Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Desktop/Laptop
  • Server
  • Audiocasts/Shows
  • Kernel Space
  • Graphics Stack
  • Applications
  • Instructionals/Technical
  • Games
  • Desktop Environments/WMs
    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
    • GNOME Desktop/GTK
• Distributions and Operating Systems
  • New Releases
  • Slackware Family
  • Fedora Family / IBM
  • Debian Family
  • Devices/Embedded
  • Open Hardware/Modding
  • Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
• Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
  • Web Browsers/Web Servers
  • Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra
  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration
    • Open Access/Content
  • Programming/Development
    • Perl / Raku
    • Python
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• Leftovers
  • Education
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  • ...

A team of physicists, including University of Massachusetts assistant professor Tigran Sedrakyan, recently announced in the journal Nature that they have discovered a new phase of matter. Called the chiral bose-liquid state, the discovery opens a new path in the age-old effort to understand the nature of the physical world.

Under everyday conditions, matter can be a solid, liquid, or gas. But once you venture beyond the everydayinto temperatures approaching absolute zero.

Absolute zero is the theoretical lowest temperature on the thermodynamic temperature scale. At this temperature, all atoms of an object are at rest and the object does not emit or absorb energy. The internationally agreed-upon value for this temperature is 273.15 C (459.67 F; 0.00 K).

After Russian hackers destroyed Viasat satellite ground receivers spanning Europe, SpaceX provided coverage via Starlink, its Lower Earth Orbit satellite constellation, and soon began noticing cyberattacks and software interferences. Now, a year later, the U.S. Department of Defense announced Russia is still attempting to complicate connections within the satellite constellation and others like it.

Documents were leaked by U.S. National Guard airman Ryan Teixeira, as reported by The Washington Post back in April of 2023. Ukraine has also stated it is experiencing similar security issues.

Russias quest to sabotage Ukrainian forces internet access by targeting the Starlink satellite operations that billionaire Elon Musk has provided to Kyiv since the wars earliest days appear to be more advanced than previously known, according to a classified U.S. intelligence report.

Id like to emphasize that these are neither embryos, nor are we trying to make embryos actually, Dr. Jitesh Neupane, of the University of Cambridges Gurdon Institute, said.

According to a recent tweet from Twitter owner Elon Musk who recently confirmed the app, Twitter is preparing to launch its own video app for Smart TVs.

Hospitals and cancer centers are running out of two major injectable cancer drugs: carboplatin and cisplatin. Dr. Eleonora Teplinsky, head of breast medical oncology for the Valley Health System in New Jersey, joins Ali Rogin to discuss the causes and effects of the shortages, and the dilemmas that providers and their patients now face.

SpaceXs Falcon 9 carrying the PSN Satria satellite successfully launched and deployed at 6:21 PM ET (22:21 UTC).

The launch had a 178-minute window, and upper-level winds delayed the first launch attempt at the opening of the window, but SpaceX had plenty of time to work with and launched just a bit later into the launch window.

The PSN Satria Indonesian Telecommunications was first contracted to be built in 2020 by Thales Alenia Spaceby the Indonesian government and delivered to the launch site in Cape Canaveral, Florida, in May 2023.

Scientists from the HIV Cure Center at the UNC School of Medicine, University of California San Diego, Emory University, and University of Pennsylvania have been searching for where exactly these latent cells are hiding in the body. New research published in the Journal of Clinical Investigations confirms that microglial cells which are specialized immune cells with a decade-long lifespan in the brain can serve as a stable viral reservoir for latent HIV.

Yuyang Tang, PhD, and Guochun Jiang, PhD, in the UNC School of Medicine extracted living brain tissue to conclude that specialized immune cells in the brain can harbor latent but replication-competent HIV.

As a part of its life cycle, the human immunodeficiency virus-1 (HIV) inserts a copy of its DNA into human immune cells. Some of these newly infected immune cells can then transition into a dormant, latent state for a long period of time, which is referred to as HIV latency.

Although current therapies, such current antiretroviral therapy (ART), can successfully block the virus from replicating further, it cannot eradicate latent HIV. If treatment is ever discontinued, the virus can rebound from latency and reignite the progression of HIV infection to AIDS.

