An incredibly sophisticated piece of malware infected government computers in Russia, Iran, and Rwanda, and evaded detection for five years. The malware, called “ProjectSauron” by Kaspersky and “Remsec” by Symantec, has been active since 2011, or longer, infecting computers on the computers of government entities, military operations, research institutions, banks, and telecommunication companies.
The malware used all kinds of tricks to stay hidden, including living mostly in system memory. But a huge part of ProjectSauron’s success, Ars Technica is reporting, is the virus’ ability to avoid leaving patterns.
“The attackers clearly understand that we as researchers are always looking for patterns,” a Kaspersky report said. “Remove the patterns and the operation will be harder to discover. We are aware of more than 30 organizations attacked, but we are sure that this is just a tiny tip of the iceberg.”
This pattern avoidance is crucial to the malware’s success, and also downright impressive. For example: executables had different names on different machines, all of them designed to look innocuous. Here are a few example filenames from Kaspersky’s report:
As you can see, the malware took on seemingly mundane filenames that users would not find out-of-place.
But things get even crazier. This malware had a plugin system, meaning custom Lua code could be configured to grab data from specific machines. There are 50 different kinds of plugin possible.
The malware can infect computers in a number of different ways. Even if a target is air-gapped, the malware can hop over on USB drives.
Information can be gleaned from targets in all sorts of different ways too, some of them quite novel. For example: the malware has been shown to send metadata over DNS.
What’s the point of all this? According to Kaspersky, the malware is “designed to perform specific functions like stealing documents, recording keystrokes, and hijacking encryption keys from both infected computers and attached USB sticks.”
What isn’t known is who made this malware. The sophistication suggests a state sponsor, but nothing can be said for sure at this point. We’ll be watching closely as security researchers try to learn more.
The absolutely absurd idea of putting a touchscreen display on a mouse isn't exactly new. Turtle Beach already did it with its Command Series MC7, which features a 2.25-inch control screen. But apparently, even that wasn't ridiculous enough for Arctic Fox Technologies. Its new Super Mouse looks like someone took the chunky old Atari ST mouse, slapped a touchscreen and scroll wheel on it, and called it an upgrade.
The result is a rather unusual-looking mouse that is now on Kickstarter, starting at $199. And as ridiculous as it looks, some of its features are genuinely intriguing.
Apple is less than a day away from launching its highly anticipated OLED MacBook Pro with a touch-sensitive screen. But it appears that the upgrade is going to cost a pretty penny. According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is reportedly eyeing a starting price of $2,899 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, while the 16-inch version could start at $3,399 in the US.
"At $2,899, the 14-inch model would mark the highest starting price for a new MacBook Pro model, surpassing the $2,799 Apple charged for a 17-inch version introduced in 2006," says the report. The report claims that Apple is targeting a minimum price hike of $400 for its upcoming redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.
I've spent a good amount of time digging into the spec sheet of the new M6 MacBook Pro (14-inch), and for all intents and purposes, this is a classic Apple "chip and connectivity" refresh. It's not a full redesign. The chassis, Liquid Retina XDR panel, speakers, ports, and battery, all of them carry over unchanged.
However, the M6 brings more cores, stronger on-device AI, higher memory bandwidth on the larger configs, and modern wireless. Here’s the practical rundown of what actually improved, and whether those gains are worth your money.