MacRumors MacRumors user forums have been breached by hackers who may have acquired cryptographically protected passwords belonging to all 860,000 users, one of the top editors of the news website said Tuesday evening. “In situations like this, it’s best to assume that your MacRumors Forum username, e-mail address and (hashed) password is now known,” Editorial Director Arnold Kim wrote in a short advisory . He went on to advise users to change their passwords for their MacRumors accounts and any other website accounts that were protected by the same passcode. The MacRumors intrusion involved “a moderator account being logged into by the hacker who then was able to escalate their privileges with the goals of stealing user login credentials,” Kim said. The company is still investigating how the attacker managed to compromise the privileged account. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Hack of MacRumors forums exposes password data for 860,000 users
Trailrunner7 writes “The RC4 and SHA-1 algorithms have taken a lot of hits in recent years, with new attacks popping up on a regular basis. Many security experts and cryptographers have been recommending that vendors begin phasing the two out, and Microsoft on Tuesday said it is now recommending to developers that they deprecate RC4 and stop using the SHA-1 hash algorithm. RC4 is among the older stream cipher suites in use today, and there have been a number of practical attacks against it, including plaintext-recovery attacks. The improvements in computing power have made many of these attacks more feasible for attackers, and so Microsoft is telling developers to drop RC4 from their applications. The company also said that as of January 2016 it will no longer will validate any code signing or root certificate that uses SHA-1.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
In Japan, engineers are attempting to contain radioactive contamination from the Fukushima power plant by freezing the ground around it into “ice walls” that will remain frozen for years . At Nova, Jessica Morrison writes about this weird technique, which has been around for over half a century and is more commonly used as part of massive construction projects with large underground components, including Boston’s Big Dig.