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CHANCE OF FLARES: NOAA forecasters estimate a 50% chance of X-class solar flares and an 80% chance of M-class solar flares today. The source would be active sunspot AR1748, which is turning toward Earth. Solar flare alerts: text, voice.
ANOTHER X-FLARE ON MAY 15: When the week began, the sun hadn't unleashed an X-flare all year long. In only two days, sunspot AR1748 has produced four. The latest X-flare from this active sunspot occured on May 15th at 0152 UT. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory captured the extreme ultraviolet flash: Although the sunspot is not directly facing Earth, this flare might have produced a CME with an Earth-directed component.
We are waiting for coronagraph data from SOHO and the twin STEREO probes to check this possibility. Stay tuned for updates. In summary, AR1748 has produced an X1.7-class flare (0217 UT on May 13), an X2.8-class flare (1609 UT on May 13), an X3.2-class flare (0117 UT on May 14), and an X1-class flare (0152 on May 15). These are the strongest flares of the year, and they signal a significant increase in solar activity.
Totally out of communications with the Curiosity rover and its over-head satellite network, NASA and its team at Jet Propulsion Laboratory are hoping that Curiosity is still alive when the angry Sun moves from between Mars and Earth.
Last week the giant sun storm AR1726 aimed its delta-class magnetic field at Earth with little damage sustained.
But the Earth is swaddled in a powerful and resilient electromagnetic shield that is all that saves the planet’s atmosphere from disintegration when the Sun’s most powerful X-class solar flares deliver billions of tons of high energy particles at millions of miles an hour.
The delta class flare-threat has now shifted to the far side of the sun. Earth is safe, but, according to the experts both Mercury and Mars are in the line of fire from incredible radiation levels. And these levels are far greater than the storm that caused JPL to shut down Curiosity on March 5.
MILAN, ITALY — Cannon Group will supply a complete foaming plant to Maersk Container Industry (MCI) for the manufacture of reefers, temperature-controlled containers used to transport frozen or refrigerated goods.
Total investment in the project is $170 million, but Cannon did not specify if this was for the factory as a whole, or for its foaming plant.
The equipment will be installed in MCI's new factory in San Antonio, Chile. This will be the first reefer manufacturing facility in some time to be located outside China and the first in Latin America, Cannon said in an April 24 news release. Cannon added that most recent global reefer manufacturing capacity has been located in China, where MCI operates a plant in Qingdao.
The new plant is scheduled to open at the beginning of 2014. MCI said the new factory will help correct the reefer trade imbalance that disadvantages exporters of fresh produce, such as fish and meat from western South America.
The core of the plant will be a polyurethane injection plant, where all the foam-insulated components of the box reefer will be manufactured. It will be able to produce reefers at a rate of one complete box assembled every nine minutes, Cannon said.
MOSCOW – Russia orbited the world’s only returnable satellite dedicated to biological research in space on Friday, helping to pave the way for future interplanetary flights, Federal Space Agency Roscosmos said.
“The Bion-1M satellite has separated from the Soyuz carrier rocket and entered an elliptic orbit at 575 kilometers (357 miles) above the Earth,” a Roscosmos spokesman told RIA Novosti.
Bion-M1 is carrying 45 mice, eight Mongolian gerbils, 15 geckos, snails, and containers with various microorganisms and plants.
During its 30-day flight, more than 70 physiological, morphological, genetic and molecular-biological experiments will be conducted in support of long-duration interplanetary flights including Mars missions.
In addition, Bion-1M carries a number of Russian and foreign microsatellites that will gradually detach from the spacecraft in the next two days and go on their individual missions.
The possible formation of a grey pool for reefer containers moved a step closer this week with the publication of a new white paper on the concept and signs that resistance to its introduction is lessening.
Steve Alaerts, general manager of perishable-specialist freight forwarder foodcareplus, told The Coolstar (sister publication to The Loadstar) that after an initial meeting in Antwerp earlier this year between representatives of the various stakeholders in the perishable maritime supply chain – shippers, forwarders, carriers, leasing companies and reefer manufacturers – there was an increasing consensus that a pool of reefer equipment owned by a neutral body could increase the efficiency of reefer operations and lead to hugely reduced costs.
“The reaction to the project is very promising and it appears that those who were most opposed to the concept, which was the shipping lines, are now beginning to understand the potential benefits. There is a change in their appreciation of how it could work and where the benefits lie.”
