Short Takes – 4-8-24

NASA engineers discover why Voyager 1 is sending a stream of gibberish from outside our solar system. LiveScience.com article. Pull quote: “"The team suspects that a single chip responsible for storing part of the affected portion of the FDS memory isn't working," NASA said in a blog post Wednesday (March 13). "Engineers can't determine with certainty what caused the issue. Two possibilities are that the chip could have been hit by an energetic particle from space or that it simply may have worn out after 46 years."”

Look at what NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter just caught speeding in orbit around the Moon. TheDebrief.com article. Pull quote: “Due to their opposite directional paths and the speed at which each lunar orbiter is traveling in their respective orbits (estimated to be close to 7,200 miles per hour), Danuri appeared elongated, making it look close to ten times its actual size, even despite the short exposure time of just 0.338 milliseconds used by the LRO’s narrow-angle camera.”

Top 10 Universal Practices for Critical Infrastructure Security. ICubedSolutions.com blog post. Pull quote: “The top 10 list is in no particular order because applying all 10 is very crucial to the security and resilience of our critical infrastructures, especially our interdependent industrial infrastructures such as water, oil, gas, electric, transportation (e.g. pipelines, rail, aviation, maritime) and telecommunications.”

NSA releases a repository of signatures and analytics to secure Operational Technology. NSA.gov press release. Pull quote: “Cyber actors have demonstrated their continued willingness to conduct malicious cyber activity against critical infrastructure by exploiting Internet-accessible and vulnerable Operational Technology (OT) assets. To counter this threat, NSA has released a repository for OT Intrusion Detection Signatures and Analytics to the NSA Cyber GitHub. The capability, known as ELITEWOLF, can enable defenders of critical infrastructure, defense industrial base, and national security systems to identify and detect potentially malicious cyber activity in their OT environments.”

Ukraine strikes at Russian oil as battlefield desperation mounts. TheHill.com article. Pull quote: “But experts say the oil refinery attacks would need to ramp up to change the calculus on the battlefield, where Russia has seized the upper hand in recent months, thanks in part to Republicans in U.S. Congress refusing to pass new aid for Ukraine.”

How to fix the military’s software SNAFU. GovExec.com article. Pull quote: “The second is drowning a military software organization with the toil associated with identifying, triaging, and remediating known vulnerabilities to meet compliance and security requirements. When a colleague and I interviewed software professionals at ten organizations, we discovered that it is common for many modern software organizations to spend thousands of staff hours on vulnerability management each year. One U.S. military unit we talked to was likely spending 15,000 hours of staff time per year on vulnerability management. This is an unacknowledged underbelly of the so-called digital transformation.”