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Over 4,400 Rockwell PLCs Exposed Online, 22 Found in Water Attack Cities

Forescout found 22 internet-facing Rockwell Automation programmable logic controllers (PLCs) in cities hit by recent cyberattacks on US water utilities. Nineteen used the same mobile carrier network.

Its August 3 scan counted 4,407 exposed Rockwell controllers worldwide, including 2,844 in the United States, but Forescout could not confirm any were compromised. That figure counts exposed controllers, not water utilities or confirmed victims.

Forescout said the publicly described effects could be achieved without a vulnerability exploit: attackers changed IP addresses and set passwords on controllers that were already reachable, causing operators to lose visibility and, in some cases, control of connected equipment.

New TONTOU CPU attack bypasses Spectre v2 fixes, leaks Linux password hashes

Researchers found a way to bypass recent mitigations for Spectre v2 speculative execution side-channel attacks and developed an exploit to leak secrets from Linux machines.

The method works against Spectre v2 defenses on AMD and Intel processors that rely on sanitizing or isolating branch predictors, which researchers generically refer to as neutralization-based mitigations.

Spectre v2 is also known as Branch Target Injection (BTI) and is a variant of the Spectre class of vulnerabilities.

Meta AI model hacked a company during misconfigured cyber test

Meta has become the latest AI company to confirm that one of its models hacked a real organization during cybersecurity testing, as similar incidents continue to emerge following OpenAI’sOpenAI’s initial disclosure that its agents breached Hugging Face.

The Information was the first to report the incident on Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter who said Meta’s Muse Spark 1.1 model breached an unidentified company and made changes to its internal systems.

According to the report, the model reached the public internet because of an error in the configuration of a sandbox testing environment operated with independent cybersecurity evaluation company Irregular.

Trauma analysis finds brain injuries more common among e-scooter riders than motorcyclists

E-scooter riders in England and Wales may face a higher risk of brain and internal organ injuries than motorcyclists and cyclists, according to a study published in Scientific Reports. The authors recommend increasing e-scooter safety through measures including mandatory helmet legislation, stricter speed limits and e-scooter design improvements such as deformable handlebar grips and enhanced braking.

E-scooters are used in urban areas throughout the world, but reliable data on injuries and risks have been limited. David Bodansky and colleagues analyzed data from the National Major Trauma Registry for 15,247 patients—including 580 e-scooter riders, 7,027 motorcyclists and 7,640 pedal cyclists—with moderate-to-severe traumatic injuries from 18 cities in England and Wales between 2020 and 2022. Of e-scooter riders, 87.9% were adults.

They found that adult e-scooter riders had a 3.5 times higher risk of traumatic brain injury, a 1.5 times higher risk of internal organ injury and a 3.2 times higher risk of artery or vein injury than motorcyclists. These risks were also 1.7, 1.4 and 1.7 times higher, respectively, compared with pedal cyclists. However, the fracture risk for adult e-scooter riders was 20.0% lower than for motorcyclists and 10.0% lower than for pedal cyclists.

First mRNA flu shot approved by FDA bodes well for improving drugs of the future few hurdles remain before mRNA can move beyond vaccines

From COVID-19 vaccines to Moderna’s mRNA flu vaccine, using mRNA as medicine has shown promise. But before mRNA drugs can go beyond vaccines, researchers need to identify the right diseases to treat.

A new way to watch heat move through electronics

The same overheating problem that happens to our laptops also plagues computer servers and data centers around the world—and heat management is only getting harder as computer chips get more compact and powerful.

Understanding how heat moves through chips at the microscale is essential for continuing to improve their performance. Unfortunately, most methods for measuring heat flow struggle with multilayered devices like the electronics that power our modern world.

Now MIT researchers have demonstrated a new way to study how heat moves through multilayered materials, combining X-rays that penetrate multiple layers with laser pulses to deliver heat. The researchers used the technique to measure how heat moves inside a promising device for transistors and flexible electronics.

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