The U.S. government, along with counterparts in Australia and the U.K, have warned that Iranian state-backed hackers are targeting U.S. organizations in critical infrastructure sectors -- in some cases with ransomware. From a report: The rare warning linking Iran with ransomware landed in a joint advisory Wednesday, issued by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC), and the U.K's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC). The advisory said that Iran-backed attackers have been exploiting Fortinet vulnerabilities since at least March and a Microsoft Exchange ProxyShell vulnerability since October to gain access to U.S. critical infrastructure organizations in the transport and public health sectors, as well as organizations in Australia. The aim of the hackers is ultimately to leverage this access for follow-on operations such as data exfiltration, extortion and ransomware deployment. In May this year, for example, the hackers abused Fortigate gear to access a web server hosting the domain for a U.S. municipal government. The following month, CISA and the FBI observed the hackers exploiting Fortinet vulnerabilities to access the networks of a U.S.-based hospital specializing in healthcare for children. The joint advisory has been released alongside a separate report from Microsoft on the evolution of Iranian APTs, which are "increasingly utilizing ransomware to either collect funds or disrupt their targets." In the report, Microsoft said it has been tracking six Iranian threat groups that have been deploying ransomware and exfiltrating data in attacks that started in September 2020.

A new space mission to hunt for potentially habitable planets around Earth's closest neighbouring star system is under way. From a report: In a project with echoes of the 2009 film Avatar, an international collaboration of scientists in Australia and the US will search in the Alpha Centauri star system for earth-like planets that could sustain life. Alpha Centauri -- Earth's closest neighbouring star system -- consists of two sun-like stars, known as Alpha Centauri A and B, and a more distant red dwarf star. The Toliman mission, named after the ancient Arabic-derived name for the star system, will search for potential planets orbiting Alpha Centauri A and B.

The Toliman telescope, which is under construction, is set to be launched into low-earth orbit in 2023. It seeks to discover new planets in the "Goldilocks orbit" -- at the right distance, so the planet is neither too hot nor too cold to sustain life. Project leader Prof Peter Tuthill, of the University of Sydney, said: "If we're looking for life as we know it, usually the gold standard is a planet where liquid water could be present at the surface of the planet â" so it's not like a frozen snowball, and it doesn't boil all the water up into the atmosphere." "We know that life has evolved at least once, around a sun-like star on an earth-like planet," Tuthill said. "We try to look for other examples that are as close to that configuration as possible."

India and China are the world's two biggest coal polluters, but Australia and South Korea lead the world in emissions from the world's dirtiest fossil fuel when you adjust for population size, according to energy and climate research organization Ember. Data calculated since the Paris Agreement on climate in 2015 show that some of the world's richest countries have the most work to do in moving away from coal to cleaner energy sources.

Tuvalu is looking at legal ways to keep its ownership of its maritime zones and recognition as a state even if the Pacific island nation is completely submerged due to climate change, its foreign minister said on Tuesday. From a report: "We're actually imagining a worst-case scenario where we are forced to relocate or our lands are submerged," the minister, Simon Kofe, told Reuters in an interview. "We're looking at legal avenues where we can retain our ownership of our maritime zones, retain our recognition as a state under international law. So those are steps that we are taking, looking into the future," he said. Images of Kofe recording a speech to the United Nations COP26 climate summit standing knee-deep in the sea have been widely shared on social media over recent days, pleasing the tiny island nation which is pushing for aggressive action to limit the impact of climate change. [...]

"We didn't think it would go viral as we saw over the last few days. We have been very pleased with that and hopefully that carries the message and emphasises the challenges that we are facing in Tuvalu at the moment," Kofe said. Tuvalu is an island with a population of around 11,000 people and its highest point is just 4.5m (15 ft) above sea level. Since 1993, sea levels have risen about 0.5cm (0.2 inches) per year, according to a 2011 Australian government report.