• Gemini* and Gopher

  • Personal/Opinions

    • SpellBinding: ACYGINF Wordo: SKIPS

    • Re: ~christyotwistys Five Questions for June 2023

      I guess it depends a bit on what you consider an object? And whether I should limit it to things I have a realistic possibility of ever buying. Is a house an object? If so, Id like a Victorian in a walkable neighborhood, please. If a house isnt, but a car is, Id like a Hyundai Ioniq or Kia EV6. Im under no misapprehension that electric cars are a real solution to climate change; we need to aim at eliminating cars almost entirely, in favor of universal quality public transit. While Im waiting on that dream, I hate my current car. It gets much worse in-town gas mileage than I expected it to, and has been unexpectedly expensive to maintain. I dont have any foreseeable chance of buying either of those things, since electric cars are still priced as luxury items here in the US.

    • Good Music You Havent Heard Of

      Music is my life is a cliche, so Ill refrain from saying it. Suffice it to say that my life has revolved significantly around music for a very long time.

      Starting from high school I was one of those kids who had headphones on at every possible second. While not quite so anti-social anymore, I have worked as a developer for more than 10 years at this point, and have spent every work day of all of those listening to music while coding. And thats to say nothing of the hundreds of thousands of miles driven, workouts worked, and dinners cooked while blasting tunes.

    • Medevel 23 Free and Open-source Documentation Generators For Developers

      What is a Documentation Generator?

      A documentation generator is a tool that automates the process of creating documentation for software projects, APIs, or other technical products.

  • ...

Security updates have been issued by Debian (golang-go.crypto, maradns, requests, sofia-sip, and xmltooling), Fedora (chromium, iaito, iniparser, libX11, matrix-synapse, radare2, and thunderbird), Red Hat (c-ares, jenkins and jenkins-2-plugins, and texlive), SUSE (bluez, chromium, go1.19, go1.20, jetty-minimal, kernel, kubernetes1.18, kubernetes1.23, kubernetes1.24, libX11, open-vm-tools, openvswitch3, opera, syncthing, and xen), and Ubuntu (libcap2, libpod, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.15, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.15, linux-azure-fde-5.15, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.15, linux-gke, linux-gke-5.15, linux-gkeop, linux-hwe-5.15, linux-ibm, linux-kvm, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-5.15, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.15, linux-raspi, linux, linux-aws, linux-azure, linux-gcp, linux-hwe-5.19, linux-kvm, linux-lowlatency, linux-oracle, linux-raspi, linux, linux-aws, linux-lowlatency, linux-raspi, linux-oem-5.17, linux-oem-6.1, pypdf2, and qemu).

It probably wont surprise you to learn that Hackaday is constantly hounded by companies that want us to review their latest and greatest gadget. After all, getting us to post about their product is cheaper, easier, and arguably more effective than trying to come up with their own ad campaign. But if youve been with us for awhile, youll also know that in-house reviews arent something we actually do very often.

...

iStorage added a new encrypted flash drive to its highly successful datAshur range. The new datAshur PRO+C, with the Type-C interface, is the flash drive pending the new FIPS 140-3 Level 3 validation scheme. This offers robust guarantees as to its data security credentials. iStorages new datAshur PRO+C is a user-friendly USB 3.2 (Gen 1) Type-C flash drive that combines speed, ease of use and the highest-level security measures. It employs PIN protection and hardware More

The post iStorage launches datAshur PRO+C with Type-C USB interface appeared first on Help Net Security.

The European Commission urges member states to limit without delay equipment from Chinese suppliers from their 5G networks, specifically Huawei and ZTE.

The European Commission told member states to impose restrictions on high-risk suppliers for 5G networks without delay, with a specific focus on the dependency on high-risk suppliers, specifically Chinese firms Huawei and ZTE.

According to a second report on Member States progress in implementing the EU Toolbox on 5G Cybersecurity, member states are recommended to ensure that the restrictions cover critical and highly sensitive assets identified in the EU Coordinated risk assessment, including the Radio Access Network.

The report was prepared by Member States authorities (NIS Cooperation Group), with the support of the Commission and the EU Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA). 

Ten Member States have used these powers to impose obligations on MNOs to restrict or exclude suppliers considered as high-risk from their 5G networks. reads the report published by the EU. Several Member States have taken measures to restrict the use of, or exclude, high-risk suppliers or components. In three Member States, decisions on high-risk suppliers or equipment are taken based on applications from MNOs to deploy 5G equipment. One Member State has taken a public decision to exclude Huawei and ZTE from its 5G network.

The report provides an overview of the implementation of the EU Toolboxs strategic and technical measures. The strategic measures aimed at mitigating risks associated with long-term dependency on specific suppliers. The technical measures focus on bolstering the security of 5G networks and equipment, analyzing the problems from different perspectives, including technologies, processes, human involvement, and physical elements.

