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As the U.S. government works to contain a sprawling hacking campaign that relies on software in technology from SolarWinds, a federal contractor, technology firms are disabling some of the hackers’ key infrastructure.

Cybersecurity giant FireEye on Wednesday said that it had worked with Microsoft and the domain registrar GoDaddy to take over one of the domains that attackers had used to send malicious code to victim machines. The move is no panacea for stopping the suspected state-sponsored hacking campaign, though it could help stem the tide of victims, which reportedly includes the departments of Treasury and Homeland Security.

The seized domain, known as a “killswitch,” will “affect new and previous” infections of the malicious code coming from that particular domain, FireEye said in a statement that was first reported by independent journalist Brian Krebs. “Depending on the IP address returned when the malware resolves avsvmcloud[.]com, under certain conditions, the malware would terminate itself and prevent further execution.”

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ESET researchers have uncovered a supply-chain attack on the website of a government in Southeast Asia.

Just a few weeks after the supply-chain attack on the Able Desktop software, another similar attack occurred on the website of the Vietnam Government Certification Authority (VGCA): ca.gov.vn. The attackers modified two of the software installers available for download on this website and added a backdoor in order to compromise users of the legitimate application.

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Circa 2015

Conventional particle accelerators are typically big machines that occupy a lot of space. Even at more modest energies, such as that used for cancer therapy and medical imaging, accelerators need large rooms to accommodate the required hardware, power supplies and radiation shielding.

A new discovery by physicists at the University of Maryland could hold the key to the construction of inexpensive, broadly useful, and portable particle accelerators in the very near future. The team has accelerated electron beams to nearly the speed of light using record-low laser energies, thus relieving a major engineering bottleneck in the development of compact particle accelerators. The work appears in the November 6, 2015 issue of the journal Physical Review Letters.

“We have accelerated high-charge electron beams to more than 10 million electron volts using only millijoules of laser pulse energy. This is the energy consumed by a typical household lightbulb in one-thousandth of a second.” said Howard Milchberg, professor of Physics and Electrical and Computer Engineering at UMD and senior author of the study. “Because the laser energy requirement is so low, our result opens the way for laser-driven particle accelerators that can be moved around on a cart.”

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“Now witness the firepower of this fully armed and operational Battle Station.” – Emperor Palpatine, Return of the Jedi

This week Microsoft took a series of dramatic steps against the recent SolarWinds supply chain attack. In the size, speed and scope of its actions, Microsoft has reminded the world that it can still muster firepower like no one else as a nearly-overwhelming force for good.

Through four steps over four days, Microsoft flexed the muscle of its legal team and its control of the Windows operating system to nearly obliterate the actions of some of the most sophisticated offensive hackers out there. In this case, the adversary is believed to be APT29, aka Cozy Bear, the group many believe to be associated with Russian intelligence, and best known for carrying out the 2016 hack against the Democratic National Committee (DNC).

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