Google launched a beta app today that people with speech impairments can use as a voice assistant while contributing to a multiyear research effort to improve Google's speech recognition. From a report: The goal is to make Google Assistant, as well as other features that use speech to text and speech to speech, more inclusive of users with neurological conditions that affect their speech. The new app is called Project Relate, and volunteers can sign up at g.co/ProjectRelate. To be eligible to participate, volunteers need to be 18 or older and "have difficulty being understood by others." They'll also need a Google account and an Android phone using OS 8 or later. For now, it's only available to English speakers in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. They'll be tasked with recording 500 phrases, which should take between 30 to 90 minutes to record.

At its fall 2021 GPU Technology Conference (GTC), Nvidia unveiled Riva Custom Voice, a new toolkit that the company claims can enable customers to create custom, "human-like" voices with only 30 minutes of speech recording data. From a report: According to Nvidia, businesses can use Riva Custom Voice to develop a virtual assistant with a unique voice, while call centers and developers can leverage it to launch brand voices and apps to support people with speech and language disabilities. Brand voices like Progressive's Flo are often tasked with recording phone trees and elearning scripts in corporate training video series. For companies, the costs can add up -- one source pegs the average hourly rate for voice actors at $39.63, plus additional fees for interactive voice response (IVR) prompts. Synthesization could boost actors' productivity by cutting down on the need for additional recordings, potentially freeing the actors up to pursue more creative work -- and saving businesses money in the process. For example, Progressive used AI to create a Facebook Messenger chatbot with the voice of Stephanie Courtney, who plays Flo. KFC in Canada built a voice in a Southern U.S. English accent for the chain's ambassador, Colonel Sanders, in the company's Amazon Alexa app. Duolingo is employing AI to create voices for characters in its language learning apps. And National Australia Bank has deployed an AI-powered Australian English voice for the customers who call into its contact centers.

A study released on Friday by an Australian university looking at multiple catastrophes hitting the Great Barrier Reef has found for the first time that only 2% of its area has escaped bleaching since 1998, then the world's hottest year on record. From a report: If global warming is kept to 1.5 degrees, the maximum rise in average global temperature that was the focus of the COP26 United Nations climate conference, the mix of corals on the Barrier Reef will change but it could still thrive, said the study's lead author Professor Terry Hughes, of the Australian Research Council's Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies. "If we can hold global warming to 1.5 degrees global average warming then I think we'll still have a vibrant Great Barrier Reef," he said. Bleaching is a stress response by overheated corals during heat waves, where they lose their colour and many struggle to survive. Eighty percent of the World Heritage-listed wonder has been bleached severely at least once since 2016, the study by James Cook University in Australia's Queensland state found. "Even the most remote, most pristine parts of the Great Barrier Reef have now bleached severely at least once," Hughes said.

Joshua Chou writes via The Conversation: Last month the Australian Space Agency announced plans to send an Australian-made rover to the Moon by as early as 2026, under a deal with NASA. The rover will collect lunar soil containing oxygen, which could eventually be used to support human life in space. Although the deal with NASA made headlines, a separate mission conducted by private companies in Australia and Canada, in conjunction with the University of Technology Sydney, may see Australian technology hunting water on the Moon as soon as mid-2024. If all goes according to plan, it will be the first rover with Australian-made components to make it to the Moon.

The ten-kilogram rover, measuring 60x60x50cm, will be launched on board the Hakuto lander made by ispace, a lunar robotic exploration company based in Japan. The rover itself, also built by ispace, will have an integrated robotic arm created by the private companies Stardust Technologies (based in Canada) and Australia's EXPLOR Space Technology (of which I am one of the founders). Using cameras and sensors, the arm will collect high-resolution visual and haptic data to be sent back to the mission control centre at the University of Technology Sydney. It will also collect information on the physical and chemical composition of lunar dust, soil and rocks -- specifically with a goal of finding water. We know water is present within the Moon's soil, but we have yet to find a way to extract it for practical use.

