As Cassini winds down its 20-year mission to Saturn, the spacecraft will maneuver into a series of weeklong orbits, allowing it to get a closer look at the planet’s famous rings as it flies by. Although there are still a few days before Cassini grazes Saturn’s rings, its cameras have already sent back some initial shots of some interesting features near the planet’s northern hemisphere. The images below, for example, show the same view of a hexagonal-shaped jetstream over the planet’s north pole , as seen from about 400, 000 miles above the planet and through four different spectral filters sensitive to wavelengths of light ranging from violet to infrared. (The curved lines you see beyond the edge of the planet are the rings, of course.) Although the images Cassini sends back are relatively small — just 256 by 256 pixels square in their original format — NASA calculated that each pixel represents about 95 miles of space and each side of the jetstream is about as wide as Earth itself. Cassini will pass by the outer edges of the planet’s rings on December 11 and it should start sending back images of the rings themselves a few days later. After that, Cassini will continue circling Saturn until April 22, when it will get a closer look at the moon Titan and another orbital adjustment in the process. That final orbit will swing the spacecraft back between the planet and its rings 22 more times before it finally takes a dive into the atmosphere and loses signal around September 15, 2017.
Visit site:
NASA’s Cassini spacecraft sent photos of Saturn’s north pole
An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: For the past two months, a new exploit kit has been serving malicious code hidden in the pixels of banner ads via a malvertising campaign that has been active on several high profile websites. Discovered by security researchers from ESET, this new exploit kit is named Stegano, from the word steganography, which is a technique of hiding content inside other files. In this particular scenario, malvertising campaign operators hid malicious code inside PNG images used for banner ads. The crooks took a PNG image and altered the transparency value of several pixels. They then packed the modified image as an ad, for which they bought ad displays on several high-profile websites. Since a large number of advertising networks allow advertisers to deliver JavaScript code with their ads, the crooks also included JS code that would parse the image, extract the pixel transparency values, and using a mathematical formula, convert those values into a character. Since images have millions of pixels, crooks had all the space they needed to pack malicious code inside a PNG photo. When extracted, this malicious code would redirect the user to an intermediary ULR, called gate, where the host server would filter users. This server would only accept connections from Internet Explorer users. The reason is that the gate would exploit the CVE-2016-0162 vulnerability that allowed the crooks to determine if the connection came from a real user or a reverse analysis system employed by security researchers. Additionally, this IE exploit also allowed the gate server to detect the presence of antivirus software. In this case, the server would drop the connection just to avoid exposing its infrastructure and trigger a warning that would alert both the user and the security firm. If the gate server deemed the target valuable, then it would redirect the user to the final stage, which was the exploit kit itself, hosted on another URL. The Stegano exploit kit would use three Adobe Flash vulnerabilities (CVE-2015-8651, CVE-2016-1019 or CVE-2016-4117) to attack the user’s PC, and forcibly download and launch into execution various strains of malware. Read more of this story at Slashdot.