Lifeboat Foundation

When you visit a website, the page can capture your IP address, but this doesn’t necessarily give the site owner enough information to individually identify you. Instead, the hack analyzes subtle features of a potential target’s browser activity to determine whether they are logged into an account for an array of services, from YouTube and Dropbox to Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, and more. Plus the attacks work against every major browser, including the anonymity-focused Tor Browser.

“If you’re an average internet user, you may not think too much about your privacy when you visit a random website,” says Reza Curtmola, one of the study authors and a computer science professor at NJIT. “But there are certain categories of internet users who may be more significantly impacted by this, like people who organize and participate in political protest, journalists, and people who network with fellow members of their minority group. And what makes these types of attacks dangerous is they’re very stealthy. You just visit the website and you have no idea that you’ve been exposed.”

The risk that government-backed hackers and cyber-arms dealers will attempt to de-anonymize web users isn’t just theoretical. Researchers have documented a number of techniques used in the wild and have witnessed situations in which attackers identified individual users, though it wasn’t clear how.

Researchers at Simon Fraser University have made a crucial breakthrough in the development of quantum technology.

Their research, published in Nature today, describes their observations of more than 150,000 silicon “T center” photon-spin qubits, an important milestone that unlocks immediate opportunities to construct massively scalable quantum computers and the quantum internet that will connect them.

Quantum computing has enormous potential to provide computing power well beyond the capabilities of today’s supercomputers, which could enable advances in many other fields, including chemistry, materials science, medicine and cybersecurity.

Microsoft warns of a large-scale AITM phishing attacks targeting over 10,000 organizations across the world.

A new data extortion group has been breaching companies to steal confidential information, threatening victims to make the files publicly available unless they pay a ransom.

The gang received the name Luna Moth and has been active since at least March in phishing campaigns that delivered remote access tools (RAT) that enable the corporate data theft.

Lee Holloway programmed internet security firm Cloudflare into being. Then he became apathetic, distant, and unpredictable—for a long time, no one could make sense of it.

Circa 2021

Finding and fixing bugs in code is a time-consuming, and often frustrating, part of everyday work for software developers. Can deep learning address this problem and help developers deliver better software, faster? In a new paper, Self-Supervised Bug Detection and Repair, presented at the 2021 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2021), we show a promising deep learning model, which we call BugLab can be taught to detect and fix bugs, without using labelled data, through a “hide and seek” game.

To find and fix bugs in code requires not only reasoning over the code’s structure but also understanding ambiguous natural language hints that software developers leave in code comments, variable names, and more. For example, the code snippet below fixes a bug in an open-source project in GitHub.

Continue reading “Finding and fixing bugs with deep learning” »

A network in which data transmission is perfectly secure against hacking? If physicists have their way, this will become reality one day with the help of the quantum mechanical phenomenon known as entanglement. For entangled particles, the rule is: If you measure the state of one of the particles, then you automatically know the state of the other. It makes no difference how far away the entangled particles are from each other. This is an ideal state of affairs for transmitting information over long distances in a way that renders eavesdropping impossible.

A team led by physicists Prof. Harald Weinfurter from LMU and Prof. Christoph Becher from Saarland University have now coupled two atomic quantum memories over a 33-kilometer-long fiber optic connection. This is the longest distance so far that anyone has ever managed entanglement via a telecom fiber.

The quantum mechanical entanglement is mediated via photons emitted by the two quantum memories. A decisive step was the researchers’ shifting of the wavelength of the emitted light particles to a value that is used for conventional telecommunications. “By doing this, we were able to significantly reduce the loss of photons and create entangled quantum memories even over long distances of fiber optic cable,” says Weinfurter.

North Korean-backed hackers are targeting hospitals and healthcare organizations in the U.S. with ransomware, a trio of government agencies that includes the Federal Bureau of Investigation warn in a cybersecurity alert.

Circa 2018

Debugging code is drudgery. But SapFix, a new AI hybrid tool created by Facebook engineers, can significantly reduce the amount of time engineers spend on debugging, while also speeding up the process of rolling out new software. SapFix can automatically generate fixes for specific bugs, and then propose them to engineers for approval and deployment to production.

SapFix has been used to accelerate the process of shipping robust, stable code updates to millions of devices using the Facebook Android app — the first such use of AI-powered testing and debugging tools in production at this scale. We intend to share SapFix with the engineering community, as it is the next step in the evolution of automating debugging, with the potential to boost the production and stability of new code for a wide range of companies and research organizations.

Continue reading “Finding and fixing software bugs automatically with SapFix and Sapienz” »