Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Old bot, new tricks.

TrickBot, a financially motivated malware in wide circulation, has been observed infecting victims’ computers to steal email passwords and address books to spread malicious emails from their compromised email accounts.

The TrickBot malware was first spotted in 2016 but has since developed new capabilities and techniques to spread and invade computers in an effort to grab passwords and credentials — eventually with an eye on stealing money. It’s highly adaptable and modular, allowing its creators to add in new components. In the past few months it’s adapted for tax season to try to steal tax documents for making fraudulent returns. More recently the malware gained cookie stealing capabilities, allowing attackers to log in as their victims without needing their passwords.

With these new spamming capabilities, the malware — which researchers are calling “TrickBooster” — sends malicious from a victim’s account then removes the sent messages from both the outbox and the sent items folders to avoid detection.

Researchers at cybersecurity firm Deep Instinct, who found the servers running the malware spamming campaign, say they have evidence that the malware has collected more than 250 million email addresses to date. Aside from the massive amounts of Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail accounts, the researchers say several U.S. government departments and other foreign governments — like the U.K. and Canada — had emails and credentials collected by the malware.

“Based on the organizations affected it makes a lot of sense to get as widely spread as possible and harvest as many emails as possible,” Guy Caspi, chief executive of Deep Instinct, told TechCrunch. “If I were to land on an end point in the U.S. State department, I would try to spread as much as I can and collect any address or credential possible.”

If a victim’s computer is already infected with TrickBot, it can download the certificate-signed TrickBooster component, which sends lists of the victim’s email addresses and address books back to the main server, then begins its spamming operating from the victim’s computer.

The malware uses a forged certificates to sign the component to help evade detection, said Caspi. Many of the certificates were issued in the name of legitimate businesses with no need to sign code, like heating or plumbing firms, he said.

The researchers first spotted TrickBooster on June 25 and was reported to the issuing certificate authorities a week later which revoked the certificates, making it more difficult for the malware to operate.

After identifying the command and control servers, the researchers obtained and downloaded the 250 million cache of emails. Caspi said the server was unprotected but “hard to access and communicate with” due to connectivity issues.

The researchers described TrickBooster as a “powerful addition to TrickBot’s vast arsenal of tools,” given its ability to move stealthily and evade detection by most antimalware vendors, they said.

Old bot, new tricks.

TrickBot, a financially motivated malware in wide circulation, has been observed infecting victims’ computers to steal email passwords and address books to spread malicious emails from their compromised email accounts.

The TrickBot malware was first spotted in 2016 but has since developed new capabilities and techniques to spread and invade computers in an effort to grab passwords and credentials — eventually with an eye on stealing money. It’s highly adaptable and modular, allowing its creators to add in new components. In the past few months it’s adapted for tax season to try to steal tax documents for making fraudulent returns. More recently the malware gained cookie stealing capabilities, allowing attackers to log in as their victims without needing their passwords.

With these new spamming capabilities, the malware — which researchers are calling “TrickBooster” — sends malicious from a victim’s account then removes the sent messages from both the outbox and the sent items folders to avoid detection.

Researchers at cybersecurity firm Deep Instinct, who found the servers running the malware spamming campaign, say they have evidence that the malware has collected more than 250 million email addresses to date. Aside from the massive amounts of Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail accounts, the researchers say several U.S. government departments and other foreign governments — like the U.K. and Canada — had emails and credentials collected by the malware.

“Based on the organizations affected it makes a lot of sense to get as widely spread as possible and harvest as many emails as possible,” Guy Caspi, chief executive of Deep Instinct, told TechCrunch. “If I were to land on an end point in the U.S. State department, I would try to spread as much as I can and collect any address or credential possible.”

If a victim’s computer is already infected with TrickBot, it can download the certificate-signed TrickBooster component, which sends lists of the victim’s email addresses and address books back to the main server, then begins its spamming operating from the victim’s computer.

The malware uses a forged certificates to sign the component to help evade detection, said Caspi. Many of the certificates were issued in the name of legitimate businesses with no need to sign code, like heating or plumbing firms, he said.

The researchers first spotted TrickBooster on June 25 and was reported to the issuing certificate authorities a week later which revoked the certificates, making it more difficult for the malware to operate.

