, ranging from metaverse spaces to digital entertainment, AI interfaces and robotics.

Researchers at Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and ETH Zurich recently developed WANDR, a new model that can generate natural human motions for avatars. This model, to be introduced in a paper presented at the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2024) in June, unifies different data sources under a single model to attain more realistic motions in 3D humanoid characters. The paper is also posted to the arXiv preprint server.

“At a high-level, our research aims at figuring out what it takes to create able to behave like us,” Markos Diomataris, first author of the paper, told Tech Xplore. “This essentially means learning to reason about the world, how to move in it, setting goals and trying to achieve them.

‘Metaholograms’: Researchers develop a new type of hologram

This innovation has the potential to significantly improve AR/VR displays by enabling the projection of more complex and realistic scenes. It also holds promise for applications in image encryption, where the information is encoded into multiple holographic channels for enhanced security.

The research is a significant step forward in developing high-performance metaholograms with a vastly increased information capacity. This study paves the way for exciting new possibilities in various fields, from advanced displays to information encryption and .