The U.S. government is warning that smart locks securing entry to an estimated 50,000 dwellings nationwide contain hard-coded credentials that can be used to remotely open any of the locks. Krebs on SecurityL: The lock's maker Chirp Systems remains unresponsive, even though it was first notified about the critical weakness in March 2021. Meanwhile, Chirp's parent company, RealPage, Inc., is being sued by multiple U.S. states for allegedly colluding with landlords to illegally raise rents. On March 7, 2024, the U.S. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) warned about a remotely exploitable vulnerability with "low attack complexity" in Chirp Systems smart locks.

"Chirp Access improperly stores credentials within its source code, potentially exposing sensitive information to unauthorized access," CISA's alert warned, assigning the bug a CVSS (badness) rating of 9.1 (out of a possible 10). "Chirp Systems has not responded to requests to work with CISA to mitigate this vulnerability." Matt Brown, the researcher CISA credits with reporting the flaw, is a senior systems development engineer at Amazon Web Services. Brown said he discovered the weakness and reported it to Chirp in March 2021, after the company that manages his apartment building started using Chirp smart locks and told everyone to install Chirp's app to get in and out of their apartments.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Shakeeb Ahmed, a cybersecurity engineer convicted of stealing around $12 million in crypto, was sentenced on Friday to three years in prison. In a press release, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York announced the sentence. Ahmed was accused of hacking into two cryptocurrency exchanges, and stealing around $12 million in crypto, according to prosecutors.

Adam Schwartz and Bradley Bondi, the lawyers representing Ahmed, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. When Ahmed was arrested last year, the authorities described him as "a senior security engineer for an international technology company." His LinkedIn profile said he previously worked at Amazon. But he wasn't working there at the time of his arrest, an Amazon spokesperson told TechCrunch. While the name of one of his victims was never disclosed, Ahmed reportedly hacked into Crema Finance, a Solana-based crypto exchange, in early July 2022.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Over the weekend, developer Mattia La Spina launched iGBA as one of the first retro game emulators legitimately available on the iOS App Store following Apple's rules change regarding such emulators earlier this month. As of Monday morning, though, iGBA has been pulled from the App Store following controversy over the unauthorized reuse of source code from a different emulator project.

iOS 8.1 plugs security hole that made it easy to install emulators Shortly after iGBA's launch, some people on social media began noticing that the project appeared to be based on the code for GBA4iOS, a nearly decade-old emulator that developer Riley Testut and a partner developed as high-schoolers (and distributed via a temporary security hole in the iOS App store). Testut took to social media Sunday morning to call iGBA a "knock-off" of GBA4iOS. "I did not give anyone permission to do this, yet it's now sitting at the top of the charts (despite being filled with ads + tracking)," he wrote.

GBA4iOS is an open source program released under the GNU GPLv2 license, with licensing terms that let anyone "use, modify, and distribute my original code for this project without fear of legal consequences." But those expansive licensing terms only apply "unless you plan to submit your app to Apple's App Store, in which case written permission from me is explicitly required."

A business columnist at the Los Angeles Times notes Sam Bankman-Fried's judge issued another ruling "that may have a more far-reaching effect on the crypto business.

U.S. Judge Failla "cleared the Securities and Exchange Commission to proceed with its lawsuit alleging that the giant crypto broker and exchange Coinbase has been dealing in securities without a license." What's important about Failla's ruling is that she dismissed out of hand Coinbase's argument, which is that cryptocurrencies are novel assets that don't fall within the SEC's jurisdiction — in short, they're not "securities." Crypto promoters have been making the same argument in court and the halls of Congress, where they're urging that the lawmakers craft an entirely new regulatory structure for crypto — preferably one less rigorous than the existing rules and regulations promulgated by the SEC and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission...

Failla saw through that argument without breaking a sweat. "The 'crypto' nomenclature may be of recent vintage," she wrote, "but the challenged transactions fall comfortably within the framework that courts have used to identify securities for nearly eighty years...." Since Congress hasn't enacted regulations specifically aimed at crypto, Coinbase said, the SEC's lawsuit should be dismissed. The judge's opinion of that argument was withering. "While certainly sizable and important," she wrote, "the cryptocurrency industry 'falls far short of being a "portion of the American economy" bearing vast economic and political significance....'"