The concept of a grey pool is hardly revolutionary. The model under consideration is similar to the chassis pool developed by TRAC Intermodal in North America, where the company operates a 230,000-strong chassis fleet owned by a variety of interests, including shipping lines and lessors. A dry container grey pool concept was also previously reported by The Loadstar. Mr Alaerts argued, however, that the idea of having an independent pool manager would represent a step change in the way that shipping lines in particular, approach the reefer business.
“Carriers need to throw away the idea that they have to own the reefer containers. They do not. They ought to be concentrating on operating the vessels. It is not essential for them to own the boxes and in fact there are several ways that having access to a pool would prove beneficial for them as well as for shippers,” he said.
Currently, the average reefer box makes four round trips per year, an utilisation level that Mr Alaerts described as ridiculous. He explained that given that the price of a new reefer container is US$30-34,000, and that the average lifetime of a reefer box is seven years (although that is currently being stretched by most reefer owners), over the course of its lifetime the average reefer may make around 30 trips with a cost to the carrier of US$1,000 per trip.
“That figure is clearly ridiculously high. Carriers say that they do not get a proper return on investment on reefer boxes, but that is not because they cost too much. It is because they do not operate them efficiently. If a reefer pool could help a reefer container make just six trips a year rather than four then that would represent a huge cost difference,” he said.
Mr Alaerts also noted that creating a pool would give carriers access to a much greater range of equipment, and would lead to higher levels of customer service. Given the highly imbalanced nature of the trade lanes which many reefers traverse, one of shippers’ greatest challenges is obtaining enough reefers to carry their cargo. Many carriers suffer from being unable to deliver empty reefers to shippers when and where they are needed, a situation that he said drives their customers into the arms of their competitors.
He also argued that giving greater access to the equipment for parties such as forwarders and depots would encourage more cargo on backhaul routes, as forwarders would look to fill available capacity.
“Carriers very often do not know where the cargo is destined inland. They simply release the container at the terminal and wait for the box to return to the port. There simply is not the dialogue that there could be.”
Mr Alaerts will present further research at next week’s Cool Logistics Africa conference in Cape Town, including a virtual application that has been developed and a possible trade lane example.
The white paper, Neutral reefer asset management: a logical solution to a chronic industry challenge? is published by foodcareplus and Seacube Container Leasing and can be downloaded here.
Hacktivist group Anonymous has launched a second massive cyber attack against Israel, dubbed #OpIsrael. The collective threatens to “disrupt and erase Israel from cyberspace” in protest over its mistreatment of Palestinians.
Dozens of Israeli websites were unavailable as of early Sunday.
In a video message posted on YouTube, Anonymous said that on April 7, “elite cyber-squadrons from around the world have decided to unite in solidarity with the Palestinian people against Israel as one entity to disrupt and erase Israel from cyberspace.”
Addressing the Israeli government, the group stated: “You have NOT stopped your endless human right violations. You have NOT stopped illegal settlements. You have NOT respected the ceasefire. You have shown that you do NOT respect international law.”
Earlier on Saturday, an Anonymous affiliated group identifying itself as The N4m3le55 cr3w announced that they “have gathered 600 websites and 100 plus servers we will be attacking” throughout Israel. The list includes banks, schools, businesses and a host of prominent government websites. “That is just our targets,” the group warned.
“We cannot speak on what the rest of Anonymous will be attacking but we can guarantee it will be in the 1000′s.”
The massive cyber attack falls on the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day. Anonymous has accused the Israeli government of mistreating its own citizens, violating treaties, attacking its neighbors, threatening to shut down the Internet in Gaza and ignoring “repeated warnings” about human rights abuses.
“The estimations are that [the cyber-attacks] will reach an unusual level that we have never seen before,” Deputy Information Security Officer Ofir Cohen said in an e-mail sent to Knesset employees on Thursday, The Jerusalem Post reported.
Cohen added that the E-government – the Israeli government’s information security body – and the Knesset’s internet service provider (ISP) are working to block the attack.
On Wednesday, thousands of Israeli Facebook users were infected by a virus, although its effects at this point appear to be minimal.
On Friday, Israeli radio reported that scores of large organizations had closed their websites to shield them from hacker attacks.
