Month: April 2022

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Sundry Photography)

More than half a decade has passed since the notorious Russian hackers known as Sandworm targeted an electrical transmission station north of Kyiv a week before Christmas in 2016, using a unique, automated piece of code to interact directly with the station’s circuit breakers and turn off the lights to a fraction of Ukraine’s capital. That unprecedented specimen of industrial control system malware has never been seen again—until now: In the midst of Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, Sandworm appears to be pulling out its old tricks.

On Tuesday, the Ukrainian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-UA) and the Slovakian cybersecurity firm ESET issued advisories that the Sandworm hacker group, confirmed to be Unit 74455 of Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency, had targeted high-voltage electrical substations in Ukraine using a variation on a piece of malware known as Industroyer or Crash Override. The new malware, dubbed Industroyer2, can interact directly with equipment in electrical utilities to send commands to substation devices that control the flow of power, just like that earlier sample. It signals that Russia’s most aggressive cyberattack team attempted a third blackout in Ukraine, years after its historic cyberattacks on the Ukrainian power grid in 2015 and 2016, still the only confirmed blackouts known to have been caused by hackers.

ESET and CERT-UA say the malware was planted on target systems within a regional Ukrainian energy firm on Friday. CERT-UA says that the attack was successfully detected in progress and stopped before any actual blackout could be triggered. But an earlier, private advisory from CERT-UA last week, first reported by MIT Technology Review Tuesday, stated that power had been temporarily switched off to nine electrical substations.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | seksan Mongkhonkhamsao)

The US has seized the domain of what it calls “one of the world’s largest hacker forums” and indicted its founder, the Department of Justice announced Tuesday. A notice on RaidForums.com says the domain was seized by the FBI, Secret Service, and Department of Justice. Europol and law enforcement agencies from Sweden, Romania, Portugal, Germany, and the UK were also involved.

RaidForums founder and chief administrator, Diogo Santos Coelho, a 21-year-old from Portugal, was arrested in the UK on January 31 and is in custody pending the outcome of extradition proceedings. The case in US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia was unsealed Monday. Two accomplices were also arrested, according to Europol.

Founded in 2015, “RaidForums served as a major online marketplace for individuals to buy and sell hacked or stolen databases containing the sensitive personal and financial information of victims in the United States and elsewhere, including stolen bank routing and account numbers, credit card information, login credentials and social security numbers,” the DOJ said. As a Vice article noted, the seizure announcement “caps off weeks of speculation of what may have happened to the site, which mysteriously became unresponsive around the end of February.”

Enlarge / The 2020, M1-equipped Apple Mac mini. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Apple’s Mac Studio just came out, but there’s some good news for anyone waiting on a refresh to Apple’s cheapest Mac desktop. Developer Steve Troughton-Smith uncovered a reference to an as-yet-unannounced “Macmini10,1” model identifier in a firmware file for the Studio Display, implying that Apple is testing a new Mac mini internally and that it could be released sooner rather than later.

The presence of an unreleased Mac mini model identifier in a firmware file tells us little about the machine, beyond the fact that the hardware physically exists somewhere inside Apple. But we can say with some confidence that it’s meant to be a new generation of Mac mini, rather than a revision of the current design—Apple uses “Macmini9,1” for the current mini, and “Macmini8,1” for the final Intel model from 2018.

Apple is expected to refresh the MacBook Air, Mac mini, and 13-inch MacBook Pro with a next-generation Apple M2 processor sometime this year. The M1 and all its variants use the CPU architecture from 2020’s A14, codenamed “Firestorm” for the performance cores and “Icestorm” for the efficiency cores. The M2 will likely update that architecture and could possibly add more GPU cores as well. 

Enlarge (credit: Vivo)

The latest foldable smartphone hitting China is the Vivo X Fold. This is the first foldable you could call a 2022 flagship, with a Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 SoC. The phone retails in China for 8,999 yen, or about $1,400.

This device looks as good as a Galaxy Z Fold 3, with an 8-inch, 120 Hz, 2160×1916 OLED as the main interior display and a 6.53-inch, 120 Hz, 2520×1080 OLED display on the outside. Besides the new Qualcomm chip, it has 12GB of RAM, 256GB of storage, an Android 12 build, and a 4,600 mAh battery.

For most of our non-Chinese readers, the most interesting thing about Vivo making a foldable is that it’s a BBK Electronics company, along with Oppo, OnePlus, Realme, and iQoo. BBK companies all share the same parts and engineering, so the hope is that OnePlus will someday pick through the BBK parts bin and bring a foldable to a wider audience. Oppo already took a swing at the foldables market with the Find N in December, and both that phone and the Vivo X Fold show how close China is to catching up with Samsung’s foldable lead.