In the first ruling of its kind nationwide, a Montana state court decided Monday in favor of young people who alleged the state violated their right to a "clean and healthful environment" by promoting the use of fossil fuels. From a report: The court determined that a provision in the Montana Environmental Policy Act has harmed the state's environment and the young plaintiffs, by preventing Montana from considering the climate impacts of energy projects. The provision is accordingly unconstitutional, the court said. The win, experts say, could energize the environmental movement and reshape climate litigation across the country, ushering in a wave of cases aimed at advancing action on climate change. "People around the world are watching this case," said Michael Gerrard, the founder of Columbia's Sabin Center for Climate Change Law.

The ruling represents a rare victory for climate activists who have tried to use the courts to push back against government policies and industrial activities they say are harming the planet. In this case, it involved 16 young Montanans, ranging in age from 5 to 22, who brought the nation's first constitutional and first youth-led climate lawsuit to go to trial. Though the cumulative number of climate cases around the world has more than doubled in the last five years, youth-led lawsuits in the United States have faced an uphill battle. Already, at least 14 of these cases have been dismissed, according to a July report from the United Nations Environment Program and the Sabin Center. The report said about three-quarters of the approximately 2,200 ongoing or concluded cases were filed before courts in the United States. Experts said the Montana youth had an advantage in the state's constitution, which guarantees a right to a "clean and healthful environment." Coal is critical to the state's economy, and Montana is home to the largest recoverable coal reserves in the country. The plaintiff's attorneys say the state has never denied a permit for a fossil fuel project.

Dell has been fined more than $6.5 million by Australian regulators after it was found to have misled consumers on discounted hardware prices. From a report: The Australian Consumer and Competition Commission (ACCC) imposed a $10 million AUS fine on the tech giant for "making false and misleading representations" about discounted prices for add-on computer monitors. Dell Australia admitted that it has misled customers over prices available on monitors in 'bundle' packages alongside desktop, laptop, or notebook devices. Add-on monitors were "often advertised with a higher 'strikethrough' price," an investigation by the regulator found. These strikethrough prices were framed as a way for consumers to make significant savings on monitors if purchased alongside other computing products.

However, these discounted prices were often overstated, with the regulator ruling that the monitors were not sold for discounted prices in many instances. Dell also conceded it misled customers about the discounted price of add-on monitors with statements such as "Total Savings," "Includes x% off," "Discounted Price," and "Get the best price for popular accessories when purchased with this product." The ACCC said in a statement, "In many cases, consumers paid more than if they had purchased the monitor as a standalone product."

"It was difficult to maintain a poker face when the leader of a big US tech firm I was chatting to said there was a definite tipping point at which the firm would exit the UK," writes a BBC technology editor: Many of these companies are increasingly fed up. Their "tipping point" is UK regulation — and it's coming at them thick and fast. The Online Safety Bill is due to pass in the autumn. Aimed at protecting children, it lays down strict rules around policing social media content, with high financial penalties and prison time for individual tech execs if the firms fail to comply. One clause that has proved particularly controversial is a proposal that encrypted messages, which includes those sent on WhatsApp, can be read and handed over to law enforcement by the platforms they are sent on, if there is deemed to be a national security or child protection risk...

Currently messaging apps like WhatsApp, Proton and Signal, which offer this encryption, cannot see the content of these messages themselves. WhatsApp and Signal have both threatened to quit the UK market over this demand.

The Digital Markets Bill is also making its way through Parliament. It proposes that the UK's competition watchdog selects large companies like Amazon and Microsoft, gives them rules to comply with and sets punishments if they don't. Several firms have told me they feel this gives an unprecedented amount of power to a single body. Microsoft reacted furiously when the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) chose to block its acquisition of the video game giant Activision Blizzard. "There's a clear message here — the European Union is a more attractive place to start a business than the United Kingdom," raged chief executive Brad Smith. The CMA has since re-opened negotiations with Microsoft. This is especially damning because the EU is also introducing strict rules in the same vein — but it is collectively a much larger and therefore more valuable market.