Despite the impending threat, Lior Tabansky, a fellow at the Yuval Ne’eman Workshop for Science, Technology, and Security of Tel Aviv University, told the Times of Israel that distributed denial of service (DDos) attacks, which work by overwhelming targeted servers with traffic which stems from multiple systems, are the only tool at the hackers’ disposal.
“Unless they have names and passwords, [DDoS] is really their only attack strategy. Unfortunately, there is little a company can do to stop it, but it is not the major cyber-threat many people, especially in the media, believe it to be. It’s more of an annoyance, and if they do manage to intimidate sites into submission, the victory will be one of public relations.” However, other experts have warned that the hackers may attempt to deploy malware such as “Trojan horses”, which can steal information and harm host computer systems.
Anonymous launched the first ‘OpIsrael’ cyber-attacks in November 2012 during Operation Pillar of Defense, an eight day Israeli Defense Force (IDF) incursion into the Gaza s trip.
Some 700 Israeli website suffered repeated DDos attacks, which targeted high-profile government systems such as the Foreign Ministry, the Bank of Jerusalem, the Israeli Defence Ministry, the IDF blog, and the Israeli President’s official website.
The Israeli Finance Ministry reported an estimated 44 million unique attacks on government websites over a four day period.
Following ‘OpIsrael,’ Anonymous posted the online personal data of 5,000 Israeli officials, including names, ID numbers and personal emails.
The group also took part in an attack in which the details of some 600,000 users of the popular Israeli email service Walla were released online.
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As cyber-war begins, Israeli hackers hit back
Anti-Israel groups start predicted hacking operation, with little initial major success. An Israeli ‘strike force’ responds with pro-Israel content on a resonant domain name
Anti-Israel hackers stepped up their attempts to pull down Israeli sites over the weekend, with numerous attempted denial of service (DDoS) attacks against Israeli government sites. Hacker sites listed numerous websites they claimed to have disabled, and several sites reported slowdowns on Saturday night, but nearly all the sites the hackers claimed to have taken down were operating normally.
Among the sites that experienced actual downtime due to attacks were those of Israel’s Education Ministry and Central Bureau of Statistics, which was still offline as of Sunday morning.
Meanwhile, Israeli hackers began to retaliate against the anti-Israel hack attacks, called #OpIsrael, with an operation of their own against sites in countries associated with the anti-Israel groups. A group called the Israeli Elite Strike Force over the weekend disabled dozens of sites in Pakistan, Iran, Syria, and several north African countries – and even acquired a domain name associated with the OpIsrael attack — opisrael.com. Instead of listing the sites anti-Israel hackers have defaced, that site features educational facts about Israel and the Jewish people, and a warning to anti-Israel groups that Israeli hackers were ready to fight fire with fire.
opsirael.com on Saturday night
Israeli Elite Strike Force seems to have been organized quickly in the past few days, in response to the threat by anti-Israel hackers to “erase Israel from the Internet” on April 7. The hackers released a list of some 1,300 Israeli sites that they planned to strike, claiming to have begun their attacks already on Saturday. But a check of most of the sites that the hackers claimed to have disabled – sites belonging to the Bank of Israel, the Tax Authority, the Central Bureau of Statistics, and other government agencies – showed they were operating normally. Several sites were hacked by groups associated with OpIsrael, but most of those were privately owned sites.
The hackers claimed to be identified with Anonymous, but Dr. Tal Pavel of MiddleEasterNet said that the group behind OpIsrael was most likely an ad-hoc assembly of Arab hacktivists calling themselves “Dangerous Hackers.” The group was not necessarily associated with international hacking group Anonymous, Pavel said, and on Saturday, individuals claiming to be members of Anonymous posted on the forum site 4Chan that they were not associated with OpIsrael. However, another alleged Anonymous site, possibly located in Sweden, on Saturday night claimed that Anonymous hackers were involved in the anti-Israel cyber attack.
A Twitter feed, ostensibly by Anonymous hackers, claimed it had stolen passwords and information from Israeli sites, including the Facebook account login data for Israeli government officials. However, Pavel said, such claims could not be trusted, because hacker groups often recycled old information from previously leaked databases, claiming it was fresh, in order to score a public relations victory. In several instances in recent days, said Pavel, he discovered that names and passwords hackers claimed to have stolen from Israeli servers last week were several years old.
Meanwhile, Israeli Elite Strike Force worked on Saturday night to pull down more sites. The group started attacking sites in Pakistan Friday but took off for Shabbat.