After identifying the command and control servers, the researchers obtained and downloaded the 250 million cache of emails. Caspi said the server was unprotected but “hard to access and communicate with” due to connectivity issues.

The researchers described TrickBooster as a “powerful addition to TrickBot’s vast arsenal of tools,” given its ability to move stealthily and evade detection by most antimalware vendors, they said.

Another state — this time North Carolina — has been enticed by the idea of hyperloop, the futuristic and still theoretical transit platform that will shuttle people and packages at speeds of up to 670 miles per hour between cities.

Virgin Hyperloop One and North Carolina’s Regional Transportation Alliance announced Friday the beginning of “an exploration” into using hyperloop to connect the state’s research triangle of Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill.

There is still a long way to go before hyperloop or this particular route that Virgin Hyperloop One is exploring  becomes a reality. Theoretically, if this one were built, it would take less than 10 minutes to travel between Raleigh and Durham or Chapel Hill, according to a pre-feasibility study carried out by AECOM. That would be a lynchpin for the area, which is home to some of the country’s top companies, universities and healthcare centers.

How this plays out is now in the hands of the North Carolina Department of Transportation. But based on comments at an event Friday, the state agency is not only interested in the research triangle; it also plans to look at expanding on the original idea and investigate a line that would connect to Charlotte and Washington D.C.

The process from here on out will be a slow one. While state agencies investigate the feasibility of building hyperloop, Virgin Hyperloop One (VHO) is working on certifying the technology to carry humans. That certification process, which currently doesn’t exist, will likely take years. VHO aims to be certified by 2023 and have one of its hyperloop platforms in place by 2029.

The announcement follows a few milestones for Virgin Hyperloop One, including a recent demonstration in Washington D.C. and the funding of NETT, or the Non traditional & Emerging Transportation Technologies Council, which will research and fund hyperloop nationally.

In May, VHO raised $172 million. The company also has a new CEO — Jay Walder,  who ran bike-sharing operator Motivate. Walder took over at VHO in November.

Sir Richard Branson,  who stepped down as chairman in October, has been replaced with Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, chairman and CEO of the United Arab Emirates shipping and logistics company DP World.

DP World is the company’s largest investor. DP World first invested in the company in 2016. The two companies launched a logistics joint venture in 2018 to develop hyperloop transport for cargo.

Another state — this time North Carolina — has been enticed by the idea of hyperloop, the futuristic and still theoretical transit platform that will shuttle people and packages at speeds of up to 670 miles per hour between cities.

Virgin Hyperloop One and North Carolina’s Regional Transportation Alliance announced Friday the beginning of “an exploration” into using hyperloop to connect the state’s research triangle of Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill.

There is still a long way to go before hyperloop or this particular route that Virgin Hyperloop One is exploring  becomes a reality. Theoretically, if this one were built, it would take less than 10 minutes to travel between Raleigh and Durham or Chapel Hill, according to a pre-feasibility study carried out by AECOM. That would be a lynchpin for the area, which is home to some of the country’s top companies, universities and healthcare centers.

How this plays out is now in the hands of the North Carolina Department of Transportation. But based on comments at an event Friday, the state agency is not only interested in the research triangle; it also plans to look at expanding on the original idea and investigate a line that would connect to Charlotte and Washington D.C.

The process from here on out will be a slow one. While state agencies investigate the feasibility of building hyperloop, Virgin Hyperloop One (VHO) is working on certifying the technology to carry humans. That certification process, which currently doesn’t exist, will likely take years. VHO aims to be certified by 2023 and have one of its hyperloop platforms in place by 2029.

The announcement follows a few milestones for Virgin Hyperloop One, including a recent demonstration in Washington D.C. and the funding of NETT, or the Non traditional & Emerging Transportation Technologies Council, which will research and fund hyperloop nationally.

In May, VHO raised $172 million. The company also has a new CEO — Jay Walder,  who ran bike-sharing operator Motivate. Walder took over at VHO in November.

Sir Richard Branson,  who stepped down as chairman in October, has been replaced with Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, chairman and CEO of the United Arab Emirates shipping and logistics company DP World.

