What have you missed on Hackaday this week? Elliot Williams and Al Williams compare notes on their favorites from the week, and you are invited. The guys may have said too much about the Supercon badge this year — listen in for a few hints about what it will be about.

For hacks, you’ll hear about scanning tunneling microscopes, power management for small Linux systems, and lots of inertial measurement units. The guys talked about a few impossible hacks for consumer electronics, from hacking a laptop, to custom cell phones.

Of course, there are plenty more long-form articles of the week, including a brief history of what can go wrong on a spacewalk and how to get the lead out (of the ground). Don’t forget to take a stab at the What’s That Sound competition and maybe score a sweet Hackaday Podcast T-shirt.

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

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Episode 291 Show Notes:

News:

• Supercon is almost here!

What’s that Sound?

• Do you know the sound? Let us know and get a chance at a coveted Hackaday Podcast T.

Interesting Hacks of the Week:

• Building A 3D Printed Scanning Tunneling Microscope
  
  • Cheap DIY Microscope Sees Individual Atoms
  • Homebrew Probe Tip Etcher Makes Amazingly Sharp Needles

  
  

• Creating Video Games With AI: A Mario Example
• Pi Zero Power Optimization Leaves No Stone Unturned
• Inside The F-4 Attitude Indicator
  
  • Retrotechtacular: Sychros Go to War and Peace

  
  

• Easily Build This IMU Array Sandbox
  
  • IMU Sensor Fusion

  
  

• Thinkpad 13 Gets NVMe Support With Three Jumpers

Quick Hacks:

• Elliot’s Picks:
  
  • MikroPhone – Open, Secure, Simple Smartphone
  • 2024 SAO Contest: We’ve Got SAOs For Your SAOs
  • Man-in-the-Middle PCB Unlocks HP Ink Cartridges

  
  

• Al’s Picks:
  
  • Blinking An LED Passively
  • 3D Printed Jellyfish Lights Up
  • Add USB-C To Your AirPods The Easy Way

  
  

Can’t-Miss Articles:

• Polaris Dawn, And The Prudence Of A Short Spacewalk
• Mining And Refining: Lead, Silver, And Zinc

hackaday.com/2024/10/04/hackad…

We might consider PCB panels as simply an intermediate step towards getting your PCBs manufactured on the scale of hundreds. This is due to, typically, an inability to run traces beyond your board – and most panel generators don’t give you the option, either. However, if you go for hand-crafted panels or modify a KiKit-created panel, you can easily add extra elements – for instance, why not add vias in the V-Cut path to preserve electrical connectivity between your boards?

[Adam Gulyas] went out and tried just that, and it’s a wonderfully viable method. He shows us how to calculate the via size to be just right given V-Cut and drilling tolerances, and then demonstrates design of an example board with discrete component LED blinkers you can power off a coin cell. The panel gets sent off to be manufactured and assembled, but don’t break the boards apart just yet — connect power to the two through-hole testpoints on the frame, and watch your panel light up all at once.

It’s a flashy demonstration – even more so once you put light-diffusing spheres on top of the domes. You could always do such a trick with mousebites, but you risk having the tracks tear off the board, and, V-Cuts are no doubt the cleanest way to panelize – no edge cleaning is required after breaking the boards apart. Want to learn about panel design? We’ve written and featured multiple guides for you over the years.

hackaday.com/2024/10/04/v-cut-…

Up first this week is a warning for the few of us still brave enough to host our own email servers. If you’re running Zimbra, it’s time to update, because CVE-2024-45519 is now being exploited in the wild.

That vulnerability is a pretty nasty one, though thankfully requires a specific change from default settings to be exposed. The problem is in postjournal. This logging option is off by default, but when it’s turned on, it logs incoming emails. One of the fields on an incoming SMTP mail object is the RCPT TO: field, with the recipients made of the to, cc, and bcc fields. When postjournal logs this field, it does so by passing it as a bash argument. That execution wasn’t properly sanitized, and wasn’t using a safe call like execvp(). So, it was possible to inject commands using the $() construction.

The details of the attack are known, and researchers are seeing early exploratory attempts to exploit this vulnerability. At least one of these campaigns is attempting to install webshells, so at least some of those attempts have teeth. The attack seems to be less reliable when coming from outside of the trusted network, which is nice, but not something to rely on.

New Tool Corner

What is that binary doing on your system? Even if you don’t do any security research, that’s a question you may ask yourself from time to time. A potential answer is WhoYouCalling. The wrinkle here is that WYC uses the Windows Event Tracing mechanism to collect the network traffic strictly from the application in question. So it’s a Windows only application for now. What you get is a packet capture from a specific executable and all of its children processes, with automated DNS capture to go along.

