0-days sold by Austrian firm used to hack Windows users, Microsoft says

reader comments 9 with 8 posters participating Share this story Microsoft said on Wednesday that an Austria-based company named DSIRF used multiple Windows and Adobe Reader zero-days to hack organizations located in Europe and Central America. Multiple news outlets have published articles like this one, which cited marketing materials and other evidence linking DSIRF to […]

The Download: Chinese robotaxi drivers, and AI gun detection

When Liu Yang started his current job, he found it hard to go back to driving his own car: “I instinctively went for the passenger seat. Or when I was driving, I would expect the car to brake by itself,” says the 33-year-old Beijing native, who joined the Chinese tech giant Baidu in January 2021 […]

A day in the life of a Chinese robotaxi driver

Robotaxi safety operator is an occupation that only exists in our time, the result of an evolving technology that’s advanced enough to get rid of a driver—most of the time, and in controlled environments— but not good enough to convince authorities that they can do away with human intervention altogether. Today, self-driving companies from the […]

Newly found Lightning Framework offers a plethora of Linux hacking capabilities

reader comments 2 with 2 posters participating Share this story The software framework has become essential to developing almost all complex software these days. The Django Web framework, for instance, bundles all the libraries, image files, and other components needed to quickly build and deploy web apps, making it a mainstay at companies like Google, […]

How big is the risk that someone will hack an EV charging network?

Enlarge / There are many good reasons why an EV charger should be networked, but it does come with vulnerabilities. Aurich Lawson | Getty Images reader comments 34 with 28 posters participating Share this story The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, as passed by Congress last November, authorizes $7.5 billion to help meet US President […]

Discovery of new UEFI rootkit exposes an ugly truth: The attacks are invisible to us

Getty Images reader comments 86 with 63 posters participating Share this story Researchers have unpacked a major cybersecurity find—a malicious UEFI-based rootkit used in the wild since 2016 to ensure computers remained infected even if an operating system is reinstalled or a hard drive is completely replaced. The firmware compromises the UEFI, the low-level and highly […]

The Download: a hepatitis mystery, and chasing crypto

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 Big Tech wants to kill the leap second The extra time has triggered internet outages and disturbances, they claim. (CNET) 2 QAnon ideology is thriving in the primariesBut savvy Republicans are avoiding explicitly outing themselves as believers. (NYT $)+ Donald Trump refused […]

Russia is quietly ramping up its Internet censorship machine

reader comments 34 with 24 posters participating Share this story Since 2019, Vladimir Putin has supercharged his plan to separate Russia from the global Internet. The country’s sovereign Internet law, which came into force that November, gives officials the power to block access to websites for millions of Russians. The law was used to hit […]

How governments seize millions in stolen cryptocurrency

After meeting probable-cause and burden-of-proof requirements, law enforcement can get seizure warrants for any illicit funds that eventually land on compliant exchanges—and many funds eventually do. Law enforcement will then work with the crypto business to move the funds to a government-controlled wallet or freeze them. “Another method is that the adversary or a member […]

Tech industry lobbies to dump the leap second

Peter Griffin, Editor. 26 July 2022, 12:06 pm In one of the more obscure lobbying efforts to be taken up by Big Tech, a movement is underway to have time-keeping authorities do away with the practice of occasionally adding a ‘leap second’ to sync clocks with the Earth’s rotation. Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Google this […]