DP World is the company’s largest investor. DP World first invested in the company in 2016. The two companies launched a logistics joint venture in 2018 to develop hyperloop transport for cargo.

Oracle has been complaining about the procurement process around the Pentagon’s $10 billion, decade-long JEDI cloud contract, even before the DoD opened requests for proposals last year. It went so far as to file a lawsuit in December, claiming a potential conflict of interest on the part of a procurement team member. Today, that case was dismissed in federal court.

In dismissing the case, Federal Claims Court Senior Judge Eric Bruggink ruled that the company had failed to prove a conflict in the procurement process, something the DOD’s own internal audits found in two separate investigations. Judge Bruggink ultimately agreed with the DoD’s findings.

“We conclude as well that the contracting officer’s findings that an organizational conflict of interest does not exist and that individual conflicts of interest did not impact the procurement, were not arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with law. Plaintiff’s motion for judgment on the administrative record is therefore denied,” Judge Bruggink wrote in his order.

The company previously had filed a failed protest with the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which also ruled that the procurement process was fair and didn’t favor any particular vendor. Oracle had claimed that the process was designed to favor cloud market leader AWS.

It’s worth noting that the employee in question was a former AWS employee. AWS joined the lawsuit as part of the legal process, stating at the time in the legal motion, “Oracle’s Complaint specifically alleges conflicts of interest involving AWS. Thus, AWS has direct and substantial economic interests at stake in this case, and its disposition clearly could impair those interests.”

Today’s ruling opens the door for the announcement of a winner of the $10 billion contract, as early as next month. The DoD previously announced that it had chosen Microsoft and Amazon as the two finalists for the winner-take-all bid.

It’s hard to feel seen, heard and represented as a person of color in today’s current media landscape. Ravneet Vohra (pictured above), founder and CEO of Wear Your Voice, is changing that.

Wear Your Voice is an intersectional feminist multimedia platform that aims to center marginalized communities, including those who are queer, trans, non-binary, female, black, brown, Asian, Indigenous or some combination of those identities. The site features stories race, identity, body politics, culture, health and, of course, news and politics.

“Wear Your Voice was born out of my own story growing up as a South Asian woman in a mainly white community and not feeling seen or heard,” Vohra told TechCrunch. “Not just within the community I was in, but also in multimedia. Out of my pain, I made it my power and launched Wear Your Voice.”

Vohra bootstrapped WYV for the first five years, hit a rough patch in 2018, but survived because “our audience saved us,” she said.

“That’s when you know you’re destined to stay,” Vohra said. “Because nothing speaks louder than the support of people on the Internet saying, ‘No, you are integral to our safety. You provide a safe space.’ So people started throwing money at us.”

But Vohra and WYV were still in survival mode. The company needed more than enough money to survive. It needed money to thrive.

“It’s been an interesting journey,” she said. “I’ve tried the VC route and the angel route, and I always felt like the door was getting closed in my face because we weren’t centering white people.”

Wear Your Voice didn’t receive its first bit of outside funding until investor and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban came along. Vohra said she later “stumbled upon Mark, and that was a really defining moment.”

To date, Cuban is the company’s sole outside investor.

“With him coming on board, I now have a clearer, more defined role,” she said. “I’m now moving away from a survival mode into being able to do my job.”

With a recent influx of capital from Cuban, Wear Your Voice is building out its team, improving on its technology and forming partnerships  — most recently a paid partnership with Planned Parenthood.

“My investment in Wear Your Voice was based on many factors, but the ultimate deciding factor was the high level of content they publish and the community it serves,” Cuban said in a statement. “Saying that, WYV doesn’t just serve underrepresented communities of color, it is also a place for the rest of us to listen and learn.”

Earlier this month, WYV partnered with Planned Parenthood for the Summer of Sex campaign. The campaign aims to center the experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual and other sexualities, sexes and genders (LGBTQIA+) and black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC).

