Researchers have shown for the first time how hidden motions could control how granular materials such as soil and snow slip and slide, confirming a long-suspected hypothesis. The knowledge could help in understanding how landslides and avalanches work and even help the construction industry in the future.
A lab-made diet sparked a 15-fold boom in bee reproduction, pointing to a possible solution for collapsing colonies.
“As opposed to using a rogue base station, which limits the practicality of many 5G attacks, SNI5GECT acts as a third-party in the communication, silently sniffs messages, and tracks the protocol state by decoding the sniffed messages during the UE attach procedure,” the researchers said. “The state information is then used to inject a targeted attack payload in downlink communication.”
The findings build upon a prior study from ASSET in late 2023 that led to the discovery of 14 flaws in the firmware implementation of 5G mobile network modems from MediaTek and Qualcomm, collectively dubbed 5Ghoul, that could be exploited to launch attacks to drop connections, freeze the connection that involves manual reboot, or downgrade the 5G connectivity to 4G.
The Sni5Gect attacks are designed to passively sniff messages during the initial connection process, decode the message content in real-time, and then leverage the decoded message content to inject targeted attack payloads.
Google is introducing a new defense for Android called ‘Developer Verification’ to block malware installations from sideloaded apps sourced from outside the official Google Play app store.
For apps on Google Play, there was already a requirement for publishers to provide a D-U-N-S (Data Universal Numbering System) number, introduced on August 31, 2023.
Google says this has had a notable effect in reducing malware on the platform. However, the system didn’t apply to the vast developer ecosystem outside the app store.