After Canada, now Australia has found that controversial facial recognition company, Clearview AI, broke national privacy laws when it covertly collected citizens' facial biometrics and incorporated them into its AI-powered identity matching service -- which it sells to law enforcement agencies and others. From a report: In a statement today, Australia's information commissioner and privacy commissioner, Angelene Falk, said Clearview AI's facial recognition tool breached the country's Privacy Act 1988 by:

Collecting Australians' sensitive information without consent
Collecting personal information by unfair means
Not taking reasonable steps to notify individuals of the collection of personal information
Not taking reasonable steps to ensure that personal information it disclosed was accurate, having regard to the purpose of disclosure
Not taking reasonable steps to implement practices, procedures and systems to ensure compliance with the Australian Privacy Principles.

Some 150 people were arrested worldwide and more than $31.6 million in cash and virtual currencies were seized during a 10-month international investigation into opioid trafficking through darknet marketplaces, the Department of Justice announced Tuesday. From a report: The massive probe, called "Operation Dark HunTor," spanned three continents and led to the recovery of about 234 kilograms (over 500 pounds) of illegal drugs, including enough fentanyl to cause more than 4 million lethal doses, according to deputy attorney general Lisa Monaco. A darknet is encrypted online content that can only be accessed with specific browsers and is primarily used to purchase or sell illegal goods or services, especially illegal drugs. 65 people were arrested in the United States, one in Bulgaria, three in France, 47 in Germany, four in the Netherlands, 24 in the United Kingdom, four in Italy and two in Switzerland. Prosecutors allege the suspects were responsible for tens of thousands of illegal sales across the U.S., Europe and Australia.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from People: Doctors around the world are seeing a rise in cases of tic-like behaviors in teen girls, which they believe could be caused by watching TikTok videos about Tourette syndrome. Pediatric hospitals have reported an increase in teen girls coming in after developing tics, sudden twitches or noises that are a common symptom of Tourette syndrome, during the pandemic. The sudden rise is unusual, with tics typically occurring in boys, not girls. Experts in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Australia studied the patients for months and consulted between hospitals, finding that the common factor between the girls was an interest in watching TikTok videos from influencers who said they have Tourette syndrome, The Wall Street Journal reported.

According to the outlet, Texas Children's Hospital said they've had around 60 teens come in with tics since March 2020, compared to just one or two a year before then, while at Johns Hopkins University Tourette's Center, the number of patients reporting tic-like behaviors has jumped from 2 to 3% a year to 10 to 20%. And Rush University Medical Center in Chicago had 20 patients with tics over just four months this year, compared to 10 all of last year. Researchers from pediatric hospitals around the world found that referrals for tic-like behaviors soared during the pandemic, especially in girls aged 12 to 25, they wrote in a study published in August in the journal Movement Disorders. Since March 2020, referrals in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Germany and Australia went from 1 to 2% to 20 to 35%. The researchers wrote that they've seen a "similarity between the tics or tic-like behaviors shown on social media and the tic-like behaviors of this group of patients." Another group of doctors say they "believe this to be an example of mass sociogenic illness," where people are copying the behaviors they see in the videos. Doctors recommend therapy to treat kids experiencing these symptoms. They also advise parents to require their teens to "take a social media break or block Tourette videos on their TikTok account," adds the report.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: In Australia, the country's information commissioner has found that 7-Eleven breached customers' privacy by collecting their sensitive biometric information without adequate notice or consent. From June 2020 to August 2021, 7-Eleven conducted surveys that required customers to fill out information on tablets with built-in cameras. These tablets, which were installed in 700 stores, captured customers' facial images at two points during the survey-taking process -- when the individual first engaged with the tablet, and after they completed the survey. After becoming aware of this activity in July last year, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) commended an investigation into 7-Eleven's survey.

During the investigation [PDF], the OAIC found 7-Eleven stored the facial images on tablets for around 20 seconds before uploading them to a secure server hosted in Australia within the Microsoft Azure infrastructure. The facial images were then retained on the server, as an algorithmic representation, for seven days to allow 7-Eleven to identify and correct any issues, and reprocess survey responses, the convenience store giant claimed. The facial images were uploaded to the server as algorithmic representations, or "faceprints," that were then compared with other faceprints to exclude responses that 7-Eleven believed may not be genuine. 7-Eleven also used the personal information to understand the demographic profile of customers who completed the survey, the OAIC said.