DNS Poisoning

Here’s a mystery. The folks at Assetnote discovered rogue subdomains from several of their customers, showing up with seemingly random IP addresses attached. A subdomain like webproxy.id.customer.vn might resolve with 10 different addresses, when querying on alibabadns.com.

That turned out to be a particularly important clue. These phantom subdomains were all linked to the Chinese Internet in some way, and it turns out that each subdomain had some interesting keyword in it, like webproxy or VPN. This seems to be a really unique way to censor the Internet, as part of the Chinese Great Firewall. The problem here is that the censorship can escape, and actually poison DNS for those subdomains for the rest of the Internet. And because sometimes the semi-random IPs point at things like Fastly CDN or old cPanel installs. A bit of legwork gets you the equivalent of subdomain takovers. Along with the story, Assetnote have shared a tool to check domains for this issue.

Virtual Name Tags Bring the Creep Factor

What do you get when you combine Internet-connected smart glasses with LLM doing facial recognition? The optimistic opinion is that you get virtual nametags for everybody you meet. I’ve played a video game or two that emulates that sort of ability. Taking a bit more cynical and realistic view, this auto-doxxing of everyone in public strays towards dystopian.

perfctl

There’s a newly discovered Linux malware, perfctl, that specializes in stealth, combined with Monero mining. The malware is also used to relay traffic, as well as install other malware in compromised machines. The malware communicates over TOR, and uses some clever tricks to avoid detection. Log in to a compromised machine, and the Monero mining stops until you log back out.

The malware is particularly difficult to get rid of, and as always, the best solution is to carefully back up and then wipe the affected machine. One of the tells to look for is a machine that’s hard charging when it has no business being spun up to 100% CPU usage, and then when you log in and look for the culprit, it drops to normal.

Bits and Bytes

[nv1t] found a kid’s toy, the Kekz Headphones, and they just begged to be taken apart. This toy has a bunch of audio on an SD Card, and individual NFC-enabled tokens that triggers playback of the right file. This one is interesting from an infosec perspective, because the token actually supplies the encryption key for the file playback, making it a nominally secure system. After pulling everything apart, it became apparent that the encryption wasn’t up to the task, with only about 56 possible keys for each file.

Something we’ve continually talked about is how the subtle mismatches in data parsing often lead to vulnerabilities. [Mahmoud Awali] has noticed this, too, and decided to put together a comparison of how different languages handle HTTP parameters. Did you know that Ruby uses the semicolon as a parameter delimiter? There are a bunch of quirks like this, and this is the sort of material that you’ll need to find that next big vulnerability.

And finally, speaking of Ruby, are you familiar with Ruby’s class pollution category of vulnerabilities? It’s akin to Python and JavaScript’s prototype pollution, and not entirely unlike Java’s deserialization issues. If Ruby is your thing, go brush up on how to avoid this particular pitfall.

hackaday.com/2024/10/04/this-w…

Recentemente, il gruppo ransomware Stormous ha rivendicato la compromissione di OfficeGroup, un’azienda italiana specializzata nello sviluppo di sistemi gestionali e informatici. Questo attacco ha portato all’esfiltrazione e alla pubblicazione di circa 1 GB di dati, come confermato dal gruppo stesso.

Stormous, noto gruppo cyber-criminale attivo dal 2021, ha costruito la propria reputazione attraverso una serie di attacchi a realtà internazionali operanti in vari settori. L’obiettivo principale degli attacchi è l’esfiltrazione di dati sensibili, seguita da richieste di riscatto per evitare la pubblicazione degli stessi. Le comunicazioni di Stormous avvengono tramite un canale Telegram dedicato, su cui pubblicano aggiornamenti sugli attacchi e le presunte violazioni.

Al momento, non possiamo confermare la veridicità della notizia, poiché l’organizzazione non ha ancora rilasciato alcun comunicato stampa ufficiale sul proprio sito web riguardo l’incidente. Pertanto, questo articolo deve essere considerato come ‘fonte di intelligence’.

Dettagli della rivendicazione

L’attacco a OfficeGroup è stato segnalato il 3 ottobre 2024, e si presume che il gruppo ransomware abbia esfiltrato 1 GB di dati dall’infrastruttura della società.

Nonostante le informazioni diffuse da Stormous, non ci sono ancora conferme ufficiali da parte di OfficeGroup. La natura e il contenuto dei dati esfiltrati non sono stati divulgati pubblicamente, e l’azienda non ha ancora rilasciato dichiarazioni riguardo all’accaduto.

Il modus operandi di Stormous si basa sull’infiltrazione nei sistemi di aziende di diverse nazioni e settori, con l’intento di rubare dati sensibili e chiedere riscatti. È probabile che l’obiettivo sia non solo quello di ottenere pagamenti dalle vittime, ma anche di intimidire altre organizzazioni mostrando la loro capacità di compromettere sistemi e pubblicare dati riservati.

