Cybersecurity researchers at Bitdefender say cyber criminals have been using a rootkit named FiveSys "that somehow made its way through the driver certification process to be digitally signed by Microsoft ," reports ZDNet: The valid signature enables the rootkit — malicious software that allows cyber criminals to access and control infected computers — to appear valid and bypass operating systems restrictions and gain what researchers describe as "virtually unlimited privileges".
It's known for cyber criminals to use stolen digital certificates, but in this case, they've managed to acquire a valid one. It's a still a mystery how cyber criminals were able to get hold of a valid certificate. While the digital signing requirements detect and stop most of the rootkits, they are not foolproof," Bogdan Botezatu, director of threat research and reporting at Bitdefender told ZDNet.
It's uncertain how FiveSys is actually distributed, but researchers believe that it's bundled with cracked software downloads. Once installed, FiveSys rootkit redirects internet traffic to a proxy server, which it does by installing a custom root certificate so that the browser won't warn about the unknown identity of the proxy.
This also blocks other malware from writing on the drivers, in what's likely an attempt to stop other cyber criminals from taking advantage of the compromised system. Analysis of attacks shows that FiveSys rootkit is being used in cyber attacks targeting online gamers, with the aim of stealing login credentials and the ability to hijack in-game purchases. The popularity of online games means that a lot of money can be involved — not only because banking details are connected to accounts, but also because prestigious virtual items can fetch large sums of money when sold, meaning attackers could exploit access to steal and sell these items.
Currently, the attacks are targeting gamers in China — which is where researchers also believe that the attackers are operating from. According to court documents filed Friday, the man was identified as Alexander Alexandrovich Solonchenko, a resident of Kirovograd, Ukraine. Facebook alleges that Solonchenko abused a feature part of the Facebook Messenger service called Contact Importer.
The feature allowed users to synchronize their phone address books and see which contacts had a Facebook account in order to allow users to reach out to their friends via Facebook Messenger. Between January and September , Facebook said that Solonchenko used an automated tool to pose as Android devices in order to feed Facebook servers with millions of random phone numbers.
As Facebook servers returned information for which phone numbers had an account on the site, Solonchenko collected the data, which he later collected and offered for sale on December 1, , in a post on RaidForums, a notorious cybercrime forum and marketplace for stolen data. The article also notes that Facebook's court documents say Solonchenko scraped data from some of the largest companies in the Ukraine, including its largest commercial bank and largest private delivery service.
And the Record points out that he's not the only person known to have this hole to scrape Facebook's user data and then sell it on the forum. Days after another incident in April involving leaked phone numbers of Facebook user , Facebook "revealed that it retired the Messenger Contact Importer feature back in September after it discovered Solonchenko and other threat actors abusing it.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: In the early hours of Sunday morning, hackers took down the corporate servers and systems of Sinclair Broadcast Group, a giant U. TV conglomerate that owns or operates more than channels across the country. Days later, inside the company, "it's pandemonium and chaos ," as one current employee, who asked to remain anonymous as they were not authorized to speak to the press, told Motherboard.
Sinclair has released very few details about the attack since it was hacked Sunday. On Wednesday, Bloomberg reported that the group behind the attack is the infamous Evil Corp. Treasury department in The ransomware attack interfered with several channels' broadcast programming, preventing them from airing ads or NFL games, as reported by The Record, a news site owned by cybersecurity firm Recorded Future.
It has also left employees confused and wondering what's going on, according to current Sinclair workers. Employees did not have access to their emails until Tuesday morning, according to the two employees and text messages seen by Motherboard. The office computers, however, are still locked by the company out of precaution, and Sinclair told employees not to log into their corporate VPN, which they usually used to do their jobs. Until Thursday, the company was communicating with employees via text, according to the sources, who shared some of the texts sent by the company.
In one of them, they called for an all hands meeting. The meeting, according to the two current employees, was quick and vague. Both sources said that the company should be more transparent with its own employees. But on one major U. The crash occurred during a massive sell-off on the Binance. US exchange that occurred around a. ET, Bloomberg reported. Binance is the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world, and its Binance. US exchange is meant to be compliant with U. According to a Binance.
US spokesperson, the crash was due to an issue with a trading algorithm being run by one "institutional trader," which may indicate an investment fund of some sort. US told Bloomberg. Intel has open-sourced ControlFlag , a tool that uses machine learning to detect problems in computer code -- ideally to reduce the time required to debug apps and software. From a report: In tests, the company's machine programming research team says that ControlFlag has found hundreds of defects in proprietary, "production-quality" software, demonstrating its usefulness.