7-Eleven claimed it received consent from customers who participated in the survey as it provided a notice on its website stating that 7-Eleven may collect photographic or biometric information from users. The survey resided on 7-Eleven's website. As at March 2021, approximately 1.6 million survey responses had been completed. In Australia, an organization is prohibited from collecting sensitive information about an individual unless consent is provided. [...] 7-Eleven [has been ordered] to cease collecting facial images and faceprints as part of the customer feedback mechanism. 7-Eleven has also been ordered to destroy all the faceprints it collected.

The Washington Post explores recent breaches at Twitch and Epik — and asks whether they really signal an upsurge in "hacktivism": The perpetrators of these hacks are distancing themselves from financially driven cybercriminals and ransomware gangs by portraying their attacks as moral crusades against what they said were the companies' sins. In celebratory notes released alongside their data dumps, the Epik hackers said they were sick of the company serving hateful websites, while the Twitch hackers used a hashtag criticizing company efforts to confront harassment and said the site had become a "disgusting cesspool...." Allan Liska, a senior intelligence analyst with the cybersecurity firm Recorded Future, said the growing accessibility and sophistication of hacking tools and the ease with which social media can draw attention to a major hack has contributed to a dramatic upsurge in attacks by "hacktivists..."

[The attacks] also showcase how weak the world's cybersecurity defenses remain despite an eruption of concern after this year's major ransomware attacks, including the crippling cyberattack on Colonial Pipeline that brought panic to fuel markets on the East Coast... Troy Hunt, a security consultant in Australia who created the data-breach notification site Have I Been Pwned, said many such hacks are actually crimes of opportunity, with a loftier mission applied later. He recalled a popular information security joke: "The definition of hacktivist is you hack someone, then make up a reason they deserve it."

"Very often the politically motivated reasons we see are convenient excuses," Hunt said.

Google Maps is getting a few new features to help people better understand our burning planet. Ars Technica reports: The first is a new "fire" layer in the main map view, which will let you view the exact boundaries of a wildfire just as easily as you can look up the current traffic patterns. Google has done fire information before as part of the "crisis response" website, but with climate change making "Fire Season" a yearly occurrence in dry areas like Australia and the Western U.S., wildfires will now be a top-level Maps feature.

Google says the new fire level will bring "all of Google's wildfire information together" in an easy interface. In the US, it will also pull in data from the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC), and the company says it wants to expand fire detail with other government agencies, starting with Australia in "the coming months." Wildfire boundaries should be updated on an hourly basis, and Google says you'll be able to tap on a fire to see information from local governments, like "emergency websites, phone numbers for help and information, and evacuation details. When available, you can also see important details about the fire, such as its containment, how many acres have burned, and when all this information was last reported." The fire layout is rolling out to Android this week, with iOS and desktop coming in October.

Google also announced it's going to expand the Tree Canopy tool it launched in 2020. This Google Maps tool combines Google's plethora of aerial imagery with computer vision AI to generate a map that shows tree cover in cities. Today's announced expansion will increase the Tree Canopy imagery from 15 cities to 100 cities worldwide. Google wants city planners to use the Tree Canopy tool to combat the phenomena of urban heat islands, where miles of asphalt and a dearth of shade from trees can cause cities to be significantly hotter than the surrounding areas. Google says heat islands "disproportionately impact lower-income communities and contribute to a number of public health concerns -- from poor air quality to dehydration. With Tree Canopy data, local governments have free access to insights about where to plant trees to increase shade, reduce heat and mitigate these adverse effects."

To slow the speed at which high temperatures and warm waters bleach the corals of the Great Barrier Reef, Australian scientists are spraying droplets of ocean water into the sky to form clouds to protect the environmental treasure. From a report: Researchers working on the so-called Cloud Brightening project said they use a turbine to spray microscopic sea particles to thicken existing clouds and reduce sunlight on the world's largest coral reef ecosystem located off Australia's northeast coast. The water droplets evaporate leaving only tiny salt crystals which float up into the atmosphere allowing water vapour to condense around them, forming clouds, said Daniel Harrison, a senior lecturer at Southern Cross University, who runs the project.

