Lifeboat Foundation

Almost 7 million users have attempted to install malicious browser extensions since 2020, with 70% of those extensions used as adware to target users with advertisements.

The most common payloads carried by malicious web browser extensions during the first half of 2022 belonged to adware families, snooping on browsing activity and promoting affiliate links.

This finding is based on telemetry data collected by Kaspersky, which reports over 1,300,000 attempts by users to install malicious extensions throughout H1 ‘22, an increase compared to last year’s figures.

Carnegie Mellon researchers have developed an open-source software that enables more agile movement in legged robots.

Robots can help humans with tasks like aiding disaster recovery efforts or monitoring the environment. In the case of quadrupeds, robots that walk on four legs, their mobility requires many software components to work together seamlessly. Most researchers must spend much of their time developing lower-level infrastructure instead of focusing on high-level behaviors.

Continue reading “Open-source software gives a leg up to robot research” »

Color coding makes aerial maps much more easily understood. Through color, we can tell at a glance where there is a road, forest, desert, city, river or lake.

Working with several universities, the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory has devised a method for creating color-coded graphs of large volumes of data from X-ray analysis. This new tool uses computational data sorting to find clusters related to physical properties, such as an atomic distortion in a crystal structure. It should greatly accelerate future research on structural changes on the atomic scale induced by varying temperature.

The research team published their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in an article titled “Harnessing interpretable and unsupervised machine learning to address big data from modern X-ray diffraction.”

Researchers have uncovered details of the ÆPIC and SQUIP vulnerabilities in Intel and AMD processors that allow attackers to obtain secret info.

Cybersecurity researchers have elaborated a novel attack technique that weaponizes programmable logic controllers (PLCs) to gain an initial foothold in engineering workstations and subsequently invade the operational technology (OT) networks.

Dubbed “Evil PLC” attack by industrial security firm Claroty, the issue impacts engineering workstation software from Rockwell Automation, Schneider Electric, GE, B&R, Xinje, OVARRO, and Emerson.

Programmable logic controllers are a crucial component of industrial devices that control manufacturing processes in critical infrastructure sectors. PLCs, besides orchestrating the automation tasks, are also configured to start and stop processes and generate alarms.

Researchers discover a new variant of the SOVA Android banking trojan with upgraded capabilities.

Researchers discover a new Python package distributed via the PyPI repository that drops fileless crypto-mining malware onto Linux systems.

A stretchable neuromorphic ‘nerve’ restores coordinated and smooth motions in the legs of mice with neurological motor disorders, enabling the animals to kick a ball, walk or run.

This same feature could also play a role in our ability to tell what is human, and what is not. Several experiments have shown that when humanoid robots exhibit human-like variability in response times or motion patterns, we perceive them as more human-like.

In a study published in Science Robotics¹, researchers have observed this same effect when the human and the robot are performing a shared activity. “To evaluate the impact of behavioural variability in the attribution of humanness to a robot, in our experiment the robot was either teleoperated by another human or controlled by a computer”, says Agnieszka Wykowska, senior researcher at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Genoa, and the coordinator of the study.

The research has also shown that the effect applies even when the variability of the robot’s behaviour does not closely resemble the human one, if it falls in the same range. “Depending on the context and on the function that the robot needs to perform, roboticists can endow their machines with a different degree of humanness by modulating the variability of their behaviors,” Wykowska adds.