“We wish all our JEWISH brothers a Shabbat Shalom,” the group said in its Twitter feed. “This was just a little taste before the day of rest. Hell’s Fire To Come.”
Solar flares and coronal mass ejections as recorded by, from left: the Solar Dynamics Observatory in February 2011; the Solar & Heliospheric Observatory's Extreme ultraviolet Imaging Telescope in July 2000; the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory's Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph in April 1997.
In 1859 the Sun erupted, and on Earth wires shot off sparks that shocked telegraph operators and set their paper on fire.
Science Times Podcast
Massive solar storms and the threat to the power grid and global communications; the story of cancer in Toms River; the science behind being social online.
Green and red auroras appeared over Whitehorse, Yukon, in September 2012, caused by a coronal mass ejection, a spray of charged particles from a sunspot.
It was the biggest geomagnetic storm in recorded history. The Sun hurled billions of tons of electrons and protons whizzing toward Earth, and when those particles slammed into the planet’s magnetic field they created spectacular auroras of red, green and purple in the night skies — along with powerful currents of electricity that flowed out of the ground into the wires, overloading the circuits.
If such a storm struck in the 21st century, much more than paper and wires would be at risk. Some telecommunications satellites high above Earth would be disabled. GPS signals would be scrambled. And the surge of electricity from the ground would threaten electrical grids, perhaps plunging a continent or two into darkness.
Scientists say it is impossible to predict when the next monster solar storm will erupt — and equally important, whether Earth will lie in its path. What they do know is that with more sunspots come more storms, and this fall the Sun is set to reach the crest of its 11-year sunspot cycle.
Sunspots are regions of turbulentmagnetic fields where solar flares originate. Their ebb and flow have been observed for centuries, but only in the past few decades have solar scientists figured out that magnetic fields within the spots can unleash the bright bursts of light called solar flares and the giant eruptions of charged particles known as coronal mass ejections.
Experts are divided on the earthly consequences of a cataclysmic solar eruption, known as a Carrington event, for the British amateur astronomer who documented the 1859 storm.
A continentwide blackout would affect many millions of people, “but it’s manageable,” said John Moura of theNorth American Electric Reliability Corporation, a nonprofit group founded by utilities to help manage the power grid. Most of the grid could be brought back online within a week or so, he said.
Others are more pessimistic. They worry that a huge and well-aimed eruption from the Sun would cause not only the lights to go out, but would also damage transformers and other critical components of the grid.
Some places could be without power for months, and “chronic shortages for multiple years are possible,”according to the National Research Council, the research arm of the National Academy of Sciences.
Still, this sunspot cycle has been quieter than most. And even if the Sun unleashes a huge burst, as it did last July, the odds are that it will head harmlessly in some other direction into the solar system. Only rarely does a giant solar blast fly directly at Earth.
Yet just as a hurricane-fueled surge hitting New York City at high tide during a full moon is rare, rare is not impossible.
“There’s always the chance of a big storm, and the potential consequences of a big storm has everyone on the edge of their seats,” said William Murtagh, program coordinator for the Space Weather Prediction Center, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
A Huge Power Trip
The most studied, unambiguous example of the Sun’s ability to snarl power grids occurred on March 13, 1989, in Quebec. In the early-morning hours, a solar storm generated currents in the transmission wires, tripping circuit breakers. Within minutes, a blackout stretched across the province, shutting down businesses, schools, airports and subways until power was restored later that day.
Canada was hit again a few months later, when another solar storm was blamed for computers shutting down at the Toronto Stock Exchange, halting trading.
Mr. Moura’s organization put out a report last year saying that utilities would have enough warning to disconnect the grid and protect the transformers; a follow-up task force is taking a closer look to determine how vulnerable the transformers might be.
“There’s a sense in the field that we don’t have all the answers,” said Antti Pulkkinen, a scientist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
The dangers will not go away after the so-called solar maximum — the period of heaviest solar weather — has passed. Even when quiet, with few sunspots, the Sun can still produce a giant eruption.
Solar flares, traveling at the speed of light, arrive at Earth in less than 8.5 minutes and can drown out some radio communications. But it is the coronal mass ejections — in which billions of tons of electrons and protons are disgorged from the Sun and accelerate to more than a million miles per hour — that cause more worry.
