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COLDCARD security audit phishing attack installs remote access tool

A phishing campaign is exploiting fears surrounding the recently disclosed COLDCARD wallet vulnerability and suspected $88.6 million Bitcoin theft to trick users into installing ScreenConnect remote access software.

Proofpoint, which discovered the campaign, says it uses emails impersonating COLDCARD that claim a security audit is underway across its hardware cold storage wallet devices.

The phishing campaign comes after attackers recently stole approximately 1,367 Bitcoin, worth an estimated $88.6 million, from 4,585 addresses using what is believed to be a random number generation flaw affecting multiple COLDCARD models and firmware versions.

Google Blogger locks hundreds of blogs in malware false positive

Google has locked hundreds of Blogger websites after a false positive claimed they violated its “Malware and Similar Malicious Content” policy, with some sites actually deleted from the platform.

The issue began on August 4, and it appears to affect many legitimate blogs that do not host malware or have malicious scripts.

As seen by BleepingComputer, hundreds of web admins have reached out to Google on the company’s official forum for help in restoring access to their blogs.

Massive ChainDrop npm supply-chain attack infects hundreds of packages

Self-propagating malware named ‘ChainDrop’ has compromised more than 1,300 packages with a combined 2 billion monthly downloads on the Node Package Manager (npm) registry.

Infected packages include very popular ones such as Keyv and Cacheable, flat-cache and file-entry-cache, all caching utilities from the same maintainer.

The supply-chain attack started after the threat actor compromised the GitHub account of Keyv’s maintainer, and quickly spread to packages associated with major organizations such as Deliveroo, Ornikar, OneReach, Picsart, Qlik, and ServiceTitan.

Scientists created the world’s whitest paint that reflects 98.1% of sunlight and it could cool buildings without air conditioning

Keeping buildings cool has become an increasingly difficult challenge as temperatures rise and air conditioning demand continues to grow. While cooling systems provide comfort, they also consume large amounts of electricity, adding to energy costs and greenhouse gas emissions.

Claude Fable 5 AI finds a tiny formula that topples an 87-year-old math conjecture

A mathematician working at Anthropic says he used the AI model Claude Fable 5 to uncover a remarkably simple counterexample to the Jacobian conjecture, a famous problem that has resisted mathematicians for more than a century. The result shows that the conjecture is false in three dimensions and above, although the original two-dimensional version remains unsolved.

ZiaCore microreactor successfully achieves criticality

The emerging technology of advanced nuclear microreactors offers solutions to many modern energy challenges. The ZiaCore design, a low-enriched uranium dioxide-fueled microreactor developed by Los Alamos National Laboratory, now joins several developing concepts for fission-based nuclear power microreactors that have achieved initial criticality. The ZiaCore design reached this milestone through a proof-of-principle experiment—a high-temperature, zero-power criticality demonstration at the National Criticality Experiments Research Center (NCERC) in Nevada.

“The execution of our ZiaCore experiment will support an entire category of nuclear power microreactors,” said Christopher Stanek, director of the Nuclear Energy Program Office at Los Alamos. “The experiment will provide valuable data for low-enriched reactor technologies, including components developed at Los Alamos, at representative reactor temperatures.”

Over four weeks in April and May this year, the ZiaCore system was brought to zero-power criticality at high temperatures. An important benchmark in reactor design and testing, zero-power criticality provides invaluable validation of reactor physics—essentially proving that the reactor design is valid.

Godfather of AI: Brace for more rogue AIs

The smarter artificial intelligence gets, the harder it will be for humanity to control it, according to Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel Prize-winning computer scientist known as the “godfather of AI.”

Even Hinton was alarmed by the sophisticated AI agents that recently caused real-world damage after escaping their human-built testing environments.

“What’s happening is these things are getting smarter,” Hinton told CNN on Wednesday during a press conference at an artificial intelligence convention. “I think as they get smarter, we’re going to see more and more complex intentions they have – and more and more ability to escape control.”

Physicists Shatter Quantum Entanglement Distance Record With 420 Kilometers of Optical Fiber

Maintaining a long-distance relationship may be difficult for humans, but it’s even more difficult for entangled states.

The longer the fiber, the harder it becomes to keep the two quantum memories linked.

Overcoming this tyranny of distance has been one of the major challenges of quantum communication.

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