Short Takes – 10-4-24

APT and financial attacks on industrial organizations in Q2 2024. ICS-CERT.Kaspersky.com report. Pull quote: “The second quarter of 2024 was rich in interesting technical details of disclosed attacks on industrial organizations. Advanced attackers continue to demonstrate unconventional approaches to solving their tasks. Creating fake profiles on social networks and mockups of entire companies to gain the trust of potential victims has been seen before, but developing a full-fledged IT product, such as a computer game – a tank simulator with a Trojan inside – is something new. No effort or resources were spared in the preparation.”

What Search Engine Should You Use? ScientificAmerican.com article. Reports that most search engines use either Google or Bing indexes. Pull quote: “Lewandowski cautions that this study was limited by its reliance on trending searches. “We can rightfully expect that the overlap for rare queries is much lower than for the popular ones,” he says. If the question is too obscure for Wikipedia to answer, different search engines might seek answers in different corners of the Internet. In such cases, he recommends using multiple search engines to dig up more information.”

ULA’s second Vulcan rocket lost part of its booster and kept going. ArsTechnica.com article. Pull quote: “As the rocket arced east from Cape Canaveral, a shower of sparks suddenly appeared at the base of the Vulcan rocket around 37 seconds into the mission. The exhaust plume from one of the strap-on boosters, made by Northrop Grumman, changed significantly, and the rocket slightly tilted on its axis before the guidance system and main engines made a steering correction. Videos from the launch show the booster's nozzle, the bell-shaped exhaust exit cone at the bottom of the booster, fall away from the rocket.”

DOE Funds New Cyber Research to Protect Clean Energy Infrastructure. Energy.gov/CESEER/ article. Pull quote: “The selected research, development, and demonstration (RD&D) projects focus on detecting and mitigating cyber threats to clean energy infrastructure, including distributed energy resources (DERs), inverter-based resources (IBRs) and virtual power plants (VPPs).”