Failla's ruling followed another in New York federal court in which a judge deemed crypto to be securities. In that case, Judge Edgardo Ramos refused to dismiss SEC charges against Gemini Trust Co., a crypto trading outfit run by Cameron and Tyler Winkelvoss, and the crypto lender Genesis Global Capital. The SEC charged that a scheme in which Gemini pooled customers' crypto assets and lent them to Genesis while promising the customers high interest returns is an unregistered security. The SEC case, like that against Coinbase, will proceed....

The hangover from March continued into this month. On April 5, a federal jury in New York found Terraform Labs and its chief executive and major shareholder, Do Kwon, liable in what the SEC termed "a massive crypto fraud...." The value of UST fell in effect to zero, the SEC said, "wiping out over $40 billion of total market value ... and sending shock waves through the crypto asset community."

The Associated Press reports: As their rivalry intensifies, U.S. and Chinese military planners are gearing up for a new kind of warfare in which squadrons of air and sea drones equipped with artificial intelligence work together like swarms of bees to overwhelm an enemy. The planners envision a scenario in which hundreds, even thousands of the machines engage in coordinated battle. A single controller might oversee dozens of drones. Some would scout, others attack. Some would be able to pivot to new objectives in the middle of a mission based on prior programming rather than a direct order.

The world's only AI superpowers are engaged in an arms race for swarming drones that is reminiscent of the Cold War, except drone technology will be far more difficult to contain than nuclear weapons. Because software drives the drones' swarming abilities, it could be relatively easy and cheap for rogue nations and militants to acquire their own fleets of killer robots. The Pentagon is pushing urgent development of inexpensive, expendable drones as a deterrent against China acting on its territorial claim on Taiwan. Washington says it has no choice but to keep pace with Beijing. Chinese officials say AI-enabled weapons are inevitable so they, too, must have them.

The unchecked spread of swarm technology "could lead to more instability and conflict around the world," said Margarita Konaev, an analyst with Georgetown University's Center for Security and Emerging Technology.
"A 2023 Georgetown study of AI-related military spending found that more than a third of known contracts issued by both U.S. and Chinese military services over eight months in 2020 were for intelligent uncrewed systems..." according to the article.

"Military analysts, drone makers and AI researchers don't expect fully capable, combat-ready swarms to be fielded for five years or so, though big breakthroughs could happen sooner."

Intel, Nvidia, AMD, and Arm are among Canonical's "silicon partners," a program that "ensures maximum Ubuntu compatibility and long-term support with certified hardware," according to Web Pro News.

And now Qualcomm is set to be Canonical's next silicon partner, "giving Qualcomm access to optimized versions of Ubuntu for its processors." Companies looking to use Ubuntu on Qualcomm chips will benefit from an OS that provides 10 years of support and security updates.

The collaboration is expected to be a boon for AI, edge computing, and IoT applications. "The combination of Qualcomm Technologies' processors with the popularity of Ubuntu among AI and IoT developers is a game changer for the industry," commented Dev Singh, Vice President, Business Development and Head of Building, Enterprise & Industrial Automation, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc...
"Optimised Ubuntu and Ubuntu Core images will be available for Qualcomm SoCs," according to the announcement, "enabling enterprises to meet their regulatory, compliance and security demands for AI at the edge and the broader IoT market with a secure operating system that is supported for 10 years." Qualcomm Technologies chose to partner with Canonical to create an optimised Ubuntu for Qualcomm IoT chipsets, giving developers an easy path to create safe, compliant, security-focused, and high-performing applications for multiple industries including industrial, robotics and edge automation...

Developers and enterprises can benefit from the Ubuntu Certified Hardware program, which features a growing list of certified ODM boards and devices based on Qualcomm SoCs. These certified devices deliver an optimised Ubuntu experience out-of-the-box, enabling developers to focus on developing applications and bringing products to market.

The PHP programming language has sunk to its lowest position ever on the long-running TIOBE index of programming language popularity. It now ranks #17 — lower than Assembly Language, Ruby, Swift, Scratch, and MATLAB. InfoWorld reports: When the Tiobe index started in 2001, PHP was about to become the standard language for building websites, said Paul Jansen, CEO of software quality services vendor Tiobe. PHP even reached the top 3 spot in the index, ranking third several times between 2006 and 2010. But as competing web development frameworks such as Ruby on Rails, Django, and React arrived in other languages, PHP's popularity waned.