In addition, ControlFlag found dozens of novel anomalies on several high-quality open-source software repositories. After years of study, they learn to translate abstracts into concrete, executable programs -- but most spend the majority of their working hours not programming. An anonymous reader shares a report from Reuters: The ransomware group REvil was itself hacked and forced offline this week by a multi-country operation , according to three private sector cyber experts working with the United States and one former official.
Former partners and associates of the Russian-led criminal gang were responsible for a May cyberattack on the Colonial Pipeline that led to widespread gas shortages on the U. East Coast. REvil's direct victims include top meatpacker JBS.
The crime group's "Happy Blog" website, which had been used to leak victim data and extort companies, is no longer available. Officials said the Colonial attack used encryption software called DarkSide, which was developed by REvil associates. VMWare head of cybersecurity strategy Tom Kellermann said law enforcement and intelligence personnel stopped the group from victimizing additional companies.
Secret Service on cybercrime investigations. That breach opened access to hundreds of Kaseya's customers all at once, leading to numerous emergency cyber incident response calls. Following the attack on Kaseya, the FBI obtained a universal decryption key that allowed those infected via Kaseya to recover their files without paying a ransom. But law enforcement officials initially withheld the key for weeks as it quietly pursued REvil's staff, the FBI later acknowledged. According to three people familiar with the matter, law enforcement and intelligence cyber specialists were able to hack REvil's computer network infrastructure, obtaining control of at least some of their servers.
After websites that the hacker group used to conduct business went offline in July, the main spokesman for the group, who calls himself "Unknown," vanished from the internet. Vaughan-Nichols writes: This will be ugly. Or, as Stephen Williams, who uncovered the bug put it, "I have a feeling that there will be some 'interesting moments' in the early morning when a bunch of the world's stratum 1 NTP servers using GPSD take the long strange trip back to Miller has acknowledged the problem, and a fix has been made to the code.
So, what's the problem if the fix is already in? Well, there are two problems. First, it won't be backported to previous releases. If you're still using an older version, you may be out of luck. It's a legacy GPS problem. This means every Or, as Miller noted , "This code is a week time warp waiting to happen. And, if, like most of us, you're relying on someone upstream from you for the correct time, check with them to make sure they've taken care of this forthcoming trouble.
AMD and Microsoft have issued patches to address the slowdowns reported with Ryzen processors when Windows 11 launched. Engadget reports: The latest chipset driver version 3.
That could have slowed down apps that are sensitive to CPU thread performance. Meanwhile, Microsoft is rolling out a software update tackling a bug that increased L3 cache latency. The issue impacted apps that need quick memory access, which in turn caused CPUs to slow down by up to 15 percent. Remote workers like Lauren and us want to completely redefine the role governments play in digital nomads' movement and regulation. By laying the foundation for the next generation of travel and work, an internet country called Plumia Plumia wants to build the alternative using decentralized technologies, while also working with countries and institutions on policies that achieve common goals Begun in as an independent project by remote-first travel insurance company, SafetyWing , Plumia's plan is to combine the infrastructure for living anywhere with the functions of a geographic country Blockchain enthusiasts are also testing an approach that begs the question: are traditional countries still necessary?
Bitnation advocates for decentralizing authority by empowering voluntary participation and peer-to-peer agreements. Currently in development, Plumia is focusing on developing member-focused services and content Verifying a digital identity, maintaining a 'permanent address' whilst on the move, switching service providers and jurisdictions on the fly, complying with complicated tax and labor laws — these are all thorny issues to solve.
Initiatives like Plumia are jumping into quite an active ring, however. In addition to countries competing to serve and attract digital nomads, a number of well-financed startups such as Jobbatical, Remote, and Oyster are creating private-sector solutions to issues posed by people and companies going remote. Cybersecurity researchers at Bitdefender say cyber criminals have been using a rootkit named FiveSys "that somehow made its way through the driver certification process to be digitally signed by Microsoft ," reports ZDNet: The valid signature enables the rootkit — malicious software that allows cyber criminals to access and control infected computers — to appear valid and bypass operating systems restrictions and gain what researchers describe as "virtually unlimited privileges".
It's known for cyber criminals to use stolen digital certificates, but in this case, they've managed to acquire a valid one. It's a still a mystery how cyber criminals were able to get hold of a valid certificate. While the digital signing requirements detect and stop most of the rootkits, they are not foolproof," Bogdan Botezatu, director of threat research and reporting at Bitdefender told ZDNet. It's uncertain how FiveSys is actually distributed, but researchers believe that it's bundled with cracked software downloads.
Once installed, FiveSys rootkit redirects internet traffic to a proxy server, which it does by installing a custom root certificate so that the browser won't warn about the unknown identity of the proxy. This also blocks other malware from writing on the drivers, in what's likely an attempt to stop other cyber criminals from taking advantage of the compromised system.