The particles, which generally take two or three days to travel the 93 million miles from the Sun to Earth, never hit the surface; the planet’s magnetic field pushes them aside.
But then they are trapped in the field. The back-and-forth sloshing generates new magnetic fields, mostly over the night side, and they, in turn, induce electrical currents in the ground. Those currents surge out of the ground and into the electrical transmission lines.
“In a sense, we’re playing Russian roulette with the Sun,” said John Kappenman, an electrical engineer who owns Storm Analysis Consultants and who has been warning of potential catastrophe.
This solar cycle has so far defied easy understanding. It started late — so late that some speculated that it was the beginning of an extended quiet period, like in the mid-1600s when almost no spots blemished the Sun for decades. It has been quieter than many experts expected, and so far it appears to have peaked early.
The two hemispheres of the Sun are out of sync. The northern hemisphere has been ahead of the curve, producing a large number of sunspots in late 2011 and has quieted since then, while the southern hemisphere has remained fairly quiet throughout.
Most solar scientists expect the southern hemisphere to perk up, and the number of sunspots to increase again, with the solar maximum arriving in the fall. Such double-peak patterns have appeared in some earlier solar cycles, including the last one.
“I believe I can say with strong confidence there will be a second peak in 2013,” saidDouglas Biesecker, a physicist at the Space Weather Prediction Center and the chairman of a panel that issued predictions about the solar cycle.
“Will the second peak be smaller or larger than the first peak?” he continued. “We’re still in a waiting game with the southern hemisphere. The northern hemisphere has mostly played out.”
If the second peak never occurs and it turns out that solar maximum has already come and gone, “then I would argue it would be very fair to call it an unusual cycle,” Dr. Biesecker said.
Even with a quieter-than-average solar maximum, the Sun is still shooting off, on average, a few coronal mass ejections a day, including one on Friday that made a direct hit on Earth on Sunday, generating picturesque nighttime aurorae as far south as Colorado but causing no noticeable harm. In the past year, about 20 — all minor or modest — have reached Earth.
The Sun’s huge eruption in July 2012 was aimed the wrong way, luckily for Earth, but it did cross one of NASA’s Sun-watching craft, known as Stereo. The data from Stereo will help computer models predict what might happen to the power grid.
Feeling Blindsided
On the morning of Sept. 1, 1859, the British amateur astronomer Richard C. Carrington was sketching a large group of sunspots when he saw a blinding white flash engulf them: a solar flare. The magnetic currents that generated the flare also set off a coronal mass ejection, and when the particles arrived at Earth fewer than 18 hours later, they created an electrical current that overwhelmed telegraph circuits.
A telegraph operator in Washington reported that his forehead grazed a ground wire and “immediately, I received a very severe electric shock,” and “an old man who was sitting facing me, and but a few feet distant, said that he saw a spark of fire jump from my forehead to the sounder.”
Given that there has been no Carrington event since, scientists know such disruptions are rare. But they also know that it was not the only such storm to hit Earth in the planet’s 4.5-billion-year history. Carrington-size solar storms “are 100 percent guaranteed to occur again,” Mr. Kappenman said.
And when it happens, he continued, transformers and other key components of the electrical grid will suffer severe damage. These big transformers are expensive, and electric companies do not have many spares lying around. Some places could be powerless for months, he said, adding, “Think of Sandy magnified by a hundredfold.”
In November, the federal agency overseeing the power grid proposed requiring electric companies to install devices that would block currents flowing from the ground and to take other measures to protect equipment. Industry groups have objected, arguing that existing systems would take the grid down automatically before transformers would be damaged.
NASA’s Sun-watching spacecraft keep track of the sunspots, and they can provide some warning of which regions look likely to erupt.
While the craft can tell how large an eruption is, they cannot do one important measurement: which way the magnetic field is pointing within the swarm of particles. If the field is pointing north, Earth’s magnetic field can absorb the shock fairly well. But if the field is facing south, in the opposite direction from Earth’s field, the magnetic fields essentially snap and reconnect — magnetic “short circuits” that release huge bursts of energy.
NASA does have one satellite, the Advanced Composition Explorer, or Ace, that can tell which way the field is pointing. But Ace is just 900,000 miles from Earth, at a spot where the gravitational pull between the Sun and Earth cancel. When it makes that crucial measurement, a giant, fast-moving coronal mass ejection could be just 10 minutes away. Utility companies would have to quickly make their final decisions — and perhaps deliberately cause a continentwide blackout — in order to protect the electrical grid from greater damage.
