Tag: score2

Dutch Police Seize Encrypted Communication Network With 19,000 Users

An anonymous reader writes: Dutch police have seized and shut down Ennetcom, an encrypted communications network with 19, 000 users, according to Reuters. The network’s 36-year-old owner, Danny Manupassa, has also been arrested, and faces charges of money laundering and illegal weapons possession, while the information obtained in the seizure may also be used for other criminal prosecutions. “Police and prosecutors believe that they have captured the largest encrypted network used by organized crime in the Netherlands, ” prosecutors said in a statement. “Although using encrypted communications is legal, ” Reuters reports, “many of the network’s users are believed to have been engaged in ‘serious criminal activity, ‘ said spokesman Wim de Bruin of the national prosecutor’s office, which noted that the company’s modified phones have repeatedly turned up in cases involving drugs, criminal motorcycle gangs, and gangland killings. A spokesman for the National Prosecutor’s office “declined to comment on whether and how police would be able to decrypt information kept on the servers.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Dutch Police Seize Encrypted Communication Network With 19,000 Users

MongoDB Config Error Exposed 93M Mexican Voter Records

An anonymous reader cites an article on CSOOnline: A 132 GB database, containing the personal information on 93.4 million Mexican voters has finally been taken offline. The database sat exposed to the public for at least eight days after its discovery by researcher Chris Vickery, but originally went public in September 2015. Vickery, who works as a security researcher at Kromtech, discovered the MongoDB instance on April 14, but had difficulty tracking down the person or company responsible for placing the voter data on Amazon’s AWS. He first reached out to the U.S. State Department, as well as the Mexican Embassy, but had little success. The database contains all of the information that Mexican citizens need for their government-issued photo IDs that enable them to vote. Along with their municipality, and district information, the database records include the voter’s name, address, voter ID number, date of birth, the names of their parents, occupation, and more. Given that the database has been online since September 2015, it isn’t clear how many people have accessed the records. Additionally, the actual owner of the account hosting the data remains unknown. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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MongoDB Config Error Exposed 93M Mexican Voter Records

Hacker’s Account of How He Took Down Hacking Team’s Servers

An anonymous reader writes: FinFisher, the hacker that broke into Italian firm Hacking Team, has published a step-by-step account of how he carried out the attacks, what tools he used, and what he learned from scouting HackingTeam’s network. Published on PasteBin, the attack’s timeline reveals he entered their network through a zero-day exploit in an (unnamed) embedded device, accessed a MongoDB database that had no password, discovered backups in the database, found a BES admin password in the backups, and eventually got admin access to the Windows Domain Server. From here, it was easy to reach into their email server and steal all the company’s emails, and later access Git repos and steal the source code of their surveillance software. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Hacker’s Account of How He Took Down Hacking Team’s Servers

New Full Duplex Radio Chip Transmits and Receives Wireless Signals At Once

Wave723 writes: A new chip by Columbia University researchers uses a circulator made of silicon transistors to reroute signals and avoid interference from a transmitter and receiver that share the same antenna. This technology instantly doubles data capacity and could eventually be built into smartphones and tablets. The chip enables them to work around the principle of Lorentz Reciprocity, in which electromagnetic waves are thought to always travel along the same path both forward and backward. Traditionally, electronic devices required two antennas — a transmitter and receiver — that took turns or operated on different frequencies in order to exchange signals. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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New Full Duplex Radio Chip Transmits and Receives Wireless Signals At Once

Scientists Build Smallest, Single Atom, Working Heat Engine

William Herkewitz, writing for Popular Mechanics: Physicists have just built the smallest working engine ever created. It’s a heat-powered motor barely larger than the single atom it runs on. Designed and build by a team of experimental physicists led by Johannes at the University of Mainz in Germany, the single atom engine is about as efficient as your car at transforming the changing temperature into mechanical energy. While scientists have previously created several micro-engines consisting of a mere 10, 000 particles, Johannes’s new engine blows these out of the water by paring down the machine to a singular atom housed in a nano-sized cone of electromagnetic radiation. The project is outlined today in the journal Science. “The engine has the same working principles as the well-known [combustion] car engine, ” Johannes says. It follows the same four strokes; expanding then cooling, contracting then heating.There’s some confusion here. The article says it’s a “four-stroke” engine. But as we know, a four-stroke engine consists of an intake stroke, a compression stroke, a power stroke, and an exhaust stroke — things that the engine in the article doesn’t seem to have. The article doesn’t mention how a single atom is able to mimic all the effects of a combustion engine. Update: 04/15 18:24 GMT by M :The article appears to have been updated for clarification. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Scientists Build Smallest, Single Atom, Working Heat Engine

Microsoft Sues US Justice Department, Asks Court To Declare Secrecy Orders Unconstitutional

