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Wednesday Newsbytes: Sneaky Malware Hides on your PC, You Need a Secret Phone Number, DuckDuckGo’s Burner Email, Malware in Telescope Images\u00a0 …and more!<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n Every day we scan the tech world for interesting news in the world of technology and sometimes from outside the world of technology. Every Wednesday, we feature some news articles that grabbed our attention over the past week. We hope you find this week’s\u00a0 ‘Wednesday Newsbytes’ informative and interesting!<\/span><\/p>\n This sneaky malware hides on your PC for a month before going to work<\/span><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n Cybersecurity researchers warn about a campaign that infects PCs via bogus software downloads.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n Crypto-mining malware is being hidden in fake versions of popular software distributed via free download sites and is avoiding detection by waiting for a month before it runs in a campaign that has infected Windows PCs around the world.<\/span><\/p>\n Dubbed Nitrokod, the malware campaign has been active since at least 2019 and has been detailed by cybersecurity researchers at Check Point.<\/span><\/p>\n Crypto miners \u2013 also known as cryptojackers \u2013 are a form of malware that secretly exploit the computing power of infected devices to mine for cryptocurrency.<\/span><\/p>\n The process often goes undetected and the victim of the attack doesn’t receive the cryptocurrency, which is sent to the malware operator, who is likely using a large network of infected devices to generate as much cryptocurrency as possible, without the cost of using their own computing power or electricity…<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Read more at ZDNet<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/a><\/p>\n Reasons You Need A Secret Phone Number And How To Get One<\/span><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n A phone number is a personal identifier that people use to contact someone. While it may seem okay to hand out your number to everyone you meet, it’s not always the best idea.<\/span><\/p>\n If you’re not careful, you could inadvertently give out your number to a scammer or someone with malicious intent. And that’s where a secret phone number comes in handy.<\/span><\/p>\n These numbers can be used for a variety of purposes, such as temporary business numbers, disposable numbers for online dating, or one-time use when signing up for new services. It’s not always easy to get a secret phone number but isn’t impossible either.<\/span><\/p>\n Why do you need a secret phone number?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n There are a few reasons why you should never hand out your phone number to people you’ve just met. First, you don’t know them personally. They could be someone harmless just looking for a new friend, or possibly a dangerous criminal.<\/span><\/p>\n Second, giving out your phone number can lead to unwanted calls or texts from that person. Even if their intentions are good, they might not respect your boundaries and could become a nuisance.<\/span><\/p>\n Finally, your phone number is a personal piece of information that should be kept private.<\/span><\/p>\n You can also consider using a secret phone number if you’re dating online or meeting people in person through a dating app. You may not want to share your contact details with someone you’ve just met, and an alternate phone number allows you to keep your personal information private until you get to know someone better.<\/span><\/p>\n Additionally, it can be a good way to manage your time and schedule. If you’re only giving out your phone number to people you’re interested in, you can avoid wasting time on unwanted calls and messages. This can also be a great way to protect yourself from harassment or stalking.<\/span><\/p>\n How to get one?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n Burner<\/span><\/strong><\/span>Burner is a mobile app that generates temporary, disposable secret phone numbers. This number can be used for anonymous calling and texting and is often used by people who want to avoid being tracked…<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Read more at International Business Times<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/a><\/p>\n DuckDuckGo Can Now Block Your Emails From Being Tracked<\/span><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n DuckDuckGo’s feature creates burner email addresses whenever a company asks you for yours.<\/span><\/p>\n When you open an email, there\u2019s no obvious indication the sender will know. It\u2019s not like Facebook Messenger, which sends an overt read receipt any time you open a message. However, the sender can include a small, pixel-sized image in the email, which identifies when we open it. In turn, it tells the sender (narc). It\u2019s known as a pixel tracker, and it\u2019s one example of how email is not a privacy-friendly service.<\/span><\/p>\n Tech companies have begun to fight back, however. Last year, Apple implemented \u201cHide My Email\u201d for its suite of products, which generates a unique \u201cburner\u201d address each time you need to share your email with a company. That burner address forwards your messages to your real address, so you never need to share it with shady services.<\/span><\/p>\n DuckDuckGo started testing a similar feature in July of last year, opening the beta to a limited pool of users. If you wanted to give it a try, though, you had to be placed on a waitlist. Now, the feature is available for anyone to try.<\/span><\/p>\n DuckDuckGo hides your email and protects your privacy<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n DuckDuckGo offers you two types of email addresses. The first is a personal Duck Address. You pick the name, and it never changes (for example, jakepete@duck.com). The second is a private, uniquely generated Duck Address. Any time you need to share your email with a service, DuckDuckGo will generate a new address for you to use. That way, you don\u2019t need to share your email with each and every company looking to abuse your personal data. Instead, they only get the burner account.<\/span><\/p>\n Both the personal and private Duck Addresses forward their emails to your primary address (your Gmail, for example). That lets you hand away your Duck Addresses to any service that wants it, without needing to give away your personal email address…<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Read more at<\/span> Lifehacker<\/span><\/strong>.