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GPU-based rootkit and keylogger offer superior stealth and computing power | Ars Technica

GPU-based rootkit and keylogger offer superior stealth and computing power
Proof-of-concept malware may pave the way for future in-the-wild attacks.

Developers have published two pieces of malware that take the highly unusual step of completely running on an infected computer's graphics card, rather than its CPU, to enhance their stealthiness and give them increased computational abilities.

Both the Jellyfish rootkit and the Demon keylogger are described as proofs-of-concept by their pseudo-anonymous developers, whom Ars was unable to contact. Tapping an infected computer's GPU allows malware to run without the usual software hooks or modifications malware makes in the operating system kernel. Those modifications can be dead giveaways that a system is infected.

Here's how the developers describe their rootkit:

Jellyfish is a Linux based userland gpu rootkit proof of concept project utilizing the LD_PRELOAD technique from Jynx (CPU), as well as the OpenCL API developed by Khronos group (GPU). Code currently supports AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards. However, the AMDAPPSDK does support Intel as well.

Advantages of gpu stored memory:

  • No gpu malware analysis tools available on web
  • Can snoop on cpu host memory via DMA
  • Gpu can be used for fast/swift mathematical calculations like xor'ing or parsing
  • Stubs
  • Malicious memory is still inside gpu after shutdown
Requirements for use:

  • Have OpenCL drivers/icds installed
  • Nvidia or AMD graphics card (intel supports amd's sdk)
  • Change line 103 in rootkit/kit.c to server ip you want to monitor gpu client from
Stay tuned for more features:

  • client listener; let buffers stay stored in gpu until you send magic packet from server
Disclaimer:
Educational purposes only; authors of this project/demonstration are in no way, shape or form responsible for what you may use this for whether illegal or not.

They provide no technical details about Demon keylogger other than to say it's a proof-of-concept that implements the malware described in this 2013 academic research paper titled You Can Type, but You Can’t Hide: A Stealthy GPU-based Keylogger. The Demon creators stress that they aren't associated with the researchers.

"The key idea behind our approach is to monitor the system’s keyboard buffer directly from the GPU via DMA [direct memory access], without any hooks or modifications in the kernel's code and data structures besides the page table," the researchers behind the 2013 paper wrote. "The evaluation of our prototype implementation shows that a GPU-based keylogger can effectively record all user keystrokes, store them in the memory space of the GPU, and even analyze the recorded data in-place, with negligible runtime overhead."

Aside from malware that taps GPUs to mint Bitcoin and other crypto currencies, Ars isn't aware of malicious software actively circulating in the wild that makes use of infected computers' graphics processors. And even then, most or all of those titles run mainly on the CPU and offload only the computationally intensive workloads to the GPU. In March, researchers from Kaspersky Lab documented highly sophisticated malware in the wild that infected firmware that runs 12 different models of hard drives. The group that created the malware had flown under the radar for 14 years.
In its current form Jellyfish is likely to remain a highly niche undertaking, since it requires a dedicated GPU. Since many computers don't contain stand-alone graphics cards, such malware might greatly limit the machines that could be infected. Still, the approach may make sense in certain situations, say for attackers targeting gamers or video enthusiasts, or espionage campaigns where stealth is crucial. And as readers have pointed out in comments below, it's feasible malware could be developed that runs on graphics processors integrated into CPUs.
 
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Footsoldier in Octopus Uprising Liberates Camera From Human Oppressor

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Days after one brave soul attempted escape from its enclosure at the Seattle Aquarium, beginning the octopus uprising in earnest, another cephalopod has taken up the flag. When a filmmaker naively attempted to photograph this beautiful captive creature in the name of "science," the octopus took the camera into its tentacles and turned it upon its captor.

The indefatigable spirit of the revolution lives on!

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Benjamin Savard wrote on Reddit that the teuthological proletarian made its act of symbolic defiance while Savard was making a film about the science department at Middlebury College: "The camera was automatically taking several photos of the octopus per second, but it picked up the camera and pointed it at me!"

Consider yourself lucky that it was only a camera, Ben.
 
