Lifeboat Foundation

Much too easy: Planting a two-dollar spy chip on hardware with a technique that can be pulled off on a less than $200 budget? Yet that was the work of a proof in concept investigation by a security researcher and tech-watching sites were discussing the story on Monday.

Turns out you can slip a spy chip into any hardware for no more than $198 to $200, said reports. The spotlight was on security researcher Monta Elkins, Hacker-in-Chief, FoxGuard Solutions. He has a proof-of-concept version of a hardware implant.

John Dunn, Naked Security, talked about the chip as bad news for security were it to happen. “In fact, this has already happened as part of a project by researcher Monta Elkins, designed to prove that this sort of high-end hardware hack is no longer the preserve of nation-states.”

The National Security Agency develops advanced hacking tools in-house for both offense and defense—which you could probably guess even if some notable examples hadn’t leaked in recent years. But on Tuesday at the RSA security conference in San Francisco, the agency demonstrated Ghidra, a refined internal tool that it has chosen to open source. And while NSA cybersecurity adviser Rob Joyce called the tool a “contribution to the nation’s cybersecurity community” in announcing it at RSA, it will no doubt be used far beyond the United States.

No one’s better at hacking than the NSA. And now one of its powerful tools is available to everyone for free.

There’s plenty of malware that turns victims’ computers into zombified servants. A new strain is using some surprising — and completely legitimate — software to do it.

The threats of cyberattack and hypersonic missiles are two examples of easily foreseeable challenges to our national security posed by rapidly developing technology. It is by no means certain that we will be able to cope with those two threats, let alone the even more complicated and unknown challenges presented by the general onrush of technology — the digital revolution or so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution — that will be our future for the next few decades.

Technology is about to upend our entire national security infrastructure.

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Classical computers struggle to crack modern encryption. But quantum computers using Shor’s Algorithm make short work of RSA cryptography. Find out how.

Cybercriminals are zeroing in on the managed service providers that handle computer systems for local governments and medical clinics.

On July 3, employees at Arbor Dental in Longview, Washington, noticed glitches in their computers and couldn’t view X-rays. Arbor was one of dozens of dental clinics in Oregon and Washington stymied by a ransomware attack that disrupted their business and blocked access to patients’ records.

But the hackers didn’t target the clinics directly. Instead, they infiltrated them by exploiting vulnerable cybersecurity at Portland-based PM Consultants Inc., which handled the dentists’ software updates, firewalls and data backups. Arbor’s frantic calls to PM went to voicemail, said Whitney Joy, the clinic’s office coordinator.

Quantum Xchange uses quantum technology to guard encryption keys.

Once the realm of science fiction, voice-mimicking software is now “well within the range of any lay criminal who’s got creativity to spare,” one cybersecurity expert said.

A web page pretending to offer an official application from PayPal is currently spreading a new variant of Nemty ransomware to unsuspecting users.

It appears that the operators of this file-encrypting malware are trying various distribution channels as it was recently observed as a payload from the RIG exploit kit (EK).