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Submission + - Lazy hackers don't bother phishing, just log in and run ransomware themselves (sophos.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: An investigation by Sophos has uncovered a new, lazy but effective ransomware attack where hackers brute force passwords on computers with RDP enabled, use off-the-shelf privilege escalation exploits to make themselves admins, turn off security software and then manually run fusty old versions of ransomware.

Comment Slashdot on 9/11 (Score 5, Interesting) 229

by lateral (#41512041) Attached to: Thanks For Reading: 15 Years of News For Nerds

I'll never forget September 11th 2001 on Slashdot. When I first heard the news that somebody had flown a plane into the World Trade Centre I reflexively checked the BBC website. It was unreachable - completely swamped. I checked CNN and that was swamped too. I went to Slashdot and they were reporting it and available so on-and-off I followed the story on Slashdot and on TV all day.

By the evening on the TV they had already gathered their pundits and reduced the days events to a continuous 10 second loop of a plane hitting a building. It was already starting to look like a music video.

Meanwhile on slashdot there were real conversations going on with real people who had been there, seen it or been affected by it. I remember one comment in particular - somebody wrote about psychologists being dispatched (volunteering I think) to go to school bus stops to tell some of the waiting kids that their parents were dead.

L.

Comment Come on people (Score 1) 549

by lateral (#36398632) Attached to: Apple Rips Off Rejected App, Says Wireless Sync Developer

This is an obvious feature to put into the Apple feature set. You think the Apple devs were sat around wondering what to do and this obvious-thing-to-do-next app hits the appstore and they're blind-sided? I think not. They just don't want another app arriving sooner and stealing their WWDC thunder. It's their playground.

And as for stealing the logo, give me a break! Both the developer and Apple both took the existing Apple logo for 'sync' and the existing Apple logo for 'wireless' and put them together. Not only is that an obvious thing to do it's the *only* sensible thing to do. What else would a good designer do but leverage the existing affordance in both those symbols?

L
Earth

New Fish Species Discovered 4.5 Miles Under the Ocean 96

Posted by Soulskill from the how-does-it-taste dept.
eldavojohn writes "The University of Aberdeen's Oceanlab (a partner in the recent census of marine life) has discovered a new snailfish. That might not sound very exciting, unless you consider that its habitat is an impressive four and a half miles below the ocean's surface (video). If my calculations are correct, that's over ten and a half thousand PSI, or about seventy-three million Pascals. The videos and pictures are a couple years old, as the team has traveled around Japan, South America and New Zealand to ascertain the biodiversity of these depths. The group hopes to eventually bring specimens to the surface. It seems the deepest parts of the ocean, once thought to be devoid of life, are actually home to some organisms. As researchers build better technology for underwater exploration, tales of yore containing unimaginable monsters seem a little more realistic than before."
Windows

Microsoft Kills Support For XP SP2 315

Posted by timothy from the too-soon? dept.
Trailrunner7 writes "Microsoft's announcement this week that it is preparing to end support for machines running Windows XP SP2 not only represents a challenge for the thousands of businesses still running SP2, but also is the end of an era for both Microsoft and its customers. It wasn't until 2004 that the final release of XP SP2 hit the streets, but when it did, it represented a huge step forward in security for Windows users. It wasn't necessarily the feature set that mattered as much as the fact that the protections were enabled by default and taken out of the users' hands."
Image

Google Street View Shoots the Same Woman 43 Times 106

Posted by samzenpus from the get-your-face-out-there dept.
Geoffrey.landis writes "Terry Southgate discovered that his wife Wendy appears on the Google Street View of his neighborhood not once or twice but a whopping 43 times. From the article: 'It seems as if the Street View car simply followed the same route as Wendy and Trixie. However, Wendy was a little suspicious that the car was doing something on the "tricksie" side. Several of the Street View shots show Wendy looking with some concern towards the car that was, well, to put it politely, crawling along the curb. "I didn't know what it was doing. It was just driving round very, very slowly," Wendy told the Sun.' The next best thing to being a movie star — a Street View star!"
Space

Dwarf Planets Accumulate In Outer Solar System 93

Posted by kdawson from the potato-radius dept.
An anonymous reader tips a piece in Australian Geographic indicating that Pluto may be in for another demotion, as researchers work to define dwarf planets more exactly. "[Australian researchers] now argue that the radius which defines a dwarf planet should instead be from 200–300 km, depending on whether the object is made of ice or rock. They base their smaller radius on the limit at which objects naturally form a spherical rather than potato-like shape because of 'self-gravity.' Icy objects less than 200 km (or rocky objects less than 300 km) across are likely to be potato shapes, while objects larger than this are spherical. ... They call this limit the 'potato radius' ... [One researcher is quoted] 'I have no problem with there being hundreds of dwarf planets eventually.'"
It's funny. Laugh.

Sophos Releases Klingon Language Version 94

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the a-for-effort dept.
Bantu1 writes to mention an attention grab by anti-virus company Sophos, which is now offering a Klingon language version of their popular anti-virus software. Now Qo'nos too can be completely safe from the storm. If only we could see a Sophos logo in the next Paramount endeavor, the cycle would be complete.

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