As scientists learn more about the Sun, they learn that a Carrington-size coronal mass ejection may not be a very rare event — just rare that it hits Earth. As long as we remain lucky.
Feb. 13, 2013: Rewind to the late 1950s. The Soviet Union had just launched the first artificial satellite, Sputnik. The United States, caught short, was scrambling to catch up, kick-starting a Cold War space race that would last for decades. Space was up for grabs, and it seemed like anything could happen.
The UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (UNCOPUOS). Credit: UN Information Service
Into this void stepped the United Nations. In 1958, the General Assembly "recognizing the common interest of mankind in furthering the peaceful use of outer space ... and desiring to avoid the extension of present national rivalries into this new field...." established the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS). COPUOS became a forum for development of laws and treaties governing space-related activities. Moreover, it set the stage for international cooperation on problems that no one nation could handle alone.
As the years went by, COPUOS membership ballooned from 18 to 74 nations, while items such as space debris, near-Earth asteroids, space-based disaster management, and global navigation were added to the committee's regular agenda. At each annual meeting in Vienna, Austria, COPUOS members confer about these issues, which present some key challenge or peril to the whole planet.
This year, a new item is on the agenda: space weather.
"This is a significant development," says Lika Guhathakurta of NASA Headquarters in Washington. "By adding space weather to the regular agenda of the COPUOS Science and Technical Subcommittee, the UN is recognizing solar activity as a concern on par with orbital debris and close-approaching asteroids."
Space weather is the outer-space equivalent of weather on Earth. Instead of wind, rain and snow, however, space has radiation storms, the solar wind, flares and coronal mass ejections. The source of space weather is the sun, and although solar storms are launched 93 million miles from Earth, they can make themselves felt on our planet.
"Strong solar storms can knock out power, disable satellites, and scramble GPS," says Guhathakurta. "It's a global problem made worse by increasing worldwide reliance on sensitive electronic technologies."
This week, members of the Science and Technical Subcommittee heard about some of the potential economic impacts of space weather. For instance, modern oil and gas drilling frequently involve directional drilling to tap oil and gas reservoirs deep in the Earth. This drilling technique depends on accurate positioning using global navigation systems. Drill heads could go awry, however, if the sun interferes with GPS reception. Solar energetic particles at the magnetic poles can force the re-routing of international airline flights resulting in delays and increased fuel consumption. Ground induced currents generated by magnetic storms can damage transformers and increase corrosion in critical energy pipelines.
Permanent damage to the Salem New Jersey Nuclear Plant GSU Transformer caused by the severe geomagnetic storm of March 13, 1989. Photos courtesy of PSE&G. More
"Space weather is a significant natural hazard that requires global preparedness,” says Prof. Hans Haubold of the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs. “This new agenda item links space science and space technology for the benefit of all humankind."
The elevation of space weather on COPUOS’s agenda coincides with the 10th anniversary of the International Living With a Star Program on Feb. 14. The program is an ad hoc group of nations that got together in 2003 to lay the groundwork for worldwide cooperation in the study of space weather. The UN will help take their efforts to the next level.
A key problem that the UN can help solve is a gap--many gaps, actually--in storm coverage around our planet. When a solar storm sweeps past Earth, waves of ionization ripple through Earth’s upper atmosphere, electric currents flow through the topsoil, and the whole planet's magnetic field begins to shake.
A NASA-funded study by the National Academy of Sciences lays out the economic consequences of severe space weather. More
"These are global phenomena," says Guhathakurta, "so we need to be able to monitor them all around the world."
Industrialized countries tend to have an abundance of monitoring stations. They can keep track of local magnetism, ground currents, and ionization, and provide the data to researchers. Developing countries are where the gaps are, particularly at low latitudes around Earth's magnetic equator. With assistance from the UN, researchers may be able to extend sensor networks into regions where it was once politically unfeasible.
Space weather might play a role in Earth’s climate, too. For example, the Maunder minimum, a 70-year period almost devoid of sunspots in the late 17th to early 18th century, coincided with prolonged, very cold winters in the northern hemisphere. Researchers are increasingly convinced that variations in solar activity have regional effects on climate and weather that pay no attention to national boundaries, and thus can only be studied in meaningful detail by international consortia.