"The major driving languages behind these new frameworks were Ruby, Python, and most notably JavaScript," Jansen noted in his statement accompanying the index. "On top of this competition, some security issues were found in PHP. As a result, PHP had to reinvent itself." Nowadays, PHP still has a strong presence in small and medium websites and is the language leveraged in the WordPress web content management system. "PHP is certainly not gone, but its glory days seem to be over," Jansen said.
A note on the rival Pypl Popularity of Programming Language Index argues that the TIOBE Index "is a lagging indicator. It counts the number of web pages with the language name." So while "Objective-C" ranks #30 on TIOBE's index (one rank above Classic Visual Basic), "who is reading those Objective-C web pages? Hardly anyone, according to Google Trends data." On TIOBE's index, Fortran now ranks #10.

Meanwhile, PHP ranks #7 on Pypl (based on the frequency of searches for language tutorials).

TIOBE's top ten?

1. Python
2. C
3. C++
4. Java
5. C#
6. JavaScript
7. Go
8. Visual Basic
9. SQL
10. Fortran

The next two languages, ranked #11 and #12, are Delphi/Object Pascal and Assembly Language.

DOJ-Collected Information Exposed In Data Breach Affecting 340,000 Information Collected An anonymous reader shared this report from Security Week: Economic analysis and litigation support firm Greylock McKinnon Associates, Inc. (GMA) is notifying over 340,000 individuals that their personal and medical information was compromised in a year-old data breach. The incident was detected on May 30, 2023, but it took the firm roughly eight months to investigate and determine what type of information was compromised and to identify the impacted individuals.



According to GMA's notification letter to the affected individuals, a copy of which was submitted to the Maine Attorney General's Office, both personal and Medicare information was compromised in the data breach... "This information may have included your name, date of birth, address, Medicare Health Insurance Claim Number (which contains a Social Security number associated with a member) and some medical information and/or health insurance information," the notification letter reads.

The compromised data, GMA says, was obtained by the US Department of Justice "as part of a civil litigation matter". More than 340,000 individuals were affected by the data breach, the company told the Maine Attorney General's Office. The impacted individuals, however, are "not the subject of this investigation or the associated litigation matters", the company tells the affected individuals.

An anonymous reader shared this report from BleepingComputer: Researchers have demonstrated the "first native Spectre v2 exploit" for a new speculative execution side-channel flaw that impacts Linux systems running on many modern Intel processors. Spectre V2 is a new variant of the original Spectre attack discovered by a team of researchers at the VUSec group from VU Amsterdam. The researchers also released a tool that uses symbolic execution to identify exploitable code segments within the Linux kernel to help with mitigation.

The new finding underscores the challenges in balancing performance optimization with security, which makes addressing fundamental CPU flaws complicated even six years after the discovery of the original Spectre....

As the CERT Coordination Center (CERT/CC) disclosed yesterday, the new flaw, tracked as CVE-2024-2201, allows unauthenticated attackers to read arbitrary memory data by leveraging speculative execution, bypassing present security mechanisms designed to isolate privilege levels. "An unauthenticated attacker can exploit this vulnerability to leak privileged memory from the CPU by speculatively jumping to a chosen gadget," reads the CERT/CC announcement. "Current research shows that existing mitigation techniques of disabling privileged eBPF and enabling (Fine)IBT are insufficient in stopping BHI exploitation against the kernel/hypervisor."
"For a complete list of impacted Intel processors to the various speculative execution side-channel flaws, check this page updated by the vendor."

From the Washington Post: The U.S. government said Thursday that Russian government hackers who recently stole Microsoft corporate emails had obtained passwords and other secret material that might allow them to breach multiple U.S. agencies.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, an arm of the Department of Homeland Security, on Tuesday issued a rare binding directive to an undisclosed number of agencies requiring them to change any log-ins that were taken and investigate what else might be at risk. The directive was made public Thursday, after recipients had begun shoring up their defenses. The "successful compromise of Microsoft corporate email accounts and the exfiltration of correspondence between agencies and Microsoft presents a grave and unacceptable risk to agencies," CISA wrote. "This Emergency Directive requires agencies to analyze the content of exfiltrated emails, reset compromised credentials, and take additional steps to ensure authentication tools for privileged Microsoft Azure accounts are secure."
"CISA officials told reporters it is so far unclear whether the hackers, associated with Russian military intelligence agency SVR, had obtained anything from the exposed agencies," according to the article. And the article adds that CISA "did not spell out the extent of any risks to national interests."