Analysis of attacks shows that FiveSys rootkit is being used in cyber attacks targeting online gamers, with the aim of stealing login credentials and the ability to hijack in-game purchases. The popularity of online games means that a lot of money can be involved — not only because banking details are connected to accounts, but also because prestigious virtual items can fetch large sums of money when sold, meaning attackers could exploit access to steal and sell these items.
Currently, the attacks are targeting gamers in China — which is where researchers also believe that the attackers are operating from. According to court documents filed Friday, the man was identified as Alexander Alexandrovich Solonchenko, a resident of Kirovograd, Ukraine.
Facebook alleges that Solonchenko abused a feature part of the Facebook Messenger service called Contact Importer. The feature allowed users to synchronize their phone address books and see which contacts had a Facebook account in order to allow users to reach out to their friends via Facebook Messenger. Between January and September , Facebook said that Solonchenko used an automated tool to pose as Android devices in order to feed Facebook servers with millions of random phone numbers.
As Facebook servers returned information for which phone numbers had an account on the site, Solonchenko collected the data, which he later collected and offered for sale on December 1, , in a post on RaidForums, a notorious cybercrime forum and marketplace for stolen data.
The article also notes that Facebook's court documents say Solonchenko scraped data from some of the largest companies in the Ukraine, including its largest commercial bank and largest private delivery service. And the Record points out that he's not the only person known to have this hole to scrape Facebook's user data and then sell it on the forum. Days after another incident in April involving leaked phone numbers of Facebook user , Facebook "revealed that it retired the Messenger Contact Importer feature back in September after it discovered Solonchenko and other threat actors abusing it.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: In the early hours of Sunday morning, hackers took down the corporate servers and systems of Sinclair Broadcast Group, a giant U. TV conglomerate that owns or operates more than channels across the country. Days later, inside the company, "it's pandemonium and chaos ," as one current employee, who asked to remain anonymous as they were not authorized to speak to the press, told Motherboard.
Sinclair has released very few details about the attack since it was hacked Sunday. On Wednesday, Bloomberg reported that the group behind the attack is the infamous Evil Corp. Treasury department in The ransomware attack interfered with several channels' broadcast programming, preventing them from airing ads or NFL games, as reported by The Record, a news site owned by cybersecurity firm Recorded Future.
It has also left employees confused and wondering what's going on, according to current Sinclair workers. Employees did not have access to their emails until Tuesday morning, according to the two employees and text messages seen by Motherboard.
The office computers, however, are still locked by the company out of precaution, and Sinclair told employees not to log into their corporate VPN, which they usually used to do their jobs.
Until Thursday, the company was communicating with employees via text, according to the sources, who shared some of the texts sent by the company. In one of them, they called for an all hands meeting. The meeting, according to the two current employees, was quick and vague. Both sources said that the company should be more transparent with its own employees.
But on one major U. The crash occurred during a massive sell-off on the Binance. US exchange that occurred around a. ET, Bloomberg reported. Binance is the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world, and its Binance.
US exchange is meant to be compliant with U. According to a Binance. US spokesperson, the crash was due to an issue with a trading algorithm being run by one "institutional trader," which may indicate an investment fund of some sort. US told Bloomberg. Intel has open-sourced ControlFlag , a tool that uses machine learning to detect problems in computer code -- ideally to reduce the time required to debug apps and software. From a report: In tests, the company's machine programming research team says that ControlFlag has found hundreds of defects in proprietary, "production-quality" software, demonstrating its usefulness.
In addition, ControlFlag found dozens of novel anomalies on several high-quality open-source software repositories. After years of study, they learn to translate abstracts into concrete, executable programs -- but most spend the majority of their working hours not programming. An anonymous reader shares a report from Reuters: The ransomware group REvil was itself hacked and forced offline this week by a multi-country operation , according to three private sector cyber experts working with the United States and one former official.
Former partners and associates of the Russian-led criminal gang were responsible for a May cyberattack on the Colonial Pipeline that led to widespread gas shortages on the U. East Coast. REvil's direct victims include top meatpacker JBS. The crime group's "Happy Blog" website, which had been used to leak victim data and extort companies, is no longer available.
Officials said the Colonial attack used encryption software called DarkSide, which was developed by REvil associates. VMWare head of cybersecurity strategy Tom Kellermann said law enforcement and intelligence personnel stopped the group from victimizing additional companies.
