Lifeboat Foundation

When the botnet floods the target with excessive requests, service failures occur which jeopardize the availability of the targeted system and even put the integrity of the whole infrastructure at risk. When aimed against essential infrastructures such as healthcare or transportation, the hazards go beyond financial and reputational harm to endangering people’s lives.

Incorporating IoT Devices into Botnets

IoT devices that are unpatched, unattended, or misconfigured, or are already under botnet DDoS attack, are at risk of being incorporated into a botnet. To expand the botnet, an attacker hacks new IoT devices. This process involves two entities: the botnet itself and the loader server, a special server that infects other devices.

Researchers at Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics (MPQ) and Technical University of Munich (TUM) demonstrated a potential platform for large-scale quantum computing and communication networks. Secure quantum networks are of interest to financial institutions, medical facilities, government agencies, and other organizations that handle personal data and classified information due to their much higher level of security.

To create an environment that supported quantum computing, the researchers excited individual atoms of the rare-earth metal erbium. The excitation process caused the erbium atoms to emit single photons with properties suitable for the construction of quantum networks.

Morgan Stanley released a report Monday, predicting a semiconductor-driven hopeful outlook for Musk’s company.

Tesla’s shares were up 9.5 percent yesterday. But what drove them up?

The investment banking firm issued a research note that upgraded the Elon Musk-owned automotive company’s rating from ‘equalweight’ to ‘overweight’ with a price target of $400 from a prior price target of $250. An ‘overweight’ rating means that the analysts, in this case Morgan Stanley (MS), expects Tesla’s stock to outperform its industry in the market.

Continue reading “Tesla’s Dojo supercomputer could fuel a $500 billion jump” »

The US firm best known for its gaming tech has long been ahead of the curve in supplying the tools needed by tech developers.

It’s not often that the jaws of Wall Street analysts drop to the floor but late last month it happened: Nvidia, a company that makes computer chips, issued sales figures that blew the street’s collective mind. It had pulled in $13.5bn in revenue in the last quarter, which was at least $2bn more than the aforementioned financial geniuses had predicted. Suddenly, the surge in the company’s share price in May that had turned it into a trillion-dollar company made sense.

Well, up to a point, anyway. But how had a company that since 1998 – when it released the revolutionary… More.

June 14 — Bill Maris, Google Ventures chief executive officer, comments on artificial intelligence’s impact on biotech, the prospects for Theranos and the venture capital environment. He speaks with Bloomberg’s Emily Chang from the Bloomberg Technology Conference in San Francisco on “Bloomberg West.”

Schmidt has become an indispensable adviser to government, even as some of his investments have won federal contracts.

Eric Schmidt isn’t shy about his wealth and power: The former Google CEO recently won an auction for a superyacht seized from a Russian oligarch, he owns a big stake in a secretive and successful hedge fund and he spent $15 million for the Manhattan penthouse featured in Oliver Stone’s sequel to Wall Street.

He has also leveraged his $27 billion fortune to build a powerful influence machine in Washington that’s allowed him to shape public policy to reflect his worldview and benefit the industries in which he’s deeply invested — most recently, artificial intelligence. When senators meet next week to hear from tech executives and experts about how AI should be regulated, Schmidt will be at the table.

Google Chrome browser extensions expose users to hackers who can easily tap into their private data, including social security numbers, passwords and banking information, according to researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-M).

The researchers further uncovered vulnerabilities involving passwords that are stored in plain text within HTML source code on web sites of some of the world’s largest corporate giants, including Google, Amazon, Citibank, Capital One and the Internal Revenue Service.

The problem stems from the manner in which extensions access internal web page code.

The United States government said today that a multinational law enforcement operation has destroyed Qakbot, also known as QBot, an infamous botnet and malware loader that was responsible for losses that amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars all over the globe, and that they have confiscated more than $8.6 million in illegal cryptocurrencies.

During a news conference held on Tuesday to announce the takedown of the botnet, United States Attorney Martin Estrada referred to the investigation as “the most significant technological and financial operation ever led by the Department of Justice against a botnet.” Duck Hunt was headed by the FBI. For one thing, the federal government developed some software that, when installed on computers that were infected with Qbot, would make the virus useless.

Continue reading “How FBI remotely deleted QBot malware from 700K computers worldwide” »

Sending an email with a forged address is easier than previously thought, due to flaws in the process that allows email forwarding, according to a research team led by computer scientists at the University of California San Diego.

The issues researchers uncovered have a broad impact, affecting the integrity of email sent from tens of thousands of domains, including those representing organizations in the U.S. government—such as the majority of U.S. cabinet email domains, including state.gov, as well as security agencies. Key financial service companies, such as Mastercard, and major news organizations, such as The Washington Post and the Associated Press, are also vulnerable.

It’s called forwarding-based spoofing and researchers found that they can send email messages impersonating these organizations, bypassing the safeguards deployed by email providers such as Gmail and Outlook. Once recipients get the spoofed email, they are more likely to open attachments that deploy malware, or to click on links that install spyware on their machine.