Daily Archives: November 6, 2016

MechWarrior: Living Legends Community Edition 0.8 released

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Almost a decade ago, a talented team started working on what was to become the favorite game for many of us. Version 0.7.1, released in 2013, was to be the final version of MechWarrior: Living Legends by Wandering Samurai Studios.

Our community has stayed loyal and active since then, bringing us amazing events such as Chaos March, Planetary League and Open Merc Night. For this community, we have worked hard towards a new release. Introducing MechWarrior: Living Legends 0.8 – Community Edition!

Using the experience gained from years of public and league gameplay and numerous player requests, we have refined just about everything for a more balanced, player-friendly experience. Of course this also includes a ton of fixed bugs and new shiny!

We are dedicated to finish what Wandering Samurai started, and this is just the beginning. Upcoming patches will focus on bringing in new toys, further refining gameplay and making this game better than ever.

Source: MechWarrior: Living Legends Community Edition

This is an incredible mod of Crysis wars and new life is being breathed into this wonderful product.

New, more-powerful IoT botnet infects 3,500 devices in 5 days

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Linux/IRCTelnet, as the underlying malware has been named, borrows code from several existing malicious IoT applications. Most notably, it lifts entire sections of source code from Aidra, one of the earliest known IoT bot packages. Aidra was discovered infecting more than 30,000 embedded Linux devices in an audacious and ethically questionable research project that infected more than 420,000 Internet-connected devices in an attempt to measure the security of the global network. As reported by the anonymous researcher, Aidra forced infected devices to carry out a variety of distributed denial-of-service attacks but worked on a limited number of devices.

Linux/IRCTelnet also borrows telnet-scanning logic from a newer IoT bot known as Bashlight. It further lifts a list of some 60 widely used username-password combinations built into Mirai, a different IoT bot app whose source code was recently published on the Internet. It goes on to add code for attacking sites that run the next-generation Internet protocol known as IPv6.

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Once a device is infected, its IP address is stored so the botnet operator can re-infect it if it suddenly loses contact with the command and control channel.

Source: New, more-powerful IoT botnet infects 3,500 devices in 5 days

“You’re all going to die”: A scientifically proven pep-talk for winning

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For the study, Greenberg and colleagues first recruited basketball players to play two back-to-back, one-on-one games with lead researcher Colin Zestcott, another psychologist at the University of Arizona. (The players didn’t know that Zestcott was a researcher; they thought he was another study participant.) After the first game, half of the participants were randomly assigned to take a questionnaire on how they felt about basketball. The other half took one about their thoughts on their own death.

Those that took the spooky survey saw a 40-percent boost in their individual performance during the second game as compared with their first. Those that took the non-macabre survey saw no change

In a second experiment, participants were given a basket-shooting challenge, which a researcher described to them in a 30-second tutorial. Based on a coin-toss, half the participants got the tutorial while the researcher was wearing a plain jacket. The other half saw the researcher in a T-shirt with a skull-shaped word-cloud made entirely of the word ‘death.’ The participants’ performance on the shooting challenge was then scored by another researcher who didn’t know which players saw the death shirt.

In the end, players who did see the shirt took more shots, and outperformed by 30 percent, those that just saw the jacket.

Source: “You’re all going to die”: A scientifically proven pep-talk for winning

Mirai botnet attackers are trying to knock an entire country (Liberia) offline

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The nation state has a single point of failure fiber, recently installed in 2011, and it could spell disaster for dozens of other countries

The attack was said to be upwards of 1.1Tbps — more than double the attack a few weeks earlier on security reporter Brian Krebs’ website, which was about 620Gbps in size, said to be one of the largest at the time. The attack was made possible by the Mirai botnet, an open-source botnet that anyone can use, which harnesses the power of insecure Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

This week, another Mirai botnet, known as Botnet 14, began targeting a small, little-known African country, Liberia, sending it almost entirely offline each time.

Security researcher Kevin Beaumont, who was one of the first to notice the attacks and wrote about what he found, said that the attack was one of the largest capacity botnets ever seen.

One transit provider said the attacks were over 500Gbps in size. Beaumont said that given the volume of traffic, it “appears to be the owned by the actor which attacked Dyn”.

Source: Mirai botnet attackers are trying to knock an entire country offline