But the agency's executive assistant director for cybersecurity did tell the newspaper that "the potential for exposure of federal authentication credentials...does pose an exigent risk to the federal enterprise, hence the need for this directive and the actions therein." Microsoft's Windows operating system, Outlook email and other software are used throughout the U.S. government, giving the Redmond, Washington-based company enormous responsibility for the cybersecurity of federal employees and their work. But the longtime relationship is showing increasing signs of strain.... [T]he breach is one of a few severe intrusions at the company that have exposed many others elsewhere to potential hacking. Another of those incidents — in which Chinese government hackers cracked security in Microsoft's cloud software offerings to steal email from State Department and Commerce Department officials — triggered a major federal review that last week called on the company to overhaul its culture, which the Cyber Safety Review Board cited as allowing a "cascade of avoidable errors."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Influential US Senator Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) has called on U.S. President Joe Biden to ban electric vehicles from Chinese brands. Brown calls Chinese EVs "an existential threat" to the U.S. automotive industry and says that allowing imports of cheap EVs from Chinese brands "is inconsistent with a pro-worker industrial policy." Brown's letter to the president (PDF) is the most recent to sound alarms about the threat of heavily subsidized Chinese EVs moving into established markets. Brands like BYD and MG have been on sale in the European Union for some years now, and last October, the EU launched an anti-subsidy investigation into whether the Chinese government is giving Chinese brands an unfair advantage.

The EU probe won't wrap until November, but another report published this week found that government subsidies for green technology companies are prevalent in China. BYD, which now sells more EVs than Tesla, has benefited from almost $4 billion (3.7 billion euro) in direct help from the Chinese government in 2022, according to a study by the Kiel Institute. Last month, the EU even started paying extra attention to imports of Chinese EVs, issuing a threat of retroactive tariffs that could start being imposed this summer. Chinese EV imports to the EU have increased by 14 percent since the start of its investigation, but they have yet to really begin in the U.S., where there are a few barriers in their way. Chinese batteries make an EV ineligible for the IRS's clean vehicle tax credit, for one thing. And Chinese-made vehicles (like the Lincoln Nautilus, Buick Envision, and Polestar 2) are already subject to a 27.5 percent import tax.

But Chinese EVs are on sale in Mexico already, and that has American automakers worried. Last year, Ford CEO Jim Farley said he saw Chinese automakers "as the main competitors, not GM or Toyota." And in January, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said he believed that "if there are no trade barriers established, they will pretty much demolish most other car companies in the world." [...] It's not just the potential damage to the U.S. auto industry that has prompted this letter. Brown wrote that he is concerned about the risk of China having access to data collected by connected cars, "whether it be information about traffic patterns, critical infrastructure, or the lives of Americans," pointing out that "China does not allow American-made electric vehicles near their official buildings." At the end of February, the Commerce Department also warned of the security risk from Chinese-connected cars and revealed it has launched an investigation into the matter. "When the goal is to dominate a sector, tariffs are insufficient to stop their attack on American manufacturing," Brown wrote. "Instead, the Administration should act now to ban Chinese EVs before they destroy the potential for the U.S. EV market. For this reason, no solution should be left off the table, including the use of Section 421 (China Safeguard) of the Trade Act of 1974, or some other authority."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: A controversial US wiretap program days from expiration cleared a major hurdle on its way to being reauthorized. After months of delays, false starts, and interventions by lawmakers working to preserve and expand the US intelligence community's spy powers, the House of Representatives voted on Friday to extend Section 702 (PDF) of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) for two years. Legislation extending the program -- controversial for being abused by the government -- passed in the House in a 273-147 vote. The Senate has yet to pass its own bill.

Section 702 permits the US government to wiretap communications between Americans and foreigners overseas. Hundreds of millions of calls, texts, and emails are intercepted by government spies each with the "compelled assistance" of US communications providers. The government may strictly target foreigners believed to possess "foreign intelligence information," but it also eavesdrops on the conversations of an untold number of Americans each year. (The government claims it is impossible to determine how many Americans get swept up by the program.) The government argues that Americans are not themselves being targeted and thus the wiretaps are legal. Nevertheless, their calls, texts, and emails may be stored by the government for years, and can later be accessed by law enforcement without a judge's permission. The House bill also dramatically expands the statutory definition for communication service providers, something FISA experts, including Marc Zwillinger -- one of the few people to advise the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) -- have publicly warned against.