The call to restrict the suppliers is subordinate to the assessments made by member states national authorities.

The report highlights the risks to collective security associated with delays in limiting the provision of network equipment from high-risk suppliers.

Out of the twenty-four Member States that possess or are in the process of developing legislative powers, seventeen have already implemented or are planning to adopt an ex-ante approach. This approach allows the states to restrict the deployment of 5G equipment from risky providers. Additionally, nineteen Member States have already confirmed their ability to enforce the removal of exis...

Via: Jonathan Turley: The Irish Green Party followed many on the left around the world, including our own Democratic Party, this week and came out for censorship and speech controls. Indeed, the party went full Orwellian as its chairwoman Pauline OReilly called for restricting freedom to protect it. Limiting free speech has become an []

Summary: Information on the World Wide Web, including censorship hubs known as social control media, is getting hard to find; in the midst of tweets and TikTok anecdotes we very rarely see any truly fascinating breaking stories and investigative journalism; to make matters worse, many sites lie intentionally

THE media in the UK is perhaps least trusted among people of the same country. By some measures, the UK is in last place in Europe, as measured among the domestic population. Its not a new problem and the subject was being raised a lot back in the dawn of the Brexit referendum, in which many voters relied on lies. The problem is so severe that I refuse to access any mainstream news site in the UK. Many others who live here feel the same way. Thats a lot worse/lower than in east European countries and this new survey says, as per the Press Gazette [1]: Trust in news in the UK was at 33%, joint 12th lowest among 46 markets.

The problem is so severe that I refuse to access any mainstream news site in the UK.The Press Gazette also says [2] UK science publisher Texere acquired by Broadcast Med (everything is up for sale; the biggest papers in the UK are also being sold and our former Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, will write for a notorious tabloid which spreads lie).

The United States has a similar problem, but the media culture there is different from Europes and some clueless politicians try to pass new laws that would further kill the press, not just the Net. Public Knowledge wrote about this twice a few days ago [3-4].

This past weekend I spent endless time working on tools to better curate the news, seeing that about 90% of the news in my RSS feeds are worthless junk and perhaps 5% are actually important.Social control media wont replace the media. We wrote about Reddit, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook in recent days and they all struggle. See the new article [5] entitled Website Owners Say Traffic Is Plummeting After a Facebook Algorithm Change (Facebook sees decline in active users and will thus try to retain whats left of them inside the walled garden).

This past weekend I spent endless time working on tools to better curate the news, seeing that about 90% of the news items in my RSS feeds are worthless junk and perhaps 5% are actually i...

hubie writes:

A study suggests sunny weather can influence how investors perform and affect stock market prices:

Sunshine levels have a significant impact on the bidding behaviour of stock market investors, according to new research.

The study examined the relationship between sunny weather and how market participants perform, as well as the subsequent seasoned equity offerings (SEOs). These discounts for shares act as an effective tool for companies to raise finance and are essential for a functioning modern economy.

[...] The data revealed investors made higher bids in sunny periods, which led to lower discounts for shares in the primary market. In fact, just a one standard deviation increase in sunshine intensity caused bid discounts to decline by 2.4 percent, while a one standard deviation increase in sunshine duration caused bid discounts to drop by 3.33 percent.

Professor Jia Liu, CISF Centre Director and Professor of Accounting and Finance at the University of Portsmouth, said: "With sunny weather, often come good spirits which in many circumstances is a positive, but that's not the case with financial decision-making. When the sunshine intensifies, bidders become overly optimistic and less risk-averse, which can lead to higher bid prices for seasoned equities."

Existing research has shown meteorological conditions, especially exposure to sunshine, affects a person's emotional state and sentiment. These weather-driven moods have been proved to influence a buyer's car choice, art prices at auction, and the tendency to take risks in a lottery.

[...] Professor Liu added: "We want to make investors aware that during periods of sunny weather, they become more optimistic about their investments. This will make them more inclined to take risks that aren't justified by asset values. Therefore, they should factor this consideration in when bidding for shares or they might suffer losses.

"Maintaining the stability of markets could depend upon our understanding of this phenomenon, since the onset of climate change might have an increasingly destabilizing impact on the judgment of investors and market-makers, with unpredictable consequences for global trading."

Journal Reference:
Qian Sun, Xiaoke Cheng, Shenghao Gao, Tao Chen, Jia Liu, Sunshine-induced mood and SEO pricing: Evidence from detailed investor bids in SEO auctions, Journal of Corporate Finance, 80, 2023, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcorpfin.2023.102411

Original...

