Tag Archives: hacks

Supercomputers across Europe have fallen to cryptomining hacks

Cryptomining hacks aren’t new by any stretch, but a string of recent incidents is raising eyebrows. ZDNet reports that culprits infected multiple European supercomputers with Monero mining malware in the past week, including the University of Edinburgh’s ARCHER, five of bwHPC’scomputer clusters and most recently a cluster at Munich’s Ludwig-Maximilians University. That’s unusual by itself, but there appears to be a common thread between the hacks. Continue reading Supercomputers across Europe have fallen to cryptomining hacks

ATM ‘jackpotting’ hacks reach the US

For some ATM thieves, swiping card data involves too much patience — they’d rather just take the money and run. The US Secret Service has warned ATM makers Diebold Nixdorf and NCR that “jackpotting” hacks, where crooks force machine to cough up large sums of cash, have reached the US after years of creating problems in Asia, Europe and Mexico. The attacks have focused largely on Diebold’s front-loading Opteva ATMs in stand-alone locations, such as retail stores and drive-thrus, and have relied on an combination of malware and hardware to pull off heists.

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An Obscure App Flaw Creates Backdoors In Millions of Smartphones

FOR HACKERS, SCANNING for an open “port”—a responsive, potentially vulnerable internet connection on a would-be victim’s machine—has long been one of the most basic ways to gain a foothold in a target company or agency. As it turns out, thanks to a few popular but rarely studied apps, plenty of smartphones have open ports, too. And those little-considered connections can just as easily give hackers access to tens of millions of Android devices.

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Malware Lets a Drone Steal Data by Watching a Computer’s Blinking LED

A FEW HOURS after dark one evening earlier this month, a small quadcopter drone lifted off from the parking lot of Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba, Israel. It soon trained its built-in camera on its target, a desktop computer’s tiny blinking light inside a third-floor office nearby. The pinpoint flickers, emitting from the LED hard drive indicator that lights up intermittently on practically every modern Windows machine, would hardly arouse the suspicions of anyone working in the office after hours. But in fact, that LED was silently winking out an optical stream of the computer’s secrets to the camera floating outside.

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