Back in March 1989, at a press conference in Salt Lake City, scientists Stanley Pons of the University of Utah and Martin Fleischmann of Great Britain’s University of Southampton made a startling announcement. The researchers had managed to fuse the atomic nuclei of a hydrogen isotope to create helium — the same sort of process that powers the sun — and they’d been able to do it at room temperature, without putting in more energy than the process produced, as this Wired retrospective from 2009 details. The research raised hopes of a new source of abundant energy that would replace fossil fuels and conventional nuclear power, as a CBS News story from that time reported. But other researchers who tried to duplicate the experiments were unable to reproduce… Source link

In Europe, a multinational team of scientists recently embarked upon yet another cold fusion investigation, the HERMES project, which will employ more advanced scientific techniques and tools developed in recent years. “The purpose is to try to look for an experiment that would reproducibly produce some anomalous effects,” says Pekka Peljo, in an email. He’s the project’s coordinator, and an associate professor in the Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering at the University of Turku in Finland. “We are revisiting some of the previous experiments. Also, we are going to study electrochemistry of palladium-hydrogen and palladium-deuterium systems in detail, utilizing well-controlled model systems such as palladium single crystals. So shortly,… Source link

Hackers hitting thousands of organizations worldwide in a massive phishing campaign forgot to protect their loot and let Google the stolen passwords for public searches. The phishing campaign has been running for more than half a year and uses dozens of domains that host the phishing pages. It received constant updates to make the fraudulent Microsoft Office 365 login requests look more realistic. Creds in plain sight Despite relying on simple techniques, the campaign has been successful in bypassing email protection filters and collected at least 1,000 login credentials for corporate Office 365 accounts. Researchers at cybersecurity companies Check Point and Otorio analyzing this campaign discovered that the hackers exposed the stolen credentials to the public internet. In a… Source link

Chained exploit leads to shell access Security researchers have earned a $50,000 bug bounty after uncovering a critical flaw in Apple’s travel portal. Rahul Maini and Harsh Jaiswal were able to achieve remote code execution (RCE) by stringing together a string of vulnerabilities in order to exploit targeted domains. The bug hunting exercise was inspired by earlier work by Sam Curry and his associates that uncovered no fewer than 55 vulnerabilities in Apple’s web infrastructure, earning a cumulative bug bounty of $288,000. Curry is continuing his work and this week went public with vulnerabilities in Apple’s domain that created a means to get billing data from any Apple user. Lucee in the sky with exploits In a detailed technical write-up, Maini… Source link

CISA has issued an alert warning that cloud services at U.S. organizations are being actively and successfully targeted. The Feds are warning that cybercriminals are bypassing multi-factor authentication (MFA) and successfully attacking cloud services at various U.S. organizations. According to an alert issued Wednesday by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), there have been “several recent successful cyberattacks” focused on compromising the cloud. Most of the attacks are opportunistic, taking advantage of poor cloud cyber-hygiene and misconfigurations, according to the agency. “These types of attacks frequently occurred when victim organizations’ employees worked remotely and used a mixture of… Source link

A researcher scraped and archived public Parler posts before the conservative social networking service was taken down by Amazon, Apple and Google. A security researcher said she has scraped and is archiving 99 percent of Parler’s public posts, as the social-media network goes offline following suspensions from Amazon, Apple and Google. Archived content includes public posts from the social-media site. These posts reportedly included Parler video URLs made up of raw video files with associated embedded metadata – and precise GPS coordinates of where the videos were taken, sparking privacy concerns about the service’s data collection. The researcher behind the archival… Source link

Photographed by Nathan Rocky for TheWrap “Jeopardy!” has lined up its next guest host, according to a report from the Los Angeles Times on Wednesday. Katie Couric has signed on to host the popular quiz show for a week’s worth of episodes, making her the second guest host after Ken Jennings, according to the paper. Representatives for the show and for Couric did not immediately return TheWrap’s request for comment. Also Read: Listen to Alex Trebek’s Touching Message in One of His Last Ever ‘Jeopardy!’ Episodes (Video) “Jeopardy!” is currently airing its final string of episodes with Alex Trebek at the podium, with his final turn as host to air on Friday, Jan. 8. The episodes were taped last October, before Trebek… Source link