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NSA's 'Codebreaker Challenge' Features Exploiting Blockchain To Steal Ethereum (ltsnet.net) 51
Posted by EditorDavid on Saturday September 22, 2018 @05:34PM from the show-me-the-money dept.
"The National Security Agency's 2018 Codebreaker Challenge kicked off on Friday, 9/21, and runs through 12/31," writes Slashdot reader eatvegetables. Each year's challenge -- which is open to U.S. students -- comes with its own (fictitious) backstory which the organizers say is "meant for providing realistic context."
This year's story?
A new strain of ransomware has managed to penetrate several critical government networks and NSA has been called upon to assist in remediating the infection to prevent massive data losses. For each infected machine, an encrypted copy of the key needed to decrypt the ransomed files has been stored in a smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain* and is set to only be unlocked upon receipt of the ransom payment. Your mission is to ultimately (1) find a way to unlock the ransomware without giving in to the attacker's demands and (2) figure out a way to recover all of the funds already paid by other victims.
* For the purposes of this challenge, a private blockchain has been created with no real monetary value associated with the Ether.
"The first half focuses on network protocol analysis and binary reverse-engineering," writes eatvegetables, while "The second half is all about attempting to exploit the blockchain."
An email address from "a recognized U.S. school or university" is required, and the original submission notes that America's college students "are already hard at work trying to push their school to the top of the leaderboard." |
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| Jimmy Fallon |
I wanted to be the next Dana Carvey. This was my ultimate goal. If I ever cut into a birthday cake and made a wish, I would wish to be on 'Saturday Night Live.' If I threw a coin into a fountain, I would wish to be on 'Saturday Night Live.' If I saw a shooting star, I would wish to be on 'Saturday Night Live.' |
| Joyce Meyer |
I've been saying for a couple of years now that people need to let God out of the Sunday morning box, that He doesn't want to just be with you for an hour or two on Sunday morning and then put back in His box to sit there until you have an emergency, but He wants to invade your Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. |
| Roman Jakobson |
The search for the symbolic value of phonemes, each taken as a whole, runs the risk of giving rise to ambiguous and trivial interpretations because phonemes are complex entities, bundles of different distinctive features. |
| Sarah Gadon |
I do build my own backstory as an actor. It's important to know where your characters have come from in order to know where they're going - in order to exist in that state of being. |
| Julia Cameron |
What we really want to do is what we are really meant to do. When we do what we are meant to do, money comes to us, doors open for us, we feel useful, and the work we do feels like play to us. |
| G. W. Bailey |
Do I enjoy features? Yeah, I really do. Would I like to do some more features before I head to the barn? Yeah, probably. But I also love television. I love doing television because it's fast, and that I like a lot. |
| Lisa Jakub |
When I was 14 years old, I went on location to film 'Mrs. Doubtfire' for five months, and my high school was not happy. My job meant an increased workload for teachers, and they were not equipped to handle a 'non-traditional' student. So, during filming, they kicked me out. |
| Guy Davenport |
Fiction's essential activity is to imagine how others feel, what a Saturday afternoon in an Italian town in the 2nd Century looked like. My ambition is solely to get some effect, as of light on stone in a forest on a September day. |
| Gautam Gambhir |
Being an impatient guy, even off the field, I would always look to score runs and score them quickly. Sometimes I panic if runs are not coming. |
| Jason Isbell |
If you're somebody who writes songs or writes fiction, a writer that people pay for your opinion in any way, you shouldn't be the least bit uncomfortable giving it to them. People want songwriters to tell them how they think and how they feel. That's what a song is. That's what I want to hear in a song. |
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Every day for the past week has been a huge challenge
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This is the last time I'll post here while procrastinating a machine learning assignment (assuming no revisions need to be made after the poster presentation). A reflection on my first year of grad school: I have never been so consistently miserable. Sure, undergrad was hard, especially senior year when I was cramming in an entire computer science minor, but the challenge was rewarding. The huge class sizes at Michigan are demoralizing. It feels like a factory. Being on the instructor side as a GSI is equally frustrating. I don't actually know how everyone is doing, so I can't what the majority of students actually needs. Office hours are probably my favorite part, since people come in who are motivated and have concrete questions that I can help with, which is great. But the entitlement of students on Piazza is horrible. I probably shouldn't take it so personally, but it's hard not to. I feel like I'm not good enough at anything.
