Breached web sites distribute malware to visitors by claiming they need to update their browser. But one group of attackers “have developed an ingenious way of keeping their malware from being taken down by security experts or law enforcement,” reports security researcher Brian Krebs.

“By hosting the malicious files on a decentralized, anonymous cryptocurrency blockchain.”

[W]hen Cloudflare blocked those accounts the attackers began storing their malicious files as cryptocurrency transactions in the Binance Smart Chain (BSC), a technology designed to run decentralized apps and “smart contracts,” or coded agreements that execute actions automatically when certain conditions are met. Nati Tal, head of security at Guardio Labs, the research unit at Tel Aviv-based security firm Guardio, said the malicious scripts stitched into hacked WordPress sites will create a new smart contract on the BSC Blockchain, starting with a unique, attacker-controlled blockchain address and a set of instructions that defines the contract’s functions and structure. When that contract is queried by a compromised website, it will return an obfuscated and malicious payload.

“These contracts offer innovative ways to build applications and processes,” Tal wrote along with his Guardio colleague Oleg Zaytsev. “Due to the publicly accessible and unchangeable nature of the blockchain, code can be hosted ‘on-chain’ without the ability for a takedown.” Tal said hosting malicious files on the Binance Smart Chain is ideal for attackers because retrieving the malicious contract is a cost-free operation that was originally designed for the purpose of debugging contract execution issues without any real-world impact. “So you get a free, untracked, and robust way to get your data (the malicious payload) without leaving traces,” Tal said.

In response to questions from KrebsOnSecurity, the BNB Smart Chain (BSC) said its team is aware of the malware abusing its blockchain, and is actively addressing the issue. The company said all addresses associated with the spread of the malware have been blacklisted, and that its technicians had developed a model to detect future smart contracts that use similar methods to host malicious scripts. “This model is designed to proactively identify and mitigate potential threats before they can cause harm,” BNB Smart Chain wrote. “The team is committed to ongoing monitoring of addresses that are involved in spreading malware scripts on the BSC. To enhance their efforts, the tech team is working on linking identified addresses that spread malicious scripts to centralized KYC [Know Your Customer] information, when possible.”

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Source: Slashdot – Scammers Try Hosting Their Malware on a Binance Network

“The major online platforms are breaking up with news,” reports the New York Times:

Campbell Brown, Facebook’s top news executive, said this month that she was leaving the company. Twitter, now known as X, removed headlines from the platform days later. The head of Instagram’s Threads app, an X competitor, reiterated that his social network would not amplify news. Even Google — the strongest partner to news organizations over the past 10 years — has become less dependable, making publishers more wary of their reliance on the search giant. The company has laid off news employees in two recent team reorganizations, and some publishers say traffic from Google has tapered off… Some executives of the largest tech companies, like Adam Mosseri at Instagram, have said in no uncertain terms that hosting news on their sites can often be more trouble than it is worth because it generates polarized debates…

Publishers seem resigned to the idea that traffic from the big tech companies will not return to what it once was. Even in the long-fractious relationship between publishers and tech platforms, the latest rift stands out — and the consequences for the news industry are stark. Many news companies have struggled to survive after the tech companies threw the industry’s business model into upheaval more than a decade ago. One lifeline was the traffic — and, by extension, advertising — that came from sites like Facebook and Twitter. Now that traffic is disappearing. Top news sites got about 11.5% of their web traffic in the United States from social networks in September 2020, according to Similarweb, a data and analytics company. By September this year, it was down to 6.5%…

The sharp decline in referral traffic from social media platforms over the past two years has hit all news publishers, including The New York Times. The Wall Street Journal noticed a decline starting about 18 months ago, according to a recording of a September staff meeting obtained by the Times. “We are at the mercy of social algorithms and tech giants for much of our distribution,” Emma Tucker, the Journal’s editor-in-chief, told the newsroom in the meeting…

Google cut some members of its news partnership team in September, and this week it laid off as many as 45 workers from its Google News team, the Alphabet Workers Union said. (The Information, a tech news website, reported the Google News layoffs earlier.) “We’ve made some internal changes to streamline our organization,” Jenn Crider, a Google spokesperson, said in a statement… Jaffer Zaidi [Google’s vice president of global news partnerships], wrote in an internal memo reviewed by the Times that the team would be adopting more artificial intelligence. “We had to make some difficult decisions to better position our team for what lies ahead,” he wrote…

Privately, a number of publishers have discussed what a post-Google traffic future may look like and how to better prepare if Google’s AI products become more popular and further bury links to news publications.

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Source: Slashdot – What Happens When Major Online Platforms Lower Traffic to News Sites?

Images from the James Webb Space Telescope “don’t match scientists’ models of how the universe formed,” reports the Washington Post.

