n2doc
n2doc's JournalSony Hackers Seen Having Snooped for Months, Planted Software Bomb
Hackers who broke into Sony Corp. (6758)’s Hollywood unit probably spent months collecting passwords and mapping the network before they committed a last act of vandalism, setting off a virus that wiped out data and crashed the system in 10 minutes.
Trend Micro Inc. (4704) arrived at these conclusions after running simulations on a copy of the virus that struck Sony Pictures Entertainment’s computers. The Tokyo-based developer of security software declined to reveal where it got the malware.
The research details methods used by hackers in what’s become one of the highest-profile cyber-attacks in history. Since November, a group calling itself Guardians of Peace has released private e-mails, salaries and health records of Sony employees to stop the release of “The Interview,” a comedy about a plot to assassinate North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un.
“They were probably in the system for months,” Masayoshi Someya, whose title is security evangelist at Trend Micro, said in an interview in Tokyo this month. “One thing that’s very unique about the malware is that it had a payload with a particular time bomb-type capability.”
more
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-12-19/sony-hackers-seen-having-snooped-for-months-planted-bomb.html
NASA’s Kepler Reborn, Makes First Exoplanet Find of New Mission
NASA's planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft makes a comeback with the discovery of the first exoplanet found using its new mission -- K2.
The discovery was made when astronomers and engineers devised an ingenious way to repurpose Kepler for the K2 mission and continue its search of the cosmos for other worlds.
"Last summer, the possibility of a scientifically productive mission for Kepler after its reaction wheel failure in its extended mission was not part of the conversation," said Paul Hertz, NASA's astrophysics division director at the agency's headquarters in Washington. "Today, thanks to an innovative idea and lots of hard work by the NASA and Ball Aerospace team, Kepler may well deliver the first candidates for follow-up study by the James Webb Space Telescope to characterize the atmospheres of distant worlds and search for signatures of life."
Lead researcher Andrew Vanderburg, a graduate student at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, studied publicly available data collected by the spacecraft during a test of K2 in February 2014. The discovery was confirmed with measurements taken by the HARPS-North spectrograph of the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo in the Canary Islands, which captured the wobble of the star caused by the planet’s gravitational tug as it orbits.
The newly confirmed planet, HIP 116454b, is 2.5 times the diameter of Earth and follows a close, nine-day orbit around a star that is smaller and cooler than our sun, making the planet too hot for life as we know it. HIP 116454b and its star are 180 light-years from Earth, toward the constellation Pisces.
more
http://www.nasa.gov/press/2014/december/nasa-s-kepler-reborn-makes-first-exoplanet-find-of-new-mission/
Citigroup Democracy
by Mark Fiore
Now that the secret backroom dealings are done and the latest budget bill passed Congress (of course, at the 11th hour), we can see the thumbprints of Wall Street once again. Actually, more than thumbprints, Citigroup actually wrote part of it. They managed to gut “Section 716” of Dodd-Frank. Sounds obscure and weird so who cares, right?
Um, it actually reinvigorates the $700 trillion (yes, trillion) derivatives market that helped drive the economy over the cliff on the way to the Great Recession. Thanks to this bill, now taxpayers will once more be on the hook for the risky financial bets made by the likes of Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup and their pals. How did this all happen? Perhaps the over $1.2 billion in lobbying by the deep-pocketed Too Big To Fail crew had something to do with it.
In case you forgot how some of these silly financial instruments of doom work, here’s a cartoon that explains the way these guys create financial magic out of thin air. Thanks to hefty lobbying and campaign contributions, Citigroup and crew brought back these financial time bombs— and pulled it off by attaching language to a “must-pass” budget bill that threatened to shut down the government. Ain’t Cashocracy grand?
flashtoon at link
http://blog.sfgate.com/fiore/2014/12/18/citigroup-democracy/
I find the talk about buying up Cuba's cars like a flock of vultures
You do realize that Cuban's aren't stupid rubes who will sell those for pennies? They can google and do searches on the free market value of those cars too, you know. And those who do sell low, for whatever reason, will already have been gotten to by the pros first.
You want a classic car? Buy one the regular route, at auction. Or find a friend.
Thursday TOON Roundup 3- The Rest
Torture
congress
Hackers
LGBT
Gop
2016
Middle East
Mr. Fish
Season
Profile Information
Gender: Do not displayMember since: Tue Feb 10, 2004, 01:08 PM
Number of posts: 47,953
