The humble piezo disc buzzer is much more than something that makes tinny beeps in retro electronic equipment, it can also be used as a sensor. Tapping a piezo buzzer gives an interesting waveform, with a voltage spike followed by an envelope, and then a negative rebound voltage. It’s something [Igor Brichkov] is using, to make a simple but effective electronic drum.

First of all, the output of the buzzer must be tamed, which he does by giving it a little impedance to dissipate any voltage spikes. There follows some simple signal conditioning with passive components, to arrive at an envelope for the final drum sound. How to turn a voltage into a sound? Using a voltage controlled amplifier working on a noise source. The result is recognizably the drum sound, entirely in electronics.

In a world of digital music it’s easy to forget the simpler end of sound synthesis, using circuits rather than software. If you hanker for the Good Old Days, we have an entire series on logic noise, doing the job with 4000 series CMOS logic.

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E’ stato scoperto un istituto di formazione dove venivano addestrati truffatori e hacker criminali, i cui obiettivi erano le aziende russe. Lo ha annunciato Stanislav Kuznetsov, vicepresidente del consiglio di amministrazione di Sberbank, in un’intervista a RIA Novosti.

Secondo lui ci sono addirittura intere “università” pronte a preparare simili attentati. Sembrerebbe che siano riusciti a identificare una di queste piattaforme; operava in formato online e reclutava adepti tramite le darknet. Il programma di formazione comprendeva corsi, materiali di studio ed esami e la sua durata era di sette settimane.

Gli analisti bancari hanno stimato che circa 10mila persone hanno completato la formazione e altre 20mila non hanno superato la selezione. “Cioè, c’è anche una concorrenza”, ha osservato Kuznetsov, aggiungendo che la frode è diventata un settore separato dell’economia sommersa con molte specializzazioni.

Secondo Sberbank, nel 2024, i truffatori hanno rubato alle aziende russe dai 250 a 300 miliardi di rubli (circa 3 miliardi di euro).

Il Ministero degli Affari Interni aveva precedentemente riferito che una delle maggiori somme trasferite ai criminali nel 2024 ammontava a circa 180 milioni di rubli. Il dipartimento ha chiarito che il danno causato a ciascuna vittima individualmente non viene preso in considerazione dalle statistiche, quindi è difficile determinare l’importo maggiore per un caso specifico. Le vittime hanno trasferito denaro direttamente sui conti dei truffatori. Secondo il Ministero degli Interni della Federazione Russa, se prima i criminali si concentravano su chiamate di massa e furti di contanti, ora coordinano le azioni delle vittime, coinvolgendole nelle transazioni immobiliari, nonché nell’elaborazione di prestiti attraverso organizzazioni di microfinanza.

Sberbank prevede che nel 2025 i truffatori si concentreranno sul furto di conti presso i servizi statali, sulle false chiamate per conto dei dipartimenti governativi e tramite gli instant messenger fingendosi dirigenti. La banca rileva inoltre che gli schemi di base rimarranno invariati, ma aumenterà il rischio di un utilizzo attivo dell’intelligenza artificiale, il che renderà le falsificazioni più convincenti.

Il Ministero dello Sviluppo Digitale e Roskomnadzor hanno iniziato a discutere del possibile blocco delle chiamate vocali nei servizi di messaggistica istantanea a causa dell’aumento delle attività fraudolente. Secondo una fonte del settore delle telecomunicazioni, tale misura può essere attuata solo a livello di Roskomnadzor, gli operatori delle telecomunicazioni non possono influenzarlo.

L'articolo Cybercrime Academy: Come i Criminali informatici Si Addestrano Per Sferrare Colpi Micidiali proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.

A couple of years ago one of the Hackaday Prize finalists was a project to take highschoolers through building a direct conversion radio receiver for the 40 metre amateur band. It was originated by the SolderSmoke podcast, and we’re pleased to see that they’ve recently put up an overview video taking the viewer through the whole project in detail.

It’s a modular design, with all the constituent building blocks broken out into separate boards on which the circuitry is built Manhattan style. Direct conversion receivers are pretty simple, so that leaves us with only four modules for oscillator, bandpass filter, mixer, and audio amplifier. We particularly like that it’s permeability tuned using a brass screw and an inductor, to make up for the once-ubiquitous variable capacitors now being largely a thing of the past.

A point that resonated was that most radio amateurs never make something like this. Arguments can be made about off-the-shelf rigs and chequebook amateurs, but we’d like to suggest that everyone can benefit from a feel for analogue circuitry even if they rarely have a need for a little receiver like this one. We like this radio, and we hope you will too after seeing the video below the break.

Need reminding? See the Hackaday.io project page, and the Hackaday Prize finalists from that year.

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Raspberry Pi’s new microcontroller, the RP2350, has a small section of memory that is meant for storing secrets. It’s protected by anti-glitching and other countermeasures, and the Raspberries wanted to test it. So this summer, they gave them out, pre-programmed with a secret string, as part of the badge for DEFCON attendees. The results of the cracking efforts are in, and it’s fair to say that the hackers have won.

