Lifeboat Foundation

It’s been a lousy week for Windows users: first, the NSA curveball crypto vulnerability and now confirmation of a zero-day vulnerability that’s being actively exploited with no fix yet.

Hot on the heels of National Security Agency (NSA) and Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) warnings for Windows 10 users to update urgently as news of the curveball crypto vulnerability broke, here we are again. The CISA has published a new warning for Windows users as Microsoft confirms a critical zero-day vulnerability is being actively exploited, and there’s no fix available at the time of writing.

In a shift toward transparency, the National Security Agency announced a bug that could have left over 900 million PCs vulnerable to attack.

Microsoft has released a security patch for a dangerous vulnerability affecting hundreds of millions of computers running Windows 10.

The vulnerability is found in a decades-old Windows cryptographic component, known as CryptoAPI. The component has a range of functions, one of which allows developers to digitally sign their software, proving that the software has not been tampered with. But the bug may allow attackers to spoof legitimate software, potentially making it easier to run malicious software — like ransomware — on a vulnerable computer.

“The user would have no way of knowing the file was malicious, because the digital signature would appear to be from a trusted provider,” Microsoft said.

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) today alerted organizations to patch their Pulse Secure VPN servers as a defense against ongoing attacks trying to exploit a known remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability.

This warning follows another alert issued by CISA in October 2019, and others coming from the National Security Agency (NSA), the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security, and UK’s National Cyber Security Center (NCSC).

Pulse Secure reported the vulnerability tracked as CVE-2019–11510 and disclosed by Orange Tsai and Meh Chang from the DEVCORE research team, and by Jake Valletta from FireEye in an April 2019 out-of-cycle advisory.

Even ordinary computers flip a bit here and there, but their quantum cousins have a lot more ways to go wrong.

As the power and qubits in quantum computing systems increase, so does the need for cutting-edge capabilities to ascertain that they work. The Army Research Office and National Security Agency recently teamed up to solicit proposals for research that can help do exactly that.

The entities launched a broad agency announcement this week to boost the development of innovative techniques and protocols that allow for Quantum Characterization, Verification, and Validation, or QCVV, of intermediate-scale quantum systems. QCVV is essentially the science of quantifying how well a quantum computer can run quantum algorithms—and experts agree that it’s a necessary step towards useful quantum computing.

A much broader array of stakeholders must engage with the problems that DNA databases present. In particular, governments, policymakers and legislators should tighten regulation and reduce the likelihood of corporations aiding potential human-rights abuses by selling DNA-profiling technology to bad actors — knowingly or negligently. Researchers working on biometric identification technologies should consider more deeply how their inventions could be used. And editors, reviewers and publishers must do more to ensure that published research on biometric identification has been done in an ethical way.

Corporations selling DNA-profiling technology are aiding human-rights abuses. Governments, legislators, researchers, reviewers and publishers must act.

The NSA had superior insight into foreign nation-state hacking operations than many cyber-security vendors.

DarkUniverse went undetected for at least 8 years. The NSA finally outed it.

We face complexity, ambiguity, and uncertainty about the future consequences of cryptocurrency use. There are doubts about the positive and negative impacts of the use of cryptocurrencies in the financial systems. In order to address better and deeper the contradictions and the consequences of the use of cryptocurrencies and also informing the key stakeholders about known and unknown emerging issues in new payment systems, we apply two helpful futures studies tools known as the “Future Wheel”, to identify the key factors, and “System Dynamics Conceptual Mapping”, to understand the relationships among such factors. Two key scenarios will be addressed. In on them, systemic feedback loops might be identified such as a) terrorism, the Achilles’ heel of the cryptocurrencies, b) hackers, the barrier against development, and c) information technology security professionals, a gap in the future job market. Also, in the other scenario, systemic feedback loops might be identified such as a) acceleration of technological entrepreneurship enabled by new payment systems, b) decentralization of financial ecosystem with some friction against it, c) blockchain and shift of banking business model, d) easy international payments triggering structural reforms, and e) the decline of the US and the end of dollar dominance in the global economy. In addition to the feedback loops, we can also identify chained links of consequences that impact productivity and economic growth on the one hand, and shift of energy sources and consumption on the other hand.

Watch the full length presentation at Victor V. Motti YouTube Channel