Month: November 2019

For well over a decade, identity thieves, phishers, and other online scammers have created a black market of stolen and aggregated consumer data that they used to break into people’s accounts, steal their money, or impersonate them. In October, dark web researcher Vinny Troia found one such trove sitting exposed and easily accessible on an unsecured server, comprising 4 terabytes of personal information—about 1.2 billion records in all.

While the collection is impressive for its sheer volume, the data doesn’t include sensitive information like passwords, credit card numbers, or Social Security numbers. It does, though, contain profiles of hundreds of millions of people that include home and cell phone numbers, associated social media profiles like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Github, work histories seemingly scraped from LinkedIn, almost 50 million unique phone numbers, and 622 million unique email addresses.

“It’s bad that someone had this whole thing wide open,” Troia says. “This is the first time I’ve seen all these social media profiles collected and merged with user profile information into a single database on this scale. From the perspective of an attacker, if the goal is to impersonate people or hijack their accounts, you have names, phone numbers, and associated account URLs. That’s a lot of information in one place to get you started.”

Troia found the server while looking for exposures with fellow security researcher Bob Diachenko on the web service Shodan, a search engine that indexes devices that are accessible from the internet. The IP address for the server simply traced to Google Cloud Services, so Troia doesn’t know who amassed the data stored there. He also has no way of knowing if anyone else found and downloaded the data before he did, but notes that the server was easy to find and access. WIRED checked six people’s personal email addresses against the data set; four were there and returned accurate profiles. Troia reported the exposure to contacts at the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Within a few hours, he says, someone pulled the server and the exposed data offline. The FBI declined to comment for this story.

Of Unknown Origin

The data Troia discovered seems to be four datasets cobbled together. Three were labeled, perhaps by the server owner, as coming from a data broker based in San Francisco called People Data Labs. PDL claims on its website to have data on over 1.5 billion people for sale, including almost 260 million in the United States. It also touts more than a billion personal email addresses, more than 420 million LinkedIn URLs, more than a billion Facebook URLs and IDs, and more than 400 million phone numbers, including more than 200 million valid US cellphone numbers.

PDL cofounder Sean Thorne says that his company doesn’t own the server that hosted the exposed data, an assessment Troia agrees with based on his limited visibility. It’s also unclear how the records got there in the first place.

“The owner of this server likely used one of our enrichment products, along with a number of other data enrichment or licensing services,” says Sean Thorne, co-founder of People Data Labs. “Once a customer receives data from us, or any other data providers, the data is on their servers and the security is their responsibility. We perform free security audits, consultations, and workshops with the majority of our customers.”

Troia thinks it’s unlikely that People Data Labs was breached, since it would be simpler to just buy data from the company. An attacker on a budget could also sign up for a free trial PDL advertises that offers 1,000 consumer profiles per month. “One-thousand profiles to 1,000 burner accounts and you’ve got pretty much all of it,” Troia points out.

One of the other data sets is labeled “OXY” and every record in it also contains an “OXY” tag. Troia speculates that this may refer to Wyoming-based data broker Oxydata, which claims to have 4 TB of data, including 380 million profiles on consumers and employees in 85 industries and 195 countries around the world. Martynas Simanauskas, Oxydata director of business to business sales, emphasized that Oxydata hasn’t suffered a breach, and that it does not label its data with an “OXY” tag.

GIFs are fun and can be deployed everywhere from your Twitter feed to your workplace Slack conversations—here’s how you can create them straight from your phone’s camera, with or without extra app help, turning any moment from your life into an instantly shareable, bite-sized digital animation.

If an iPhone is your cell phone of choice, remember you’ve got Live Photos built right in—even if you’ve never gotten around to making much use of them (and presuming you bought an iPhone launched in 2015 or later). The feature is enabled or disabled via the Live Photos button (the concentric circles icon) on the Camera shutter screen.

Assuming you’ve captured a bunch of photos as Live Photos, with three seconds’ worth of frames in total, they can be converted into GIFs from the Photos app on your phone. With the photo on screen, swipe up to choose either Loop (the animation repeats) or Bounce (the animation goes forwards then backwards) as your animation choice.

Tap Share (the arrow jumping out of the box) and the GIF format is used by default—you don’t need the help of any extra apps. From the Media Types heading under Albums in Photos, you can see all the Live Photos you’ve turned into GIFs, and share them again.

For a little more control over the process, Lively for iOS is one of the best tools in the business: You can trim the GIF, change its speed, and adjust the frame size, but you do need to pay $3 to export the finished animations without a watermark.

Over on Google Pixel phones (2017 and later), Live Photos is called Motion Photos, but the principle and the clip length (three seconds) is the same. On the latest version of the Google Camera app, you tap the arrow at the side of the shutter screen to choose whether Motion Photos are enabled, disabled, or applied automatically (so when you keep the camera steady enough for long enough).

Once a Motion Photo has been captured and is up on screen in the Google Photos app, exporting it couldn’t be much easier: Tap the Menu button (three dots) then choose Export and GIF (if you can’t see the Export option, it’s not a Motion Photo). The GIF gets saved as a new image in the Google Photos app, ready for sharing.

Animated snaps are called Motion Photos on flagship Samsung Galaxy handsets (2016 and later) too. To make sure you’re recording Motion Photos, tap the cog icon on the camera shutter screen, and you’ll find the Motion photo toggle switch.

Unfortunately there’s no easy way to convert these Motion Photos to GIFs inside the on-board software, though the option was available on older software. You can export them as videos—tap a Motion Photo when it’s playing, then the Menu button (three dots), then Save video.

What you can do is build GIFs from video captured on your Samsung Galaxy phone, and that includes Motion Photos that you’ve exported as videos as we’ve just explained. Start playing a video in the Samsung Gallery app, then pause it, then tap the GIF button (top right)—you get options for trimming or changing the speed of the clip before you share it.

