Thunderbolt Attack, Celebrity Ransomware, ClearView Government, Blackhat DEFCON Virtual, War Thunder, 5G Bio Attacks, PC Game Cheating, Zoom Keybase, Technology News, Human News, Ideas Trends & Analysis, Discovery, Recommendations, and the Weekly Aphorism…
All right what comes up so 228. Starting off security news there's a new physical evil made attack against Windows and Linux systems that lets an attacker bypass the lock screen for a system in under five minutes basically just allows you to if you have any time with a computer you can basically. Take the keyboard off make a connection and. Get full access to the system just completely bypassing the initial security log in screen. And the research will be shown at this year's blackout conference which along with DEF CON is now virtual. Major ransomware attack has been launched against private legal firm that does work for top TV and movie celebrities including people like Nero the weekend David Letterman. They're threatening to release over a terabyte of dirt on the clients unless law firm pays the ransom and they have a history of doing this and actually releasing data. So it's it's not a idle threat looks to be real. Clear View ISIS. It's only going to sell services to government related customers from now on no more private sales think this is interesting but I wonder if that'll be enough to stop the deluge of lawsuits that have already come inbound. Probably not.
Black Hat and DEF kind of gone virtual this year. I've mentioned at the beginning don't go to Vegas. It really is canceled this time. Officials in Seoul every closed their bars and definitely because somewhere between 27 and 40 new cases of covered 19 were associated with people gathering there. So they locked it down. Things got good. They opened it back up and sure enough people started getting sick again and they have good contact tracing and good testing which is how they know we don't have that in the US. So really worry about places like Florida and Texas who are going to open things up without being able to monitor how bad it gets. The U.S. Army is using an MMO Cold War Thunder to train cavalry troops during the quarantine. The game allows soldiers to get familiar with multiple roles in a way that's difficult and expensive to do in real life. You can do a swap in and swap out and different stuff and learn different positions. It's pretty cool. A cyber security company in Israel says a group of hackers called Nikon which is thought to be associated with the Chinese military has released a new tool called Area body. They say the tool uses multiple techniques to make it easy to gain control over systems and remain undetected which is the goal of a lot of malware but evidently it's pretty good package. Of 5G conspiracy theorists spat on you broadband engineer. In London. Basically they were in line at a coffee shop and they saw. That the person the engineer had the logo of this sub pub and company on their jacket. They got in a fight with him and evidently spat in his face. In the end up getting super SEC which he of course thinks is probably coronavirus. And meanwhile 77 5G towers have been attacked throughout the U.K. by similar type folks. Peace Games are struggling with a rise in cheating related to the pandemic and a massive surge in players. My buddy Jason and I created the last big game security framework a few years back and we're trying to address this in kind of a structured way. But it's currently on hold while he works on actual gaming company can't really participate in that stuff or is there. Zoom its purchase key base which has confused a lot of people in the industry including me. And the crux thinks it's actually a signal that they're not going to let someone like China gain access to the data. So they're basically saying look we're going to end the encryption everywhere. No one should have access to your data. Not thought a lot about that but it seems like a smart theory advisories we brought in as a critical vulnerability patch immediately if you have it. Cisco's patch multiple high severity volumes in security products. There's a one in the mass owners attack to send some phones. So from one to patch that one and SVP has some phones in its cloud products technology news. Tesla just reopened its Fremont factory today against the orders of the county. And this is after Musk said he's leaving California for Texas or Florida because they actually allow people to go back to work. And I think that these types of outbursts seem to be a common downside of having that much creativity and eccentricity and hopefully he'll settle down soon. And definitely if we see data that opening back up is actually hurting people hopefully then he'll change his tune. Amelia raised 20 million to use A.I. for customer support. But don't worry. All those millions of customer service people can probably just pivot to coding right. Learn to code. I really don't get that argument no sarcasm anyway. Amazon has just released Kendra which is kind of like their take on Splunk when we powered by the back end of A.I. and IP. So you're supposed to be able just ask your question in a natural way. I think is very sci fi of them. What I really like about them the kind of like they just do constant mugshots. So you're supposed to be able to just type in what you're looking for in whatever language. And have it magically come back with the answer. All I can really say about this is it is likely to be really bad in the beginning without even having seen it. And it's probably likely to get better. And the fact that they're even trying and it's exciting I'm really happy that companies like Splunk and Amazon and Google are all competing on this. So really good for us as consumers. Someone created a modular synth called synth space in virtual reality. So put on the goggles go in there and you're actually turning the knobs and controlling the synthesizer just like a real deejay. I think that's really cool. I think the next version of hardware I'm definitely getting in next version of the hardware combined with you know some good games. I'm definitely getting an. Over 44 million U.S. adults are supposedly borrowing someone else's streaming account to high number 44 million. It's not a high number it's a large number. Right. Is. Finland is abandoning subject based learning and moving to phenomenal education. That's the brand. Phenomenal education where real world phenomenon are the foundation of learning the ideas to have the class explore a real world situation where like a job or a function or whatever. Think and to study that across all the different subjects of math science like life science whatever in Yeah it's based on constructivism which is the idea that you learn best by doing things as opposed to instructive ust which is I'm saying that right. It's where you just learn you know like buy books in an old style classroom. So they're going all in on this and abandoning their main subjects. It's gonna be really interesting to see the data on this in whatever 5 10 20 years.