Sex is something that cannot be singularly defined, and yet so many continually attempt to define it through rigid hetero and cisnormative understandings. With this campaign, we are igniting and continuing important conversations about sex — from sex positivity, sexual health, and sexual liberation to purity culture’s effects on people of color, especially queer and trans folks. From desirability politics — how racism, misogyny, fatphobia, ableism, and more impact how we think about sex, attraction, humanity, and certain people’s prescribed roles — to masturbation and sex toys. From STI stigma and sex education to debunking myths about the clitoris and de-centering the penis and penetration in our understandings of sex and pleasure. We want to explore the myriad of ways QTBIPOC experience sex and the things surrounding it.

To achieve this, WYV is producing a number of articles, essays and interviews around the topic of sex.

“This is huge,” Vohra told me. “It’s a big deal for me because this explores sex through the QTBIPOC lens.”

Down the road, expect to see more partnerships with brands and corporations, Vohra said.

“There are so many other campaigns in the pipeline,” Vohra said. “We are also looking for more investment so I can continue to grow and really shake up the status quo of how normal digital media companies are operated and show them how to do it better.”

It’s hard to feel seen, heard and represented as a person of color in today’s current media landscape. Ravneet Vohra (pictured above), founder and CEO of Wear Your Voice, is changing that.

Wear Your Voice is an intersectional feminist multimedia platform that aims to center marginalized communities, including those who are queer, trans, non-binary, female, black, brown, Asian, Indigenous or some combination of those identities. The site features stories race, identity, body politics, culture, health and, of course, news and politics.

“Wear Your Voice was born out of my own story growing up as a South Asian woman in a mainly white community and not feeling seen or heard,” Vohra told TechCrunch. “Not just within the community I was in, but also in multimedia. Out of my pain, I made it my power and launched Wear Your Voice.”

Vohra bootstrapped WYV for the first five years, hit a rough patch in 2018, but survived because “our audience saved us,” she said.

“That’s when you know you’re destined to stay,” Vohra said. “Because nothing speaks louder than the support of people on the Internet saying, ‘No, you are integral to our safety. You provide a safe space.’ So people started throwing money at us.”

But Vohra and WYV were still in survival mode. The company needed more than enough money to survive. It needed money to thrive.

“It’s been an interesting journey,” she said. “I’ve tried the VC route and the angel route, and I always felt like the door was getting closed in my face because we weren’t centering white people.”

Wear Your Voice didn’t receive its first bit of outside funding until investor and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban came along. Vohra said she later “stumbled upon Mark, and that was a really defining moment.”

To date, Cuban is the company’s sole outside investor.

“With him coming on board, I now have a clearer, more defined role,” she said. “I’m now moving away from a survival mode into being able to do my job.”

With a recent influx of capital from Cuban, Wear Your Voice is building out its team, improving on its technology and forming partnerships  — most recently a paid partnership with Planned Parenthood.

“My investment in Wear Your Voice was based on many factors, but the ultimate deciding factor was the high level of content they publish and the community it serves,” Cuban said in a statement. “Saying that, WYV doesn’t just serve underrepresented communities of color, it is also a place for the rest of us to listen and learn.”

Earlier this month, WYV partnered with Planned Parenthood for the Summer of Sex campaign. The campaign aims to center the experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual and other sexualities, sexes and genders (LGBTQIA+) and black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC).

Sex is something that cannot be singularly defined, and yet so many continually attempt to define it through rigid hetero and cisnormative understandings. With this campaign, we are igniting and continuing important conversations about sex — from sex positivity, sexual health, and sexual liberation to purity culture’s effects on people of color, especially queer and trans folks. From desirability politics — how racism, misogyny, fatphobia, ableism, and more impact how we think about sex, attraction, humanity, and certain people’s prescribed roles — to masturbation and sex toys. From STI stigma and sex education to debunking myths about the clitoris and de-centering the penis and penetration in our understandings of sex and pleasure. We want to explore the myriad of ways QTBIPOC experience sex and the things surrounding it.

To achieve this, WYV is producing a number of articles, essays and interviews around the topic of sex.

“This is huge,” Vohra told me. “It’s a big deal for me because this explores sex through the QTBIPOC lens.”

Down the road, expect to see more partnerships with brands and corporations, Vohra said.

“There are so many other campaigns in the pipeline,” Vohra said. “We are also looking for more investment so I can continue to grow and really shake up the status quo of how normal digital media companies are operated and show them how to do it better.”

