SilentAir used compromised Asian telecom equipment to intercept calls, texts, and 2FA codes, targeting mainly Taiwan, Enea reports.
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Operation Endgame Takes Down Gootloader, CastleRAT and StealC Servers, Seizes 6.4M Stolen Logins
An international police operation took down servers behind Gootloader, CastleRAT and StealC this week. Criminals used the three malware tools to gain access to computers, steal passwords, and launch ransomware attacks.
Police also seized about 6.4 million stolen logins belonging to more than 40,000 victims, according to Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA).
Gootloader is a loader: once on a computer, it could download other malware, especially ransomware. It spread through fake legal documents placed on hacked websites, often WordPress sites. Criminals used SEO poisoning to push those sites high in search results.
Trezor confirms crypto-stealing implants in three wallets, releases fix
Cryptocurrency hardware wallet maker Trezor has confirmed that three Safe 5 devices sold by Southeast Asian reseller CryptoBilis contained malicious hardware implants designed to steal wallet recovery phrases and send them to attackers over cellular networks.
The findings follow an investigation into a suspected hardware implant first reported in October, when a customer discovered an unauthorized circuit board inside a Trezor Safe 5 purchased from Indonesian reseller CryptoBilis.
At the time, Trezor had not received the device for examination and could not confirm the implant’s capabilities.
German military drone operations disrupted by cyberattack
German defense technology company Quantum Systems confirmed that it detected an incident in late October that was part of an active cyberattack by “hostile actors.”
The company responded quickly, working with relevant authorities to resolve the issue swiftly and ensure its unmanned systems could safely resume operations.
Quantum Systems is a German defense technology company that builds reconnaissance and interceptor drones, along with other unmanned systems and the software that controls them.
Check Point gateways hacked via PHP2Shell to deploy VMware ESXi wiper
Vulnerable Check Point Security Gateway instances have been targeted in PHP2Shell attacks that deployed data-wiping malware on VMware ESXi hosts.
The attacks started on October 30, initially against Israeli organizations, and were conducted by an actor that ran the entire campaign, from initial access to lateral movement and launching PHP webshells.
In some instances, researchers found political messages during the destructive stage, raising questions about a possible false-flag operation.
How one AI agent exposed five critical enterprise security gaps
An AI agent built to automate invoice processing could be manipulated into changing vendor bank details through a malicious email, without triggering traditional security alerts. Token Security examines five critical AI agent security gaps and shares practical guidance from industry security leaders on preventing them.
Protein Guides Cytoneme ‘Highway’ Formation to Support Developmental Signaling
See how Sonic Hedgehog (SHH) uses BOC, CDON and FARP1 to create cytonemes for cell signaling during embryonic development
Scientists Fear ‘Mirror Life’ Could End Humanity, But We May Now Be Able to Detect It
Many scientists are seriously worried about the potential threat of ‘mirror life’: hypothetical organisms built from molecules that are flipped from what we find in nature.
Many of life’s basic building blocks, including DNA and amino acids, have a certain ‘left-or right-handedness’
If that were to be flipped, like a DNA double helix twisting to the left instead of the right, then these looking-glass versions of life could sneak past the biological defenses of animals, plants, and humans.
Two Forever Chemicals Show Links to an Aggressive Breast Cancer Type in NIH Study
New NIH study links PFOA and PFOS to higher ER-negative breast cancer risk, highlighting PFAS and breast cancer concerns.
AI rivals tackle one of physics’ deepest mathematical challenges
One by one, artificial intelligence (AI) is felling some of the biggest trees in the mathematical forest. In September, OpenAI announced it had cracked the notoriously difficult Navier-Stokes fluid dynamics problem, one of math’s seven Millennium Prize challenges. A month later, the company released more than 700 math papers, including a major advance on the Riemann hypothesis, another famous unsolved Millennium Prize Problem involving prime numbers. Its latest release, on 28 October, included a refutation of a decades-old conjecture in computer science —as well as a proof that one of physics’ most successful theories is on firm mathematical footing.
Controversially, OpenAI did not release the 1147-page proof of the physics result, known as the 4D Yang-Mills existence problem. Instead, it appointed a committee of physicists and mathematicians headed by Nobel laureate David Gross to “shepherd” the result. On 10 November, the group released a validation of a formalized version of the proof in Lean, a computer language that can check mathematical arguments against a set of axioms. Although it doesn’t mean the still-unreleased proof is correct, it’s a sign of its logical consistency.
For physicists, the result is unlikely to change their day-to-day work: The Yang-Mills theory has already been remarkably successful at explaining the behavior of particles at accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider. But important mysteries still remain, including how most of the mass of protons and neutrons arises, and why the quarks that make them up can never be found alone. A rigorous proof could offer fresh insights into these phenomena. “Maybe there’s something we’re missing,” says David Tong, a physicist at the University of Cambridge.