Researchers first disclosed details on the data wiper on Wednesday. ESET
reported that the wiper was installed on hundreds of machines in Ukraine, and followed
distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks targeting Ukrainian websites earlier in the day.
In the attacks Wednesday, Symantec researchers said that the destructive malware was deployed against defense organizations as well as financial, aviation and IT services companies. And ransomware was a component of the attacks in some cases.
"As with the wiper, scheduled tasks were used to deploy the
ransomware," the researchers said. "File names used by the ransomware included client.exe, cdir.exe, cname.exe, connh.exe, and intpub.exe." Notably, "it appears likely that the ransomware was used as a decoy or distraction from the wiper attacks," the Symantec researchers said, posting an
image of a presumably fake ransom note used with the ransomware.
"After a week of defacements and increasing DDoS attacks, the proliferation of sabotage operations through wiper malware is an expected and regrettable escalation," Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade, the researcher at SentinelOne wrote.
>> Read more. The report published today, which cited four sources familiar with the matter, was dismissed by a White House spokesperson. However, the NBC News report itself specified that cyberattacks would be either covert or clandestine military operations, and the U.S. would never publicly acknowledge the activities.
The proposals include the use of
U.S. "cyberweapons" in an unprecedented manner — "on a scale never before contemplated" — to target Russia's military, according to the NBC News report. Agencies including U.S. Cyber Command, the NSA and the CIA would be among those with a role in the operation, according to the report.
Cyber operations are a "low-cost way to
inflict inconvenience" on an adversary, said John Bambenek, principal threat hunter at Netenrich.
"But in the absence of conventional military force, it will,
at best, slow Russia down," Bambenek said. "This provides the opportunity to look like we are 'doing something,' without the consequences of doing what would be effective to counter this invasion."
>> Read more. [3] In its deep-dive, two-hour-plus video explanation of how it sees
the metaverse operating in the future, Meta offered 2,000-plus online listeners both high-level descriptions and details on several specific areas of this proposed new world.
Personalized assistants that understand people and let them control the flow of conversation can make peoples' lives easier and pave the way to smarter devices — at home or on the go. But today, in 2022, they generally still leave a lot to be desired in terms of understanding requests, speed and accuracy of information.
"Assistants today — whether via voice or chat — are generally underwhelming,"
Meta conversational AI tech lead Alborz Geramifard said. "There are several reasons why, starting with how they are engineered. We're sharing the challenges developers and engineers face when attempting to build useful assistants, and how we can navigate these challenges as we build for the metaverse."
Zuckerberg's hope for his company is to build
a personal assistant that puts Siri, Alexa, and Google to shame. While Meta hasn't picked out a name for it yet, Zuckerberg said Meta wants its voice assistant to be more intuitive:
picking up contextual clues in conversations, along with other data points that it can collect about our bodies, such as where our gaze is going, facial expressions and hand gestures.
>> Read more. 
No comments:
Post a Comment