In a summer surprise this week, IBM announced it had closed its $34 billion blockbuster deal to acquire Red Hat. The deal, which was announced in October, was expected to take a year to clear all of the regulatory hurdles, but U.S. and EU regulators moved surprisingly quickly. For IBM, the future starts now, and it needs to find a way to ensure that this works.

There are always going to be layers of complexity in a deal of this scope, as IBM moves to incorporate Red Hat into its product family quickly and get the company moving. It’s never easy combining two large organizations, but with IBM mired in single-digit cloud market share and years of sluggish growth, it is hoping that Red Hat will give it a strong hybrid cloud story that can help begin to alter its recent fortunes.

As Box CEO (and IBM partner) Aaron Levie tweeted at the time the deal was announced, “Transformation requires big bets, and this is a good one.” While the deal is very much about transformation, we won’t know for some time if it’s a good one.

Transformation blues

Decades ago, a young naval engineer on a British nuclear submarine started taking an interest in the electric batteries helping to run his vessel. Silently running under the frozen polar ice-cap during the Cold War, little did this sub-mariner know that, in the 21st Century, batteries would become one of the biggest single sectors in technology. Even the planet. But his curiosity stayed with him, and almost 20 years ago he decided to pursue that dream, borne many years beneath the waves.

The journey for Trevor Jackson started, as many things do in tech, with research. He’d become fascinated by the experiments done, not with lithium batteries, which had come to dominate the battery industry, but with so-called ‘Aluminum-air’ batteries.

Technically described at “(Al)/air” batteries, these are the – almost – untold story from the battery world. For starters, an Aluminum-air battery system can generate enough energy and power for driving ranges and acceleration similar to gasoline powered cars.

Sometimes known as ‘Metal-Air’ batteries, these have been successfully used in ‘off-grid’ applications for many years, just as batteries powering army radios. The most attractive metal in this type of battery is Aluminum because it is the most common metal on Earth and has one of the highest energy densities.

Think of an air-breathing battery which uses Aluminum as a ‘fuel’. That means it can provide vehicle power with energy originating from clean sources (hydro, geothermal, nuclear etc). These are the power sources for most Aluminum smelters all over the world. The only waste product is Aluminum Hydroxide and this can be returned to the smelter as the feedstock for – guess what? – making more Aluminum! This cycle is therefore highly sustainable and separate from the oil industry. You could even recycle aluminum tin cans and use them to make batteries.

Imagine that – a power source separate from the highly polluting oil industry.

But hardly anyone was using them in mainstream applications. Why?

Aluminum-air batteries had been around for a while. But the problem with a battery which generated electricity by ‘eating’ Aluminum was that it was simply not efficient. The electrolyte used just didn’t work well.

This was important. An electrolyte is a chemical medium inside a battery that allows the flow of electrical charge between the cathode and anode. When a device is connected to a battery — a light bulb or an electric circuit — chemical reactions occur on the electrodes that create a flow of electrical energy to the device.

When an Aluminum-Air battery starts to run, a chemical reaction produces a ‘gel’ by-product which can gradually block the airways into the cell. It seemed like an intractable problem for researchers to deal with.

But after a lot of experimentation, in 2001, Jackson developed what he believed to be a revolutionary kind of electrolyte for Aluminum-air batteries which had the potential to remove the barriers to commercialization. His specially-developed electrolyte did not produce the hated gel that would destroy the efficiency of an Aluminum-air battery. It seemed like a game-changer.

The breakthrough – if proven – had huge potential. The energy density of his battery was about 8 times that of a Lithium-Ion battery. He was incredibly excited. Then he tried to tell politicians…

Despite a detailed demonstration of a working battery to Lord ‘Jim’ Knight in 2001, followed by email correspondence and a promise to ‘pass it onto Tony (Blair)’ there was no interest from the UK Government.

And Jackson faced bureaucratic hurdles. The UK government’s official innovation body, Innovate UK, emphasized lithium battery technology, not Aluminum-Air batteries.

He was struggling to convince public and private investors to back him, such was the hold the “lithium battery lobby” had over the sector.