The FBI's track record of abusing the program kicked off a rare detente last fall between progressive Democrats and pro-Trump Republicans -- both bothered equally by the FBI's targeting of activists, journalists, anda sitting member of Congress. But in a major victory for the Biden administration, House members voted down an amendment earlier in the day that would've imposed new warrant requirements on federal agencies accessing Americans' 702 data. The warrant amendment was passed earlier this year by the House Judiciary Committee, whose long-held jurisdiction over FISA has been challenged by friends of the intelligence community. Analysis by the Brennan Center this week found that 80 percent of the base text of the FISA reauthorization bill had been authored by intelligence committee members.

Scientists from Oxford University Physics have developed a breakthrough in cloud-based quantum computing that could allow it to be harnessed by millions of individuals and companies. The findings have been published in the journal Physical Review Letters. Phys.Org reports: In the new study, the researchers use an approach dubbed "blind quantum computing," which connects two totally separate quantum computing entities -- potentially an individual at home or in an office accessing a cloud server -- in a completely secure way. Importantly, their new methods could be scaled up to large quantum computations. "Using blind quantum computing, clients can access remote quantum computers to process confidential data with secret algorithms and even verify the results are correct, without revealing any useful information. Realizing this concept is a big step forward in both quantum computing and keeping our information safe online," said study lead Dr. Peter Drmota, of Oxford University Physics.

The researchers created a system comprising a fiber network link between a quantum computing server and a simple device detecting photons, or particles of light, at an independent computer remotely accessing its cloud services. This allows so-called blind quantum computing over a network. Every computation incurs a correction that must be applied to all that follow and needs real-time information to comply with the algorithm. The researchers used a unique combination of quantum memory and photons to achieve this. The results could ultimately lead to commercial development of devices to plug into laptops, to safeguard data when people are using quantum cloud computing services. "We have shown for the first time that quantum computing in the cloud can be accessed in a scalable, practical way which will also give people complete security and privacy of data, plus the ability to verify its authenticity," said Professor David Lucas, who co-heads the Oxford University Physics research team and is lead scientist at the UK Quantum Computing and Simulation Hub, led from Oxford University Physics.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from KrebsOnSecurity: The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) said today it is investigating a breach at business intelligence company Sisense, whose products are designed to allow companies to view the status of multiple third-party online services in a single dashboard. CISA urged all Sisense customers to reset any credentials and secrets that may have been shared with the company, which is the same advice Sisense gave to its customers Wednesday evening. New York City based Sisense has more than 1,000 customers across a range of industry verticals, including financial services, telecommunications, healthcare and higher education. On April 10, Sisense Chief Information Security Officer Sangram Dash told customers the company had been made aware of reports that "certain Sisense company information may have been made available on what we have been advised is a restricted access server (not generally available on the internet.)" In its alert, CISA said it was working with private industry partners to respond to a recent compromise discovered by independent security researchers involving Sisense.

Sisense declined to comment when asked about the veracity of information shared by two trusted sources with close knowledge of the breach investigation. Those sources said the breach appears to have started when the attackers somehow gained access to the company's code repository at Gitlab, and that in that repository was a token or credential that gave the bad guys access to Sisense's Amazon S3 buckets in the cloud. Both sources said the attackers used the S3 access to copy and exfiltrate several terabytes worth of Sisense customer data, which apparently included millions of access tokens, email account passwords, and even SSL certificates.

The incident raises questions about whether Sisense was doing enough to protect sensitive data entrusted to it by customers, such as whether the massive volume of stolen customer data was ever encrypted while at rest in these Amazon cloud servers. It is clear, however, that unknown attackers now have all of the credentials that Sisense customers used in their dashboards. The breach also makes clear that Sisense is somewhat limited in the clean-up actions that it can take on behalf of customers, because access tokens are essentially text files on your computer that allow you to stay logged in for extended periods of time -- sometimes indefinitely. And depending on which service we're talking about, it may be possible for attackers to re-use those access tokens to authenticate as the victim without ever having to present valid credentials. Beyond that, it is largely up to Sisense customers to decide if and when they change passwords to the various third-party services that they've previously entrusted to Sisense. "If they are hosting customer data on a third-party system like Amazon, it better damn well be encrypted," said Nicholas Weaver, a researcher at University of California, Berkeley's International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) and lecturer at UC Davis. "If they are telling people to rest credentials, that means it was not encrypted. So mistake number one is leaving Amazon credentials in your Git archive. Mistake number two is using S3 without using encryption on top of it. The former is bad but forgivable, but the latter given their business is unforgivable."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Hardware sold for years by the likes of Intel and Lenovo contains a remotely exploitable vulnerability that will never be fixed. The cause: a supply chain snafu involving an open source software package and hardware from multiple manufacturers that directly or indirectly incorporated it into their products. Researchers from security firm Binarly have confirmed that the lapse has resulted in Intel, Lenovo, and Supermicro shipping server hardware that contains a vulnerability that can be exploited to reveal security-critical information. The researchers, however, went on to warn that any hardware that incorporates certain generations of baseboard management controllers made by Duluth, Georgia-based AMI or Taiwan-based AETN are also affected.

