Technology

When Tesla’s Powerwall battery energy storage system was first announced, solar-friendly Australians went mad for it. A relatively cheap integrated system that could hook up to the grid and to rooftop solar panels, the Powerwall is one of the first widely-available technologies that could reduce users’ reliance on energy delivered via the national electricity grid. And now, one of the first Powerwall batteries to be installed in Australia is already bolted to the outside wall of a home in western Sydney.

Australia is the first country in the world to have Powerwall batteries installed and delivered, and companies like Natural Solar and Origin Energy are receiving and installing their first shipments into homes and businesses around Australia. New South Wales is first, but other states and territories have their first installations scheduled from the start of next week onwards — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Cisco’s Talos research team has managed to identify and partially shut down a cyber-criminal group that is using the RIG exploit kit to infect users with all kinds of malware.

This particular group used a series of security vulnerabilities, but most of the time, it was using the CVE-2015-5119 flaw in Flash, which allowed the group to compromise computers and later infect them with spambots.

Cisco reports that, in most cases, the main payload was the Tofsee spambot variant, which infected Windows machines via Internet Explorer.

Researchers say that most of the users getting infected via this particular RIG exploit kit campaign are redirected to the site using malicious ads and iframes embedded in legitimate and compromised websites.

The campaign was extremely active during the past fall and used well over 7,000 different domain names and 44 IPs to spread their malware payloads — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Microsoft has shown off an internet helmet built by a customer.

The hard-wired headwear is the brainchild of construction outfit Laing O’Rourke, which is rightly concerned with the welfare of workers it sends out to build stuff in the sweltering heat of places like Australia and the Middle East.

Folks toiling in the hot sun in such locales are liable to come down with nasty ailments like heatstroke, which the company would rather avoid because an afflicted worker is a danger to their colleagues as well as themselves.

The firm’s therefore found a way to fit sensors measuring heart rate, ambient temperature, body temperature, ultra-violet light and location into the sweatband of a bog-standard building site hard hat. There’s also a Zigbee radio in there with a range of 100m to shunt all the data into a Linux box, which passes it on to an Intel Compute Stick. That device shunts the lot into Azure where the incoming data’s crunched and turned into alerts to get that chap off the site, stat. And not because of the classic building site shocker — horrid arse-crack exposure — but rather because the helmet suggests a worker’s in a physical state that suggests ill-health or increased likelihood of accidents.

What’s that you say? Building sites are bigger than 100m? They certainly are, so Laing O’Rourke’s cunning R&D folk have daisy-chained Zigbee repeaters and reckon they’ve built a helmet-net with a range of 500 metres. Zigbee’s low power requirements make for all-day data beaming action. And if you’re worried about all that collection, storing-and-forwarding and cloud uploading going on, know that heatstroke’s symptoms can be detected before a sufferer notices them. So a few minutes diagnostic delay won’t be disastrous — via redwolf.newsvine.com

It may not be the definitive decision which propels humanity towards our inevitable end, but in a post on the Beeb’s internet blog, James East, the Media Playout Product Manager, stated that his team is now confident they can achieve the playback quality you’d expect from the BBC without using a third-party plugin.

HTML5 has already been used to deliver video to iOS devices. However, the Beeb has been hesitant to share this rollout to desktop services.

This was not an act of spite, East assures readers, but because Aunty felt that the consistent experience and efficient media delivery offered by Flash outweighed the benefit of moving to HTML5 — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Internet lowlives who used Yahoo! ads to infect potentially countless PCs with malware have struck again — using adverts on popular websites to reach millions more people.

Security researchers at MalwareBytes this week discovered the crooks running another massive campaign of ads that use the Angler Exploit Kit to infiltrate Windows PCs via vulnerabilities in Adobe Flash and web browsers.

Prominent websites including the Drudge Report and Weather.com — a pair of sites whose total traffic alone amounts to nearly 200 million visits per month — were apparently inadvertently carrying the ads, putting millions of netizens at risk.

MalwareBytes said the network carrying the ads, AdSpirit, was notified, and it has since taken down the offending adverts. The campaign has now moved to AOL’s ad network, with dodgy adverts appearing on eBay, we’re told — via redwolf.newsvine.com

The National Security Agency and its British counterpart, Government Communications Headquarters, have worked to subvert anti-virus and other security software in order to track users and infiltrate networks, according to documents from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The spy agencies have reverse engineered software products, sometimes under questionable legal authority, and monitored web and email traffic in order to discreetly thwart anti-virus software and obtain intelligence from companies about security software and users of such software. One security software maker repeatedly singled out in the documents is Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab, which has a holding registered in the UK, claims more than 270,000 corporate clients, and says it protects more than 400 million people with its products.

British spies aimed to thwart Kaspersky software in part through a technique known as software reverse engineering, or SRE, according to a top-secret warrant renewal request. The NSA has also studied Kaspersky Lab’s software for weaknesses, obtaining sensitive customer information by monitoring communications between the software and Kaspersky servers, according to a draft top-secret report. The US spy agency also appears to have examined emails inbound to security software companies flagging new viruses and vulnerabilities.

The efforts to compromise security software were of particular importance because such software is relied upon to defend against an array of digital threats and is typically more trusted by the operating system than other applications, running with elevated privileges that allow more vectors for surveillance and attack. Spy agencies seem to be engaged in a digital game of cat and mouse with anti-virus software companies; the US and UK have aggressively probed for weaknesses in software deployed by the companies, which have themselves exposed sophisticated state-sponsored malware — via redwolf.newsvine.com