British Airways hackers used same tools behind Ticketmaster breach

https://www.engadget.com/2018/09/11/british-airways-hackers-used-tools-from-ticketmaster-breach/



Reuters/Hannah McKay

The British Airways web hack wasn’t an isolated incident. Analysts at RiskIQ have reported that the breach was likely perpetrated by Magecart, the same criminal enterprise that infiltrated Ticketmaster UK. In both cases, the culprits used similar virtual card skimming JavaScript to swipe data from payment forms. For the British Airways attack, it was just a matter of customizing the scripts and targeting the company directly instead of going through compromised third-party customers.

RiskIQ also suspected that BA may have fallen victim earlier than claimed. While the air carrier said the data was compromised starting August 21st, Magecart received the SSL certificate used in the hack (to pose as a legitimate operation) on August 15th. Unless it simply waited to act, there’s a chance it could have been active on the 15th, if not earlier.

It may be difficult to catch the intruders. The hacks have relied on service providers in Lithuania and Romania, and there’s a good possibility the culprits are located somewhere else. This shows that the attacks are likely part of a coordinated campaign, however, and suggests that you could see comparable high-profile breaches in the near future.

via Engadget http://www.engadget.com

September 11, 2018 at 01:33PM

VW plans to use 3D printing for mass production

https://www.autoblog.com/2018/09/11/vw-3d-printing-mass-production-cars/



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September 11, 2018 at 12:48PM

Watch the bizarre sight of BMW Motorrad’s self-riding motorcycle

https://www.autoblog.com/2018/09/11/bmw-self-riding-autonomous-motorcycle-video/



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September 11, 2018 at 01:23PM

Data Confirm Semiautomatic Rifles Linked to More Deaths, Injuries

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/data-confirm-semiautomatic-rifles-linked-to-more-deaths-injuries/


If a shooter uses a semiautomatic rifle instead of another type of gun, it appears to roughly double the chances of victims being wounded and killed.


Researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) came to this conclusion about “active shooters”—people who attempt to kill or hurt others with a gun in a populated area—in a paper published Tuesday. The work analyzed more than 200 such incidents in the U.S.


A 1994 federal assault weapons ban prohibited manufacturing, transferring or possessing certain semiautomatic firearms for civilian use. But that legislation expired in 2004, and gun control advocates have since been lobbying hard to reintroduce such limitations alongside other more expansive gun reform.


Semiautomatic rifles, which include assault weapons like the AR-15 and its variants, are relatively easy to operate and capable of firing very quickly. They can be used with large magazines and high-velocity ammunition, and are infamous for causing egregious damage to soft tissue and bone. In recent years mass shooters wielded them in Aurora, Colo., Orlando, Fla., and Newtown, Conn., among other places. Yet there had been no comprehensive assessment of injuries from the different types of firearms used in such situations, notes Adil Haider, a trauma and critical care surgeon who directs the Center for Surgery and Public Health at BWH. He and his colleagues aimed to address that gap in their study, published in JAMA The Journal of the American Medical Association. “The biggest take-home message is that in an active shooter incident, an assailant with a semiautomatic rifle may be able to hurt and kill about twice the number of people compared to if they had a non-semiautomatic rifle or a handgun,” he says.


The new study from Haider and colleagues compares the number of people hurt or killed in 248 active shooter incidents from 2000 through 2017, using FBI data. The scientists cross-referenced those incidents with court records and media reports to determine whether the weapon was a semiautomatic rifle. They found about a quarter of all those shootings involved such weapons whereas the rest involved handguns, shotguns and non-semiautomatic rifles. In total, these shootings wounded almost 900 people and killed more than 700.


The researchers’ records do not include every shooting with mass casualties during that 17-year period, and the definition of “active shooter” may have missed instances of gang violence, Haider says. The JAMA analysis also did not include situations with multiple shooters or extremely large death tolls because these would skew their results, Haider says. “We wanted to make sure we were comparing like with like incidents to truly get at the question about injuries and deaths from semiautomatic rifles versus other guns with a single active shooter,” he says.


The analysis found a shooting involving a semiautomatic rifle was associated on average with five injuries versus three if a different kind of gun was used. Similarly, the presence of the semiautomatic rifle was associated with four deaths instead of two.




Credit: Amanda Montañez; Source: “Lethality of Civilian Active Shooter Incidents with and without Semiautomatic Rifles in the United States,” by Elzerie de Jager et al., in JAMA The Journal of the American Medical Association, Vol. 320, No. 10; September 11, 2018




When people were injured with semiautomatic firearms as compared with other types of guns, however, it appeared the proportion of people who eventually died was roughly equal—leading to fatalities around 44 percent of the time regardless of weapon used. Haider attributes the similar rate to the fact that in each of these incidents an active shooter would likely be shooting at close range in a confined space. Although death rates were similar when people were shot, he says, semiautomatic rifles would increase the chance of getting hit at all.


Using the FBI database of active shooters underrepresents mass shootings and other public shootings, says Philip Cook, a professor at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University who was not involved with the JAMA paper. He also believes the new BWH work has limited policy applications, because it looks at all semiautomatic rifles—instead of limiting the study to “assault weapons” as defined in the 1994 legislation. From a policy perspective, he says, “The possibility of banning all semiautomatic rifles is nil, since they are such a common type of rifle.”


The FBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but the agency has previously defined “mass shootings” as incidents with several fatalities—thus not all active shooting incidents would qualify as mass shooting events. The FBI has also said it excludes shootings that resulted primarily from gang or drug violence from its active shooter reports.

via Scientific American https://ift.tt/n8vNiX

September 11, 2018 at 10:04AM

7 Quantum Particles Act Like Billions in Weird Physics Experiment

https://www.space.com/41778-bose-einstein-laser.html



Physicists have revealed that just seven quantum particles can behave as if they were in a crowd of billions.


At larger scales, matter goes through changes, called phase transitions, in which (for example) water turns into a solid (ice) or a vapor (steam). Scientists were used to seeing this behavior in large masses of molecules, but never in such a tiny cluster.


In a new study, detailed today (Sept. 10) in the journal Nature Physics, researchers witnessed these phase transitions in systems made up of just seven light particles, or photons, which took on an exotic physical state known as a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). That’s the physical state that matter can reach at ultracold temperatures, in which particles begin to blend together and act in unison.


Because photons are packets of light, they’re made of energy, not matter, which makes the idea of them going through a phase transition strange. But back in 2010, a team of German researchers showed that light particles could be induced to behave as a BEC would, just like their matter-particle cousins.


To trap the photons, those researchers built a small mirrored chamber and filled it with a colored dye. When the light particles banged into the dye particles, the dye particles would absorb them and re-emit them, so the photons took longer to move through the chamber — effectively slowing them down. When the photons struck the chamber’s mirrored walls, the photons would bounce off without being absorbed or escaping. So the chamber was effectively a space where researchers could make photons sluggish and put them in close quarters. And in that situation, the physicists found, the photons would interact with one another like matter, and exhibit behaviors recognizable as those of a BEC.


In the more recent experiment, the researchers wanted to figure out the minimum number of photons necessary for that to happen. Using a fine-tuned laser, they pumped photons into a similar dye-filled mirror trap one at a time and observed the concoction to figure out when a BEC would emerge. They found that after an average of just seven photons, the photons formed a BEC — they began acting like one particle. That’s a new low bar for particle counts necessary for a phase transition. [The Coolest Little Particles in Nature]


“Now that it’s confirmed that ‘phase transition’ is still a useful concept in such small systems, we can explore properties in ways that would not be possible in larger systems,” lead author Robert Nyman, a physicist at Imperial College London, said in a statement.


There were some differences between the micro-BEC and phase transitions involving larger groups of particles, the researchers noted. When ice heats up past its melting point, it seems to go from solid to liquid form instantly, without any in-between stage. The same is true for most phase transitions of most chemicals. But the seven-photon BEC seemed to form a bit more gradually, the researchers said in the statement, rather than all at once.


Still, they wrote in the paper, the photon phase transition showed that even at very small scales, phase transitions are remarkably like what’s common at larger scales. Physics is physics, all the way down.


Originally published on Live Science.

via Space.com https://www.space.com

September 11, 2018 at 06:28AM

Researchers Show Off Method for Hacking Tesla’s Keyless Entry, So Turn on Two-Factor Authentication 

https://gizmodo.com/researchers-show-off-method-for-hacking-tesla-s-keyless-1828951056


Elon Musk started the day with some much-needed good news after Space X pulled off an early morning satellite launch without any troubles. The good news didn’t last long because on Monday afternoon security researchers went public with claims that Tesla’s keyless entry system is vulnerable to a spoofing hack that could give a sophisticated hacker an environmentally-friendly free ride.

Aside from being a pioneer in electric vehicles, Tesla is famous for fully embracing a digital driving experience. That includes keyless entry with a fob that is apparently hackable on the Model S using around $600 worth of equipment. Today, Wired reports that researchers at the KU Leuven University in Belgium are presenting the results of nine months of reverse-engineering work at the Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems conference in Amsterdam. They claim their technique could open the car’s door and turn on the engine, enabling an attacker to make a getaway with the car that tends to go for around six figures.

According to Wired, the researchers discovered that the Model S key fob used a 40-bit cipher to encrypt the code transmitted to the vehicle’s radio receivers. This is relatively unsophisticated in encryption terms and is, unfortunately, a limit imposed by the fob’s processing power. The researchers found they could listen in to the radio ID that’s being constantly broadcasted from the car and relay it to the target’s key fob. They then had to listen for the fob’s response and intercept two return-broadcasts. Once they had two code examples, they were able to run them through a 6-terabyte table of pre-computed keys and acquire the code they needed to break into the car in under two seconds.

Tesla has already addressed this issue with an option that should’ve been available in the first place. A software update was recently pushed out that enables a driver to add a pin code that must be entered with the key fob present in order to start the car. Anyone who owns a Tesla Model 3 that was shipped after June should be fine, according to the report. But if you own a model that shipped before that time, you should definitely turn on the two-factor authentication and contact Tesla for a replacement key fob with stronger encryption.

We reached out to Tesla for comment on the report and to ask about the cost of replacement fobs but did not receive an immediate reply.

[Wired via the Verge]

via Gizmodo https://gizmodo.com

September 10, 2018 at 06:00PM

Battle floods with this portable wall

https://www.autoblog.com/2018/09/10/battle-floods-with-this-portable-wall/



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September 10, 2018 at 06:44PM