BMCs are tiny computers soldered into the motherboard of servers that allow cloud centers, and sometimes their customers, to streamline the remote management of vast fleets of servers. They enable administrators to remotely reinstall OSes, install and uninstall apps, and control just about every other aspect of the system -- even when it's turned off. BMCs provide what's known in the industry as "lights-out" system management. AMI and AETN are two of several makers of BMCs. For years, BMCs from multiple manufacturers have incorporated vulnerable versions of open source software known as lighttpd. Lighttpd is a fast, lightweight web server that's compatible with various hardware and software platforms. It's used in all kinds of wares, including in embedded devices like BMCs, to allow remote administrators to control servers remotely with HTTP requests. [...] "All these years, [the lighttpd vulnerability] was present inside the firmware and nobody cared to update one of the third-party components used to build this firmware image," Binarly researchers wrote Thursday. "This is another perfect example of inconsistencies in the firmware supply chain. A very outdated third-party component present in the latest version of firmware, creating additional risk for end users. Are there more systems that use the vulnerable version of lighttpd across the industry?"

The vulnerability makes it possible for hackers to identify memory addresses responsible for handling key functions. Operating systems take pains to randomize and conceal these locations so they can't be used in software exploits. By chaining an exploit for the lighttpd vulnerability with a separate vulnerability, hackers could defeat this standard protection, which is known as address space layout randomization. The chaining of two or more exploits has become a common feature of hacking attacks these days as software makers continue to add anti-exploitation protections to their code. Tracking the supply chain for multiple BMCs used in multiple server hardware is difficult. So far, Binarly has identified AMI's MegaRAC BMC as one of the vulnerable BMCs. The security firm has confirmed that the AMI BMC is contained in the Intel Server System M70KLP hardware. Information about BMCs from ATEN or hardware from Lenovo and Supermicro aren't available at the moment. The vulnerability is present in any hardware that uses lighttpd versions 1.4.35, 1.4.45, and 1.4.51. "A potential attacker can exploit this vulnerability in order to read memory of Lighttpd Web Server process," Binarly researchers wrote in an advisory. "This may lead to sensitive data exfiltration, such as memory addresses, which can be used to bypass security mechanisms such as ASLR." Advisories are available here, here, and here.

Microsoft has started showing full screen warnings about the upcoming end of support date on Windows 10 PCs. From a report: Users on Reddit have reported seeing the prompt, which began appearing after this week's Patch Tuesday updates were installed, and encourages the user to learn more about how they can transition to Windows 11. Windows 10's end of support date is currently set for October 14, 2025. After that date, Windows 10 users will no longer receive critical security and bug fix updates, leaving any Windows 10 PC connected to the internet vulnerable to any newly discovered security exploits. The full screen prompt that is now appearing on some Windows 10 PCs thanks the user for their loyalty using Windows 10, and warns that this end of life (EOL) date is approaching. It also wastes no time advertising Windows 11, encouraging the user to learn more about how they can transition to a new Windows 11 PC. Notably, there's no button to tell the prompt to never show again.

Apple sent threat notifications to iPhone users in 92 countries on Wednesday, warning them that may have been targeted by mercenary spyware attacks. From a report: The company said it sent the alerts to individuals in 92 nations at 12pm Pacific Time Wednesday. The notification, which TechCrunch has seen, did not disclose the attackers' identities or the countries where users received notifications.

"Apple detected that you are being targeted by a mercenary spyware attack that is trying to remotely compromise the iPhone associated with your Apple ID -xxx-," it wrote in the warning to affected customers. "This attack is likely targeting you specifically because of who you are or what you do. Although it's never possible to achieve absolute certainty when detecting such attacks, Apple has high confidence in this warning -- please take it seriously," Apple added in the text.