“But it might not be time to dump the standard model of cosmology yet. ”

A recent analysis in the Astrophysical Journal Letters suggests an explanation for the surprisingly massive-seeming galaxies: brilliant, extremely bright bursts of newborn stars.

The galaxies photographed by the telescope looked far too mature and large to have formed so fully so soon after the universe began, raising questions about scientists’ assumptions of galaxy formation. But when researchers ran a variety of computer simulations of the universe’s earliest days, they discovered that the galaxies probably are not as large as they seem. Instead, they attribute their brightness to a phenomenon called “bursty star formation.” As clouds of dust and debris collapse, they form dense, high-temperature cores and become stars. Bursty galaxies spit out new stars in intermittent, bright bursts instead of creating stars more consistently. Usually, these galaxies are low in mass and take long breaks between starbursts.
Because the galaxies in question look so bright in photos produced by the Webb telescope, scientists at first thought they were older and more massive. But bursty systems with the ability to produce extremely bright, abundant light may appear more massive than they really are.
“Not only does this finding explain why young galaxies appear deceptively massive, it also fits within the standard model of cosmology,” explains the announcement:
In the new study, Guochao Sun, who led the study, Northwestern’s, Claude-André Faucher-Giguère, the study’s senior author, and their team used advanced computer simulations to model how galaxies formed right after the Big Bang. The simulations produced cosmic dawn galaxies that were just as bright as those observed by the JWST…

Although other astrophysicists have hypothesized that bursty star formation could be responsible for the unusual brightness of galaxies at cosmic dawn, the Northwestern researchers are the first to use detailed computer simulations to prove it is possible. And they were able to do so without adding new factors that are unaligned with our standard model of the universe.

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Source: Slashdot – JWST’s Disconnect With Cosmology Models Linked to ‘Bursty Star Formations’

Nearly two dozen species are being taken off America’s endangered species list, reports CBS News, “because they are extinct, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said Monday.”

Most of the species were listed under the Endangered Species Act in the 1970s or 1980s and were very low in numbers or likely already extinct at the time of listing. In the years since, “rigorous reviews of the best available science” have been conducted to determine whether the animals are extinct. “Federal protection came too late to reverse these species’ decline, and it’s a wake-up call on the importance of conserving imperiled species before it’s too late,” Service Director Martha Williams said. Scientists in 2019 warned that worldwide, 1 million species of plants and animals were at risk of extinction.

There are more than 1,300 species listed as either endangered or threatened in the United States under the Endangered Species Act. The 21 species being removed include one mammal, 10 types of birds, two species of fish and eight types of mussels. Eight of the 21 species were found in Hawaii.

From the agency’s announcement:
The 21 species extinctions highlight the importance of the Endangered Species Act and efforts to conserve species before declines become irreversible. The circumstances of each also underscore how human activity can drive species decline and extinction by contributing to habitat loss, overuse, and the introduction of invasive species and diseases…

The Endangered Species Act has been highly effective and credited with saving 99% of listed species from extinction. Thus far, more than 100 species of plants and animals have been delisted based on recovery or reclassified from endangered to threatened based on improved conservation status, and hundreds more species are stable or improving thanks to the collaborative actions of Tribes, federal agencies, state and local governments, conservation organizations and private citizens.

An official from the agency said in the announcement “The ultimate goal is to recover these species, so they no longer need the Act’s protection.”

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Source: Slashdot – 21 Species Moved From ‘Endangered’ to ‘Extinct’ in America

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: China has unveiled plans to restrict exports of graphite — a mineral crucial to the manufacture of batteries for electric vehicles (EVs) — on national security grounds, the Ministry of Commerce and the General Administration of Customs said Friday. The announcement comes just days after the United States imposed additional limits on the kinds of semiconductors that American companies can sell to Chinese firms. China, which dominates the world’s production and processing of graphite, says export permits will be needed, starting in December, for synthetic graphite material — including high-purity, high-strength and high-density versions — as well as for natural flake graphite. […]

According to the US Geological Survey (PDF), the market for graphite used in batteries has grown 250% globally since 2018. China was the world’s leading graphite producer last year, accounting for an estimated 65% of global production, it said. Besides EVs, graphite is commonly used in the semiconductor, aerospace, chemical and steel industries. The export curbs were announced as China faces pressure from multiple governments over its commercial and trade practices. For more than a year, it has been embroiled in a tech war with the United States and its allies in Europe and Asia over access to advanced chips and chipmaking equipment. “At the moment both China and Western countries are engaged in a tit for tat, highlighting how protectionist measures often spread. Newton’s third law that every action causes a reaction applies here, too,” said Stefan Legge, head of tax and trade policy research at the University of St Gallen in Switzerland.

“At the same time, both sides of the dispute also realize how costly it is if geopolitics trumps economics,” he added.

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Source: Slashdot – China Restricts Exports of Graphite As It Escalates a Global Tech War