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The takedown may be small but any ransomware gang sent to the shops is good news in our book The Dispossessor ransomware group is the latest to enter the cybercrime graveyard with the Feds proudly laying claim to the takedown....

Elon Musk: Aiming for Mars, but sometimes ends up with Mercury? Updated Elon Musk's SpaceX is disputing claims that its rockets are polluting water in Texas from the deluge system used to stop Starship ripping up its launchpad on lift-off....

US sanctions may make things hard for Huawei, but the tech titan still has big GPU ambitions Huawei is reportedly preparing a graphics chip on par with Nvidia's popular H100, and will launch it later this year....

Bad news if you're buying personal kit as consumer flash starts getting $$$ Demand for AI-capable infrastructure is causing server buyers to significantly up orders for enterprise solid state drives (SSDs), and this is having an inflationary impact on the price of flash-based storage units....

Knowing precise time on satellite essential if we want accurate GPS-like system for exploration Researchers at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have come up with a proposal for keeping track of time on the Moon - an essential for lunar navigation tools....

Incident sounds like a BEC fraud targeting an unwitting staffer Luxembourg-based chemicals and manufacturing giant Orion SA is telling US regulators that it will lose out on around $60 million after it was targeted by a criminal wire fraud scheme....

Because apps talking like pirates and creating ASCII art never gets old Despite worries about criminals using prompt injection to trick large language models (LLMs) into leaking sensitive data or performing other destructive actions, most of these types of AI shenanigans come from job seekers trying to get their resumes past automated HR screeners - and people protesting generative AI for various reasons, according to Russian security biz Kaspersky....

The Reg flies to Germany to visit the Speyer and Sinsheim palaces of engineering marvels Geek's Guide The Register's Geek's Guide series for explorers who love feats of tech and engineering prowess, took a trip to the European mainland to see exhibits ranging from an Air France Concorde and a Soviet Tupolev Tu-144 "Concordski" to a Buran prototype, alongside various engineering marvels....

Report suggests govt get cracking on a proper ownership structure survey and ... hang on, did they forget the Midlands? UK government may need to revisit the National Semiconductor Strategy to guard against potential supply chain disruptions and succeed in nurturing a successful domestic semiconductor ecosystem for the future....

We can misremember it for you wholesale AI chatbots, known for their habit of hallucinating, can induce people to hallucinate too, researchers claim....

Is it not a strange fate that we should suffer so much fear and doubt for so small a thing? def con The electronic badges at DEF CON have long been a hot commodity for attendees, tinkerers, and collectors, though this year they're getting attention for an entirely different reason....

Bad guys claim they're cops, keep you on hold for hours until you pay to make loved ones' crimes go away A woman in the Indian city of Delhi last week found herself under "digital arrest" - a form of scam in which victims make payments to criminals posing as law enforcement officers....

Once-great platform tanks another major political livestream, bigly Elon Musk has blamed a "DDoS" attack for a forty-minute delay in the start of his live-streamed interview, hosted on X, with presidential candidate Donald Trump....

Kernel mode not good enough for you? Maybe you'll like SMM of this Some AMD processors dating back to 2006 have a security vulnerability that's a boon for particularly underhand malware and rogue insiders, though the chip designer is only patching models made since 2020....

Tech industry told to clean up its act - and help others to do likewise - in pursuit of 2035 'Beautiful China' goal China's digital infrastructure providers have been told they need to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and energy consumption, plus consider ending use of smaller facilities, under a sweeping "comprehensive green transition" plan announced yesterday....

You don't get to be the biggest business in the world by being nice Patreon today said Apple will soon take a 30 percent cut of new subscriptions bought via its iOS app....

SpaceX 'WasteX' Starlink said to make up 60% of sats circling Earth The US Public Interest Research Group (US PIRG), a federation of public interest advocacy groups, has asked the FCC to halt low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite launches until the environmental consequences of space pollution can be better managed....