In the UK, proposed amendments to the Investigatory Powers Act, which included tech firms getting Home Office approval for new security features before worldwide release, incensed Apple so much that it threatened to remove Facetime and iMessage from the UK if they go through. Clearly the UK cannot, and should not, be held to ransom by US tech giants. But the services they provide are widely used by millions of people. And rightly or wrongly, there is no UK-based alternative to those services.
The article concludes that "It's a difficult line to tread. Big Tech hasn't exactly covered itself in glory with past behaviours — and lots of people feel regulation and accountability is long overdue."

"Owners of some older iPhone models are expected to receive about $65 each," reports SiliconValley.com, "after a judge cleared the way for payments in a class-action lawsuit accusing Apple of secretly throttling phone performance." The Cupertino cell phone giant agreed in 2020 to pay up to $500 million to resolve a lawsuit alleging it had perpetrated "one of the largest consumer frauds in history" by surreptitiously slowing the performance of certain iPhone models to address problems with batteries and processors...

According to the lawsuit, filed in 2018, reports of unexplained iPhone shutdowns began to surface in 2015 and increased in the fall of 2016. Consumers complained their phones were shutting off even though the batteries showed a charge of more than 30%, the lawsuit claimed. The lawsuit claimed the shutdowns resulted from a mismatch between phones' hardware, including batteries and processing chips, and the ever-increasing demands of constantly updating operating systems. Apple tried to fix the problem with a software update, but the update merely throttled device performance to cut the number of shutdowns, the lawsuit claimed... In a 2019 court filing in the case, Apple argued that lithium-ion batteries become less effective with time, repeated charging, extreme temperatures and general use. Updating software, Apple asserted in the filing, entails trade-offs. "Providing more features also introduces complexity and can reduce speed, and increasing features or speed may adversely impact hardware lifespan," the company said.

Consumer grief over the shutdowns and alleged throttling also led to a 2020 lawsuit against Apple by the State of California and Alameda and Los Angeles counties. Apple, admitting to no wrongdoing, settled the case for $113 million.
About 3 million claims were received, the article notes, and two iPhone owners who'd objected to the settlement lost their appeal this week, "removing the final obstacle to the deal..."

"The phones at issue in the case were iPhone 6, 6 Plus, 6s, 6s Plus, and SE devices running operating systems iOS 10.2.1 or later before Dec. 21, 2017, and iPhone 7 and 7 Plus phones running iOS 11.2 or later before that date."

Monday sees the release of "The Billion Dollar Heist," a documentary about the theft of $81 million from the Bangladesh Bank, considered the biggest cyber-heist of all time. The film's executive producer wrote the book Dark Market: How Hackers Became the New Mafia (and is also a rector at the Institute for Human Sciences).

But he's also written an article for the Financial Times outlining the complicated background of Russian-speaking hacker gangs responsible for malware and ransomware, starting with "one of the most remarkable if little-known events in post-cold war history: the first and, to my knowledge, the last publicly organised conference of avowed criminals" in May, 2002.

The First Worldwide Carders Conference was the brainchild of the administrators of a landmark website, carderplanet.com. Known as "the family", this was a mixed group of young men, both Ukrainians and Russians, who had spent the previous 10 years growing up in a lively atmosphere of gangster capitalism. During the 1990s, conventional law and order in the former Soviet Union had broken down. The collapse of the communist system had left a vacuum in which new forms of economic activity were emerging...

Founded a year before the conference, CarderPlanet revolutionised web-based criminal activity, especially the lucrative trade in stolen or cloned credit card data, by solving the conundrum that until then had faced every bad guy on the web: how can I do business with this person, as I know he's a criminal, so he must be untrustworthy by definition? To obviate the problem, the CarderPlanet administrators created an escrow system for criminals. They would act as guarantor of any criminal sale of credit and debit card data — a disinterested party mediating between the vendor and the purchaser... The escrow system led to an explosion of credit card crime around the world in which many criminal fortunes were made....

Roman Stepanenko Vega, a Russian-speaking Ukrainian national who was one of the founders and administrators of CarderPlanet, explained to me how "two days before the conference's opening, we received a visit from an FSB [Federal Security Service] officer in Moscow. He explained that Moscow had no objections to us cloning credit cards or defrauding banks in Europe and the United States but anywhere within the CIS was off limits." In addition, the FSB officer let CarderPlanet know that if the Russian state ever required assistance from criminal gangs, it would be expected to co-operate...

