The Venusian surface was a subject of speculation until some of its secrets were revealed by planetary science in the 20th century. Today, Venus is not a dream destination for aspiring space tourists, as revealed by numerous missions in the last few decades. The planet is not only hot enough to melt lead, but it also rains sulphuric acid. View full article »
Stem cells, famous for replenishing the body’s stockpile of other cell types throughout life, may have an additional, unforeseen ability to cache memories of past wounds and inflammation. New studies in the skin, gut and airways suggest that stem cells, often in partnership with the immune system, can use these memories to improve the responses of tissues to later injuries and pathogenic assaults. View full article »
In 2004, the Italian theoretical cosmologist Valeria Pettorino wrote her doctoral thesis on “dark energy in generalized theories of gravity.” As a side project, she translated the opening lines of Dante’s Divine Comedy into a geometry problem. View full article »
Have you ever sat in a math classroom and wondered, “When will I ever use this?” You might have asked yourself this question when you first encountered “imaginary” numbers, and with good reason: What could be less practical than a number described as imaginary? View full article »
Elliptic curves seem to admit infinite variety, but they really only come in two flavors. That is the upshot of a new proof from a graduate student at Harvard University. View full article »
Philip Gibbs is not a professional mathematician. So when he wanted a problem to chew on, he looked for one where even an amateur could make a difference. What he found was a challenge that could drive even the most exacting minds mad. In a paper completed earlier this year, Gibbs achieved a major advance on a 100-year-old question that hinges on the ability to accurately measure area down to the atomic scale. View full article »
In my blog on DemonBot, I discussed how Hadoop YARN exploit attempts were ramping up. In the middle of October, our deception network recorded up to 1.5 million attempts per day. The good news is that the attempt rate steadily slowed down in the second half of last month—though unfortunately not to the point where we should pat ourselves on the back for exposing one of the many malicious campaigns that are taking advantage of exposed Hadoop YARN servers. View full article »
DDG is a botnet focused on scanning control SSH, Redis databases and OrientDB database servers, and drawing server computing power (Monroe). We first perceived the DDG botnet on October 25, 2017 , and subsequently released reports and reports . A recent report released in 2018-08, was updated to version DDG 3013. View full article »
Banking Trojans traditionally target users of online financial services; looking for financial data to steal or building botnets out of hacked devices for future attacks. However, over time, several of these banking Trojans have enhanced their functionality, launching new variants and extending their range. Some are now able to obtain root access to infected devices, perform transactions, inject other malicious code, record video, and more. And the victims of such malware are not just people who bank online but online shoppers in general. View full article »