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Shooting a Laser at a Planet, But Not To Blow it Up

dn7knrb1qnckzbyp8czo.jpg


This breathtaking photo shows the intense orange beam of a new 22-watt laser pointed at the planet Saturn. Wait, isn’t this like the shocking scene in Star Wars where the Death Star’s superlaser completely annihilated planet Alderaan?

Thankfully humankind has not evolved (yet) to the level where we can destroy entire planets with the help of laser turrets. This laser beam is emitting from the Unit Telescope 4 at European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope at Paranal, Chile. It’s the first of four so-called “laser guide star units” of the future 4 Laser Guide Star Facility (4LGSF), which will help astronomers to get much sharper images of deep space objects.

Today’s ESO announcement explains how and why:

The Adaptive Optics Facility uses sensors to analyse the atmospheric turbulence and a deformable mirror integrated in the telescope to correct for the image distortions caused by the atmosphere. But several bright point-like stars needs to be at hand in order to correct for the effects of turbulence, and these need to be very close to the science target in the sky.

Finding multiple natural stars for this role is unlikely. So, to make correcting for the atmospheric turbulence possible everywhere in the sky, for all possible science targets, powerful laser beams are projected into the sky. When the beams interact with the sodium layer high in the atmosphere they create artificial stars. By measuring the atmospherically induced motions and distortions of these artificial stars, and making minute adjustments to the deformable secondary mirror, the telescope can produce images with much greater sharpness than is possible without adaptive optics.

When completed in 2016, the Adaptive Optics Facility will see the UT4 telescope become a fully adaptive telescope providing turbulence-corrected images for all its instruments, without the addition of adaptive modules and supplementary optics.


You can witness the illumination of the first laser unit in the amazing photoset below, and maybe hear the Imperial March tune playing softly in the distance.

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1243661932647521608.jpg


1243661932508270664.jpg


1243661932905778248.jpg


1243661932948314952.jpg
 
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Carl Sagan's solar-powered spacecraft is getting its first test flight

Legendary astronomer Carl Sagan once envisioned a solar sailer, a spaceship that uses sunlight radiation to push itself through the solar system much like a boat relies on the wind. Decades later, his project is about to become a practical reality. The Planetary Society (which was co-founded by Sagan) has scheduled the first test flight for just such a solar vehicle, the LightSail, on May 20th. This initial run will see if the craft can successfully deploy its four Mylar sails. It won't be in a high-enough orbit to harvest the Sun's energy, but the experiment should pave the way for an honest-to-goodness sailing test in April 2016.

This isn't the first sailer, we should add. Japan's IKAROS probe took flight in July 2010, and NASA launched its own example just months later. However, LightSail could be very important for the future of space travel, especially as it shifts toward private companies. The whole program costs just $4.5 million (a drop in the bucket compared to typical space budgets)... and of course, it doesn't rely on expensive, heavy fuel to get around. If it proves successful, it would both make space exploration practical for more organizations and allow for long trips using smaller, nimbler vessels.

 
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Aircraft carrier that survived atomic blasts lies at bottom of Pacific

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A former U.S. Navy aircraft carrier that survived a Japanese torpedo strike and was a massive guinea pig for two atomic bomb blasts looks remarkably intact at the bottom of the Pacific, according to federal researchers who surveyed the wreck last month with an underwater drone.

The USS Independence was scuttled in January 1951 during weapons testing near California's Farallon Islands. Although its location was confirmed by a survey in 2009, researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration went looking for it again in March as part of a project to map about 300 wrecks that lie in and around the Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary.

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27AC4ECC00000578-3043865-Found_The_USS_Independence_was_found_off_California_s_Farallon_I-a-12_1429302083390.jpg


"After 64 years on the seafloor, Independence sits on the bottom as if ready to launch its planes," mission leader James Delgado, the maritime heritage director for NOAA's Office of National Marine Sanctuaries, said in a statement.

Indeed, sonar images show what looks to be an airplane on one of the elevators that took planes from the Independence's hangar deck to its flight deck. The ship sits upright with a slight list to starboard, according to NOAA.