<\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/a><\/p>\n Hackers hide malware in James Webb telescope images<\/span><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n Threat analysts have spotted a new malware campaign dubbed \u2018GO#WEBBFUSCATOR\u2019 that relies on phishing emails, malicious documents, and space images from the James Webb telescope to spread malware.<\/span><\/p>\n The malware is written in Golang, a programming language that is gaining popularity among cybercriminals because it is cross-platform (Windows, Linux, Mac) and offers increased resistance to reverse engineering and analysis.<\/span><\/p>\n In the recent campaign discovered by researchers at Securonix, the threat actor drops payloads that are currently not marked as malicious by antivirus engines on the VirusTotal scanning platform.<\/span><\/p>\n Infection chain<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n The infection starts with a phishing email with an attached malicious document, \u201cGeos-Rates.docx\u201d, which downloads a template file.<\/span><\/p>\n That file contains an obfuscated VBS macro that auto-executes if macros are enabled in the Office suite. The code then downloads a JPG image (\u201cOxB36F8GEEC634.jpg\u201d) from a remote resource (\u201cxmlschemeformat[.]com\u201d), decodes it into an executable (\u201cmsdllupdate.exe\u201d) using certutil.exe, and launches it.<\/span><\/p>\n n an image viewer, the .JPG shows the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723, published by NASA in July 2022.<\/span><\/p>\n However, if opened with a text editor, the image reveals additional content disguised as an included certificate, which is a Base64-encoded payload that turns into the malicious 64-bit executable.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Read more at Bleeping Computer<\/a>.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n Facial recognition — the good, the bad and the getting older<\/span><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n Your friends may not be willing to tell you that you’re looking older, but facial recognition systems have no such reservations.<\/span><\/p>\n Face-recognition algorithms might struggle to identify you as the same person after just five years, according to the New Scientist.<\/span><\/p>\n As we increasingly turn to biometrics to secure our systems, the team at Ping Identity has been looking in more detail at the pros and cons of facial recognition systems.<\/span><\/p>\n Accuracy is increasingly high with Google FaceNet being 99.63 percent accurate when matching 13,000 pictures of faces from across the web, and Facebook’s DeepFace technology having a true positive rate of 97.25 percent.<\/span><\/p>\n However, it isn’t infallible, in 2019, hackers cracked Apple’s iPhone FaceID user authentication in around two minutes. Data stored in biometric recognition systems also needs to be properly secured to prevent it falling into the wrong hands. And there are privacy concerns, firms may share or even sell facial data to third parties, allowing them to recognize and follow you.<\/span><\/p>\n Because the technology relies on algorithms there’s also a risk that it can develop unconscious racial and sexual biases depending on the data used to train it and the numbers in the database. Also, as noted above, additional images may be needed regularly to cope with ageing and changes in appearance…<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Read more at BetaNews.<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/a><\/p>\n When was the internet invented? What to know about the creators of it and more.<\/span><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n Every day, you click and tap on devices, most likely using the internet to answer questions you have, stay up to date with current events and stay connected with people in the world around you.<\/span><\/p>\n The internet and its modern form, however, has changed over the years and is relatively new. While young people today grew up with the internet, many people did not. So when was the internet created? And who invented it? We have the answers for you.<\/span><\/p>\n When was the internet invented?<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n The birth date of the internet is widely considered to be Jan. 1, 1983, but the road to creating it started long before the technology required for the internet even existed.<\/span><\/p>\n The creation of the internet involved the work of many scientists and engineers, with many of the people who worked to create it having a vision of the internet long before the technology to create it was invented, according to History.com. As far back as the early 1900s inventor Nikola Tesla had thought of a \u201cworld wireless system.\u201d (Yes, the electric car company Tesla is named for him).<\/span><\/p>\n According to History.com, ‘the first practical schematics for the internet would not arrive until the early 1960s,’ when Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider came up with a vision of using computer networks to communicate…<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Read more at USA Today.<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/a><\/p>\n Thanks for reading this week’s Wednesday Newbytes. We hope you found these articles informative, interesting, fun, and\/or helpful. Darcy & TC<\/span><\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Wednesday Newsbytes: Sneaky Malware Hides on your PC, You Need a Secret Phone Number, DuckDuckGo’s Burner Email, Malware in Telescope Images\u00a0 …and more! Every day we scan the tech world for interesting news in the world of technology and sometimes from outside the world of technology. Every Wednesday, we feature some news articles that grabbed our\u2026 Read More »<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":23363,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4179,1461,3428,1433,1678,1669,1674,4372],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24136"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24136"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24136\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24137,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24136\/revisions\/24137"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23363"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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