I don't understand why large scale cyberattacks by state actors do not count as an act of war. Not that I would want that, but it's an hostile act against military and government targets, but i don't see that the west reacts in any way.
Well, espionage has a long history, and generally wasn't treated as cause for war. I don't think that China's aim here was to destroy Dutch infrastructure -- I mean, okay, maybe to set things up to do so in an actual war -- but rather to do espionage against the Netherlands at large scale.
Also, governments generally don't disclose -- in the near term -- that online activity was done by them. And a random group of people in Russia doing something that is indistinguishable from the Kremlin do it has potential to start wars.
Also, possible for one government to pretend to be another.
Lastly, I think that there's just an enforcement problem associated with stopping cyberattacks by trying to figure out the responsible party is and slugging them hard enough to try to deter it. Like, I think that a better route would be just making computers and networks more secure. We aren't there today, that's for sure. But, we improve, too. I mean, in the late '90s, I remember pretty much all computer protocols being unencrypted plaintext. I can imagine us having computer systems and practices that are more-resistant to attack.
The Netherlands officials first reported in February that Chinese state hackers had exploited CVE-2022-42475 to install an advanced and stealthy backdoor tracked as CoatHanger on Fortigate appliances inside the Dutch Ministry of Defense.
Once installed, the never-before-seen malware, specifically designed for the underlying FortiOS operating system, was able to permanently reside on devices even when rebooted or receiving a firmware update.
Targets include dozens of Western government agencies, international organizations, and companies within the defense industry.
Monday’s report said that exploitation of the vulnerability started two months before Fortinet first disclosed it and that 14,000 servers were backdoored during this zero-day period.
Targets include dozens of (Western) governments, international organizations and a large number of companies within the defense industry.
The Dutch intelligence services and the NCSC consider it likely that the state actor could potentially expand its access to hundreds of victims worldwide and carry out additional actions such as stealing data.
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In this first phase of the program, The Exploration Company and Thales Alenia Space will refine their concepts, mature technologies, and focus on requirements for their cargo vehicles.
ESA plans to award contracts for the second phase of the LEO Cargo Return Service program in 2026, eyeing a round-trip demonstration flight to the International Space Station (ISS) in 2028.
Samantha Cristoforetti, an ESA astronaut who leads the procurement effort, said only the two winners "presented a combination of work plan and financing scheme that were suitable for the purposes of this call.”
At its next high-level budget meeting late next year, ESA will ask its member states for the rest of the funding needed to carry the program through the demonstration flights to the ISS.
This helps ensure stable funding for the agency's programs, but it can stand in the way of the kind of fast-paced change emblematic of startup culture.
"We have to now evaluate in detail the technical proposals and the capabilities, but this is extremely fast, and is actually faster than some of our competitors overseas managed to build such a vehicle."
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This week the European Space Agency posted a slightly ominous note regarding its BepiColombo spacecraft, which consists of two orbiters bound for Mercury.
The problem was first noted on April 26, when the spacecraft's primary propulsion system was scheduled to undertake an orbital maneuver.
The critical question is, at this power level, can BepiColombo still perform its primary task of reaching orbit around Mercury?
What is clear, she said, is that the current thrust level can support the next critical milestone, BepiColombo's fourth Mercury swing-by, which is due to occur on September 5 of this year.
"This swing-by sequence provides a braking delta-V of 2.4 km/s and provides a change of velocity vector direction with respect to the Sun as required for the trajectory end game in 2025," Montagnon said.
This transfer module is scheduled to be jettisoned from the rest of the stack in October 2025, and after that the remaining Mercury approach and orbit insertion maneuvers will be carried out with the chemical propulsion subsystem of the European MPO spacecraft.
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I have yet to play the game Daybreak, but I bought a copy of it from my FLGS because of the monumental effort they put into their game about the effects of climate change; each of the more than 200 project and crisis cards has a QR code which links to a web page on the game's site that gives details about that card, provides links to articles and research on the topic, and directs readers to groups where they can become an advocate for/against that topic.
It's a very different type of gameplay compared to Catan, but I'm interested in seeing how faithful this New Energies game is to teaching about climate change.
I've played a few rounds of digital Daybreak on BGA. It plays pretty nice, though difficulty seems to increase a lot outside the solo version. I worry that fiddling with CO2 tokens could get tedious in the printed version. The QR Code idea is nice.
This is real. I saw news about it maybe 1-2 months ago or so. Catan has largely rotated out of my group's play pool, but I still remember it as the game that kinda got us into resource-based games 20 years ago.
arstechnica.com
Heiß