Plenty of third-party apps will take on GIF creation duties for you, and give you a bit more control over the finished product than the built-in options do too. Giphy for iOS and Android, for example: Tap the Plus icon at the bottom, then tap and hold on the Shutter button to make your GIF. You can drop a bunch of fun stickers on top and Giphy can also convert videos captured on your phone.

Google actually has a separate app called Motion Stills for Android and iOS that can capture GIFs directly from the camera, as well as process your Motion Photos (or Live Photos on iPhones). If you need extra features like text or stickers on top of your GIFs, it’s worth installing.

Elsewhere GIF Maker for iOS is one of the best options for Apple phones, though you’ll find some of the features limited until you pay $5 for the premium version—it can capture GIFs straight from the camera or convert existing photos and videos, throw on a bunch of effects and overlays, and more besides.

GIF Maker for Android (no relation) is almost as comprehensive, packing in a host of filters and features for getting great GIFs on your phone (though again, a lot of the functionality needs paying for). With rotate, resize, trim and other options included, it’s like having a mobile video editor for capturing GIFs on the go.

On Thursday night, Tesla CEO Elon Musk revealed his company’s take on that most quintessentially American of automobiles, the pickup truck. “Trucks have been basically the same for 100 years. We want to do something different,” Musk told a rapturous audience. He wasn’t underselling things. Tesla’s design is called the Cybertruck, and it looks like a cross between the Aston Martin Bulldog—a wedge-shaped concept from the early 1980s—and that cool APC you remember from Aliens.

“We moved the mass to the outside,” Musk said, referring to the fact that the Cybertruck has a stainless steel monocoque construction, like the Model 3. Criticizing the body-on-frame construction technique used for most heavy trucks on sale today, Musk told attendees that “the body and the bed don’t do anything useful,” before launching into a lengthy demonstration of people hitting or shooting body panels and glass from the Cybertruck to prove the toughness of the exterior.

The shape is highly unconventional, but the size could have been picked by a focus group—almost exactly as wide and tall as a Ford F-150 and about as long as some four-seat versions of America’s favorite pickup. At the rear, the 6.5-foot (2m) bed—called the Cybertruck Vault here—has a lockable aerodynamic cover that gives the vehicle 100 cubic feet (2,831L) of protected cargo storage. The Vault will also support loads of up to 3,500lbs (1,588kg).

Some of the Cybertruck’s other features suggest that Musk might be paying attention to Bollinger, which is working on a very un-Tesla-like range of boutique battery EV off-roaders. A Bollinger will have 15 inches of ground clearance via its air suspension, so the Cybertruck will have 16 inches, Musk revealed. Like the Bollinger, the Cybertruck will also offer 110V and 220V AC outlets, so the vehicle can act as a power source on remote job sites.

There will be three versions of the Cybertruck. The single (rear) motor configuration will have a range of 250 miles (400km) with a towing capacity of 7,500lbs (3,402kg) for $39,900. For an extra $10,000, there’s a dual motor (all-wheel drive) variant, which ups the towing capacity to 10,000lbs (4,536kg) and drops the 0-60mph time by two seconds. A trimotor Cybertruck—presumably with one front motor and two rear motors—will cost $69,900 and is tow-rated for 14,000lbs (6,350kg), but you get 500 miles (800km) of range.

Tesla is now accepting $100 refundable deposits for the Cybertruck, which the order page says will go into production in late 2021, with the three-motor version following a year later.

Listing image by Tesla

Researchers found evidence of sugar molecules in primitive meteorites, according to a new study. Now, if you please, I would like to taste the rocks.

Yes, I understand that sugar is a family of molecules that consists of more than just the sucrose molecules I use to make my coffee a little more exciting. In fact, ribose, one of the sugar molecules found on these rocks, is an essential biological molecule that serves as a building block of genetic material. I don’t care. Let me lick it.

The researchers based in Japan and the United States analyzed three carbon-containing meteorites called chondrites, thought to be among the meteorites that have changed the least since the start of the solar system. That included the Murchison meteorite, one of the most-studied meteorites on Earth, a 220+ pound rock that fell in Australia in 1969. They analyzed samples of these meteorites in the laboratory for sugars, finding at least four kinds of sugar molecules: ribose, arabinose, xylose, and lyxose. A quick Google search reveals that all four of these molecules have pleasant, sweet tastes.

Then, they measured the fraction of carbon-13, a slightly heavier version of carbon, that the molecules contained. In some of the samples, there was extra carbon-13, more than would be expected from molecules found in the dirt or plants, demonstrating that the molecules could have been of extraterrestrial origin. The researchers published their results this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Most people value ribose for reasons aside from its flavor: It forms the backbone of ribonucleic acid, or RNA, the genetic material used by our cells to produce the proteins that make us who we are. Finding ribose in the oldest meteorites provides extra evidence that we’re star stuff; that the molecules that produced us could have formed in the earliest days of the solar system. Scientists think these sugars form via a “formose-like reaction,” which turns a class of molecules called aldehydes into sugars in the presence of heat and alkaline molecules.

Sugars join a variety of other organic molecules found in carbonaceous chondrites, including the amino acids that produce proteins and the nucleobase molecules that RNA uses to encode data. It seems as though you could construct an entire RNA molecule from stuff found in these meteorites.

Back to my main point. I understand there is only a trace amount of sugar in these meteorites. But I know that geologists lick rocks all the time. And now this study has planted the seed in my mind that meteorites might be a real flavor bomb; amino acids have a variety of flavors, from sour to savory. Add in all of these sugars, and you’ve practically got a gourmet meal. Let me taste the space rocks.