This emphasis on Lithium batteries over anything else meant UK the government was effectively leaving on the table a technology which could revolutionize electrical storage and mobility and even contribute to the fight against carbon emission and move the UK towards its pollution-reduction goals.

Disappointed in the UK, Jackson upped sticks and found better backing in France where he moved his R&D in 2005.

Finally, in 2007, the potential of Jackson’s invention was confirmed independently in France at the Polytech Nantes institution. Its advantages over Lithium Ion batteries were (and still are) increased cell voltage. They used ordinary aluminum, would create very little pollution and had a steady, long-duration power output.

As a result, in 2007 the French Government formally endorsed the technology as ‘strategic and in the national interest of France’.

At this point, the UK’s Foreign Office suddenly woke up and took notice.

It promised Jackson that the UKTI would deliver ‘300%’ effort in launching the technology in the UK if it was ‘repatriated’ back to the UK.

However, in 2009, the UK’s Technology Strategy Board refused to back the technology, citing that the Automotive Council Technology Road Map ‘excluded this type of battery’. Even though the Carbon Trust agreed that it did indeed constitute a ‘credible CO2-reduction technology’ it refused to assist Jackson further.

Meanwhile, other governments were more enthusiastic about exploring metal-air batteries.

The Israeli Government, for instance, directly invested in Phinergy, a startup working on very similar Aluminum-Air technology. Here’s an, admittedly corporate, video which actually shows the advantages of metal-air batteries in electric cars:

The Russian Aluminum company RUSAL developed a CO2-free smelting process, meaning they could, in theory, make an Aluminum-air battery with a CO2-free process.

Jackson tried to tell the UK government they were making a mistake. Appearing before the Parliamentary Select Committee for business-energy and industrial strategy, he described how the UK had created a bias towards lithium-Ion technology which had led to a battery-tech ecosystem which was funding Lithium-Ion research to the tune of billions of pounds. In 2017, Prime Minister Theresa May further backed the lithium-ion industry.

Jackson (below) refused to take no for an answer.

He applied to UK’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory. But in 2017 they replied with a ‘no-fund’ decision which dismissed the technology, even though DSTL had an actual programme of its own on Aluminum-Air technology, dedicated to finding a better electrolyte, at Southampton University.

Jackson turned to auto industry instead. He formed his company MAL (branded as “Metalectrique“) in 2013 and used seed-funding to successfully test a long-range design of power pack in its laboratory facilities in Tavistock, UK.

Here he is on a regional BBC channel explaining the battery:

He worked closely with Lotus Engineering to design and develop long-range replacement power packs for the Nissan Leaf and the Mahindra Reva ‘G-Wiz’ electric cars. At the time, Nissan expressed a strong interest in this ‘Beyond Lithium Technology’ (their words) but they were already committed to fitting LiON batteries to the ‘Leaf’. Undeterred, Jackson concentrated on the G-Wiz and went on to produce full-size battery cells for testing and showed that Aluminum-Air technology was superior to any other existing technology.

And now this emphasis on Lithium-Ion is still holding back the industry.

The fact is that Lithium batteries now face considerable challenges. The technology development has peaked; unlike Aluminum, Lithium is not recyclable and Lithium battery supplies are not assured.

The advantages of Aluminum-Air technology are numerous. Without having to charge the battery, a car could simply swap the battery out in second, completely removing ‘charge time’. Most current charging points are rated at 50 kW which is roughly one-hundredth of that required to charge a Lithium battery in 5 minutes. Meanwhile, Hydrogen Fuel Cells would require a huge and expensive Hydrogen distribution infrastructure and a new Hydrogen generation system.

But Jackson has kept on pushing, convinced his technology can address both the power needs of the future, and the climate crisis.

Last May, he started getting much-needed recognition

The UK’s Advanced Propulsion Centre included the Metalectrique battery as part of its grant investment into 15 UK startups to take their technology to the next level as part of its Technology Developer Accelerator Programme (TDAP). The TDAP is part of a 10-year program to make UK a world-leader in low carbon propulsion technology.

The catch? These 15 companies have to share a paltry £1.1m in funding.

And as for Jackson? He’s still raising money for Metalectrique and spreading the word about the potential for Aluminum-air batteries to save the planet.

Heaven knows, at this point, it could use it.