Tag: russian

New evidence suggests DNC hackers penetrated deeper than previously thought

The suspected hacking of a Democratic National Committee consultant’s personal Yahoo Mail account provides new evidence that state-sponsored attackers penetrated deeper than previously thought into the private communications of the political machine attempting to defeat Republican nominee Donald Trump. According to an article published Monday by Yahoo News, the suspicion was raised shortly after DNC consultant Alexandra Chalupa started preparing opposition research on Trump Campaign Chairman Paul Manafort. Upon logging in to her Yahoo Mail account, she received a pop-up notification warning that members of Yahoo’s security team “strongly suspect that your account has been the target of state-sponsored actors.” After Chalupa started digging into Manafort’s political and business dealings in Ukraine and Russia, the warnings had become a “daily occurrence,” Yahoo News reported, citing a May 3 e-mail sent to a DNC communications director. (credit: Yahoo News) It was one of more than 19,000 private DNC messages posted to WikiLeaks on Friday. The massive e-mail dump came five weeks after DNC officials said hackers with backing from the Russian government had breached its network and made off with opposition research into Trump and almost a year’s worth of private e-mail. The airing on WikiLeaks, which included messages in which DNC officials derided Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders, has already led to the resignation of Chair Debra Wasserman Schultz. Now, the revelations about Chalupa’s Yahoo account suggest the hack may have gone deeper than previously reported. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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New evidence suggests DNC hackers penetrated deeper than previously thought

Artificially Intelligent Russian Robot Escapes…Again

Slashdot reader Taco Cowboy brings a new report about Russian robot IR77, which has escaped from its research lab again… The story goes that an engineer working at Promobot Laboratories, in the Russian city of Perm, had left a gate open. Out trundled Promobot, traveling some 150 feet into the city before running out of juice. There it sat, batteries mostly dead, in the middle of a Perm street for 40 minutes, slowing cars to a halt and puzzling traffic cops A researcher at Promobot’s facility in Russia said that the runaway robot was designed to interact with human beings, learn from experiences, and remember places and the faces of everyone it meets. Other versions of the Promobot have been docile, but this one just can’t seem to fall in line, even after the researchers reprogrammed it twice. Despite several rewrites of Promobot’s artificial intelligence, the robot continued to move toward exits. “We have changed the AI system twice, ” Kivokurtsev said. “So now I think we might have to dismantle it”. Fans of the robot are pushing for a reprieve, according to an article titled ‘Don’t kill it!’: Runaway robot IR77 could be de-activated because of ‘love for freedom’ Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Artificially Intelligent Russian Robot Escapes…Again

ISIS Damage to Ancient City of Palmyra Is ‘Enormous’

Late last week, Islamic State militants were routed from the historic city of Palmyra, a UN World Heritage site. A preliminary investigation of the ancient ruins suggests that the damage is not as bad as feared, and that a significant portion of the relics could be restored quickly. Read more…

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ISIS Damage to Ancient City of Palmyra Is ‘Enormous’

Hackers tried and failed to steal a billion dollars from bank

Hackers stole $80 million from a bank, but it could have been a lot worse if they had just Googled the name of a company, according to Reuters . Thieves got inside servers of the Bangladesh Bank, stealing the credentials used to make online transfers. They then bombarded the Federal Reserve Bank in New York with up to 13 money transfer requests to organizations in the Philippines and Sri Lanka. The Fed allowed four to go through totaling $81 million, but the next one was flagged by a routing bank in Germany because the hackers misspelled “foundation” as “fandation.” Once alerted, officials put a stop to the the remaining transfers, which amounted to nearly $850 million. The $81 million theft is still one of the largest ever, but if all the transfers had gone through, it would have been one of the biggest heists on record. Last year, Russian hackers reportedly got away with up to $1 billion from 100 banks using malware. Meanwhile, Bangladeshi officials are trying to lock down their systems and figure out how the attack happened, but say there’s little hope the hackers and money will be recovered. As with many large-scale attacks , experts told Reuters that the thieves likely targeted and spied on employees to gain access to servers. While the bank blames the US Federal Reserve Bank for not stopping the transfers, Fed officials say that it’s systems were not breached and that it has been cooperating in the investigation. Luckily, hackers are just as bad at spelling in large fraud attempts as they are in basic spear-phishing attacks. Source: Reuters

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Hackers tried and failed to steal a billion dollars from bank

Released: First PC Based On Russia’s Homegrown "Baikal" Processor

WheatGrass writes to note that the company T-Platforms has introduced the first mass production unit based upon the Russian Baikal-T1 processor, mentioned here last in 2014. The new Baikal-based workstation is called the “Meadowsweet terminal, ” according to T-Platform’s official website; the feature list says it’s running a Debian-based Linux distro. “Congratulations, Russia, ” Says WheatGrass. (According to Google’s translation of this Russian-language story at RG.RU Digital, “[Y]ou can install many conventional applications, such as the LibreOffice office suite, Firefox web browser, and so on, the developers say, ” but the main use seems to be as a thin client.) Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Released: First PC Based On Russia’s Homegrown "Baikal" Processor