"If we do it over an extended period of time for a few weeks to a couple of months when the corals are experiencing a marine heatwave we can actually start to lower the water temperature over the Reef," said Harrison. The project had its second trial in March, the end of the Southern Hemisphere summer when the Reef off Australia's northeast is at its hottest, gathering valuable data on the atmosphere when corals are at most risk of bleaching. A combination of light and warm water causes coral bleaching. By cutting light over the reef by 6% in summer, "bleaching stress" would be cut by 50% to 60% on the undersea ecosystem, Harrison said.

Tesla's Big Battery, located in southern Australia, just got hit with a federal lawsuit for failing to provide the crucial grid support it once promised it could. Motherboard reports: Built by Tesla in 2017, the 150-megawatt battery supplies 189 megawatt-hours of storage and was designed to support the grid when it becomes overloaded. Now operated by French renewable energy producer Neoen, it supplies storage for the adjacent Hornsdale wind farm, using clean energy to fill gaps that coal power leaves behind. It made waves at the time of its construction for being the largest lithium-ion battery in the world -- though it's now been superseded by another Tesla battery, the 300-megawatt Victorian Big Battery, also in Australia, which caught fire in July. On Wednesday, the Australian Energy Regulator (AER), the body that oversees the country's wholesale electricity and gas markets, announced it had filed a federal lawsuit against the Hornsdale Power Reserve (HPR) -- the energy storage system that owns the Tesla battery -- for failing to provide "frequency control ancillary services" numerous times over the course of four months in the summer and fall of 2019. In other words, the battery was supposed to supply grid backup when a primary power source, like a coal plant, fails.

The HPR's alleged pattern of failures was first brought to light during a disruption to a nearby coal plant in 2019, according to the regulator. When the nearby Queensland's Kogan Creek power station tripped on October 9, 2019, the HPR was called on to offer grid backup, having made offers to the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) to do so. But the power reserve failed to provide the level of grid support that AEMO expected, and, in fact, was never able to do so in the first place, the lawsuit alleges, despite making money off of offering them. Though HPR did step in eventually, and no outages were recorded, the incident spurred investigation into a number of similar failures over the course of July to November 2019. The reserve's failure to support the grid in the way it promised created "a risk to power system security and stability," a press release on the lawsuit says.

Eftpos has become Australia's first accredited non-government operator of a digital identity exchange under the federal government's Trusted Digital Identity Framework (TDIF). From a report: By becoming an accredited operator, Eftpos connectID can now facilitate online transactions requiring a digital identity from Australians. Eftpos sent connectID live in June as a fully-owned subsidiary of the organisation and as a standalone fintech company. It's been set up to act as "broker" between identity service providers and merchants or government agencies that require identity verification, such as proof of age, address details, or bank account information. It has been designed to work within the federal government's Trusted Digital Identity Framework (TDIF) and the banking industry's TrustID framework. Although the Australian government has its own digital identity solution with myGovID, Eftpos has previously said its solution could provide a "smoother, faster, and more secure onboarding experience, including for government services." Eftpos has also assured that connectID does not store any identity data.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Vice: If you live near a freshwater river or lake, odds are good that you have seen warning signs about harmful algal and bacterial blooms posted on its shores. Alarmingly, a new study reports that these blooms may be early indicators of an ongoing ecological disaster, caused by humans, that eerily parallels the worst extinction event in Earth's history. Some 251 million years ago, the end-Permian event (EPE), popularly known as the "Great Dying," wiped out nearly 90 percent of species on Earth, making it the most severe loss of life in our planet's history. Ominous parallels of that upheaval are now showing up on Earth, according to a team led by Chris Mays, a postdoctoral researcher and palaeobotanist at the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm. The researchers found that toxic algal and bacterial blooms during the Great Dying are similar to a recent microbial proliferation in modern lakes and rivers -- a trend that has been linked to human activities such as greenhouse gas emissions (especially carbon dioxide), deforestation, and soil loss.