Members of criminal gangs were later recruited into notorious state-backed hacking teams such as Advanced Persistent Threat 28.
A 2021 ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline brought warnings of a U.S. counterattack, the article notes, after which "Russian police started arresting and imprisoning cyber criminal groups." Ransomware attacks now seem particularly focused on Europe, and "According to cyber-security experts, the Russian government is giving these criminal groups information on potential targets." But once more the hackers have been careful not to cross what the Americans consider red lines, as advised, presumably, by Russia's security services. Russia is probably confident that disrupting European businesses will be unlikely to provoke a cyber attack. But the U.S. — whether its government, municipalities or police — remains strictly off-limits.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Geoffrey.landis for sharing the article.

An anonymous reader shared this investigative report from The Markup: Over the past quarter-century, privacy policies — the lengthy, dense legal language you quickly scroll through before mindlessly hitting "agree" — have grown both longer and denser. A study released last year found that not only did the average length of a privacy policy quadruple between 1996 and 2021, they also became considerably more difficult to understand. "Analyzing the content of privacy policies, we identify several concerning trends, including the increasing use of location data, increasing use of implicitly collected data, lack of meaningful choice, lack of effective notification of privacy policy changes, increasing data sharing with unnamed third parties, and lack of specific information about security and privacy measures," wrote De Montfort University Associate Professor Isabel Wagner, who used machine learning to analyze some 50,000 website privacy policies for the study...

To get a sense of what all of this means, I talked to Jesse Woo — a data engineer at The Markup who previously helped write institutional data use policies as a privacy lawyer. Woo explained that, while he can see why the language in Zoom's terms of service touched a nerve, the sentiment — that users allow the company to copy and use their content — is actually pretty standard in these sorts of user agreements. The problem is that Zoom's policy was written in a way where each of the rights being handed over to the company are specifically enumerated, which can feel like a lot. But that's also kind of just what happens when you use products or services in 2023 — sorry, welcome to the future!

As a point of contrast, Woo pointed to the privacy policy of the competing video-conferencing service Webex, which reads: "We will not monitor Content, except: (i) as needed to provide, support or improve the provision of the Services, (ii) investigate potential or suspected fraud, (iii) where instructed or permitted by you, or (iv) as otherwise required by law or to exercise or protect Our legal rights." That language feels a lot less scary, even though, as Woo noted, training AI models could likely be covered under a company taking steps to "support or improve the provision of the Services."
The article ends with a link to a helpful new guide showing "how to read any privacy policy and quickly identify the important/creepy/enraging parts."

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Wall Street Journal: U.S. spy agencies will share more intelligence with U.S. companies, nongovernmental organizations and academia under a new strategy released this week that acknowledges concerns over new threats, such as another pandemic and increasing cyberattacks. The National Intelligence Strategy, which sets broad goals for the sprawling U.S. intelligence community, says that spy agencies must reach beyond the traditional walls of secrecy and partner with outside groups to detect and deter supply-chain disruptions, infectious diseases and other growing transnational threats. The intelligence community "must rethink its approach to exchanging information and insights," the strategy says.

The U.S. government in recent years has begun sharing vast amounts of cyber-threat intelligence with U.S. companies, utilities and others who are often the main targets of foreign hackers, as well as information on foreign-influence operations with social-media companies... The emphasis on greater intelligence sharing is part of a broader trend toward declassification that the Biden administration has pursued.
"The new strategy is meant to guide 18 U.S. intelligence agencies with an annual budget of about $90 billion... "

An anonymous reader shared this report from CNBC: The mastermind behind a ransomware hosting service that allegedly helped criminals collect more than 5,000 bitcoin in ransom from hundreds of victims was indicted in federal court this week, prosecutors announced Thursday. Artur Grabowski's LolekHosted service operated for about a decade and advertised itself as a haven for "everything but child porn," according to Florida prosecutors. Clients allegedly used the hosting service to deploy ransomware viruses that infected around 400 networks around the world... [That's 400 just for the Netwalker ransomware, which the announcement calls "one of the ransomware variants facilitated by LolekHosted."]