Via: Daily Mail: A woke teacher has come under fire after telling a pupil she should go to a different school for rejecting a classmates claim that she identified as a cat. The pupil said she was made to stay after class by the teacher, who can be heard in a secret recording calling her []

Also available via the Gemini protocol at:

• gemini://gemini.techrights.org/irc-gmi/irc-log-techrights-180623.gmi
• gemini://gemini.techrights.org/irc-gmi/irc-log-180623.gmi
• gemini://gemini.techrights.org/irc-gmi/irc-log-social-180623.gmi
• gemini://gemini.techrights.org/irc-gmi/irc-log-techbytes-180623.gmi

Over HTTP:

IBM announced plans to expand its longstanding partnership with Adobe to help brands successfully accelerate their content supply chains through the implementation of next-generation AI including Adobe Sensei GenAI services and Adobe Firefly (currently in beta), Adobes family of creative generative AI models. Drawing on decades of AI experience, IBM Consulting is launching a new portfolio of Adobe consulting services to help clients navigate the complex generative AI landscape, bringing together innovation, technology and design More

The post IBM expands collaboration with Adobe to help users navigate the complex generative AI landscape appeared first on Help Net Security.

Promoted by Red Hats official site this past Friday: (every day prior to this the Red Hat official Web site promoted Azure, as we noted in Daily Links)

Address change at Red Hat:

Summary: Looking closely at what Red Hat promotes under the guise of diversity, it turns out IBM lacks the office space to host a meeting; IBM has 288,300 employees worldwide compared to 221,000 at Microsoft (probably a lot less after this years mass layoffs), but together with Microsoft, the foremost opponent of GNU/Linux, Red Hat under IBM actively undermines the community and criticising this event would seem racist and sexist (IBM is against racists, even if its founder admired and saluted Hitler himself)

...

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a set of malicious artifacts that they say is part of a sophisticated toolkit targeting Apple macOS systems. "As of now, these samples are still largely undetected and very little information is available about any of them," Bitdefender researchers Andrei Lapusneanu and Bogdan Botezatu said in a preliminary report published on Friday. The Romanian firm's

There were at least eight other human species, some of whom existed for far longer than we have. Who were they?

A new high-performance metal alloy, called a superalloy, could help boost the efficiency of the turbines used in power plants and the aerospace and automotive industries.

Created using a 3D printer, the superalloy is composed of a blend of six elements that altogether form a material thats both lighter and stronger than the standard materials used in conventional turbine machinery. The strong superalloy could help industries cut both costs and carbon emissions if the approach can be successfully scaled up.

The challenge: In the world of materials science, the search for new metal alloys has been heating up in recent years. For over a century, weve depended on relatively simple alloys like steel, composed of 98% iron, to form the backbone of our manufacturing and construction industries. But todays challenges demand more: alloys that can withstand higher temperatures and remain strong under stress, yet still be lightweight.

An international research group has engineered a new energy-generating device by combining piezoelectric composites with carbon fiber-reinforced polymer (CFRP), a commonly used material that is both light and strong. The new device transforms vibrations from the surrounding environment into electricity, providing an efficient and reliable means for self-powered sensors.

Details of the groups research were published in the journal Nano Energy on June 13, 2023.

Energy harvesting involves converting energy from the environment into usable electrical energy and is something crucial for ensuring a sustainable future.

The World Cup only takes place every four years so when the opportunity to see the worlds best players arrived again last year, an estimated 1.5 billion eventually tuned in to see the elite square off in the final.

Millions cheered on the French national team as the defending champions pursued glory against Argentina. After the French lost in a dramatic penalty shoot-out, for some it became a tournament to forget. For French telecoms regulator Arcom, the end of the competition signaled the start of research to determine how citizens consumed World Cup 2022 and how France benefited from it financially.

World Cup 2022 Audiovisual Broadcasting Review

Published this week, Arcoms study reveals that more than six out of 10 French people watched or listened to at least one live match during the World Cup, a figure that rose to 73% in respect of all content, including replays, match analysis, and behind-the-scenes reporting.

Of those who watched live matches, 90% did so from home, with television the medium of choice for 96% of respondents. Around one in five football fans watched at least one match on a smartphone, with 14% and 7% viewing on computers and tablets, respectively.

Most Fans Watched Matches for Free

Football is traditionally seen as a sport of the people, with national teams serving their countries and citizens rather than their usual corporate paymasters. For these and similar reasons, some countries have laws or regulations in place that prevent the whole of the World Cup from being locked away behind TV subscription packages.

