Category: Artemus Spotlights

FBI Opens a Case on Chinese Activity…

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FBI Opens a Case on Chinese Activity ‘Every 10 Hours,’ Intel Chiefs Say

The threat from China, multi-faceted and severe, is foremost in a pack that includes Russian actions in Ukraine, Iranian nuclear efforts, and North Korea’s existing nukes, U.S. intelligence leaders told the Senate Intelligence Committee on Wednesday.

“We have now over 2,000 investigations that tie back to the Chinese government,” FBI Director Chris Wray said at the hearing. “On the economic espionage side alone, it’s a 1,300 percent increase over the last several years. We’re opening a new investigation on China every ten hours and I assure the committee it’s not because our folks don’t have anything to do with their time.”

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Advanced Computer Model Enables…

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Advanced Computer Model Enables Improvements to “Bionic Eye” Technology

Researchers at Keck School of Medicine of There are millions of people who face the loss of their eyesight from degenerative eye diseases. The genetic disorder retinitis pigmentosa alone affects 1 in 4,000 people worldwide.

Today, there is technology available to offer partial eyesight to people with that syndrome. The Argus II, the world’s first retinal prosthesis, reproduces some functions of a part of the eye essential to vision, to allow users to perceive movement and shapes.

While the field of retinal prostheses is still in its infancy, for hundreds of users around the globe, the “bionic eye” enriches the way they interact with the world on a daily basis. For instance, seeing outlines of objects enables them to move around unfamiliar environments with increased safety.

That is just the start. Researchers are seeking future improvements upon the technology, with an ambitious objective in mind.

 

 

 

 

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A Ransomware Gang is Now Shorting…

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A Ransomware Gang is Now Shorting Stock Price of its Victims

source: cyware.com

 

Darkside ransomware operators have changed their extortion tactics and are now targeting organizations listed on NASDAQ or other stock markets. They believe that the negative impact of having a traded organization’s name listed on their website would cause its stock price to fall, and the attackers are trying to make a profit out of this.

What is happening?

In a recent message on their dark web portal, the operators stated that they are willing to inform crooked stock traders in advance.

Supreme Court to Rule on Whether C.I.A…

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source:  nytimes.com

A Guantánamo detainee is seeking information from two former government contractors in connection with a Polish criminal inquiry into a facility there.

The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to decide whether the government can block a detainee at Guantánamo Bay from obtaining information from two former C.I.A. contractors involved in torturing him on the ground that it would expose state secrets.

The detainee, known as Abu Zubaydah, sought to subpoena the contractors, James E. Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, in connection with a Polish criminal investigation. The inquiry was prompted by a determination by the European Court of Human Rights that Mr. Zubaydah had been tortured in 2002 and 2003 at so-called black sites operated by the C.I.A., including one in Poland.

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Ready for Post-Vaccine Life? This Astronaut Explains…

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Ready for Post-Vaccine Life? This Astronaut Explains How to Reenter Society After a Long Time Away

source: fastcompany.com

Douglas Wheelock spent five months on the International Space Station before coming back to Earth. He says we’re all about to have a small version of the same experience, and it helps to be ready.

“The planet,” says decorated NASA astronaut Douglas Wheelock, “is this beautiful explosion of life and color during the day, and just raging with light and motion at night. It’s this oasis of life in this vast, empty, dark sea of just blackness.” Those were his impressions of the earth as viewed from the International Space Station, where he spent five months in 2010. “I’m kind of ashamed that I lived so many years without realizing how special our existence is in this universe.”

Russian Foreign Intelligence Service Exploiting U.S. Vulnerabilities

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Russian foreign intelligence service exploiting five publicly known vulnerabilities to compromise U.S. and allied networks

source: securitymagazine.com

The National Security Agency (NSA), the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) jointly released a Cybersecurity Advisory, “Russian SVR Targets U.S. and Allied Networks,” to expose ongoing Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) exploitation of five publicly known vulnerabilities. This advisory is being released alongside the U.S. government’s formal attribution of the SolarWinds supply chain compromise and related cyber espionage campaign. We are publishing this product to highlight additional tactics, techniques, and procedures being used by SVR so that network defenders can take action to mitigate against them.  

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This Site Published Every Face From Parler’s Capitol Riot Videos

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source: wired.com

Faces of the Riot used open source software to detect, extract, and deduplicate every face from the 827 videos taken from the insurrection on January 6.

