Security News for the Week Ending November 18, 2022

Remember Mastodon’s 1 Million Users Last Week – Now 6 Million

Last week I reported that the open source distributed alterative to Twitter, Mastodon (sorry, mammoth, I misspelled it last week) now has 6 million. While that pales before Twitter’s 200 million, the growth curve is interesting. And because it is distributed, it will be harder to corrupt. Of course, there is a learning curve and people don’t like change, so as long as Twitter still operates, people will use it. And Twitter will likely stabilize if its finances don’t kill it. Musk is talking the B word – bankruptcy, but he says lots of things. Definitely stay tuned. Credit: Cybernews

Shocker: EV Charging Stations Are Easy to Hack

Two Department of Energy labs – Idaho and Sandia, who in the past have shown how you can set utility grade generators on fire. Remotely. By hacking the software. Are at it again. Now they are hacking the public electric car charging network. Every single type of charging station they tested, they were able to own. They could even change the firmware on the fly. Hopefully the vendors will listen to DoE. History does not indicate that is promising and the only solution might be more regulation. Credit: The Register

Thales Denies Getting Hacked – It Was Our Vendor That Got Hit

I guess that is supposed to make us feel better – the 9.5 gigabytes of stolen Thales data was not obtained directly from Thales, it was stolen from a vendor they chose and did not manage effectively. The hacker claims the data includes financial, accounting, customer and other data. Don’t blame it on your bad vendor risk management system. You will not get any brownie points for doing that. Credit: Security Week

Houston, We Have a Problem-Send A Repair Team To Mars, Stat!

There is not a threat to anyone’s safety because of this attack. To our knowledge. Oh, great. Apparently there is an attack method that is relatively simple to do that could break the networks in spacecraft, airplanes and critical infrastructure. A solution is to replace copper cables with fiber. Anyone up for taking some fiber to Mars or the Moon? Credit: Dark Reading

Brits Block Takeover of Chipmaker by Chinese

Chinese owned by Dutch operated Nexperia bought a controlling interest in a small high-tech British fab operation called Newport wafer fab. The did this in 2021 for 60 Million Pounds. Now the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) says the takeover is a national security risk – a year and a half later. Not only is the fab’s product strategic, but so is the physical location. Maybe they should have done this 19 months ago. Newport says that they have mitigated the risk. And I believe in the tooth fairy. Credit: The Guardian

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