NOAA's survey of the 623-foot-long, 11,000-ton carrier was conducted by the Echo Ranger, an 18.5-foot-long autonomous underwater vehicle provided by the Boeing Co. The Echo Ranger traveled 30 miles from its base in Half Moon Bay, California, and hovered 150 above the carrier, which lies 2,600 feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean. The drone used a three-dimensional sonar system provided by Coda Octopus to get images that showed how well the warship has weathered 64 years in the deep.

"This ship fought a long, hard war in the Pacific and after the war was subjected to two atomic blasts that ripped through the ship. It is a reminder of the industrial might and skill of the 'greatest generation' that sent not only this ship, but their loved ones to war," Delgado said in the statement.

In its 20 years in the Navy, the ship played a role in some of the most important events of World War II, earning eight battle stars in the process, and the dawn of the nuclear age.

Independence was seriously damaged by Japanese torpedo planes during the Battle of Tarawa in late 1943. The ship returned to California for repairs and made it back across the Pacific by July 1944 to participate in the Battle of the Sibuyan Sea and the sinking of one of the Japanese Imperial Navy's biggest warships, the battleship Musashi. Later, in the Battle of Cape Engano, planes from the Independence were involved in the sinking of four Japanese aircraft carriers.


After the war, Independence became part of a fleet used to measure the effects of atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific on July 1, 1946. It sat just 560 yards from ground zero in the first test, a 23-kiloton air blast of a fission bomb similar to the one used over Nagasaki, Japan, a year earlier, according to the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization. Twenty-four days later, Independence was 1,390 yards from the center of a second atomic blast -- also a 23-kiloton device but an underwater detonation.

The ship was later brought back to California for nuclear decontamination before being sunk during the weapons training in 1951.

NOAA said no signs of radioactive contamination were noted during the survey of the sunken carrier last month.

The agency has no plans for further missions to the ship, according to the NOAA statement.

From Aircraft carrier that survived atomic blasts surveyed - CNN.com

...

@Nihonjin1051 - For all the talk on this forum from some members about nukes and their use against, well everything, it seems their expectations are wrong. It's actually pretty difficult to kill a carrier, even with nukes. The Independence survived two nuclear blasts. It was sunk using demolition charges.

American engineering:usflag::usflag::usflag:

@Gabriel92 @AMDR @C130
 
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This Is What 15,000 Aircraft Look Like to Satellites in Space

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The main task of European Space Agency’s Proba-V minisatellite is monitoring vegetation growth on our planet—but it also sees something a little higher in our atmosphere, too: signals from thousands of aircraft.

The collected data contains flight information such as speed, position and altitude. Based upon all this information, experts have created this flight map of thousands and thousands of aircraft:

Proba-V has picked up upwards of 25 million positions from more than 15 000 separate aircraft. There are roughly 20 000 aircraft worldwide from which the DLR German Aerospace Center and SES team has captured more than 25 million positions. The team has identified more than 22 000 unique callsigns, identifying more than 15 000 aircraft by their unique International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) addresses (one aircraft can share a callsign with others, depending on the flight route).
 
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Shooting a Laser at a Planet, But Not To Blow it Up

dn7knrb1qnckzbyp8czo.jpg


This breathtaking photo shows the intense orange beam of a new 22-watt laser pointed at the planet Saturn. Wait, isn’t this like the shocking scene in Star Wars where the Death Star’s superlaser completely annihilated planet Alderaan?

Thankfully humankind has not evolved (yet) to the level where we can destroy entire planets with the help of laser turrets. This laser beam is emitting from the Unit Telescope 4 at European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope at Paranal, Chile. It’s the first of four so-called “laser guide star units” of the future 4 Laser Guide Star Facility (4LGSF), which will help astronomers to get much sharper images of deep space objects.

Today’s ESO announcement explains how and why:

The Adaptive Optics Facility uses sensors to analyse the atmospheric turbulence and a deformable mirror integrated in the telescope to correct for the image distortions caused by the atmosphere. But several bright point-like stars needs to be at hand in order to correct for the effects of turbulence, and these need to be very close to the science target in the sky.