Todd Bishop, reporting for GeekWire: Microsoft is suing the U.S. Justice Department, asking a federal judge to declare unconstitutional a provision of U.S. law that lets the government keep Microsoft and other tech companies from informing their customers when investigators seek access to emails and other cloud data. The suit, filed moments ago in U.S. District Court in Seattle, targets Section 2705(b) of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which allows the government to seek and obtain secrecy orders preventing companies from letting their customers know when their data is the target of a federal warrant, subpoena or court order. Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president and chief legal officer, recently criticized the 30-year-old Electronic Communications Privacy Act as outdated during his testimony in February before the U.S. House Judiciary Committee — bringing along IBM’s first laptop, released the same year, to help illustrate his point.Microsoft argues that these “indefinite gag orders” violate the First Amendment rights to inform customers. Furthermore, the company adds that the law also “flouts” the Fourth Amendment, which requires the government to give a notice to the concerned person when his or her property is being searched or seized. “This is a First Amendment fight that needed to get picked and I’m glad Microsoft picked it. Just as in the real world with physical seizures, secrecy in digital seizures should be the exception and not the rule. Yet as the Microsoft complaint shows, it’s receiving thousands of law enforcement gag orders every year and more than two-thirds of them are eternal gags with no end data, ” said Kevin Bankston, internet freedom advocate and digital rights lawyer. “This is clearly unconstitutional, yet with so many orders per year, it makes sense to strike at the root with a facial challenge to the law rather than try and challenge them all individually. And based on previous similar cases around gag orders in national security cases, I think they’ll succeed in striking this overbroad law down.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Microsoft Sues US Justice Department, Asks Court To Declare Secrecy Orders Unconstitutional

Jigsaw Ransomware Deletes Your Files If You Don’t Pay Or When You Reboot Your PC

An anonymous reader writes: Researchers found a new ransomware yesterday called Jigsaw which will first lock your files and ask for a 0.4 Bitcoin ($150 USD) payment. If users don’t pay, every hour the ransomware deletes your files. If the user restarts their PC, the ransomware also deletes 1, 000 more files. The good news is there’s a free Decrypter available to unlock the ransomware. The Decrypter was built by Michael Gillespie, who announced yesterday on Softpedia the ID Ransomware service, which tells infected victims what kind of ransomware infection they have by allowing them to upload an encrypted file and the ransom note. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Jigsaw Ransomware Deletes Your Files If You Don’t Pay Or When You Reboot Your PC

FBI Offers $25K Reward For Andy Warhol Campbell’s Soup Painting Heist

coondoggie quotes a report from Networkworld: The FBI today said it was offering a reward of up to $25, 000 for information leading to the recovery of seven Andy Warhol paintings stolen from the Springfield Art Museum in Springfield, Missouri. The collection, which has been owned by the Springfield Art Museum since 1985, is set number 31 of the Campbell’s Soup I collection and is valued at approximately $500, 000. Each painting in the screen print collection measures 37 inches high by 24.5 inches wide and framed in white frames, the FBI stated. The FBI says that seven of 10 Andy Warhol paintings Campbell’s Soup I collection, made in 1968, were taken. Since its inception, the FBI’s Art Crime Team has recovered more than 2, 650 items valued at over $150 million. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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FBI Offers $25K Reward For Andy Warhol Campbell’s Soup Painting Heist

Experts Crack Petya Ransomware, Enable Hard Drive Decryption For Free

Reader itwbennett writes: Petya appeared on researchers’ radar last month when criminals distributed it to companies through spam emails that masqueraded as job applications. It stood out from other file-encrypting ransomware programs because it overwrites a hard drive’s master boot record (MBR), leaving infected computers unable to boot into the operating system. Now, security experts have devised a method that, while not exactly straightforward, allows users to recover data from computers infected with the ransomware without paying money to cyber criminals. Folks over at BleepingComputer have confirmed that the aforementioned technique works. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Experts Crack Petya Ransomware, Enable Hard Drive Decryption For Free

New Metal Foam Armor Obliterates Bullets To Dust On Impact

HughPickens.com writes: Discovery Magazine reports that researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a super strong armor material that literally turns bullets to dust upon impact. The armor plating is made in part from composite metal foams, or CMFs, which are both lighter and stronger than traditional metal plating used in body and vehicle armor. The armor — only an inch thick — features a ceramic strike face, Kevlar backing, and CMFs in the energy-absorbing middle layer. “We could stop the bullet at a total thickness of less than an inch, while the indentation on the back was less than 8 millimeters, ” says Afsaneh Rabiei. “To put that in context, the NIJ standard allows up to 44 millimeters indentation in the back of an armor.” CMFs are very effective at shielding X-rays, gamma rays and neutron radiation. Other applications include space exploration and shipping nuclear waste which both require a material to be not only light and strong, but also capable of withstanding extremely high temperatures and blocking radiation. A video shows a 7.62 x 63 millimeter M2 armor-piercing projectile that was fired using standard testing procedures established by the Department of Justice for evaluating armor types. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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New Metal Foam Armor Obliterates Bullets To Dust On Impact