Tag: energy
Adobe Applies Patches to Critical Flaws – June 12th
Yesterday, June 11th, Adobe announced that they rolled out security patches for 6 critical vulnerabilities affecting Adobe After Effects, Photoshop, and Illustrator. According to Adobe, the vulnerabilities could have led to successful arbitrary code execution and/or memory leaks in the current user's context.
AI could overload US power grid
Silicon Valley’s tech giants are fond of publicizing their green credentials by installing everything from waterless urinals to solar power. But, according to a new report from the International Energy Agency (IEA), tech giants’ latest offerings, primarily artificial intelligence (AI), are driving energy consumption to unprecedented levels. The report, Electricity 2024 Analysis and Forecast to 2026, predicts that, if current trends continue, AI and cryptocurrency power consumption could more than double from 460 TWh in 2022 to up to 1,050 TWh in 2026, roughly equivalent to adding another Germany to global electricity consumption. According to the IEA, there are currently over 8,000 data centers globally, with about 33% of these located in the United States, with the largest data center hubs located in California, Texas, and Virginia.
‘Hacktivists’ target environmental services
Politically-motivated hacking, known as ‘hacktivism’, is now on the rise across large sections of the globe. Politically motivated groups are increasingly attacking their enemies with primitive but effective distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, which involve overwhelming the target’s servers with vast volumes of internet traffic. But, according to cybersecurity firm Cloudflare’s DDoS Threat Report, the organizations being targeted most are environmental agencies pursuing green agendas such as Net Zero. While Cloudflare reported an overall increase of 117 percent in DDoS attacks around Black Friday and the holiday season, DDoS attacks on environmental agencies have soared over sixty-thousand-fold over the same period.
Cyber-gangs to launch media offensive in 2024
Cybercrime, which has become a multi-trillion-dollar industry over recent decades, became increasingly sophisticated during 2023, with criminal groups now adopting many of the business practices used by legitimate enterprises. According to a new report from cybersecurity firm, Sophos, leading ransomware gangs now increasingly employ their own internal HR and PR departments. Far from shying away from the media, as criminals always have in the past, some ransomware gangs have been swift to seize the opportunities it affords them. Some regularly issue press releases and take great pains to forge relationships with individual journalists using the same PR methods as those employed by legitimate corporations. Threat actors also offer Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) and answers for journalists visiting their leak sites, encouraging reporters to get in touch, give in-depth interviews, and recruit writers, reports Sophos.
Nuclear facility reportedly hacked by Russia and China
In what is an urgent and stark warning to nuclear facilities around the world, UK nuclear facility Sellafield, formerly called Windscale, is reported to have been hacked by groups linked to China and Russia. The 70-year-old sprawling six-square-kilometre facility, located on the North-West coast of England, holds the planet's largest store of plutonium as a result of processing nuclear waste from decades of atomic power generation and weapons programs. The UK authorities do not know exactly when the hack originally occurred, according to The Guardian newspaper, although breaches are said to have been detected as long ago as 2015, when sleeper malware, used to attack systems remotely and at will over a long period, was found to have been embedded. In what amounts to a national scandal for the UK, it is still not yet known if the malware has actually been eradicated.