Hackers Can Read Your Thoughts Inside Your Mind

Hackers Can Read Your Thoughts. It’s like phishing, only it happens inside of your skull.

 It’s hard to imagine something more futuristic than a helmet that lets you control machines with your mind. As if out of an X-Men comic, this technology became a reality about five years ago when not one but two devices, the NeuroSky MindWave and the Emotiv EPOC, that used brainwaves as an input hit the market. At first, the headsets were more or less novelties, a fun new way to play video games, but as the technology improved, all kinds of industries — from medicine to education, security to government — are looking for ways to take advantage of brain-controlled interfaces. We may never have to push a button again.

 Turns out there’s a downside to hooking your brain up to a computer. If you’re not careful, hackers could manipulate the game you’re playing or program you’re using and literally read your mind. (Sidenote: I’m pretty sure this was actually the horrifying premise of one of the latest X-Men movies and at least two Arnold Schwarzenegger flicks from the ‘90s.) A new study by a team of researchers from the University of California at Berkeley, Oxford and the University of Geneva shows how these devices can give unwarranted access to your private thoughts. By taking some backdoor approaches to reading the electronic signals the brain machines pick up, the team gained access to subconscious thoughts, including the location of the subjects’ homes and their banking PIN numbers.

 Hacking into someone’s brain isn’t exactly a straight-forward task. To find these private thoughts, By matching the EEG data of reactions from the first set with reactions from the second set, the researchers were able to when the subject recognized an image of something, say the location of their house on a map. It’s very basic mind-reading but mind-reading nevertheless.

 This doesn’t mean that thought thieves can come at your in the middle of the night, hook you up to a machine and download the contents of your brain. It is an indication that these brain-control devices pick up more information than what it needs to accomplish the task at hand.

 And, the researchers warned, the technology will improve over time and make it easier to identify and translate those signals. So you could look forward to hackers developing fake applications aimed at getting your brainwaves going.

 “In this threat model, the attacker doesn’t need to compromise anything,” says Dawn Song, a Berkeley computer science professor who helped lead the study. “He simply embeds the attack in an app, such as a game using [brain-machine interface] that the user downloads and plays. In this case, the malicious game designs and knows the visual stimuli the user is looking at and also gets the brain signal reading at the same time.” It’s like phishing, only it happens inside of your skull.

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Oil giant Saudi Aramco workstations hit by malware Restored

Oil giant Saudi Aramco back online after workstations hit by malware.

 Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s national oil company, said on Sunday that the company was back in operation ten days after a massive malware outbreak hobbled 30,000 workstations at the company.

 In a statement on the company’s Facebook page (content alert: Facebook page contains images of extremely phallic architecture), Aramco said that it had “restored all its main internal network services” that were affected by a malware outbreak on August 15.

 The attack was attributed to “external sources.” It is just the latest against a national oil company, following reports of malware attacks on Iran’s oil infrastructure linked to the “Flame” malware in May.

 The malicious Trojan horse, which Sophos named Troj/MDrop-ELD, attempts to overwrite the master boot record on infected systems, which would make it impossible to boot the machine.

 Responsibility for the attack from a previously unknown group calling itself the “Cutting Sword of Justice.”

 The group posted details of the hack on Pastebin, and said that Aramco was attacked in retaliation against the Al-Saud regime for the “crimes and atrocities taking place in various countries around the world, especially in the neighboring countries such as Syria, Bahrain, Yemen, Lebanon (and) Egypt.

 Pastie bin link:
http://pastebin.com/HqAgaQRj

 We, behalf of an anti-oppression hacker group that have been fed up of crimes and atrocities taking place in various countries around the world, especially in the neighboring countries such as Syria, Bahrain, Yemen, Lebanon, Egypt and ..., and also of dual approach of the world community to these nations, want to hit the main supporters of these disasters by this action.

 One of the main supporters of this disasters is Al-Saud corrupt regime that sponsors such oppressive measures by using Muslims oil resources. Al-Saud is a partner in committing these crimes. It's hands are infected with the blood of innocent children and people.

 In the first step, an action was performed against Aramco company, as the largest financial source for Al-Saud regime. In this step, we penetrated a system of Aramco company by using the hacked systems in several countries and then sended a malicious virus to destroy thirty thousand computers networked in this company. The destruction operations began on Wednesday, Aug 15, 2012 at 11:08 AM (Local time in Saudi Arabia) and will be completed within a few hours.

 This is a warning to the tyrants of this country and other countries that support such criminal disasters with injustice and oppression. We invite all anti-tyranny hacker groups all over the world to join this movement. We want them to support this movement by designing and performing such operations, if they are against tyranny and oppression.

 Cutting Sword of Justice

 Attacks against private and public energy-producing firms are nothing new. In addition to the “Flame” malware attacks against Iran’s oil refineries, the US Department of Homeland Security warned in May about ongoing cyber attacks aimed at firms operating natural gas pipelines within the United States.

 In its Pastebin manifesto, Cutting Sword of Justice said its attack on Aramco was “a warning to the tyrants of this country and other countries that support such criminal disasters with injustice and oppression.” The group invited other “anti-tyranny hacker groups” to join the movement.

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