Conclusione

Al momento, non ci sono conferme ufficiali da parte di OfficeGroup in merito all’entità del danno subito o alle azioni intraprese per mitigare le conseguenze dell’attacco. È auspicabile che l’azienda prenda misure appropriate per garantire la sicurezza dei dati e la continuità dei propri servizi, oltre a collaborare con le autorità competenti per investigare sulla vicenda.

Come nostra consuetudine, lasciamo sempre spazio ad una dichiarazione da parte dell’azienda qualora voglia darci degli aggiornamenti sulla vicenda. Saremo lieti di pubblicare tali informazioni con uno specifico articolo dando risalto alla questione.

RHC monitorerà l’evoluzione della vicenda in modo da pubblicare ulteriori news sul blog, qualora ci fossero novità sostanziali. Qualora ci siano persone informate sui fatti che volessero fornire informazioni in modo anonimo, possono utilizzare la mail crittografata del whistleblower.

L'articolo Stormous rivendica un attacco all’Italiana Office Group: 1 GB di Dati nel dark web proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.

It’s fairly insignificant in the scheme of things, and there’s no hardware as yet for us to look at, but there it is. Tucked away in a device tree file, the first mention of a Raspberry Pi 500. We take this to mean that the chances of an upgrade to the Pi 400 all-in-one giving it the heart of a Pi 5 are now quite high.

We’ve remarked before that one of the problems facing the Raspberry Pi folks is that a new revision of the regular Pi no longer carries the novelty it might once have done, and certainly in hardware terms (if not necessarily software) it could be said that the competition have very much caught up. It’s in the Compute Module and the wildcard products such as the all-in-one computers that they still shine then, because even after several years of the 400 it’s not really seen an effective competitor.

So we welcome the chance of an all-in-one with a Pi 5 heart, and if we had a wish list for it then it should include that mini PCI-E slot on board for SSDs and other peripherals. Such a machine would we think become a must-have for any space-constrained bench.

hackaday.com/2024/10/04/the-ra…

“Uzeda – Do it yourself” è un docufilm, realizzato dalla regista Maria Arena (e prodotto da DNA audiovisivi e dalla casa di produzione indipendente Point Nemo) che racconta la storia degli Uzeda, fondamentale alternative/math/noise rock band italiana, formatasi nel 1987, che ha tracciato il proprio percorso musicale senza scinderlo da quello umano, fortemente etico.... @Musica Agorà

iyezine.com/uzeda-arriva-nei-c…

Uzeda, arriva nei cinema il docufilm "Do it yourself"

Uzeda, arriva nei cinema il docufilm "Do it yourself" - "Uzeda - Do it yourself" è un docufilm, realizzato dalla regista Maria Arena (e prodotto da DNA audiovisivi e dalla casa di produzione indipendente Point Nemo) che racconta la storia degli Uzeda…

^{Reverend Shit-Man (In Your Eyes ezine)}

Monos : la realtà vuole però che la band nasca da una folgorazione (probabilmente non di origine divina) avuta da Mr. Bonobo e Mr. Gorilla rispettivamente alla chitarra e alla batteria. La loro prima uscita è datata 2019 mentre il nuovo album è alle porte.

@Musica Agorà

iyezine.com/monos-road-to-perv…

Monos - "Road to Perversion" e quattro chiacchiere

Monos - "Road to Perversion" e quattro chiacchiere - Monos : la realtà vuole però che la band nasca da una folgorazione (probabilmente non di origine divina) avuta da Mr. Bonobo e Mr. Gorilla rispettivamente alla chitarra e alla batteria.

^{Claudio Frandina (In Your Eyes ezine)}

I Khost sono un pianeta oscuro che vaga per lo spazio cerebrale mietendo vittime, portando con sé un rumorismo molto potente, e fatto di industrial, doom, drone, dark ambient, nosie geneticamente modificato e molto di più.
@Musica Agorà

iyezine.com/khost-many-things-…

Khost - Many Things Afflict Us Few Things Console Us

Khost - Many Things Afflict Us Few Things Console Us - I Khost sono un pianeta oscuro che vaga per lo spazio cerebrale mietendo vittime, portando con sé un rumorismo molto potente, e fatto di industrial, doom, drone, dark ambient, nosie geneticamente…

^{Massimo Argo (In Your Eyes ezine)}

storicang.it/foto-del-giorno/s…

@Storia
@Storiaweb

La spia che si finse donna per venti anni

Shi Pei Pu fu un cantante lirico cinese che lavorava come spia. Fin qui niente di strano, se non fosse perché si finse donna e diventò l'amante di un diplomatico francese per ben venti anni.

^{Abel G.M. (National Geographic Storica)}