Secret Service on cybercrime investigations. That breach opened access to hundreds of Kaseya's customers all at once, leading to numerous emergency cyber incident response calls. Following the attack on Kaseya, the FBI obtained a universal decryption key that allowed those infected via Kaseya to recover their files without paying a ransom. But law enforcement officials initially withheld the key for weeks as it quietly pursued REvil's staff, the FBI later acknowledged.
According to three people familiar with the matter, law enforcement and intelligence cyber specialists were able to hack REvil's computer network infrastructure, obtaining control of at least some of their servers. After websites that the hacker group used to conduct business went offline in July, the main spokesman for the group, who calls himself "Unknown," vanished from the internet. Vaughan-Nichols writes: This will be ugly. Or, as Stephen Williams, who uncovered the bug put it, "I have a feeling that there will be some 'interesting moments' in the early morning when a bunch of the world's stratum 1 NTP servers using GPSD take the long strange trip back to Miller has acknowledged the problem, and a fix has been made to the code.
So, what's the problem if the fix is already in? Well, there are two problems. First, it won't be backported to previous releases. If you're still using an older version, you may be out of luck.
How to update the PS4 console system software If the system software update on your PS4 console is stuck, restart the update. Manually update PS4 system software. PS4 update file. How to reinstall the PS4 console system software Reinstalling the system software on your PS4 console will delete all of the data on your PS4 console. Reinstall PS4 system software. PS4 console reinstallation file. Previous PS4 console system software releases. PS4 8.
Other updated features On the game session details screen, you can now use the Request to Join button to ask the session leader to join their game session. We've updated the file format for extended storage. When you connect an extended storage device, its file format will be updated.
The Communities feature is no longer available. You can also view your trophy tracker in pin-to-side mode to see information about the trophies during gameplay. When viewing the trophy lists of games, the trophies will now be displayed vertically instead of horizontally. You'll now be able to see more information for each trophy without selecting it. In the control center, we've updated the following: You can now customize your control center more freely. All the controls at the bottom of the screen can be rearranged.
The first time you open the control center, you'll see a quick introduction to some of its key features. When you enable the screen reader, you can now use the following features: You can now pause the screen reader by pressing the PS button and triangle button at the same time.
To resume, press the PS button and triangle button again. You can now make the screen reader repeat anything it reads. To do so, press the PS button and the R1 button at the same time. There's a new accolade type: Leader. This is for a player who crafts the plan, strategizes, and inspires others.
In PS5 games, you can give accolades like "Leader" to players after online matches, when you want to encourage positive behavior. All of a player's accolades, including this new type, appear on their profile. In PlayStation Now, we've updated the following: The streaming connection test lets you identify and fix problems with your connection. You can now choose your maximum streaming resolution to optimize your game performance. Now you'll see directly in the game hub if and when a PlayStation Now game is scheduled to be removed, so you can be sure to try new games or play your favorites while they're still available.
When you're competing in challenges for a better time or a higher score and you set a new personal best, we'll automatically take a video clip of the action for you. You can share the video clip directly from the challenge card in the control center, or you can share it later from your media gallery. You see suggestions in your control center when a friend is playing a game you can join. Previously, it would take about 1 day before these suggestions would appear for a friend you just added.
They can now appear much more quickly. Suggestions will also now appear even if your friend is playing a streamed PlayStation Now game.
We've made the following improvements to parental controls: Now when a child requests to play a game or use communication features in a specific game, their parent or guardian will receive a notification on the PS5 and PlayStation App. The child will also receive a notification when their parent or guardian accepts or denies a request, or stops allowing the child to play a game or use communication features.
In Media Gallery, we've added new fonts for the text you can add to your screenshots. For the features available from the Create menu, we've updated the following: When you're manually recording a video clip, the elapsed time counter will now automatically disappear after 3 seconds, and reappear when needed.
We've added more video lengths for you to choose from when saving recent gameplay. You can now choose whether to display save confirmation notifications for screenshots. You can now select whether you'd like to receive notifications on your PS5 or through email about new products and special offers. In Notifications , we've updated the following: When you receive pop-up notifications with videos in them, you can now start the videos directly from the pop-ups or from your notifications list.
You can now turn off the sound your notifications make. When you log in to the PS5, and an accessory with a microphone is connected, the mute status of the microphone is now displayed.
So still the note 4 is like a bit ahead with the features camera wise when it comes to you know video performance. The s-pen got premium with the galaxy note 5 and their devices. You know so overall the note 4 is still a great phone. Also, Fingerprint scanner with PayPal support and private mode access. So, Heart-rate monitor etc..
Flagship the features are still top-notch but the thing is that the lack of support is something. That is going to affect. Nowadays you can pay less and get super awesome build quality phones which is, of course, the note 4 fails to provide.
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