Nextgov/FCW - Authors - Connor Simpson

Yahoo! Mail Accounts Hacked Through Third-Party

Connor Simpson, The Wire — Fri, 31 Jan 2014 11:05:46 -0500

Late Thursday Yahoo! acknowledged hackers accessed a number of its Mail accounts through a third party and that the affected accounts must now reset their passwords. If you didn't know your Yahoo! Mail password, you're in luck.

In a post on the company blog, Yahoo! says their servers are still safe. But the company acknowledged hackers used a "third-party database compromise" to log in to multiple Yahoo! Mail accounts. The hackers seemed to target "names and email addresses from the affected accounts’ most recent sent emails," the company said. Yahoo! did not disclose how many accounts were affected.

In response the tech behemoth is forcing affected accounts to reset their passwords using two-step verification, if possible. The company also says it contacted federal law enforcement and "implemented additional measures to block attacks against Yahoo’s systems."

HealthCare.Gov Passes 1 Million Enrollments

Connor Simpson, The Wire — Mon, 30 Dec 2013 10:36:49 -0500

HealthCare.gov, the struggling federal health care startup, finally cleared 1 million users in the month of December, federal officials have announced, acknowledging a milestone that falls short of original goals.

Over the last three months, from October 1 to December 24, more than 1.1 million people enrolled in a new qualified health care plan using HealthCare.gov, Marilyn Tavenner, the head of Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, announced Sunday. The numbers break down probably won't surprise you if you have followed these stories closely: more than 975,000 enrolled in December alone. Part of that surge in sign-ups — only 27,000 enrolled in October, or 137,000 in November — can be attributed to the now (mostly) functional website, and the panic to sign up before the first coverage deadline.

The administration originally planned to have 7 million people registered for federal healthcare by the end of March. That goal seems lofty now, as they may not even clear half of that at the rate registrations are going.

The numbers announced Sunday don't include those signed up through the 14 state-run exchanges.

Read the full story at TheWire.com.

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NSA Intercepts Laptops Purchased Online to Install Malware

Connor Simpson, The Wire — Mon, 30 Dec 2013 10:25:41 -0500

According to a new report from Der Spiegel on the National Security Agency's top team of hackers, the agency intercepted electronics purchased online before delivery to install malware and other spying tools.

NSA's Tailored Access Operations (TAO) division is responsible for the biggest hacks we've learned about in the last year, so Der Spiegel's report is a special look at the methods and madness behind the NSA's all-star team. When a world leader's cell phone is hacked by the NSA, the TAO team is responsible. They're the hackers who can access anyone, anywhere, under any condition.

TAO hackers can track your digital movements remotely by exploiting security flaws in an operating system, like Windows, for example. (It's a TAO favorite.) But when new-fangled remote access hacking strategies don't work, though, the NSA goes old school. The agency's most-skilled team of hackers does not always work from behind a computer screen. Occasionally a target must be physically intercepted before the NSA can access their information. In these instances, TAO waits for the target to order new electronics. When their surveillance system alerts that Target X just bought a new laptop, the TAO intercepts the mail order, and has the computer delivered to an NSA facility. They then open the package, and install their malware technology onto the target's new computer. The product is then repackaged and sent along its merry way:

If a target person, agency or company orders a new computer or related accessories, for example, TAO can divert the shipping delivery to its own secret workshops. The NSA calls this method interdiction. At these so-called "load stations," agents carefully open the package in order to load malware onto the electronics, or even install hardware components that can provide backdoor access for the intelligence agencies. All subsequent steps can then be conducted from the comfort of a remote computer.

These minor disruptions in the parcel shipping business rank among the "most productive operations" conducted by the NSA hackers, one top secret document relates in enthusiastic terms. This method, the presentation continues, allows TAO to obtain access to networks "around the world."

You have to be on the NSA's target list already in order for this to happen.

Read the full story at TheWire.com.

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China Is Now the Third Country to Successfully 'Soft Land' on the Moon

Connor Simpson, The Wire — Mon, 16 Dec 2013 10:41:17 -0500

A Chinese lunar rover landed Saturday, making China the third country to ever successfully “soft-land” on the moon.

On Saturday morning, Chinese state television reported the Chang’e-3, an unmanned spacecraft carrying a lunar rover that will carry out experiments and collect geological samples, “soft-landed” on the moon. The ship left earth about two weeks ago. A soft-landing occurs when the rocket is designed to touch down as gently as possible. Yes, they are generally preferred to hard landings.

Read the rest at TheWire.com.

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Map Shows the NSA's Massive Worldwide Malware Operations

Connor Simpson, The Wire — Mon, 25 Nov 2013 10:32:24 -0500

A new map details how many companies across the world have been infected by malware by the National Security Agency's team of hackers, and where the companies are located.

Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad reports the NSA uses malware to infect, infiltrate and steal information from over 50,000 computer networks around the globe. This new, previously unreported scope of the NSA's hacking operation comes from another PowerPoint slide showing a detailed map of every infection leaked by former contractor Edward Snowden.

The practice is called "Computer Network Exploitation," or CNE for short, and it's carried out by the NSA's Tailored Access Operations team. A yellow dot on the map signifies a CNE infection. The NSA plants malware within a network that can flipped on or off at any time. Once a network is infected, the malware gives the NSA unfiltered access to the network's information whenever it's most convenient. The Washington Post previously profiled the team of "elite hackers" who make up the NSA's TAO division.