Finding multiple natural stars for this role is unlikely. So, to make correcting for the atmospheric turbulence possible everywhere in the sky, for all possible science targets, powerful laser beams are projected into the sky. When the beams interact with the sodium layer high in the atmosphere they create artificial stars. By measuring the atmospherically induced motions and distortions of these artificial stars, and making minute adjustments to the deformable secondary mirror, the telescope can produce images with much greater sharpness than is possible without adaptive optics.

When completed in 2016, the Adaptive Optics Facility will see the UT4 telescope become a fully adaptive telescope providing turbulence-corrected images for all its instruments, without the addition of adaptive modules and supplementary optics.


You can witness the illumination of the first laser unit in the amazing photoset below, and maybe hear the Imperial March tune playing softly in the distance.

1243661932452184648.jpg


1243661932647521608.jpg


1243661932508270664.jpg


1243661932905778248.jpg


1243661932948314952.jpg
:tup:
 
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Drug-Resistant Typhoid Superbug Spreading Worldwide, Research Says

Typhoid fever is caused by consuming food or drink contaminated with the feces or urine of people who are infected
A drug-resistant strain of typhoid fever is spreading worldwide, according to new research.

A study published in Nature Genetics conducted by a team of 74 researchers in over 12 countries shows that antibiotic resistant typhoid, driven by one family of bacteria called H58, is spreading globally.

“Multidrug resistant typhoid has been coming and going since the 1970s and is caused by the bacteria picking up novel antimicrobial resistance genes, which are usually lost when we switch to a new drug,” said study author Kathryn Holt in a statement. “In H58, these genes are becoming a stable part of the genome, which means multiply antibiotic resistant typhoid is here to stay.”

In the study, researchers sequenced the genomes of 1,832 samples of the Salmonella Typhi bacteria (which causes typhoid fever) that were collected from 63 different countries between the years 1992 and 2013. The researchers discovered that 47% of these strains were from the drug-resistant H58 family. According to their findings, the strain likely first emerged in South Asia roughly 30 years ago and from there spread on to Southeast Asia, Western Asia, East Africa and Fiji. Southern Africa has also been affected.

Typhoid fever is caused by consuming food or drink contaminated with the feces or urine of people who are infected. People who are infected can experience a consistently high fever and can feel weak or have stomach pain and headaches. In the United States there are an estimated 5,700 cases each year, mostly from travelers who became infected abroad.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says typhoid affects 21.5 million people every year.

140909154851-typhoid-map-horizontal-gallery.jpg


----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Looks like we are all (well mostly all) going to die
 
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Drug-Resistant Typhoid Superbug Spreading Worldwide, Research Says

Typhoid fever is caused by consuming food or drink contaminated with the feces or urine of people who are infected
A drug-resistant strain of typhoid fever is spreading worldwide, according to new research.

A study published in Nature Genetics conducted by a team of 74 researchers in over 12 countries shows that antibiotic resistant typhoid, driven by one family of bacteria called H58, is spreading globally.

“Multidrug resistant typhoid has been coming and going since the 1970s and is caused by the bacteria picking up novel antimicrobial resistance genes, which are usually lost when we switch to a new drug,” said study author Kathryn Holt in a statement. “In H58, these genes are becoming a stable part of the genome, which means multiply antibiotic resistant typhoid is here to stay.”

In the study, researchers sequenced the genomes of 1,832 samples of the Salmonella Typhi bacteria (which causes typhoid fever) that were collected from 63 different countries between the years 1992 and 2013. The researchers discovered that 47% of these strains were from the drug-resistant H58 family. According to their findings, the strain likely first emerged in South Asia roughly 30 years ago and from there spread on to Southeast Asia, Western Asia, East Africa and Fiji. Southern Africa has also been affected.

Typhoid fever is caused by consuming food or drink contaminated with the feces or urine of people who are infected. People who are infected can experience a consistently high fever and can feel weak or have stomach pain and headaches. In the United States there are an estimated 5,700 cases each year, mostly from travelers who became infected abroad.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says typhoid affects 21.5 million people every year.

140909154851-typhoid-map-horizontal-gallery.jpg


----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Looks like we are all (well mostly all) going to die

:usflag::usflag::usflag:

We're all (mostly) going to die!