Zack Whittaker and Carly Page report via TechCrunch: Microsoft has resolved a security lapse that exposed internal company files and credentials to the open internet. Security researchers Can Yoleri, Murat Ozfidan and Egemen Kochisarli with SOCRadar, a cybersecurity company that helps organizations find security weaknesses, discovered an open and public storage server hosted on Microsoft's Azure cloud service that was storing internal information relating to Microsoft's Bing search engine. The Azure storage server housed code, scripts and configuration files containing passwords, keys and credentials used by the Microsoft employees for accessing other internal databases and systems. But the storage server itself was not protected with a password and could be accessed by anyone on the internet.

Yoleri told TechCrunch that the exposed data could potentially help malicious actors identify or access other places where Microsoft stores its internal files. Identifying those storage locations "could result in more significant data leaks and possibly compromise the services in use," Yoleri said. The researchers notified Microsoft of the security lapse on February 6, and Microsoft secured the spilling files on March 5. It's not known for how long the cloud server was exposed to the internet, or if anyone other than SOCRadar discovered the exposed data inside.

Vinod Khosla, the founder of venture capital firm Khosla Ventures, opines on the bill that seeks to ban TikTok or force its parent firm to divest the U.S. business: Even if one could argue that this bill strikes at the First Amendment, there is legal precedent for doing so. In 1981, Haig vs Agee established that there are circumstances under which the government can lawfully impinge upon an individual's First Amendment rights if it is necessary to protect national security and prevent substantial harm. TikTok and the AI that can be channelled through it are national and homeland security issues that meet these standards.

Should this bill turn into law, the president would have the power to force any foreign-owned social media to be sold if US intelligence agencies deem them a national security threat. This broader scope should protect against challenges that this is a bill of attainder. Similar language helped protect effective bans on Huawei and Kaspersky Lab. As for TikTok's value as a boon to consumers and businesses, there are many companies that could quickly replace it. In 2020, after India banned TikTok amid geopolitical tensions between Beijing and New Delhi, services including Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, MX TakaTak, Chingari and others filled the void.Â

Few appreciate that TikTok is not available in China. Instead, Chinese consumers use Douyin, the sister app that features educational and patriotic videos, and is limited to 40 minutes per day of total usage. Spinach for Chinese kids, fentanyl -- another chief export of China's -- for ours. Worse still, TikTok is a programmable fentanyl whose effects are under the control of the CCP.

After 64 years of service, ULA on Tuesday launched its last-ever Delta rocket carrying a classified payload for the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). "The powerful booster departed Space Launch Complex-37 (SLC-37) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 12:53 p.m. EDT (1653 GMT), literally setting itself on fire for the 16th and final time," reports Space.com. From the report: That spectacle, which was unique to the Delta IV in its heaviest configuration, was the result of hydrogen building up in the flame trench and then rising up alongside the rocket after it was used to cool down the three RS-68A engines to cryogenic temperatures. When the engines fired, the hydrogen ignited and flames lapped at the orange insulation covering the core stage and its two side-mounted boosters. The two boosters were jettisoned about four minutes into the flight, followed by the core, or first stage, separating one minute and 45 seconds later. A single RL10C-2-1 engine on the Delta cryogenic second stage then took over, propelling the NROL-70 payload into space. Due to national security concerns, coverage of the launch ceased following fairing jettison at about 6 minutes and 40 seconds into the flight.

ULA is retiring the Delta IV, and eventually its other legacy rocket, the Atlas V, in favor of its newly introduced Vulcan, which flew a near-perfect first mission in January. The Vulcan was developed to replace both long-flying rockets in all of their configurations. "This is a great mission to think about that transition, because national security space missions is our core and the unique set of missions there require a high-energy launch vehicle. We designed Vulcan specifically for that," said [Tory Bruno, chief executive officer of United Launch Alliance]. In addition to being the 16th Delta IV Heavy, Tuesday's launch was also the 45th liftoff of a Delta IV, the 35th Delta IV to fly from Florida and the 389th Delta launch of any kind since 1960 (of which 294 were sent skyward from Cape Canaveral). Half of the Delta IV Heavy launches were devoted to sending NRO payloads into orbit. The rocket and its less powerful configurations were also used in support of NASA, NOAA (the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), U.S. Air Force and commercial payloads.