All those BIOS options that promise better performance? Enabling them might kill your processor Owners of Intel's 13th and 14th Gen Core processors may need to stick to the chip giant's official power limits in order to safely use their CPUs....

Voting village reports have been so successful, says Jeff Moss, that the whole of DEF CON will now be included Def Con With an average of 30,000 attendees per year at the DEF CON security conference in Las Vegas, it's safe to assume at least one or two hackers attending have some necessary insights to secure critical infrastructure. Now a new initiative dubbed "Franklin" hopes to capture some of that infosec pro expertise in a policy-friendly format....

Cuts reportedly to come as soon as Wednesday's earnings release Networking goliath Cisco will reportedly slash thousands of jobs as it focuses on growing its cybersecurity business and capitalizing on AI demand....

Basic Auth among web traffic? Possible flaw in a well-known commercial VPN product? 'Security has to watch its own things' Black Hat The large network that materializes along with legions of infosec professionals at Black Hat every year presents the perfect opportunity to see how well the security community practices what it preaches....

Nearly 50 different data points were accessed by cybercrim An Arizona tech school will send letters to 208,717 current and former students, staff, and parents whose data was exposed during a January break-in that allowed an attacker to steal nearly 50 types of personal info....

Unloved multi dimensional doodler set for axe as its predecessor gets an AI update Microsoft has hammered home a final nail in the coffin of its Mixed Reality adventures with confirmation that Paint 3D is to be ditched once and for all in the not-too-distant-future....

It also attracts exactly the type of unempathetic people you would think it does Black Hat Recently published interviews with known doxxers reveal the incredible finances behind the practice and how their extortion tactics are becoming increasingly violent....

Seeks $23 million in damages over Musk's alleged reluctance to pay his bills Elon Musk's Twitter X is being sued by its former chairman for damages he alleges run to more than $23 million over unpaid stock options....

43% of the time, it really, really works 45% of the time Analysis Although a lot is promised of generative AI, it has the potential to be expensive at scale, and the return on investment isn't always clear. It's understandable why some enterprises, big and small, may be hesitant to invest in the technology at this stage....

Michael Sentonas hopes trophy will remind staff that failure is unacceptable DEF CON CrowdStrike's president received commendations from DEF CON attendees after accepting the Pwnie Award for Most Epic Fail, following the recent global IT outage caused by the infamous Falcon sensor update....

'Surprising move' for Indian megacorp but less so for French seller Altice India's Bharti Enterprises has swooped in to buy the 24.5 percent stake in BT Group from Patrick Drahi's Altice, at a stroke making it the biggest shareholder in the UK telecoms giant....

Forget the woes of Starliner with an audacious NASA landing on another planet that went very very right While NASA might be struggling to get its Starliner crew home, it's worth remembering that circa 12 years ago, the agency was celebrating the successful deployment of the Curiosity rover on the surface of Mars....

Automatic for the people? Don't mind if we do Opinion Rust changes worlds. The iron ore we mine to feed the industrial age started out as iron atoms dissolved in oceans two billion years ago. Then photosynthesis happened, pouring out oxygen that rusted that iron out of the water into the solid minerals we've found so useful today. Much the same is happening with Rust the programming language, as it becomes the mechanism of choice for turning prehistoric C code into secure, performant material fit for the future....

A fake hacker trying to take credit didn't help much, either who, me? Welcome denizens of The Reg to another Monday morn, which means an instalment of Who, Me? - the column in which readers share tales of times their undoubted technical prowess fell just a little short....

A career and life so classically Silicon Valley Susan Wojcicki, the architect of YouTube's spectacular rise and one of Silicon Valley's most influential figures, has passed away at age 56 after a two-year battle with cancer....

Dots have been joined, but hard evidence is not apparent Former US president Donald Trump's re-election campaign has claimed it's been the victim of a cyber attack....

