This Week In Security: Nintendo Accounts, Pernicious Android Malware, And An IOS 0-day

April 24, 2020 by Jonathan Bennett 8 Comments

A rash of Nintendo account compromises has made the news over the last week. Nintendo’s official response was that they were investigating, and recommended everyone enabled two factor authentication on their accounts.

[Dan Goodin] over at Ars Technica has a canny guess: The compromised accounts were each linked to an old Nintendo Network ID (NNID). This is essentially a legacy Nintendo account — one made in the Wii U and 3DS era. Since they’re linked, access via the NNID exposes the entire account. Resetting the primary account password doesn’t change the NNID credentials, but turning on two factor authentication does seem to close the loophole. There hasn’t yet been official confirmation that NNIDs are responsible, but it seems to fit the situation. It’s an interesting problem, where a legacy account can lead to further compromise.

Just Can’t Lose You: xHelper

xHelper, an Android malware, just won’t say goodbye. xHelper looks like a cleaner application, but once installed it begins rather stubbornly installing itself via the Triada trojan. The process begins with rooting the phone, and then remounting /system as writable. Binaries are installed and startup scripts are tampered with, and then the mount command itself is compromised, preventing a user from following the same steps to remove the malware. Additionally, if the device has previously been rooted, the superuser binary is removed. This combination of techniques means that the infection will survive a factory reset. The only way to remove xHelper is to flash a clean Android image, fully wiping /system in the process. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Nintendo Accounts, Pernicious Android Malware, And An IOS 0-day” →

The Back And Forth Of Windshield Wipers And Patent Lawsuits

April 23, 2020 by Al Williams 50 Comments

Who among us hasn’t dreamed of having some brainstorm idea, prototyping it, and then have some huge company put it into worldwide production? The problem is, that’s not really as easy as it sounds in most cases. Take the case of Robert Kearns. Never heard of him? You use the result of one of his patents pretty often; Kearns invented the intermittent windshield wiper.

If he had sold the patent to one of the big carmakers, this would be a short article. Not that he didn’t try. But it didn’t go very well and while, in the end, he prevailed, it was a very expensive victory.

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Printed It: Collet Drill Stop

April 22, 2020 by Tom Nardi 25 Comments

You’d think that being quarantined in your home would be perfect for hackers and makers like us, as we all have a project or two that’s been sitting on the back burner because we didn’t have the time to tackle it. Unfortunately, some are finding that the problem now is actually getting the parts and tools needed to do the job. When there’s a bouncer and a line outside the Home Depot like it’s a nightclub on Saturday night, even the simplest of things can be difficult to source when making in the time of COVID.

Which is exactly the situation I found myself in recently when I needed to drill a bunch of holes to the same depth. The piece was too big to put in the drill press, and while I contemplated just wrapping the bit in some tape to serve as a makeshift stop, I wasn’t convinced it would be accurate or repeatable enough. It occurred to me that a set of drill stop collars would be easy enough to design and 3D print, but before I fired up OpenSCAD, I decided to see what was already available online.

Which is how I found the “Collet Drill Stop” from Adam Harrison. Rather than the traditional ring and setscrew arrangement, his design uses a printable collet that will clamp down on the bit at an arbitrary position without tools. So not only could I avoid a trip to the store by printing this design out, it looked like it would potentially be an upgrade over what I would have bought.

Of course, it’s wise not to take anything for granted when dealing with 3D printing. The only way I could be sure that Adam’s design would work for me was to commit it to plastic and try it out.

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Limiting Factor Submersible Is In A League Of Its Own

April 22, 2020 by Kristina Panos 26 Comments

Space may be the final frontier, but there are still Earthly frontiers that a select few have visited — the deepest depths of the high seas. Victor Vescovo, a Texas businessman and former Naval officer, is one of those few. Last spring, Vescovo realized his dream of becoming the first person to scrape the bottoms of all five oceans.