First place went to [Aedan Cullen], who also gave a great talk about how he did it at 38C3. One of the coolest features of the RP2350, from a hacker perspective, is that it has dual ARM and dual RISC-V cores onboard, and they can be swapped out by multiplexers. The security module has a critical register that has disable bits for both of these processors, but it turns out that the ARM disable bits have priority. When [Aedan] glitched the security module just right, it disabled the ARM cores but left the RISC-V cores running in the secure context, with full debug(!), and the game was over. As of yet, there is no mitigation for this one, because it’s baked into the secure boot module’s silicon.

[Marius Muench] managed to pre-load malicious code into RAM and glitch a reboot-out-of-secure-mode on the USB module. This one is possibly fixable by checking other reboot flags. [Kévin Courdesses] has a sweet laser fault-injection rig that’s based on the 3D-printable OpenFlexure Delta Stage, which we’ve seen used for microscopy purposes, but here he’s bypassing the anti-glitching circuitry by exposing the die and hitting it hard with photons.

Finally, [Andrew Zonenberg] and a team from IOActive went at the RP2350 with a focused ion beam and just read the memory, or at least the pairwise-OR of neighboring bits. Pulling this attack off isn’t cheap, and it’s a more general property of all anti-fuse memory cells that they can be read out this way. Chalk this up as a mostly-win for the offense in this case.

If you want to read up on voltage glitching attacks yourself, and we promise we won’t judge, [Matthew Alt] has a great writeup on the topic. And ironically enough, one of his tools of choice is [Colin O’Flynn]’s RP2040-based Chip Shouter EMP glitcher, which he showed us how to make and use in this 2021 Remoticon talk.

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These days, anything with copper in it is expensive. If you doubt that, a walk into any Home Depot electrical department, where the wire is locked up tighter than Fort Knox, will prove otherwise. Coaxial cable is a particularly expensive species, which is a pity for hams and other radio enthusiasts since it’s the only thing we can use for antenna feedlines.

Or is it? [Steve (VE6WZ)] has found a way to use ordinary Cat 6 Ethernet cable for antenna feed lines that seems pretty clever. As he points out, Ethernet cables are designed to handle frequencies that coincide nicely with most of the interesting amateur radio bands, and their insertion losses are acceptably low, especially for Cat 6 cable. The twisted pairs are also a balanced system that’s good at rejecting common mode noise. Cat 6 cable also has four pairs of conductors, allowing you to feed multiple antennas with one cable, or to distribute power to amplifiers and switches along with antenna feeds.

The downside? Cat6 conductor pairs have a characteristic impedance of around 100 ohms, which isn’t a match for the 50-ohm feedline impedance universally expected by ham radios. Also, the relatively small wires probably aren’t up to the job of carrying much current, limiting their use to feedlines for receive-only antennas. That works for [Steve] since he uses Cat 6 to support his massive Beverage antenna farm (Beverage antennas are non-resonant horizontal antennas that live close to the ground and point in the direction of the signal, rather than broadside to the signal as with a resonant antenna like a dipole.) Each antenna in his farm has a transimpedance amplifier that needs to be powered, plus switching relays so he can turn the correct antennas on for the signals he wants to receive. He describes the amps in detail in the video below, along with the custom impedance-matching transformers he uses and the combining gear.

Coax will probably still be the cable of choice for most feedline applications, but it’s nice to know there are alternatives. And who knows—if you stick to QRP work, maybe Cat 6 could even be used for transmitting.

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Un nuovo strumento per tracciare e sequestrare i proventi illeciti delle organizzazioni criminali transnazionali, la prima Silver Notice è stata richiesta dalle autorità italiane.

La Silver Notice ha lo scopo di intercettare e recuperare beni illeciti, principalmente in Asia e Sud America, relativi a un programma di riciclaggio di denaro del valore di oltre 500 milioni di euro.

Il progetto Silver Notice è stato proposto dall'Italia all'Assemblea Generale dell'INTERPOL del 2022 ed è stato istituito un gruppo di lavoro guidato da un colonnello della Guardia di Finanza italiana per definirne la portata e il funzionamento. - Si tratta dell’ultima aggiunta alla suite di avvisi e diffusioni codificati a colori dell’Organizzazione, che consente ai paesi di condividere avvisi e richieste di informazioni in tutto il mondo. Viene lanciato come parte di una fase pilota che coinvolge 52 paesi e territori, che durerà almeno fino a novembre 2025.

La Silver Notice sarà utilizzata per condividere informazioni a supporto di vari tipi di recupero dei beni, compresa la confisca basata su condanna e non basata su condanna, e può includere richieste di esecuzione di ordini di sequestro o confisca.

L'iniziativa rientra nel “Modello” italiano di prevenzione e contrasto alla criminalità organizzata transnazionale attraverso il targeting dei patrimoni illeciti, come sottolineato dal Dipartimento di Pubblica Sicurezza italiano.