Google kills download-shrinking Lite Mode browser tech

The number of zero-day vulnerabilities exploited in the wild reached an all-time high last year, according to Mandiant.

The security shop identified 80 such actively abused flaws in 2021, which Mandiant researcher James Sadowski noted is more than double the previous zero-day record from 2019.

This echoes another zero-day report also published this week by Google. However, the cloud giant’s bug hunters spotted 58, compared to Mandiant’s 80 recorded instances.

The US Space Force has created a unit, the 19th Space Defense Squadron, to monitor activity in the region beyond Earth’s geosynchronous orbit, all the way out to the Moon and yonder.

Commander of the 18th SDS, Lt. Col. Matt Lintker, confirmed the launch of the task force during a panel discussion at the intelligence and defense-focused C4ISRNet conference held virtually this week.

Lintker said the 19th SDS will be in charge of monitoring the area of space further out than our planet’s geosynchronous equatorial orbit, a region officials called “xGEO” space. Space Force is mostly concerned with the operation and defense of its satellites for communications and navigation purposes, but it also keeps an eye on space for any military activity from foreign adversaries and also tracks space junk that could cause a risk to American interests.

Researchers in the US have received a $15 million National Science Foundation (NSF) award to develop superconductor chips that ought to be much faster and use significantly less energy than the hardware the world today relies on for computing.

A team at the University of Southern California’s Viterbi School of Engineering is leading the effort, and it goes by the name DISCoVER, a rather fun acronym that stands for Design and Integration of Superconductive Computation for Ventures beyond Exascale Realization.

As the name suggests, the scientists are looking to use superconducting materials as an alternative to today’s semiconductors to develop new kinds of superfast and highly energy efficient integrated circuits that can enable sustainable and large-scale exascale computing.

Federal regulators are taking a closer look at Google’s planned $5.4 billion acquisition of Mandiant, a deal designed to boost the web giant’s public cloud’s cybersecurity capabilities.

In a filing [PDF] with the SEC this week, Mandiant officials said that both their company and Google received a request from the Department of Justice for more information, though no details about what data is being sought was disclosed.

Both companies expect to respond to this request promptly and continue to work with the DOJ’s review of the proposed deal, which was announced in early March, they stated in the SEC filing. The merger is still expected to go ahead this year.

Samsung’s IT services arm and other companies are said to be testing out a processor that sports more than 1,000 general-purpose RISC-V cores to deliver what the chip’s designer claims is faster and more energy-efficient AI inference performance than power-hungry specialty silicon.

The chip designer, Esperanto Technologies, said Thursday Samsung SDS and other unnamed companies, which it only identified as “lead customers,” are doing initial evaluations of the startup’s ET-SoC-1 AI inference accelerator.

The Mountain View, California-based startup was founded in 2014 by Dave Ditzel, a semiconductor industry veteran who worked on parallel computing architectures at Intel and, earlier in his career, led the development of the SPARC CPU instruction set architecture at Sun Microsystems. Esperanto is now led by Art Swift, who has held several semiconductor leadership roles, including CEO of Wave Computing.

SpaceX has signed its first Starlink contract with an air carrier, and despite recent news it isn’t Delta. 

Semi-private airline JSX will be outfitting 100 of its planes with Starlink receivers, providing in-flight Wi-Fi to passengers in a manner that JSX said won’t require logging in “or other complexities associated with legacy systems,” and will be operating by the end of 2022. 

Earlier speculation had Delta Airlines poised to be the first company to partner with SpaceX to provide in-flight Starlink service, as its CEO Ed Bastian admitted to the company testing the systems on some of its planes. Bastian has declined to make comments outside of that confirmation. 

The OpenBSD Project has released version 7.1 of its eponymous OS for 13 different computer architectures, including Apple’s M1 Macs.

OpenBSD is the security-focused member of the BSD family. Project leader Theo de Raadt co-founded the NetBSD project in 1993, but after disagreements with other core team members, he left and forked the NetBSD 1.0 codebase, releasing OpenBSD 1.2 in 1996. As a generalization, OpenBSD focuses on robustness and security, NetBSD focuses on supporting as many different platforms as possible, and FreeBSD focuses on providing a rich modern OS for the most popular platforms.

Version 7.1 is the 52nd release since then, in which time only two remote holes have been found in the default installation.

Chinese tech giant Alibaba is joining a coalition pledging to freely distribute energy efficient and green technologies, and has made nine patents available as part of the deal. 

The patents Alibaba is giving to the Low Carbon Patent Pledge (LCPP) mostly involve parts of its own in-house “soaking server” liquid immersion cooling system developed in 2015 that Alibaba claims reduced its datacenter energy expenditure by 70 percent.

Two of the nine patents were unrelated: one limits hard drive power consumption, and another was designed to improve hardware utilization rates. 

SoftBank is said to be planning to keep a controlling stake in Arm after its public offering, rather than divesting itself of the chip design firm as had been thought. The move may indicate that SoftBank does not believe it would get the valuation it has been seeking for a full sale of Arm.

The planned initial public offering (IPO) for Arm was set to value the chip designer at up to $60 billion, but according to Bloomberg, owner SoftBank is now considering selling off a smaller portion of the business than originally planned so that it can retain a controlling interest in the company.

One reason for this may be that SoftBank is concerned by the current supply chain issues that are affecting the semiconductor market and which have led to a fall in the value of chip company stocks as investors lose confidence. The Japanese conglomerate may have decided that it is better to hold on to much of Arm for now and wait for better market conditions.

An affiliate of the aggressive Hive ransomware group is exploiting known vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange servers to encrypt and exfiltrate data and threaten to publicly disclose the information if the ransom isn’t paid.

In a recent attack on an unnamed organization, the Hive affiliate rapidly compromised multiple devices and file servers by exploiting the ProxyShell vulnerabilities in Exchange servers, encrypting the data within 72 hours of the start of the attack, threat hunters with data security vendor Varonis Systems said in a report this week.

The attack included all the hallmarks of one associated with Hive, a ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) group that emerged in June 2021 and has targeted a range of sectors, including healthcare, retail, nonprofits, and energy providers.

Engineers are to double down on efforts to get Lucy’s solar array fully deployed amid worries regarding potential damage during a main engine burn of the Trojan asteroid explorer.

Problems were noted shortly after launch last year, when one of the probe’s 7.3 meter (23.9 feet) solar arrays failed to latch into place after deployment. Enough of the fan-like array had opened to generate plenty of power for the spacecraft, but not enough to latch securely into place. Engineers reckon that the array got to approximately 345 out of 360 degrees before stalling.

The issue did not present an immediate threat to the mission. Engineers pondered if they might simply leave things as is; after all, the array was generating ample power. However, as investigations have proceeded, particularly with regard to what might happen during an engine firing, a decision has been taken to try and latch the array in place.