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Microsoft blocked Russian cyberattacks targeting Ukraine
Microsoft said it has disrupted cyberattacks from a Russia-linked group called Strontium (aka APT28 and Fancy Bear) targeting Ukraine and the West.
Microsoft: State-backed hackers targeted COVID-19 vaccine creators
Microsoft says state-backed Russian and North Korean hackers have targeted seven COVID-19 vaccine creators.
Russian state hackers appear to have breached a federal agency
Evidence suggests Russia's state-backed Fancy Bear group was behind a hack targeting a US federal agency.
Microsoft: Russian hackers are using IoT devices to infiltrate networks
A state-sponsored Russian hacking group has been taking advantage of Internet of Things devices' poor security measures to infiltrate corporate networks, according to Microsoft. The company has revealed that researchers from Microsoft's Threat Intelligence Center have discovered hacking attempts on companies using popular IoT devices, namely VOIP phones, office printers and video decoders. In a couple of cases, the bad actors didn't even have to crack passwords: the devices used their manufacturers' default ones.
Microsoft: Russian hackers are trying to influence EU elections
The European Elections come at a crucial time for the world, since their outcome could ultimately dictate if peace in Europe can be maintained. That explains why the number of attempts to undermine the process by a hostile nation state (with a name that rhymes with blusher) is intensifying. Microsoft has revealed that it's not just political campaigns that have come under fire, but the broader pillars of the political process.
Microsoft detected Russian phishing attacks on three 2018 campaigns
Russia is still launching cyberattacks against the US, a Microsoft exec has revealed, contradicting what the President claimed just a few days ago. According to Microsoft VP for customer security and trust Tom Burt (shown above second from right, with his hand raised), his team discovered a spear-phishing campaign targeting three candidates running for office in 2018. Burt announced his team's findings while speaking on a panel at the Aspen Security Forum, where he also revealed that they traced the new campaign to a group believed to be operated by the GRU, Russia's largest foreign intelligence agency. In other words, those three candidates are being targeted by the same organization that infiltrated the DNC and Hillary Clinton's Presidential campaign in 2016.
A 'trapped' atom is visible to the naked eye
The tiny dot in the center of the screen, between the two metal electrodes, is the light emitted by a single atom. The photo, Single Atom in an Ion Trap, just won the grand prize in the UK's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) science photo and imaging contest. "The idea of being able to see a single atom with the naked eye had struck me as a wonderfully direct and visceral bridge between the miniscule quantum world and our macroscopic reality," said Oxford University quantum physics professor David Nadlinger, who took it.
Russia-backed malware can now target Macs
The state-backed Russian group accused of hacking the Democratic National Committee appears to be expanding its repertoire. Bitdefender Labs researchers have obtained a sample of a Mac-native variant of Xagent, the backdoor malware linked to Russia's APT28 (aka Fancy Bear or Strontium). The code not only allows swiping passwords and capturing screenshots, but includes a module that can swipe iOS device backups created by iTunes. While it's easy to encrypt those backups, this theoretically gives intruders a chance at snooping on iPhone data without having to compromise the iPhone itself.
Microsoft patch for Google-outed exploit is still a week away
Microsoft is still more than a little upset at Google revealing unpatched Windows security flaws, but it'll at least have a solution in hand in the days ahead. The software giant now plans to issue a patch for affected version of Windows on November 8th. You're in good shape if you use both Windows 10 Anniversary Update and a sufficiently up to date browser (both Chrome and Edge should be safe), but you'll definitely have to be cautious if you can't use one of the known safe browsers or the latest version of Windows.
World's most precise atomic clock will still be spot-on in 5 billion years
Most of us only pay attention to time when it's causing headaches, but the same can't be said of a team of researchers working out of the University of Colorado at Boulder. Led by National Institute of Standards and Technology fellow Jun Ye, they've crafted an atomic clock that can keep precise time for billions of years, a world record. This hefty new timekeeper can tick off the seconds with the same unflinching regularity as the best of them, but it'll be about 5 billion years before it experiences its first temporal hiccup. For the morbidly curious, that means the clock will still be precise when the sun starts ballooning into a massive red giant. That may not sound like a huge deal now, but when our descendants start laying in escape routes to some more pleasant planets they'll be glad for that extra precision. How does the thing work? Well, strontium atoms are held in "traps" formed by lasers, and researchers are able to track how often they oscillate by using that laser light to get them moving. It's hardly a new technique, but you can't argue with the results: The new clock is 50 percent more precise than the last record-setter, and Ye says that there are plenty more breakthroughs to come.
New atomic clock claims title of world's most accurate
You may have thought that the previous world's most accurate clock was good at keeping time, but it's apparently nothing compared to this new strontium atomic clock developed by scientists at the University of Colorado, which is supposedly more than twice as accurate and just as atomic. To achieve that impressive feat, the scientists made use of the same so-called "pendulum effect" of atoms as before, but took things one step further by holding the atoms in a laser beam and freezing them to almost -273 degrees Celsius, or the temperature at which all matter stops resonating. In clock terms, that translates to about one second lost every 300 million years. Of course, that's still one second too many for the researchers, and they say they "dream of getting an atomic clock with perfect precision." You just know you never want to be late for a meeting with these guys.