Built its own replacement - Canal Mesh - that it says leaves Google's Istio and Ambient eating dust SIGCOMM 2024 Alibaba Cloud has claimed its home-grown service mesh for Kubernetes - Canal Mesh - significantly outperforms Google's Istio and other rival tools....

Also: British nuke subs get code from Russia; and BlackSuit begs for $500M Infosec in brief The United Nations often reaches consensus rather than complete agreement, but last week a proposal from Russia to cut down on cyber crime was unanimously approved....

Plus: Vietnam's PM leads chips push; Tesla backs out of Thailand; Drones fly trash off Everest; and more Asia In Brief US Space Command last Friday warned that a Chinese Long March 6a rocket launched on August 6 broke up in orbit and created at least 300 pieces of debris....

Utility tapped out? Why not build your own? Proximity to natural gas lines could become just as desirable for datacenter operators as high-speed fiber-optic networks as they scramble to satiate AI's ever growing thirst for power....

Or rather could, until the web giant was tipped off DEF CON Ten now-fixed bugs in Google's Quick Share for Windows could have been exploited to wirelessly write new files onto victims' PCs without their approval, and ultimately execute code remotely on those victims' machines by chaining together a handful of other vulnerabilities....

Mobile app analytics software said to surreptitiously snarf data Twilio, a communications service provider, was sued on Thursday based on allegations that the developer's Segment software siphons data from mobile apps without consent....

Is that a lot? Depends on the context. GHz, no. Voltage, yes Intel has divulged more details on its Raptor Lake family of 13th and 14th Gen Core processor failures and the 0x129 microcode that's supposed to prevent further damage from occurring....

Rival making its biggest inroads in server CPU segment The bad news for Intel keeps coming as rival AMD is slowly chipping away at its dominance in server, desktop and mobile processors, although the industry giant still holds onto the lion's share of the market and any other outfit has a long way to go to unseat it....

'Vendors cannot fix' this architectural failure, SquareX founder tells us DEF CON Secure Web Gateways (SWGs) are an essential part of enterprise security, which makes it shocking to learn that every single SWG in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for SASE and SSE can reportedly be bypassed, allowing attackers to deliver malware without gateways ever catching on....

Come to 2019. The in-place upgrades to the Subscription Edition will be lovely Microsoft is getting serious about the impending end of extended support for Exchange 2016 and has published a guide on stripping the product from an environment that already has Exchange 2019 installed....

Layers of abstraction and speedy development have left engineers unable to understand what lies beneath black hat There's a rot at the heart of modern software development that's destroying innovation, and infosec legend Moxie Marlinspike believes he knows exactly what's to blame: Agile development....

Political officials, advisors targeted in cyber attacks as fake news sites deliver lefty zingers Microsoft says Iran's efforts to influence the November US presidential election have gathered pace recently and there are signs that point toward its intent to incite violence against key figures....

A mission that was supposed to last for less than a year went on for more than a decade NASA's comeback kid, the NEOWISE spacecraft, was this week shut down for the final time as its transmitter was turned off ahead of a reentry into the Earth's atmosphere later this year....

Code of Conduct violations include allegations that posts created 'atmosphere of FUD' The Python Steering Council has decided to suspend a core Python developer for three months for alleged Code of Conduct violations....

Meanwhile, UK watchdog contemplates breaking Cupertino's WebKit rule Apple this week revised its alternative contractual terms for devs selling apps in the European Union - a revision that was immediately dismissed by critics as more "malicious compliance."...

Poor cloud titans, just trying to give a helping hand to AI startups valued at billions of dollars Britain's competition regulator is embarking on a full blown deep dive into Amazon's multi-billion dollar investments in Anthropic to ascertain if the exchange equates to a stealthy "merger situation."...

Chipzilla taking some punches but could it stay down? Opinion Just like Boeing, once upon a time, Intel was the darling of the engineering world. Both companies were the premier tech companies in their day, but those days are long gone now....