Category Archives: News

Source: The Verge - All Posts

Julian Assange’s legal team is preparing to testify that the WikiLeaks founder was offered a pardon by President Trump in exchange for covering up the source of the DNC leaks, as first reported by The Daily Beast.

According to Edward Fitzgerald, who is representing Assange in his ongoing extradition hearing in the UK, Assange’s representatives received messages from then-Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), effectively offering a pardon from Trump in exchange for false statements relating to the source of the DNC leaks.

Fitzgerald did not have first-hand knowledge of the exchange, but he said future testimony from another legal representative would show “Mr. Rohrabacher going to see Mr Assange and saying, on instructions from the president, he...

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Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education | News

For the sake of research, their careers, and their mental health, scientists should spend more time developing software.    

Source: Hacker News

Source: Engadget

Source: Ars Technica

Enlarge / Boris Hagelin's mechanical crypto gear, like the CX-52 first introduced in 1952, gave US intelligence fits. So they cut deals with Hagelin and eventually bought the company. (credit: Rama , Wikimedia Commons, Cc-by-sa-2.0-fr)

Crypto AG, a Swiss cryptographic communications gear company that got its big break building code-making gear for the US Army in World War II, has been a provider of encryption systems for more than 120 countries. And according to a report by The Washington Post and German broadcaster ZDF, the company was owned outright for decades by the Central Intelligence Agency and Germany's intelligence agency, the BND—allowing the CIA, the National Security Agency, and German intelligence to read the most sensitive communications of practically everyone but the Soviets and Chinese.

That unprecedented level of access allowed the US to monitor Iranian communications during the Iranian hostage crisis, Argentine communications during the Falklands War (shared with British intelligence), the communications of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat during negotiations of an Egypt-Israel peace deal at Camp David, and communications from Libya that confirmed the Qaddafi regime's involvement in a 1986 West Berlin disco bombing. During the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, Iranian communications were "80-90 percent readable," according to documents viewed by the Post and ZDF.

While German intelligence cashed out of the company in the 1990s, the CIA's ownership persisted until 2016, even though the intelligence value of the company diminished with the widespread availability of other digital cryptography tools—and a series of missteps, including what a CIA history described as a "storm of publicity" after the arrest of a Crypto AG salesman in Iran in 1992. But the history also informs the US government's concerns over the potential threat that comes from other countries' ownership of parts of communications infrastructure, including concerns over China's Huawei.

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Source: Schneier on Security

EKANS is a new ransomware that targets industrial control systems:

But EKANS also uses another trick to ratchet up the pain: It's designed to terminate 64 different software processes on victim computers, including many that are specific to industrial control systems. That allows it to then encrypt the data that those control system programs interact with. While crude compared to other malware purpose-built for industrial sabotage, that targeting can nonetheless break the software used to monitor infrastructure, like an oil firm's pipelines or a factory's robots. That could have potentially dangerous consequences, like preventing staff from remotely monitoring or controlling the equipment's operation.

EKANS is actually the second ransomware to hit industrial control systems. According to Dragos, another ransomware strain known as Megacortex that first appeared last spring included all of the same industrial control system process-killing features, and may in fact be a predecessor to EKANS developed by the same hackers. But because Megacortex also terminated hundreds of other processes, its industrial-control-system targeted features went largely overlooked.

Speculation is that this is criminal in origin, and not the work of a government.

It's also the first malware that is named after a Pokémon character.

Source: Sarah Vessels' Tumblr

“Future Relics is a column about the objects that our society is currently making, and how they may explain our lives to future generations.” via Pocket

Source: Hacker News

Source: OSNews

Just another heads up that kernel extensions on macOS will soon stop working. This has been known for a while, but you might not even know you’re using kernel extensions in the first place.

System extensions on macOS Catalina (10.15) allow software like network extensions and endpoint security solutions to extend the functionality of macOS without requiring kernel-level access. At WWDC19, we announced the deprecation of kernel extensions as part of our ongoing effort to modernize the platform, improve security and reliability, and enable more user-friendly distribution methods. Kernel programming interfaces (KPIs) will be deprecated as alternatives become available, and future OS releases will no longer load kernel extensions that use deprecated KPIs by default.

If you use macOS, run kextstat | grep -v com.apple to see how many third party kernel extensions you have running. Things like VirtualBox, controller support for Steam, DropBox, Little Snitch, and more all come with kernel extensions, so there’s definitely chances you might be running some without even realising it.

Source: NYT > Health

Writing in payment limits when signing hospital forms might provide some leverage over disputes that arise from surprise medical bills, some proponents suggest.