WHEN HACKERS EXPLOITED a bug in Parler to download all of the right-wing social media platform’s contents last week, they were surprised to find that many of the pictures and videos contained geolocation metadata revealing exactly how many of the site’s users had taken part in the invasion of the US Capitol building just days before. But the videos uploaded to Parler also contain an equally sensitive bounty of data sitting in plain sight: thousands of images of unmasked faces, many of whom participated in the Capitol riot. Now one website has done the work of cataloging and publishing every one of those faces in a single, easy-to-browse lineup.

Late last week, a website called Faces of the Riot appeared online, showing nothing but a vast grid of more than 6,000 images of faces, each one tagged only with a string of characters associated with the Parler video in which it appeared. The site’s creator tells WIRED that he used simple open source machine learning and facial recognition software to detect, extract, and deduplicate every face from the 827 videos that were posted to Parler from inside and outside the Capitol building on January 6, the day when radicalized Trump supporters stormed the building in a riot that resulted in five people’s deaths. The creator of Faces of the Riot says his goal is to allow anyone to easily sort through the faces pulled from those videos to identify someone they may know or recognize who took part in the mob, or even to reference the collected faces against FBI wanted posters and send a tip to law enforcement if they spot someone. Continue reading “This Site Published Every Face From Parler’s Capitol Riot Videos” →

The Biggest Security Threats to the US Are the Hardest to Define

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The Biggest Security Threats to the US Are the Hardest to Define

source: wired.com

In a Senate briefing, the heads of the major intelligence agencies warned the public about dangers that offer no easy solutions.

 

IT’S BEEN TWO years since the heads of the top US intelligence agencies last came to Congress for an update on global threats; they skipped 2020 amid tensions with former president Donald Trump. In the Biden administration, though, the public hearing was back on Wednesday. Their message: With sprawling crises like the Covid-19 pandemic and climate change, the gravest threats to US national security have ballooned into complicated and interconnected specters that the intelligence community can only warn about.

In a public hearing before the Senate intelligence committee, and a corresponding report released on Tuesday, directors of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, National Security Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency, CIA, and FBI laid out their agencies’ assessments. They highlighted cybersecurity and offensive hacking as a major topic in light of the SolarWinds attacks, which they firmly attributed to Russia. They also pointed to technological innovation, particularly advances from China, that threaten to undermine the security of US infrastructure. 

 

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Child Tweets Gibberish from U.S. Nuke Account

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Child Tweets Gibberish from U.S. Nuke Account

source: threatpost.com

 

Telecommuting social-media manager for the U.S. Strategic Command left the laptop open and unsecured while stepping away.

A nonsense tweet sent out from the official account of U.S. Strategic Command is no reason for alarm, according to the department. The social media manager’s kid found an open laptop, pounded on a few random keys and sent the tweet, which read, “;l;;gmlxzssaw” last Sunday.

The tweets were met with alarm since @USSTRATCOM controls the launch codes for the country’s nuclear arsenal. Mikael Thalen, a reporter with the Daily Dot, decided to file a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to get answers.

“Filed a FOIA request with U.S. Strategic Command to see if I could learn anything about their gibberish tweet yesterday,” Thalen wrote. “Turns out their Twitter manager left his computer unattended, resulting in his ‘very young child’ commandeering the keyboard.”

USSTRATCOM stressed, according to Thalen, the post was not the result of a breach.

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What is an NFT? The Trendy Blockchain Technology Explained

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source: cbsnews.com

What is an NFT? The Trendy Blockchain Technology Explained

n early March, a tech company bought a piece of art worth $95,000. Then the executives lit it on fire. At the end of the spectacle, which was shared live on the internet, the group unveiled a copy of the art, this time in digital form. The creation, by elusive British artist Banksy, was called “Morons (White).”

As for the digital format, it’s getting more hype than the painting and the burning put together. It’s a rising type of technology called a non-fungible token, or NFT. Think of an NFT as a unique proof of ownership over something you can’t usually hold in your hand — a piece of digital art, a digital coupon, maybe a video clip. Like the digital art itself, you can’t really hold an NFT in your hand, either — it’s a one-of-a-kind piece of code, stored and protected on a shared public exchange. 

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