Beaker.gif
 
.
Drug-Resistant Typhoid Superbug Spreading Worldwide, Research Says

Typhoid fever is caused by consuming food or drink contaminated with the feces or urine of people who are infected
A drug-resistant strain of typhoid fever is spreading worldwide, according to new research.

A study published in Nature Genetics conducted by a team of 74 researchers in over 12 countries shows that antibiotic resistant typhoid, driven by one family of bacteria called H58, is spreading globally.

“Multidrug resistant typhoid has been coming and going since the 1970s and is caused by the bacteria picking up novel antimicrobial resistance genes, which are usually lost when we switch to a new drug,” said study author Kathryn Holt in a statement. “In H58, these genes are becoming a stable part of the genome, which means multiply antibiotic resistant typhoid is here to stay.”

In the study, researchers sequenced the genomes of 1,832 samples of the Salmonella Typhi bacteria (which causes typhoid fever) that were collected from 63 different countries between the years 1992 and 2013. The researchers discovered that 47% of these strains were from the drug-resistant H58 family. According to their findings, the strain likely first emerged in South Asia roughly 30 years ago and from there spread on to Southeast Asia, Western Asia, East Africa and Fiji. Southern Africa has also been affected.

Typhoid fever is caused by consuming food or drink contaminated with the feces or urine of people who are infected. People who are infected can experience a consistently high fever and can feel weak or have stomach pain and headaches. In the United States there are an estimated 5,700 cases each year, mostly from travelers who became infected abroad.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says typhoid affects 21.5 million people every year.

140909154851-typhoid-map-horizontal-gallery.jpg


----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Looks like we are going to die


It had me once and drained energy to the extent that lifting freezer door was like pulling 200lbs
 
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I think the #1 priority of this planet is to get clean water to everybody,
Wait a minute...somebody said that.... Team USA | Page 70

Indeed. I had just started college and it can reach above 45 degrees celsius here easily, so you gotta drink sometimes outside even if you don't want to
 
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The White House's Fence Upgrade Looks Straight Out of Game of Thrones

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From toddlers to truly deranged adults, the White House has seen its share of intruders this year. Now, the Secret Service and the Parks Service are upgrading the fence that so many crazies have scrambled over. And they’re using millennia-old defense techniques.

After several embarrassing breaches this year, the Secret Service began looking for ways to improve the security of the White House fence, as Wired’s Eric Niler writes today in a story about improving security through design. Many of those incidents involved the fence, which is why this summer, the Parks Service is installing hundreds of steel pokers against the existing decorative, leaf-shaped spikes that currently top the fence.

Spikes? Yes, spikes—ones that follow the same basic blueprint that civilizations have followed for thousands of years to defend their strongholds.

It seems stupid-simple. How will fence improvements deter attackers who burrow, or those who use drones to breach security? Those are legitimate questions, but a look back at the many White House security breaches over the years prove that they usually involve climbing that damn fence. Quadcopters are a new fear, but the most obvious way to stop the most intruders is the fence. Think of it as Occam’s razor for security—the simplest design solution is usually the right one.

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They look positively medieval, based on schematics submitted by the National Parks Service andpointed out by Politico.

The spikes will be clamped onto the existing fence toppers, which are more decorative than destructive, creating a secondary line of pointy metal that climbers will face when they’ve made it over the existing spikes. Each pointer is more than 7 inches long, and is angle backwards away from the fence to create the perfect geometry for catching errant scraps of clothing or skin that might be shimmying over the fence.

The most painful detail: What the Parks Service calls “pencil points,” or sharped steel pokers that tip each spiked rod.

These pencil point spikes are basically just a modern version of a palisade—which has been a core part of defense tech for millennia, used by everyone from the Roman army to pre-Columbian Amazonian peoples. Though they vary in details, palisades are usually lines of sharped points angled in the direction of the defending army, designed to catch or impale anyone trying to scale them:

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It’s only a temporary solution for the White House, which has a lot more than a fence to worry about in our age of quadcopters and cybersecurity. But historically speaking, it’s got a pretty good track record.
 
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