Tag Archive for: closed

Howard University Closed After Ransomware Attack

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Howard University Closed After Ransomware Attack

By Breoona Randall, Howard University News Service

Howard University, one of the nation’s largest and most prestigious historically black universities and the alma mater of Vice President Kamala Harris, was shut down Tuesday due to a ransomware attack.

The FBI and District of Columbia city government have been working with the university about the attack, the university said. The university did not mention who conducted the attack or what they are asking for to release the university’s networks.

University officials said Howard’s Enterprise Technology Services (ETS) became aware Friday of a potential cyberattack. In response, ETS shutdown all the university’s networks to further investigate.

On Monday, the university said, the computer and technology interruption was a ransomware attack. Consequently, all in-person and online classes were cancelled Tuesday, Howard’s Office of University Communications said.

“ETS and its partners have been working diligently to fully address this incident and restore operations as quickly as possible,” the Office of University Communications said in an email Monday.

The university will reopen Wednesday, but only in-person. Howard University’s wi-fi, however, will still be unavailable.

Ingrid Sturgis, chair of the Department of Media, Journalism and Film in Howard’s Cathy Hughes School of Communications, said the ransomware attack “has been very disruptive.”

“Over the weekend, I had some faculty members emailing me about what they should do, because their students could not turn in their work, because they did not have access to blackboard and other tools they usually use for class,” Sturgis said.

She said she’s been through several malfunctions at the university, but this one is different.

“It’s kind of scary to me knowing how many student and faculty records there are, and these kinds of attacks are happening more and more frequently,” she said. “In a way, we are fortunate the university has beefed up its ability to detect these kinds of things.

Jennifer C. Thomas, an associate professor and journalism sequence coordinator in the…

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Is China Looking to Stockpile Zero-Days? New Vulnerability Disclosure Rules Could Create Closed Pipeline From Security Researchers to CCP

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New vulnerability disclosure rules announced by the Chinese government have raised the prospect of “zero-day hoarding,” as anything discovered in the country must now be reported to the CCP and to no one else (in most cases). This includes a rule forbidding disclosures to the general public before a vendor has had a “reasonable chance” to patch the issue.

The new rules will, at the very least, threaten to disrupt working relationships between Chinese security researchers and “bug bounty” programs based in the West. The more worrisome possibility is that the Chinese government will collect and sit on zero-days, holding them in reserve for use by its state-backed hacking groups rather than disclosing them to software vendors and to the public so that appropriate safety measures can be taken.

Is the Chinese government planning to hoard zero-days?

All of this traces back to new vulnerability disclosure rules proposed by the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), which are slated to go into effect on September 1. The new rules make it illegal for anyone but the government to “publish or sell” vulnerabilities, requires everyone in the country to report discovered vulnerabilities within two days, prohibits disclosures before a vendor has had a “reasonable chance” to patch the issue (with case-by-case exemptions potentially granted by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology), and prohibits any type of vulnerability disclosure to “overseas organizations” among other new requirements.

When researchers make a discovery, the new vulnerability disclosure process is rigid and requires them to go to the government first. Researchers themselves could face criminal penalties from the Ministry of Public Safety should they step outside the bounds of the formal reporting process. Any new zero-day discovered must be reported to the MIIT within two days, and in most cases it will then be up to the agency as to how and when the vendor is notified of the exploit. Naturally, the worry is that the government will simply keep many of these vulnerabilities quiet and keep them on hand for use by their own state-affiliated hackers. If the…

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KitGuru Advent Calendar 2020 Day 25: Win a Palit RTX 3070 Jetstream OC! (closed)

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Update (26/12/20): This competition is now CLOSED. Thanks to all who entered, our winner today is George Passmore. If you missed out this time around, then keep an eye out as we still have another couple of giveaways left on the calendar! Our Day 26 competition can be found HERE. 

For Day 25 of the KitGuru Advent Calendar 2020, we’re teaming up with Palit to give one lucky KitGuru reader a GPU upgrade! Our prize today is none other than the Palit RTX 3070 Jetstream OC! 

The Palit Jetstream OC version of the RTX 3070 comes with a dual-fan cooler with an RGB-lit logo on the side of the card. As with all RTX 3070 GPUs, you’ll get 8GB of GDDR6 memory, meanwhile the base clock for the GPU is 1500MHz, with a boost speed of 1815MHz.

Entering this giveaway is simple, all you need to do is head over to THIS POST on our Facebook page and leave a comment. We plan to have a new discussion topic each day, today we are asking you guys to tell us – what GPU are you currently using in your gaming rig? This competition is open in the UK.

The winner will be picked at random by 10am December 26th, and a new competition will also be announced for Day 26.

Terms and Conditions: This competition is open in the UK, starting at 10AM on December 25th and ending at 9:59AM on December 26th. Due to the busy Christmas season and the COVID-19 situation, prize deliveries could take longer than usual. In compliance with GDPR, we will not collect or store any personal information as part of this competition. Once the winner has been contacted and their prize received, personal details will be deleted from our email servers. Your details will not be shared, we respect your privacy.

KitGuru Says: Good luck to everyone entering today’s competition! We’ll be back to announce the winner tomorrow morning and open the door for Advent Calendar Day 26!

Become a Patron!

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With Theaters Closed, The Trailer For Christopher Nolan’s ‘Tenet’ Debuts In Fortnite Instead

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With the explosion of the video game industry and the technology that has come along with it, it’s starting to get really fun to see what creative minds can do inside of the gaming realm. It’s turning games into something much more than they would have been 20 years ago. Back then, games were singular in purpose: play the video game. Today they can be so much more when done right. They can be a social ecosystem. They can be economies onto themselves.

Or they can be a place to premier top tier movie trailers, in the case of Fortnite.

Tonight, a new trailer for Christopher Nolan’s upcoming film Tenet aired in Fortnite. The trailer was introduced by Geoff Keighley, because he’s the only consistency we have left in this topsy-turvy world.

Keighley introduced the trailer, shown at Fortnite’s new Party Royale hub’s movie theater. He spoke with Tenet star John David Washington about his gaming history and his role in the film. The trailer itself featured some clips we’ve seen before, but it didn’t reveal all that much more about the movie, which seems to involve time travel and Robert Pattinson.

While the trailer is now widely available, its first showing was in Fortnite. And that strikes me as both rather strange and very, very cool. There is something about layering entertainment inside other entertainment that just clicks with me. Those Minecraft builds where folks build a working computer inside the game? That’s amazing to me. Those people who band together in the latest version of Skyrim just to produce a reproduction of previous Elder Scrolls games in the new engine? I love that stuff. And forward thinking media executives who want to have a little fun during a pandemic and show off a new movie trailer in a movie screen inside a popular video game? I mean, that’s just cool.

And it would appear that either Nolan himself or someone on his team is interested in keeping these experiments running, given the closure of most movie theaters in the country.

The Tenet trailer ended with the words “Coming to theaters,” which seems like an awfully ambitious declaration due to, you know, the world. But just as each day brings new horrors, it also brings new possibilities to imagine, as well as Geoff Keighley telling us new things about games.

Keighley ended by announcing that there will be a screening of “an iconic Christopher Nolan film” in Fortnite this summer. (I haven’t seen a Nolan film since Memento, but it’s probably not that.)

Whatever it is, screening an entire movie inside a video game? Sounds cool to me!

Techdirt.