Daily Archives: October 25, 2022

A California project would store solar energy to use when the sun goes down in water batteries

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The San Diego County Water Authority has an unusual plan to use the city’s scenic San Vicente Reservoir to store solar power so it’s available after sunset. The project, and others like it, could help unlock America’s clean energy future.

Perhaps a decade from now, if all goes smoothly, large underground pipes will connect this lake to a new reservoir, a much smaller one, built in a nearby canyon about 1100 feet higher in elevation. When the sun is high in the sky, California’s abundant solar power will pump water into that upper reservoir.

It’s a way to store the electricity. When the sun goes down and solar power disappears, operators would open a valve and the force of 8 million tons of water, falling back downhill through those same pipes, would drive turbines capable of generating 500 megawatts of electricity for up to eight hours. That’s enough to power 130,000 typical homes.

Neena Kuzmich, deputy director of engineering for the San Diego County Water Authority, has been working on plans for pumped energy storage at the San Vicente reservoir.
Dan Charles for NPR

“It’s a water battery!” says Neena Kuzmich, Deputy Director of Engineering for the water authority. She says energy storage facilities like these will be increasingly vital as California starts to rely more on energy from wind and solar, which produce electricity on their own schedules, unbothered by the demands of consumers.

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Source: A California project would store solar energy to use when the sun goes down : NPR

Crooks use POS malware to steal 167,000 credit card numbers from shops with open VNC + RDP ports

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Cybercriminals have used two strains of point-of-sale (POS) malware to steal the details of more than 167,000 credit cards from payment terminals.

The backend command-and-control (C2) server that operates the MajikPOS and Treasure Hunter malware remains active, according to Group-IB’s Nikolay Shelekhov and Said Khamchiev, and “the number of victims keeps growing,” they said this week.

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The MajikPOS and Treasure Hunter malware infect Windows POS terminals and scan the devices to exploit the moments when card data is read and stored in plain text in memory. Treasure Hunter in particular performs this so-called RAM scraping: it pores over the memory of processes running on the register for magnetic-stripe data freshly swiped from a shopper’s bank card during payment. MajikPOS also scans infected PCs for card data. This info is then beamed back to the malware operators’ C2 server.

MajikPOS and Treasure Hunter

Of the two POS malware strains used in this campaign, MajikPOS is the newest, first seen targeting POS devices in 2017. The malware operators likely started with Treasure Hunter, and then paired it with the newer MajikPOS due to the latter’s more advanced features.

This includes “a more visually appealing control panel, an encrypted communication channel with C2, [and] more structured logs,” compared to Treasure Hunter, according to Group-IB. “MajikPOS database tables contain information about the infected device’s geolocation, operation system name, and hardware identification number.”

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Treasure Hunter first appeared in 2014 before the source code was leaked on a Russian-speaking forum. Its primary use is RAM scraping, and is likely installed the same way as MajikPOS.

Today both MajikPOS and Treasure Hunter can be bought and sold on nefarious marketplaces.

In a months-long investigation, Group-IB analyzed about 77,400 card dumps from the MajikPOS panel and another 90,000 from the Treasure Hunter panel, the researchers wrote. Almost all — 97 percent or 75,455 — of the cards compromised by MajikPOS were issued by US banks with the remaining 3 percent distributed around the world.

The Treasure Hunter panel told a similar story with 96 percent (86,411) issued in the US.

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Source: Crooks use POS malware to steal 167,000 credit card numbers • The Register

Lenovo reveals rollable growing laptop and smartphone screens

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Lenovo has staged its annual Tech World gabfest and teased devices with rollable OLED screens that shrink or expand as applications demand.

The company emitted the video below to show off its rollables. We’ve embedded and set the vid to start at the moment the rollable phone is demoed. The rollable laptop demo starts at the 53 second mark.

Lenovo has offered no explanation of how the rollables work, and the video above does not show the rear of the prototype rollable smartphone and laptop.

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Source: Lenovo reveals rollable laptop and smartphone screens • The Register