In France, all matches played by the national team must be broadcast on a widely accessible system, at no charge to the public. The same applies to the opening match, semi-finals, and the final, regardless of which teams are playing.

Free TV broadcaster TF1 won the rights to air these games in 2022 and, as a result, 87% of those who watched live World Cup matches did so on TF1, legally and for free.

Paywalls Guarantee Piracy

Of the 64 matches played in the tournament, 36 matches were broadcast exclusively by beIN Sports. Since users of beIN must have a subscription, piracy of World Cup matches was effectively gu...

Progress Software has asked customers to update their MOVEit Transfer installations again, to fix a third SQL injection vulnerability (CVE-2023-35708) discovered in the web application in less that a month. Previously, the Cl0p cyber extortion gang exploited CVE-2023-34362 to grab enterprise data, and Huntress researchers discovered CVE-2023-35036 after partnering with Progress to perform a code review of the web app. About CVE-2023-35708 CVE-2023-35708 is a vulnerability that could lead to escalated privileges and unauthorized access. More

The post A third MOVEit vulnerability fixed, Cl0p lists victim organizations (CVE-2023-35708) appeared first on Help Net Security.

Intel engineers had sent in Shadow Stack support for Linux 6.4 as this feature part of Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET) but it hit a last-minute snag during the merge window with issues raised by Linus Torvalds. Now it looks like the cleaned-up Shadow Stack code will be re-submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.5 cycle...

While the use of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) has gained significant popularity as organizations embrace cloud computing and DevOps practices, the speed and flexibility that IaC provides can also introduce the potential for misconfigurations and security vulnerabilities.  IaC allows organizations to define and manage their infrastructure using machine-readable configuration files, which are

By Waqas

Microsoft has acknowledged that the crippling service outages in early June 2023 were caused by a DDoS attack apparently carried out by "Anonymous Sudan."

This is a post from HackRead.com Read the original post: Microsoft Discloses DDoS Attack Impact with Limited Details

The Microsoft 365 and Azure Portal outages users expirienced this month were caused by Layer 7 DDoS attacks, Microsoft has confirmed on Friday. The DDoS attacks against Microsoft 365 and Azure Portal Throughout the first half June 2023 Microsoft confirmed, at various times, ongoing issues with its cloud-based services Microsoft 365 (including Outlook on the web and OneDrive) and Azure Portal but did not say at the time that they were caused by More

The post Microsoft confirms DDoS attacks against M365, Azure Portal appeared first on Help Net Security.

One of the most common ways of measuring the speed of a vehicle is by using radar, which typically involves generating radio waves, directing them at a moving vehicle, and measuring the various ways that they return to the device. This is a tried-and-true method, but can be expensive and technically complex. [GeeDub] wanted an easier way of measuring vehicles passing by his home, so he switched to using sonar instead to measure speeds based on the sounds the cars generate themselves.

The method he is using is similar to passive sonar in submarines, which can locate objects underwater based on the sounds they produce. After a false start attempting to measure Doppler shift, he switched to time correlation using two microphones, essentially using stereo audio input to detect subtle differences in arrival times of various sounds to detect the positions of passing vehicles. Doing this fast enough and extrapolating the data gathered, speed information can be calculated. For the data gathering and calculation, [GeeDub] is using a Raspberry Pi to help keep costs down, and some further configuration of the microphones and their power supplies were also needed to ensure quality audio was gathered.

With the system in place in a window, it detected around 9,000 vehicles over a three-day period. The software generates a n...

Stemming from looking at the generated x264 video encode binary and some performance inefficiencies, SUSE engineers have worked out AVX-512 fully masked vectorization support for the GCC 14 development code...

While the Linux 6.5 merge window isn't opening for another week, Rust for Linux lead developer Miguel Ojeda has already submitted the pull request of the new Rust kernel code destined for this next kernel cycle...

The "Terakan" Vulkan driver continues to be developed as an open-source Vulkan API implementation catering to the aging Radeon HD 6000 series graphics processors...

Governmental entities in the Middle East and Africa have been at the receiving end of sustained cyber-espionage attacks that leverage never-before-seen and rare credential theft and Exchange email exfiltration techniques. "The main goal of the attacks was to obtain highly confidential and sensitive information, specifically related to politicians, military activities, and ministries of foreign

upstart writes:

iPhone maker Foxconn to switch to cars as US-China ties sour:

iPhone maker Foxconn is betting big on electric cars and redrawing some of its supply chains as it navigates a new era of icy Washington-Beijing relations.