Vescovo descended alone in Limiting Factor, a $37 million two-seater submersible he commissioned from Triton, a private manufacturer who made this feat of engineering come to life. Vescovo and the crew discovered over 40 new species of aquatic lifeforms throughout the course of their Five Deeps expedition. But the attention-getting takeaway came when Vescovo visited the absolute lowest point on Earth. In the Challenger Deep portion of the Marianas Trench, seven miles below sea level, he saw a plastic bag drift by in the abyss.

One normal-sounding quirk sets this sub apart from others: it’s made to be reusable. You read that right, most super-deep divers never manage to dive over and over again.

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Searching For Alien Life With The Sun As Gravitational Telescope

April 21, 2020 by Moritz v. Sivers 19 Comments

Astronomy is undoubtedly one of the most exciting subjects in physics. Especially the search for exoplanets has been a thriving field in the last decades. While the first exoplanet was only discovered in 1992, there are now 4,144 confirmed exoplanets (as of 2nd April 2020). Naturally, we Sci-Fi lovers are most interested in the 55 potentially habitable exoplanets. Unfortunately, taking an image of an Earth 2.0 with enough detail to identify potential features of life is impossible with conventional telescopes.

The solar gravitational lens mission, which has recently been selected for phase III funding by the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program, is aiming to change that by taking advantage of the Sun’s gravitational lensing effect. Continue reading “Searching For Alien Life With The Sun As Gravitational Telescope” →

COBOL Isn’t The Issue: A Misinterpreted Crisis

April 20, 2020 by Sven Gregori 145 Comments

Is history doomed to repeat itself? Or rather, is there really any doubt that it isn’t, considering recent events that made the news? I am of course talking about New Jersey’s call for COBOL programmers to fix their ancient unemployment system, collapsing under the application spikes caused by the COVID-19 lockdown. Soon after, other states joined in, and it becomes painfully apparent that we have learned absolutely nothing from Y2K: we still rely on the same old antiques running our infrastructure, and we still think people want to voluntarily write COBOL.

Or maybe they do? Following the calls for aid, things went strangely intense. IBM announced to offer free COBOL trainings and launched a forum where programmers can plug their skills and availability. The Open Mainframe Project’s COBOL programming course suddenly tops the list of trending GitHub projects, and Google Trends shows a massive peak for COBOL as well. COBOL is seemingly on its way to be one of the hottest languages of 2020, and it feels like it’s only a matter of time until we see some MicroCOBOL running on a Teensy.

However, the unemployment systems in question are unfortunately only a tiny selection of systems relying on decades old software, written in a language that went out of fashion a long time ago, which makes it difficult to find programmers in today’s times. Why is that?

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Inputs Of Interest: The Differently Dexterous DataHand Directionalizes Digits

April 20, 2020 by Kristina Panos 24 Comments

If you had debilitating pain from repetitive stress injury in the 1990s, there were a lot of alternative keyboard options out there. One of the more eye-catching offerings was the DataHand keyboard made by DataHand Systems out of Phoenix, AZ. The DataHand debuted in 1993 with a price tag around $2,000. While this is admittedly pretty steep for the average consumer, it was well within the IT budgets of companies that wanted to avoid workman’s comp claims and keep their employees typing away.

In theory, this is holy grail territory for anti-RSI keyboards. The DataHand was designed to eliminate wrist motion altogether by essentially assigning a d-pad plus a regular push-down button to each finger. The layout resembles QWERTY as closely as possible and uses layers to access numbers, symbols, and other functions, like a rudimentary mouse.

Although if you put them this close together, you’re kind of missing the point. Image via Bill Buxton

Ergonomic to the Max

Typing on the DataHand is supposed to be next to effortless. The directional switches are all optical, which probably has a lot to do with the eye-popping price point. But instead of being spring-loaded, these switches use magnets to return to the neutral position.

Continue reading “Inputs Of Interest: The Differently Dexterous DataHand Directionalizes Digits” →