Grabowski was charged with computer fraud, wire fraud, and conspiracy to commit international money laundering. Grabowski himself is also the subject of a $21.5 million seizure order... Grabowski, a Polish national, faces a maximum sentence of 45 years, if he is ever detained and convicted.
Grabowski also "remains a fugitive," according to an announcement from the U.S. Department of Justice. It notes that the 36-year-old's site — registered in 2014 — also "facilitated" brute-force attacks, and phishing.

"Grabowski allegedly facilitated the criminal activities of LolekHosted clients by allowing clients to register accounts using false information, not maintaining Internet Protocol (IP) address logs of client servers, frequently changing the IP addresses of client servers, ignoring abuse complaints made by third parties against clients, and notifying clients of legal inquiries received from law enforcement."

Last year, Queens resident David Leacraft filed a lawsuit against Canon claiming that his Canon Pixma All-in-One printer won't scan documents unless it has ink. According to The Verge's Sean Hollister, it has quietly ended in a private settlement rather than becoming a big class-action. From the report: I just checked, and a judge already dismissed David Leacraft's lawsuit in November, without (PDF) Canon ever being forced to show what happens when you try to scan without a full ink cartridge. (Numerous Canon customer support reps wrote that it simply doesn't work.) Here's the good news: HP, an even larger and more shameless manufacturer of printers, is still possibly facing down a class-action suit for the same practice.

As Reuters reports, a judge has refused to dismiss a lawsuit by Gary Freund and Wayne McMath that alleges many HP printers won't scan or fax documents when their ink cartridges report that they've run low. Among other things, HP tried to suggest that Freund couldn't rely on the word of one of HP's own customer support reps as evidence that HP knew about the limitation. But a judge decided it was at least enough to be worth exploring in court. "Plaintiffs have plausibly alleged that HP had a duty to disclose and had knowledge of the alleged defect," wrote Judge Beth Labson Freeman, in the order denying almost all of HP's current attempts to dismiss the suit.

Interestingly, neither Canon nor HP spent any time trying to argue their printers do scan when they're low on ink in the lawsuit responses I've read. Perhaps they can't deny it? Epson, meanwhile, has an entire FAQ dedicated to reassuring customers that it hasn't pulled that trick since 2008. (Don't worry, Epson has other forms of printer enshittification.) HP does seem to be covering its rear in one way. The company's original description on Amazon for the Envy 6455e claimed that you could scan things "whenever". But when I went back now to check the same product page, it now reads differently: HP no longer claims this printer can scan "whenever" you want it to. Now, we wait to see whether the case can clear the bars needed to potentially become a big class-action trial, or whether it similarly settles like Canon, or any number of other outcomes.

Pornhub, along with several other members and activists in the adult industry are suing Texas to block the state's impending law that would require age verification to view adult content. Motherboard reports: The complaint was filed on August 4 in US District Court for the Western District of Texas, and the law will take effect on September 1 unless the court agrees to block it. Governor Greg Abbott passed HB 1181 into law in June. The plaintiffs, including Pornhub, adult industry advocacy group Free Speech Coalition, and several other site operators and industry members, claim that the law violates both the Constitution of the United States and the federal Communications Decency Act.

In the complaint, the plaintiffs write that the act employs "the least effective and yet also the most restrictive means of accomplishing Texas' stated purpose of allegedly protecting minors," and that minors can easily use VPNs or Tor; on-device content filtering would be a better method of restricting access to porn for children, they write. "But such far more effective and far less restrictive means don't really matter to Texas, whose true aim is not to protect minors but to squelch constitutionally protected free speech that the State disfavors."