In an exclusive interview, chairman and boss Young Liu told the BBC what the future may hold for the Taiwanese firm.

[...] "Look at this - this is a big iPhone, so we're very familiar with this," he said, pointing to a panel that controlled the car he had taken us for a drive in. Built for families and priced for an aspiring global middle class, the shiny white SUV is one of several models manufactured by Foxconn.

"The reason why we think this is a great opportunity for us is that with the traditional gas engine, you have engines which are mostly mechanical. But with EVs, it's batteries and motors," he explains. That is a familiar language for a technology company like Foxconn, he added.

Original Submission

Read more of this story at SoylentNews.

Microsoft on Friday attributed a string of service outages aimed at Azure, Outlook, and OneDrive earlier this month to an uncategorized cluster it tracks under the name Storm-1359. "These attacks likely rely on access to multiple virtual private servers (VPS) in conjunction with rented cloud infrastructure, open proxies, and DDoS tools," the tech giant said in a post on Friday. Storm-#### (

[Adrian Smith] recently scored an avionics module taken from a British Aerospace 146 airliner and ripped it open for our viewing pleasure. This particular aircraft was designed in the early 1980s when the electronics used to feed the various displays in the cockpit were very different from modern designs. This particular box is called a symbol generator and is used to generate the various real-time video feeds that are sent to the cockpit display units. Various instruments, for example, the weather radar, feed into it, and it then reformats the video if needed, mixing in any required additional display.

Researchers found evidence that Diicot threat actors are expanding their capabilities with new payloads and the Cayosin Botnet.

Cado researchers recently detected an interesting attack pattern linked to an emerging cybercrime group tracked as Diicot (formerly, Mexals) and described in analyses published by Akamai and Bitdefender.

The experts discovered several payloads, some of which were not publicly known, that are being used as part of a new ongoing campaign. 

Evidence collected by Cado suggests the deployment of a botnet having DDoS capabilities.

The use of the name Diicot, which is also the name of a Romanian organized crime and anti-terrorism policing unit, and the presence of Romanian-language strings and log statements in the payloads suggests that the group could be based in Romania. 

The Diicot cybercrime group has traditionally been associated with cryptojacking campaigns, but Cado Labs observed the group deploying the off-the-shelf Mirai-based bot known as Cayosin. The Cayosin bot employed in the attacks observed by Cado targeted routers running the Linux-based embedded devices operating system OpenWrt. 

The group has distinctive TTPs such as the heavy use of the (using a header modified with the bytes 0x59545399) to prevent unpacking via the standard command (upx -d c).

Diicot heavily used Discord for C2, the platform supports HTTP POST requests to a webhook URL, allowing exfiltrated data and campaign statistics to be viewed within a given channel. Cado identified four distinct channels used in this campaign.

Diicot campaigns generally involve a long execution chain, with individual payloads and their outputs forming interdependent relationships. shc executables are typically used as loaders and prepare the system for mining via Diicots custom fork of XMRig, along with registering persistence. reads the report published by Cado. Executables written in Golang tend to be dedicated to scanning, brute-forcing and propagation, and a fork of the zmap i...

Recently I was contacted by a Falklands veteran who was a victim of what appears to have been a classic pre-play attack; his story is told here.

Almost ten years ago, after we wrote a paper on the pre-play attack, we were contacted by a Scottish sailor whod bought a drink in a bar in Las Ramblas in Barcelona for 33, and found the following morning that hed been charged 33,000 instead. The bar had submitted ten transactions an hour apart for 3,300 each, and when we got the transaction logs it turned out that these transactions had been submitted through three different banks. Whats more, although the transactions came from the same terminal ID, they had different terminal characteristics. When the sailors lawyer pointed this out to Lloyds Bank, they grudgingly accepted that it had been technical fraud and refunded the money.

In the years since then, Ive used this as a teaching example both in tutorial talks and in university lectures. A payment card user has no trustworthy user interface, so the PIN entry device can present any transaction, or series of transactions, for authentication, and the customer is none the wiser. The mere fact that a customers card authenticated a transaction does not imply that the customer mandated that payment.

Payment by phone should eventually fix this, but meantime the frauds continue. Theyre particularly common in nightlife establishments, both here and overseas. In the first big British case, the Spearmint Rhino in Bournemouth had special conditions attached to its license for some time after a series of frauds; a second case affected a similar establishment in Soho; there have be...