Your visits are down 40 to 50 percent and doctors are really concerned. The problem is a lot of those visits are strokes and heart attacks and the doctors are freaking out because they're like you know these aren't going to go down during a pandemic. They're still going to have him at home. They're not coming in that means they're you know going through this and they're either surviving or they're not thinks this is quite related to the other story in The New York Times from last week which showed that the percentage of people dying at home. Has gone up 50 percent and those numbers are not included in the corona virus numbers. But maybe maybe because of coronavirus they're not going that yard. Maybe more people are dying of term virus. You know some some combination of those two. New York Times did a great story on job loss in April which ended up being 20 million jobs 20 million and a half actually. But the highlight was the data visualization that they used for the piece hits a chart showing losses and gains over time going back multiple decades. But has this massive red line that goes downwards on the right side of the page actually looks like a margin to the page looks like it's drawing it drawing a giant box around the story it's an actual to scale indicator of how much we've lost relative to previously. Really really cool NASA is making a serious attempt to land a human on the moon by the end of 2024. Ideas trends and analysis a three tiered approach to securing your home network. This is an essay I did last weekend and it blew up over the we can probably have like 10 20000 hits on it that really good really good feedback on that. And yeah it's a three tiered approach so it's got like a basic here's the first three things you do if you want to do intermediate here's the next three and then the advanced three. So it's nine different steps with the first three being the most important and then you get to Mission returns for the ones after. The first three are exactly what you would think. It's you know passwords patching. And in this case a recommended Malware bytes which evidently doesn't do so well compared to enterprise products but it's the best consumer one that I know of. And websites are all starting to look the same. That's a pretty cool piece that does some quantitative analysis on different works of websites and the colors they use in their structures. The VR winter by Benedict Evans talks about why VR is not taking off at this moment and what actually is going to be the moment if VR actually does have a moment like what's going to bring that on. And peloton continues to absolutely crush it. Revenue is up 66 percent over last quarter think it hits all the notes of exercise social interaction and a status symbol which means it's great for rich people and that's exactly who's buying it. And I was tricked into thinking I had grit critical essay here. Updates. So we just saw this article about the last unicorn it's kind of a feature piece talking about how awesome it was and that movie massively affected me as a kid. I also just watched the never ending story as well which I also hadn't done since childhood. I haven't actually seen Last Unicorn I'm gonna do that again probably soon. But the never ending story was particularly powerful for me. And I think it was part of the whole bridge between fantasy and reality that got me not to spoil anything. But I was absolutely devastated with it when a tree you lost his horse and the princess altered my universe long before I knew girls were even a thing. So I just lot of memories there and I'll be speaking at DEF CON this year at the Red Team village topic will be automating recon using Linux so it'll be virtual but I'll put out the details when I get them. Discovery Paquette a photographer who tinkers with time encouraging a culture of written communication within your business. Got a guy here who created a blog powered by Google Docs. That a piece here now is the perfect time to memorize a poem that might actually try this. And I haven't started listening yet but I just subscribe to a podcast called war on the rocks which is about security intelligence national policy that sort of thing got a guy who documents the set up of using mutt in vim for email. I've done this before and I really loved it. Now I'm hooked on superhumans. I don't know if I could try this celebrities or reading Harry Potter for the public vim as a markdown editor which is peace using a map as a lightweight volume scanner. SS age prank is a tool that it's basically an SSA scanner and banner grabber based on Python and mask n word scraper. This is super cool it's a selection based web scraper to generate password lists so you're trying to attack a website. It'll go through and scrape everything and build your word less that you can you know build a hybrid list out of to combine it with a bunch of other stuff like ABC 1 2 3 and that kind of stuff. JF patterns a bunch of content specific patterns for TomTom names. JF utility and some examples are SSR f or c e fi sequel ie. I adore you your l redirection debug logic etc.. And recommendations as many of you know I normally watch very little TV but I've used the lockdown as an excuse to binge basically anything of significant reputation and in my travels so far I've three recommendations for you. In this order after life by Ricky devs which is on effects and it's unbelievable and upload which is. Kind of my least favorite. It's not super serious but it's some pretty pretty good sci fi combined with a decent story. So go like all three of those definitely top heavy after life being the best and devs being really really good as well. Probably even better produced an afterlife and it just completely different animal. So definitely recommend those afterlife devs and upload in the less you know about them the better. Just trust me if you like the newsletter you like this podcast you'll probably love these as well. And the aphorism for the week success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm. Winston Churchill.