Under the law, porn sites would be required to display a "Texas Health and Human Services Warning" on their websites in 14-point font or larger font, in addition to age verification. "Texas could easily spread its ideological, anti-pornography message through public service announcements and the like without foisting its viewpoint upon others through mandated statements that are a mix of falsehoods, discredited pseudo-science, and baseless accusations," the complaint says.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Last Friday, Illinois became one of the few states to pass an anti-doxxing law, making it possible for victims to sue attackers who "intentionally" publish their personally identifiable information with intent to harm or harass them. (Doxxing is sometimes spelled "doxing.") The Civil Liability for Doxing Act, which takes effect on January 1, 2024, passed after a unanimous vote. It allows victims to recover damages and to request "a temporary restraining order, emergency order of protection, or preliminary or permanent injunction to restrain and prevent the disclosure or continued disclosure of a person's personally identifiable information or sensitive personal information."

It's the first law of its kind in the Midwest, the Daily Herald reported, and is part of a push by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to pass similar laws at the state and federal levels. ADL's Midwest regional director, David Goldenberg, told the Daily Herald that ADL has seen doxxing become "over the past few years" an effective way of "weaponizing" the Internet. ADL has helped similar laws pass in Maryland, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington. [...] The law does not involve criminal charges but imposes civil liability on individuals who dox any Illinois residents. Actions can also be brought against individuals when "any element" of a doxxing offense occurs in the state. [...]

Goldenberg told Ars that the Illinois law was written to emphasize not how information was found and gathered by people seeking to dox others, but on what they did with the information and how much harm they caused. The law might need less updating as the Internet evolves if it doesn't focus on the methods used to mine personally identifiable information. "The reality is that those who are using the Internet to spread hate, to spread misinformation, to do bad are pretty nimble and technology changes on a near daily basis," Goldenberg told Ars. "The law was crafted in a way that ensures that if technology changes, and people use new technologies to share someone's personally identifiable information with the intent to do harm and that harm actually happens, this law remains relevant."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Variety: Zoom changed its terms of service to say that it won't use any customer content -- at all -- in training generative artificial intelligence models. The update, which the videoconference company announced Friday, comes after observers raised the alarm about a recent change in Zoom's TOS that appeared to grant the company royalty-free rights in perpetuity for customer video calls and presentations for the purposes of training AI models. In its initial response on Aug. 7, Zoom said it doesn't use any customer audio, video or chat content for training AI "without consent." Now it says it will not use such content in any way related to generative AI development.

In a statement Friday appended its its earlier blog post, Zoom said, "Following feedback received regarding Zoom's recently updated terms of service, particularly related to our new generative artificial intelligence features, Zoom has updated our terms of service and the below blog post to make it clear that Zoom does not use any of your audio, video, chat, screen-sharing, attachments or other communications like customer content (such as poll results, whiteboard, and reactions) to train Zoom's or third-party artificial intelligence models." Zoom said it also updated in-product notices to reflect the change. According to Zoom's revised terms of service, the company still owns all rights to what it calls "service-generated data." That comprises telemetry data, product-usage data, diagnostic data and similar data "that Zoom collects or generates in connection with your or your End Users' use of the Services or Software," the terms of service say.

A U.S. judge revoked Sam Bankman-Fried's bail due to probable cause that he tampered with witnesses at least twice. U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan rejected a defense request to delay SBF's detention pending appeal of the bail revocation. Reuters reports: The decision could complicate Bankman-Fried's efforts to prepare for trial, where the 31-year-old former billionaire faces charges of having stolen billions of dollars in FTX customer funds to plug losses at his Alameda Research hedge fund. Bankman-Fried has pleaded not guilty. He was led out of the courtroom by members of the U.S. Marshals Service in handcuffs after removing his shoelaces, jacket and tie and emptying his pockets.

His parents, both law professors at Stanford University, were present in the courtroom's audience. His mother, Barbara Fried, nodded to him in tears as he left. His father, Joseph Bankman, placed his hand over his heart as he watched his son be led away. Bankman-Fried has been largely confined to his parents' Palo Alto, California, home on $250 million bond since his December 2022 arrest.

The Detroit police chief said he's setting new policies on the use of facial-recognition technology after a woman who was eight months pregnant said she was wrongly charged with robbery and carjacking in a case that was ultimately dismissed by prosecutors. From a report: The technology, which was used on images taken from gas station video, produced leads in the case but was followed by "very poor" police work, Chief James White said. "We want to ensure that nothing like this happens again," White said Wednesday. His comments came two days after the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan announced a lawsuit on behalf of Porcha Woodruff, a 32-year-old Black woman, who was arrested in February while trying to get children ready for school. There have been two similar lawsuits against Detroit.

