08.15.25 Security News Bites

Qubic Claims to Control Monero Mining

Any blockchain is supposed to be unchangeable. That is unless you control the hashing function. The premise behind all blockchains is that there are a lot of independent hash systems which prevents collusion to change the data. If you can change the block data then it is like a bank ledger written in pencil. Qubic claims to have control over 51 percent and there is some evidence that this might be true. This attack conceptually would them to change the data on any blockchain. Credit: Coindesk

China and US Battle Over Sale, Safety of AI Chips

The president said that allowing Nvidia to sell H20 AI chips to China was not a problem because the chips were old, but only if Nvidia gives the government 15 percent of their revenue from the sale. This comes after the president halted the sale of $2.5 billion of these chips in April. If they are old then selling them should not be a problem. It is unclear how taxing a US company for selling chips to China makes things safer. At the same time China is telling Chinese companies not to use the chip, especially for national security related work due to concerns about there being backdoors in the chips. Credit: Time and CNN

Hackers Breach and Expose North Korea Spy Operations

Hackers claim to have compromised a North Korean spy operation and have leaked the contents online. The North Korean spy whose computer was hacked works for APT43. This gives an interesting insight into things where hackers are allowed to steal intelligence and launder cryptocurrency at the same time. Credit: Tech Crunch

Russian Hackers Took Control of a Dam in Norway; Opened Floodgates

There is bad news and good news here. The bad news is that Russian hackers were able to take over control of the dam and open the flood gates, draining millions of gallons of water. The good news is that they were able to recover control of the dam in a matter of hours. It is unclear whether that is because their IT folks were amazingly skilled or because the disconnected their network from the Internet and put it in manual mode. One of these days we won’t be so lucky. Credit: Tech Crunch

Hackers Sell Keys to Enterprise Networks

Cybercrime is a business and if you are from a renegade country (China, Russia, North Korea and others), it is very profitable and the risk of getting caught is close to zero. On the other hand, if you are in a friendly country, there is a decent chance you will get caught, if you are greedy. You can even choose what kind of keys (userids/passwords) you want. You want VPN access, it is available. Domain credentials, yup, that too. A bundle? They can do that. It is hard to figure out who the final victim is to warn them so all the police can try to do is take down the entire network of a seller. That can be done, but it is pretty labor and time intensive. So, for the moment, the hackers are winning. Learn more at the link. Credit: Security Week

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