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Russian Trolls Tried -- and Failed -- To Push Divisive Content On Vaccines (fortune.com) 190
Posted by EditorDavid on Saturday August 25, 2018 @10:34AM from the thinking-of-the-children dept.
Russian trolls "seem to be using vaccination as a wedge issue, promoting discord in American society," according to a new study shared by long-time Slashdot reader skam240. "The topic became another issue the Russian trolls seized upon to widen existing rifts in America and turn citizens against each other," reports NBC News.
But Fortune reports there's more to the story:...
This post is a comment.
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Once Hailed As Unhackable, Blockchains Are Now Getting Hacked
Early last month, the security team at Coinbase noticed something strange going on in Ethereum Classic, one of the cryptocurrencies people can buy and sell using Coinbase's popular exchange platform. Its blockchain, the history of all its transactions, was under attack. An attacker had somehow gained control of more than half of the network's computing power and was using it to rewrite the transaction history. That made it possible to spend the same cryptocurrency more than once -- known as "double spends." The attacker was spotted pulling this off to the tune of $1.1 million. Coinbase claims that no currency was actually stol...
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Computer Pioneer and Codebreaker Alan Turing To Appear On UK Money (bbc.com)
Computer pioneer and codebreaker Alan Turing will feature on the new design of the Bank of England's 50 pound note. He is celebrated for his code-cracking work that proved vital to the Allies in World War Two. The 50 pound note will be the last of the Bank of England collection to switch from paper to polymer when it enters circulation by the end of 2021. The note was once described as the "currency of corrupt elites" and is the least used in daily transactions. However, there are still 344 million 50 pound notes in circulation, with a combined value of 17.2bn pound, according to the Bank of England's banknote circulation figures. "Alan Turing was an outstanding mathematician whose work has had an enormous impa...
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Hacker Steals $30 Million Worth of Ethereum From Parity Multi-Sig Wallets
An unknown hacker has used a vulnerability in an Ethereum wallet client to steal over 153,000 Ether, worth over $30 million dollars. The hack was possible due to a flaw in the Parity Ethereum client. The vulnerability allowed the hacker to exfiltrate funds from multi-sig wallets created with Parity clients 1.5 and later. Parity 1.5 was released on January 19, 2017. The attack took place around 19:00-20:00 UTC and was immediately spotted by Parity, a company founded by Gavin Wood, Ethereum's founder. The company issued a security alert on its blog. The Ether stolen from Parity multi-sig accounts was transferred into this Ethereum wallet, currently holding 153,017.021336727 Ether. Because Parity spotted the attack i...
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One Year After Data Breach, Equifax Goes Unpunished
"It's been a year since Equifax doxed the nation of America through carelessness, deception and greed, lying about it and stalling while the problem got worse and worse," writes Cory Doctorow. Equifax's new CSO says they've spent over $200 million on security upgrades, in work being overseen by auditor from eight different states. An anonymous reader quotes Doctorow's response:
This all sounds very good and all, but it's still monumentally unfair. The penalty for Equifax's recklessness should have been the corporate death penalty: charter revoked, company shut down, assets sold to competitors... The fact that Equifax's investors and exec...
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Hacker Group Leaks 'NSA's Top Secret Arsenal of Digital Weapons'
Hacker group 'The Shadow Brokers', which last year allegedly released top-secret tools that the National Security Agency had used to break into the networks of foreign governments and other espionage targets, today said it is disappointed with President Donald Trump, and released more such alleged tools. From a report on Motherboard:
On Saturday, The Shadow Brokers, a hacker or group of hackers that has previously dumped NSA hacking tools, released more alleged exploits. The group published a password for an encrypted cache of files they distributed last year. "Be considering this our form of protest," the group wrote in a r...
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Amazon Will Pay $0 in Federal Taxes on $11.2 Billion Profits (fortune.com)
Those wondering how many zeros Amazon, which is valued at nearly $800 billion, has to pay in federal taxes might be surprised to learn that its check to the IRS will read exactly $0.00. From a report:
According to a report published by the Institute on Taxation and Economic (ITEP) policy Wednesday, the e-tail/retail/tech/entertainment/everything giant won't have to pay a cent in federal taxes for the second year in a row. This tax-free break comes even though Amazon almost doubled its U.S. profits from $5.6 billion t...
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2018 update https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tesr1OyymXo
This post is a comment.
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