Woodruff was identified as a suspect in a January robbery and carjacking through facial-recognition technology. She denied any role. The Wayne County prosecutor's office said charges later were dropped because the victim did not appear in court. White said his officers will not be allowed "to use facial-recognition-derived images in a photographic lineup. Period." He said two captains must review arrest warrants when facial technology is used in a case, among other changes. The new policies will be presented to the Detroit Police Board of Commissioners.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: A group of teenage hackers managed to breach some of the world's biggest tech firms last year by exploiting systemic security weaknesses in US telecom carriers and the business supply chain, a US government review of the incidents has found, in what is a cautionary tale for America's critical infrastructure. The Department of Homeland Security-led review of the hacks, which was shared exclusively with CNN, determined US regulators should penalize telecom firms with lax security practices and Congress should consider funding programs to steer American youth away from cybercrime. The investigation of the hacks -- which hit companies like Microsoft and Samsung -- found that, in general, it was far too easy for the cybercriminals to intercept text messages that corporate employees use to log into systems. [...]

"It is highly concerning that a loose band of hackers, including a number of teenagers, was able to consistently break into the best-defended companies in the world," Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told CNN in an interview, adding: "We are seeing a rise in juvenile cybercrime." After a series of high-profile cyberattacks marked his first four months in office, President Joe Biden established the DHS-led Cyber Safety Review Board in 2021 to study the root causes of major hacking incidents and inform policy on how to prevent the next big cyberattack. Staffed by senior US cybersecurity officials and executives at major technology firms like Google, the board does not have regulatory authority, but its recommendations could shape legislation in Congress and future directives from federal agencies. [...]

The board's first review, released in July 2022, concluded that it could take a decade to eradicate a vulnerability in software used by thousands of corporations and government agencies worldwide. The second review, to be released Thursday, focused on a band of young criminal hackers based in the United Kingdom and Brazil that last year launched a series of attacks on Microsoft, Uber, Samsung and identity management firm Okta, among others. The audacious hacks were often followed by extortion demands and taunts by hackers who seemed to be out for publicity as much as they were for money. The hacking group, known as Lapsus$, alarmed US officials because they were able to embarrass major tech firms with robust security programs. "If richly resourced cybersecurity programs were so easily breached by a loosely organized threat actor group, which included several juveniles, how can organizations expect their programs to perform against well-resourced cybercrime syndicates and nation-state actors?" the Cyber Safety Review Board's new report states. Lapsus$, as well as other hacking groups, conduct "SIM-swapping" attacks that can take over a victim's phone number by having it transferred to another device, thereby gaining access to 2FA security codes and personal messages. These can then be used to reveal login credentials and access financial information.

"The board wants telecom carriers to report SIM-swapping attacks to US regulatory agencies, and for those agencies to penalize carriers when they don't adequately protect customers from such attacks," reports CNN.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: President Joe Biden signed an executive order Wednesday to block and regulate high-tech U.S.-based investments going toward China -- a move the administration said was targeted but it also reflected an intensifying competition between the world's two biggest powers. The order covers advanced computer chips, micro electronics, quantum information technologies and artificial intelligence. Senior administration officials said that the effort stemmed from national security goals rather than economic interests, and that the categories it covered were intentionally narrow in scope. The order seeks to blunt China's ability to use U.S. investments in its technology companies to upgrade its military while also preserving broader levels of trade that are vital for both nations' economies.

The officials previewing the order said that China has exploited U.S. investments to support the development of weapons and modernize its military. The new limits were tailored not to disrupt China's economy, but they would complement the export controls on advanced computer chips from last year that led to pushback by Chinese officials. The Treasury Department, which would monitor the investments, will announce a proposed rulemaking with definitions that would conform to the presidential order and go through a public comment process. The goals of the order would be to have investors notify the U.S. government about certain types of transactions with China as well as to place prohibitions on some investments. Officials said the order is focused on areas such as private equity, venture capital and joint partnerships in which the investments could possibly give countries of concern such as China additional knowledge and military capabilities. The Chinese Ministry of Commerce responded in a statement early Thursday that it has "serious concern" about the order and "reserves the right to take measures."