“The new permanent agenda item of the Science and Technology Subcommittee is an important opportunity to harness the effort of all Members to ensure coordinated global action,” comments Terry Onsager of the United States’ National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
Now that space weather has been elevated to a permanent place on the COPUOS agenda, it will be a matter of regular conversation among UN diplomats, scientists and emergency planners. This is important because, while space is no longer up for grabs, it is still true that in the realm of space weather almost anything can happen.
With a billion people sharing an assortment of personal information on a daily basis, Facebook holds the most significant amount of private information in today's connected world.
To allow easier data access, and a new way to navigate more than 240 billion photos and more than a trillion connections among its users, Facebook recently announced Graph Search.
While Graph Search is described as a way to allow people to make new connections, it's undeniably a powerful tool for unearthing a wealth information in a highly accessible manner. You could call it stalker's heaven.
"Harvesting this information prior to Graph Search would have involved hours to days to weeks of painstakingly manual reviews. Additionally, the data would soon become dated and require periodic rescanning. Scripting could help automate some of this activity, however this is often a difficult task due to constantly changing environments. Now with the advent of Graph Search anyone can instantly discover the goods within seconds," said Salvador Le Grec, founder of NovaInfosec.com.
I've composed a few searches and got embarrassing results in just a few minutes. Want to know how many employees in one of the world's biggest software companies like malware? Tons. How about how many in the same company like soft drugs? Even more. These are their private profiles but it doesn't look good for the brand, does it?
The enterprise threat
While plenty of organizations forbid the use of social networking in the workplace, not many can outright forbid their employees to indulge in such online activities in general. The problem lies in the fact that the exposure of personal information can impact not only the individual, but also the company they work for.
"Graph Search could potentially unveil employees' positions and interests that are contrary to an organization’s overall image," said Josh Chin, CyberSecurity Consultant at Net Force. The crux of the problem lies in the fact that a great number of users don't bother using any of the protection settings and leave their data open to everyone.
"Searching for pictures of employees that work at a certain company will yield pictures of friends, friends of friends and in cases even more. If some of these pictures are considered inappropriate it may put the company and the employee at more of a reputational risk," comments Tom Eston, Manager, Profiling and Penetration Team at SecureState.
Protect your privacy
It's clear that everyone should review and adjust their privacy settings in order to restrict the uncovering of sensitive data in Graph Search. Tim Senft, Founder of Facecrooks, recommends the following settings:
1. Restrict “Who can look me up?” to just Friends.
2. Don’t let search engines link to your Timeline.
3. Review all of your posts and things you’re tagged in.
4. Limit who can see your future posts.
What about data access? Alex Doll, CEO of OneID, believes users should turn on Login Approvals. While not the endgame, functions that require a code from a second device such as a cell phone make it harder for attackers to access your data.
Using Facebook responsibly comes down to common sense and data hygiene. "You should use Facebook as if anything that you posted there was available to everybody in the world, and as if there were people actively going through your information in order to see how to sell things to you or worse," according to Dominique Karg, Chief Hacking Officer at AlienVault.
Check your privacy settings and be cautious with the data you share, you never know who can misuse it. For detailed information on how to lock down your Facebook account, I invite you to read this Facecrooks article as well as Rik Ferguson's blog post.
Aerospace and defense firms targeted with clever spear phishing
Posted on 31.01.2013 Directors, vice presidents and other top management of companies in the aerospace industry and U.S. government and defense contractors have recently been targeted with a highly believable spear phishing campaign (click on the screenshot to enlarge it):
According to Symantec researchers, the content of all the sent out emails was the same, and the attackers aimed at making it seem as though the email originally came from the company that authored the report, then forwarded by employees.
Once downloaded and run, the attached malicious PDF file attempts to exploit a Adobe Flash Player vulnerability, and if it succeeds, it drops a malicious version of the svchost.exe file into the computer. The PDF also opens itself so that the targets don't become suspicious.
The executable then drops a malicious version of the ntshrui.dll file into the Windows directory, and makes explorer.exe run it.
It all ends with the victims having a permanent backdoor opened on their computer, and it contacts its C&C server (from which it gets further updates), enumerates disk drives, steals system information and forwards it all to the C&C server. Judging by this, this espionage campaign is currently in the reconnaissance phase.
"Organizations should ensure proper email security is in place and also make patch management a priority, as the vulnerability exploited here was patched in 2011," the researchers point out.
