Collaborate Disseminate
As many of you may have just read, Boston Dynamics’ Spot quadruped robot is now commercially available – for a cool US$75,000. If that’s a little outside of your budget, then you might be more interested in the much cheaper open-source Solo 8.Continue … Continue reading Budget quadruped robot designed to boost robotics research
Sediment layers in rock or tree rings can hold clues to what the environment was like at different times in the past – and the same idea may even apply to your own teeth. Scientists at New York University have found that the material that makes up toot… Continue reading Your teeth may record your life’s most important biological events
For at least the past decade, a computer crook variously known as “Yalishanda,” “Downlow” and “Stas_vl” has run one of the most popular “bulletproof” Web hosting services catering to a vast array of phishing sites, cybercrime forums and malware download servers. What follows are a series of clues that point to the likely real-life identity of a Russian man who appears responsible for enabling a ridiculous amount of cybercriminal activity on the Internet today. Continue reading Meet the World’s Biggest ‘Bulletproof’ Hoster
Researchers say people over 65 are seven times more likely to share fake news than 18 to 29-year-olds. Continue reading Is fake-news sharing driven by age, not politics?
A new study found that age was the main factor that determined whether someone would spread misinformation on Facebook. Continue reading Boomers Share the Most Fake News on Facebook, Study Finds
It’s the same principle as a master key, but applied to biometric identification with a high rate of success. Continue reading Researchers Created Fake ‘Master’ Fingerprints to Unlock Smartphones
Rather than eliminating bugs, the idea is to add large numbers of non-exploitable bugs to software as decoys to waste cyber-criminals’ time. Continue reading ‘Chaff Bug’ Defense Rolls Out Shiny Objects for Attackers to Find
Two young Israeli men alleged by this author to have co-founded vDOS — until recently the largest and most profitable cyber attack-for-hire service online — were arrested and formally indicted this week in Israel on conspiracy and hacking charges. Continue reading Alleged vDOS Operators Arrested, Charged
A new report proves the value of following the money in the fight against dodgy cybercrime services known as “booters” or “stressers” — virtual hired muscle that can be rented to knock nearly any website offline.
Last fall, two 18-year-old Israeli men were arrested for allegedly running a vDOS, perhaps the most successful booter service of all time. The pair were detained within hours of being named in a story on this blog as the co-proprietors of the service (this site would later suffer a three-day outage as a result of an attack that was alleged to have been purchased in retribution for my reporting on vDOS).
That initial vDOS story was based on data shared by an anonymous source who had hacked vDOS and obtained its private user and attack database. The story showed how the service made approximately $600,000 over just two of the four years it was in operation. Most of those profits came in the form of credit card payments via PayPal.
But prior to vDOS’s takedown in September 2016, the service was already under siege thanks to work done by a group of academic researchers who teamed up with PayPal to identify and close accounts that vDOS and other booter services were using to process customer payments. The researchers found that their interventions cut profits in half for the popular booter service, and helped reduce the number of attacks coming out of it by at least 40 percent. Continue reading Following the Money Hobbled vDOS Attack-for-Hire Service