"We hope the U.S. side respects the laws of the market economy and the principle of fair competition, does not artificially obstruct global economic and trade exchanges and cooperation and does not put up obstacles for the recovery and growth of the world economy."

The Chinese Ministry of Commerce also said the executive order "seriously deviates from the market economy and fair competition principles the United States has always advocated. It affects the normal business decisions of enterprises, disrupts the international economic and trade order and seriously disrupts the security of global industrial and supply chains."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Imagine being able to sit behind a hacker and observe them take control of a computer and play around with it. That's pretty much what two security researchers did thanks to a large network of computers set up as a honeypot for hackers. The researchers deployed several Windows servers deliberately exposed on the internet, set up with Remote Desktop Protocol, or RDP, meaning that hackers could remotely control the compromised servers as if they were regular users, being able to type and click around. Thanks to these honeypots, the researchers were able to record 190 million events and 100 hours of video footage of hackers taking control of the servers and performing a series of actions on them, including reconnaissance, installing malware that mines cryptocurrencies, using Android emulators to conduct click fraud, brute-forcing passwords for other computers, hiding the hackers' identities by using the honeypot as a starting point for another attack, and even watching porn. The researchers said a hacker successfully logging into its honeypot can generate "tens of events" alone.

The "Rangers," according to the two, carefully explored the hacked computers, doing reconnaissance, sometimes changing passwords, and mostly leaving it at that. "Our hypothesis is that they are evaluating the system they compromised so that another profile of attacker can come back later," the researchers wrote in a blog post published on Wednesday to accompany their talk. The "Barbarians" use the compromised honeypot computers to try and bruteforce into other computers using known lists of hacked usernames and passwords, sometimes using tools such as Masscan, a legitimate tool that allows users to port-scan the whole internet, according to the researchers. The "Wizards" use the honeypot as a platform to connect to other computers in an attempt to hide their trails and the actual origin of their attacks. According to what Bergeron and Bilodeau wrote in their blog post, defensive teams can gather threat intelligence on these hackers, and "reach deeper into compromised infrastructure."

According to Bergeron and Bilodeau, the "Thieves" have the clear goal of monetizing their access to these honeypots. They may do that by installing crypto miners, programs to perform click fraud or generate fake traffic to websites they control, and selling access to the honeypot itself to other hackers. Finally, the "Bards" are hackers with very little or almost no skills. These hackers used the honeypots to use Google to search for malware, and even watch porn. These hackers sometimes used cell phones instead of desktop or laptop computers to connect to the honeypots. Bergeron and Bilodeau said they believe this type of hacker sometimes uses the compromised computers to download porn, something that may be banned or censored in their country of origin. In one case, a hacker "was downloading the porn and sending it to himself via Telegram. So basically circumventing a country-level ban on porn," Bilodeau told TechCrunch. "What I think [the hacker] does with this then is download it in an internet cafe, using Telegram, and then he can put it on USB keys, and he can sell it." These types of honeypots could be useful for law enforcement or cybersecurity defensive teams. "Law enforcement could lawfully intercept the RDP environments used by ransomware groups and collect intelligence in recorded sessions for use in investigations," the researchers wrote in the blog post. "Blue teams for their part can consume the [Indicators of Compromise] and roll out their own traps in order to further protect their organization, as this will give them extensive documentation of opportunistic attackers' tradecraft."

Moreover, if hackers start to suspect that the servers they compromise may be honeypots, they will have to change strategies and decide whether the risks of being caught are worth it, "leading to a slow down which will ultimately benefit everyone," according to the researchers.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: Open source project Moq (pronounced "Mock") has drawn sharp criticism for quietly including a controversial dependency in its latest release. Distributed on the NuGet software registry, Moq sees over 100,000 downloads on any given day, and has been downloaded over 476 million times over the course of its lifetime. [...] Last week, one of Moq's owners, Daniel Cazzulino (kzu), who also maintains the SponsorLink project, added SponsorLink to Moq versions 4.20.0 and above. This move sent shock waves across the open source ecosystem largely for two reasons -- while Cazzulino has every right to change his project Moq, he did not notify the user base prior to bundling the dependency, and SponsorLink DLLs contain obfuscated code, making it is hard to reverse engineer, and not quite "open source."