Magic cards generated by neural networks

@RoboRosewater is a twitter account that posts, once a day, a Magic: The Gathering card generated by a recurrent neural network. [via Ditto ] This is an implementation of the science described by Vice’s Brian Merchant in this article . Reed Morgan Milewicz, a programmer and computer science researcher, may be the first person to teach an AI to do Magic, literally. Milewicz wowed a popular online MTG forum—as well as hacker forums like Y Combinator’s Hacker News and Reddit—when he posted the results of an experiment to “teach” a weak AI to auto-generate Magic cards. He shared a number of the bizarre “cards” his program had come up with, replete with their properly fantastical names (“Shring the Artist,” “Mided Hied Parira’s Scepter”) and freshly invented abilities (“fuseback”). Players devoured the results. Here’s the code , and here’s a simple text-only generator . Magic: The Gathering is Turing-complete .

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Magic cards generated by neural networks

Russian hackers reportedly stole stock trading info from Dow Jones

Last week, Dow Jones (owner of The Wall Street Journal among other things) said that its customer database was hacked — but it’s possible the company has been contending with a much bigger data breach for a long time now. According to Bloomberg , the FBI, Secret Service, and SEC have all been investigating a theft of data from Dow Jones by Russian hackers who wanted to access insider trading information. There’s a bit of a twist to the story, however: Dow Jones is strongly denying the Bloomberg report. In a statement, Dow Jones says: “to the best of our knowledge, we have received no information from the authorities about any such alleged matter, and we are looking into whether there is any truth whatsoever to this report by a competitor news organization.” Despite that strong denial (and shade thrown at Bloomberg’s reporting), CNBC received confirmation from the FBI’s New York office that it was indeed aware of the hack and investigating it. For months, the FBI and SEC have been trying to determine exactly what sort of data was accessed and how the hackers could have profited from the breach. Some of Bloomberg’s sources claimed that the hackers were able to view news stories not yet released for publication, some of which could have provided information and news about companies that hadn’t been released to the public. And this isn’t the first hack centered around finding insider info: earlier this year, Ukrainian hackers infiltrated servers from PR companies like PR Newswire and Businesswire for five years to access unreleased press releases from major corporations. [Image credit: AP/Mary Altaffer] Source: Bloomberg , CNBC

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Russian hackers reportedly stole stock trading info from Dow Jones

Vostochny Launch Building Built To the Wrong Size

schwit1 writes: The Russians have just discovered that their Soyuz 2 rocket does not fit in the building just finished at their new spaceport at Vostochny: “The cutting-edge facility was meant be ready for launches of Soyuz-2 rockets in December, but an unidentified space agency told the TASS news agency late Thursday that the rocket would not fit inside the assembly building where its parts are stacked and tested before launch. The building ‘has been designed for a different modification of the Soyuz rocket, ‘ the source said, according to news website Medusa, which picked up the story from TASS.” The rocket had just been delivered to Vostochny for assembly, so this report, though unconfirmed at this time, fits well with current events. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Vostochny Launch Building Built To the Wrong Size

All gas stations in Russia will have to install EV charging stations

The Russian auto market is struggling recently , and falling energy prices aren’t helping the country’s oil industry, either. With the economy looking somewhat uncertain, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev is taking a baby step toward a greener future by mandating every gas station in the country have an electric vehicle charger by November 1, 2016. The rule is meant to boost Russia’s dismal EV segment that currently numbers a grand total of about 500 vehicles across the vast territory, according to Autostat data cited by The Moscow Times . Unfortunately, while this mandate is trying to overturn the status quo, it already looks easy to circumvent. A major problem is that the new rules don’t specify the type of charger to install, and the government isn’t offering any financial assistance to gas station owners. Therefore, they’re expected to take the cheapest option to satisfy the law. According to The Moscow Times , the least expensive charging equipment costs the equivalent of $1, 480 to import before installation expenses. However, a site like this would take nine hours to fully power-up an EV. “We believe that the new decree could stimulate business, ” Yelena Burenina, a spokesperson for the Moscow United Electric Grid Company, said to The Moscow Times . Although, at this point practically anything would be an advancement. Just 140 EVs were sold in Russia last year and fewer than 50 in the first half of 2015. Russia’s frigid winters are considered a major hurdle for EV adoption because the low temperatures cut back their total range. Somehow, though, chilly Norway is figuring out how to make green cars sell. [Image credit: Bloomberg via Getty Images] Filed under: Transportation Comments Via: Gas2 Source: The Moscow Times Tags: autoblog, charger, DmitryMedvedev, ElectricVehicle, EV, GasStation, partner, russia, syndicated

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All gas stations in Russia will have to install EV charging stations