The repeated correlation of these blooms with mass extinction events is "a disconcerting signal for future environmental change," report the researchers in a study published on Friday in the journal Nature Communications. Indeed, there's a lot of evidence to suggest we are currently in the midst of yet another mass extinction event, caused by humans. Not only do microbial blooms transform freshwater habitats into "dead zones" that can both choke out other species, thereby increasing the severity of extinction events, they can also delay the recovery of ecosystems by millions of years, the team noted. Mays and his colleagues reached this troubling conclusion by analyzing fossil records near Sydney, Australia, that were laid down before, during, and after the end-Permian extinction.

Though the exact mechanisms behind the Great Dying are a matter of debate, it was driven in part by an intense bout of volcanic eruptions that sparked a dramatic uptick in global temperatures and greenhouse gases emissions. Wildfires, droughts, and other disruptions swept across the woodlands, causing a collapse of plant life and widespread deforestation. The sudden loss of forests, which act as a sink for carbon, created a noticeable "coal gap" during the end-Permian that exposes this long-term interruption in carbon sequestration. Nutrients and soils that had once been metabolized by these botanical ecosystems instead seeped into nearby freshwater habitats, bolstering microbial blooms that were already thriving as a result of higher temperature and atmospheric carbon.

The Guardian tells the story of "a viral sensation in the global underworld," the high-security An0m phones, which launched with "a grassroots marketing campaign, identifying so-called influencers — 'well-known crime figures who wield significant power and influence over other criminal associates', according to a US indictment — within criminal subcultures." An0m could not be bought in a shop or on a website. You had to first know a guy. Then you had to be prepared to pay the astronomical cost: $1,700 for the handset, with a $1,250 annual subscription, an astonishing price for a phone that was unable to make phone calls or browse the internet.

Almost 10,000 users around the world had agreed to pay, not for the phone so much as for a specific application installed on it. Opening the phone's calculator allowed users to enter a sum that functioned as a kind of numeric open sesame to launch a secret messaging application. The people selling the phone claimed that An0m was the most secure messaging service in the world. Not only was every message encrypted so that it could not be read by a digital eavesdropper, it could be received only by another An0m phone user, forming a closed loop system entirely separate from the information speedways along which most text messages travel. Moreover, An0m could not be downloaded from any of the usual app stores. The only way to access it was to buy a phone with the software preinstalled...

[U]sers could set an option to wipe the phone's data if the device went offline for a specified amount of time. Users could also set especially sensitive messages to self-erase after opening, and could record and send voice memos in which the phone would automatically disguise the speaker's voice. An0m was marketed and sold not so much to the security conscious as the security paranoid...

An0m was not, however, a secure phone app at all. Every single message sent on the app since its launch in 2018 — 19.37m of them — had been collected, and many of them read by the Australian federal police (AFP) who, together with the FBI, had conceived, built, marketed and sold the devices.

On 7 June 2021, more than 800 arrests were made around the world....
Law enforcement agencies ultimately saw An0m as a creative workaround for unbreakable encryption, according to the Guardian. "Why debate tech companies on privacy issues through costly legal battles if you can simply trick criminals into using your own monitored network?"

The Guradian's story was shared by jd (Slashdot user #1,658), who sees an ethical question. "As the article notes, what's to stop a tyrant doing the same against rivals or innocent protestors?"

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Australia's High Court, roughly the equivalent of the U.S. Supreme Court, has ruled that Facebook users are responsible for the content of complete strangers who post defamatory comments on their posts. The ruling upholds a June 2019 ruling by the Supreme Court of New South Wales, home to Australia's largest city of Sydney. And it runs counter to how virtually everyone thinks about liability on the internet.

The High Court's ruling on Wednesday is just a small part of a larger case brought against Australian news outlets, including the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, and The Australian, among others, by a man who said he was defamed in the Facebook comments of the newspapers' stories in 2016. The question before the High Court was the definition of "publisher," something that isn't easily defined in Australian law. From Australia's ABC News: "The court found that, by creating a public Facebook page and posting content, the outlets had facilitated, encouraged and thereby assisted the publication of comments from third-party Facebook users, and they were, therefore, publishers of those comments."