"It seems that starting from version 4.20, SponsorLink is included," Germany-based software developer Georg Dangl reported referring to Moq's 4.20.0 release. "This is a closed-source project, provided as a DLL with obfuscated code, which seems to at least scan local data (git config?) and sends the hashed email of the current developer to a cloud service." The scanning capability is part of the .NET analyzer tool that runs during the build process, and is hard to disable, warns Dangl. "I can understand the reasoning behind it, but this is honestly pretty scary from a privacy standpoint."

SponsorLink describes itself as a means to integrate GitHub Sponsors into your libraries so that "users can be properly linked to their sponsorship to unlock features or simply get the recognition they deserve for supporting your project." GitHub user Mike (d0pare) decompiled the DLLs, and shared a rough reconstruction of the source code. The library, according to the analyst, "spawns external git process to get your email." It then calculates a SHA-256 hash of the email addresses and sends it to SponsorLink's CDN: hxxps://cdn.devlooped[.]com/sponsorlink. "Honestly Microsoft should blacklist this package working with the NuGet providers," writes Austin-based developer Travis Taylor. "The author can't be trusted. This was an incredibly stupid move that's just created a ton of work for lots of people." Following the backlash, Cazzulino updated the SponsorLink project's README with a lengthy "Privacy Considerations" section that clarifies that no actual email addresses, just their hashes, are being collected.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ExtremeTech: Intel has introduced a telemetry collection service by default in the latest beta driver for its Arc GPUs. You can opt out of it, but we all know most people just click "yes" to everything during a software installation. Intel's release notes for the drivers don't mention this change to how its drivers work, which is a curious omission. News of Intel adding telemetry collection to its drivers is a significant change to how its GPU drivers work. Intel has even given this new collation routine a cute name -- the Intel Computing Improvement Program. Gee, that sounds pretty wonderful. We want to improve our computing, so let's dive into the details briefly.

According to TechPowerUp, which discovered the change, Intel has created a landing page for the program that explains what is collected and what isn't. At a high level, it states, "This program uses information about your computer's performance to make product improvements that may benefit you in the future." Though that sounds innocuous, Intel provides a long list of the types of data it collects, many unrelated to your computer's performance. Those include the types of websites you visit, which Intel says are dumped into 30 categories and logged without URLs or information that identifies you, including how long and how often you visit certain types of sites. It also collects information on "how you use your computer" but offers no details. It will also identify "Other devices in your computing environment." Numerous performance-related data points are also captured, such as your CPU model, display resolution, how much memory you have, and, oddly, your laptop's average battery life. The good news is that Intel allows you to opt out of this program, which is not the case with Nvidia. According to TechPowerUp, they don't even ask for permission! As for AMD, they not only give you a choice to opt out but they also explain what data they're collecting.

DARPA, the Pentagon agency that funds moonshot technology innovations, is hosting a two-year competition for artificial intelligence experts to create new ways to bolster the world's cybersecurity. From a report: The competition launches Wednesday at the cybersecurity conference Black Hat in Las Vegas. It asks participants to create tools that can be used by anyone to help identify and fix holes in software to keep hackers from exploiting them. It will dole out a total of $18.5 million to winners in different categories and will formally conclude at the Def Con hacker conference in Las Vegas in August 2025.

In a call to reporters Tuesday previewing the competition, Arati Prabhakar, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said it was "a clarion call for all kinds of creative people and organizations to bolster the security of critical software that American families and businesses and all of our society relies on." U.S. organizations have been battered by hackers in recent years. During the Biden administration alone, federal agencies have been repeatedly breached by hackers allegedly working for Chinese and Russian intelligence services, which often find creative ways to break into common software programs and then use that access to spy on government activity around the world.