Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 6,184

A team of security researchers at Avanan is reporting that hackers are taking advantage of a Google Docs security vulnerability—one that takes advantage of a comment feature. They are claiming that they saw hackers using the vulnerability to target 500 inboxes of 30 Outlook users involving over 100 individual email accounts.

The at Avanan claims that they found an earlier exploit in Google Docs last June—one that allowed hackers to send phishing links to users. Then, this past October, they discovered that hackers had found another way to send phishing links to unsuspecting users, using the comment feature. They further claim that the vulnerability was not fixed by Google and because of that they began seeing hackers taking advantage of the vulnerability last month.

The hacking approach is both simple and straightforward—a creates a Google Docs document and adds comments to it that include an @ symbol followed by an email address. The symbol automatically alerts the system to send an email to the person designated in the email address—the email that is sent has phishing links in it, sending the user to a webpage that could lead to malicious code.

Read more | >

Researchers at UC Berkeley have developed a drone whose hinged arms can fold themselves from horizontal to vertical position in order to pass through tight spaces or carry light objects.

Previous limb-adjusting vehicles created by labs like Purdue University’s Engineering Technology school were outfitted with actuators that shifted the arms and rotors into different positions, making them more efficient in certain conditions like heavy winds. The HiPeRLab staff wanted to avoid inclusion of actuators, which draw off the drone’s batteries and thereby reduce its flight time. Their solution: use passive hinges whose up and down folding is powered by the rotors themselves.

Read more | >

It was cute at first. When Xbox head Phil Spencer took the stage at E3 2018 and announced the acquisition of five notable studios – Undead Labs, Playground Games, Ninja Theory, Compulsion Games and The Initiative – the air inside the Microsoft Theater turned electric. It felt like the company was righting a wrong in its business plan and finally building an internal roster of exciting games that it could offer exclusively on Xbox platforms. You know, a few friends to keep Master Chief company.

Today’s announcement that Microsoft is buying Activision Blizzard, the largest third-party publisher in the video game industry, doesn’t feel as harmless. Four years on and numerous acquisitions later, the Activision Blizzard deal feels like an extreme escalation of Microsoft’s plans, and it could mark a turning point in the video game industry as a whole, with negative consequences for both players and developers.

So far, public reaction to the acquisition has been mixed, which makes sense for a few reasons: first, Activision Blizzard’s sheer size is daunting, and this purchase represents more money and industry power than Microsoft’s previous gaming acquisitions combined. Second, Activision Blizzard is currently the subject of multiple investigations into allegations of sexual harassment and gender discrimination at the studio, where CEO Bobby Kotick has been in charge and largely unchecked for the past 30 years. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Kotick is poised to leave the company in a golden parachute once the Microsoft deal goes through.

Read more | >