The British intelligence service liked this strategy too, NRC Handelsblad reports, because they successfully duped a Belgium telecom company with a fake LinkedIn account. A strip at the bottom says the map is relative to relative to the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, the "Five Eyes" nations that share intelligence.

Read the full story at TheWire.com.

(Image via Finchen/Shutterstock.com)

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Stuxnet Used an Old Movie Trick to Fool Iran's Nuclear Program

Connor Simpson, The Atlantic — Wed, 20 Nov 2013 16:54:04 -0500

In a fascinating new read, Foreign Policy's Ralph Langer explored the deep history of Stuxnet, the super computer virus jointly authored, allegedly, by American and Israeli intelligence services to attack Iranian nuclear facilities. In doing so , he learned the real story involves not one, but two viruses, including an early, previously unreported version of the virus that relied on the cyber-attack equivalent of the camera trick from the movie Speed.

Langer's impressive three-year investigation into the virus's effects on the Iranian nuclear program shows how it effectively tore the system limb-from limb. It reportedly destroyed 1,000 out of 5,000 nuclear centrifuges and, by Langer's estimates, set the program back by two full years. Langer also discovered that a much more complicated and lesser-known gambit than the one we're most familiar with, was already being carried out years earlier.

Stuxnet was allegedly jointly created by U.S. and Israeli military forces to infiltrate and then damage Iran's nuclear program from the inside. It became public knowledge after it malfunctioned — or worked a little too well — and infected millions of non-Iranian computers worldwide in the summer of 2010.

But years before the Stuxnet we know and love went to work, an early variant targeted Iran's Natanz nuclear facility. Natanz employs a complicated, cascading system of safeguards to prevent centrifuges used for uranium enrichment from overheating and malfunctioning in order to overcome the country's outdated and dubious nuclear technology. Stuxnet's genius was in its ability to override those safety systems, by infecting computers that weren't connected to the outside world, and without anyone realizing it was being done until it was too late.

What the very early Stuxnet virus was designed to do is "so far-out, it leads one to wonder whether its creators might have been on drugs," Langer says. But in reality, they may have got the idea from a brilliant 1994 action flick starring Reeves and Sandra Bullock.

A controller infected with the first Stuxnet variant actually becomes decoupled from physical reality. Legitimate control logic only "sees" what Stuxnet wants it to see. Before the attack sequence executes (which is approximately once per month), the malicious code is kind enough to show operators in the control room the physical reality of the plant floor. But that changes during attack execution.

One of the first things this Stuxnet variant does is take steps to hide its tracks, using a trick straight out of Hollywood. Stuxnet records the cascade protection system's sensor values for a period of 21 seconds. Then it replays those 21 seconds in a constant loop during the execution of the attack. In the control room, all appears to be normal, both to human operators and any software-implemented alarm routines.

In you're too young (or old) to remember Speed, a terrorist installs a bomb on a Los Angeles bus and holds the passengers, including a cop played by Reeves, hostage by watching them through a closed circuit camera. The cops win by intercepting the video feed, and replacing it with looped footage of bus; making it appear to the villain that everything was normal, while the hostages escaped unnoticed. There was a big explosion at the end, too.

Anyway, once the Iranian system was blinded to the threat, American hackers remotely messed with the safety systems, routinely destroying Iranian centrifuges through coordinated attacks that would do significant damage without revealing the virus's existence. The version of Stuxnet that came later was much more abrasive, and did more damage in a shorter time. Staying hidden was no longer a goal, Langer posits, because once the damage was done, the creators wanted the world to know what they were capable of in the realm of cyberwarfare. It was time to reveal the secret.

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FBI: Anonymous Hackers Stole Info on 100,000 Federal Employees, Contractors

Connor Simpson, The Wire — Sat, 16 Nov 2013 11:26:50 -0500

Hackers associated with Anonymous launched a year-long campaign to break into multiple government agency networks and steal the personal information of over 100,000 employees, contractors and family members, according to a recently distributed memo obtained by Reuters.

The FBI memo, Reuters reports, was meant to call for aministrators to clean up the mess left behind by Lauri Love, a 28-year-old British man arrested at the end of October for stealing employee personal information from the government. Love was accused of working with a team of hackers to leave malware in networks for the U.S. Army, NASA and the Missile Command Agency, among others, that gave them "back door" access to networks and allowed them to come and go as they pleased.

Reuters reported that It said the breach also affected the Energy Department, the Department of Health and Human Services and perhaps many more agencies.

Love and his co-conspirators, who the FBI believe were loosely-involved with the Anonymous hacking collective Anonymous, would re-enter the networks and steal the personal information of employees, contractors and family members. Despite Love's indictment, the FBI believes his co-workers have continued their campaign, "a widespread problem that should be addressed," the memo says.

A Russian Cosmonaut Accidentally Infected the ISS with Stuxnet

Connor Simpson, The Wire — Mon, 11 Nov 2013 15:48:55 -0500

Russian security expert Eugene Kaspersky says that the infamous Stuxnet computer virus infected the International Space Station after being installed through a USB stick carried on board by a Russian cosmonaut.

Speaking to reporters at a National Press Club event in Canberra, Australia, last week, Kaspersky also says the virus infected a nuclear power plant in Russia and "badly damaged" their internal infrastructure. Kaspersky refused to provide details or elaborate on how the virus affected ISS operations or how engineering crews cleaned up the mess left behind by the world's most notorious computer virus.

The virus was allegedly jointly created by U.S. and Israeli military forces to seriously damage Iran's nuclear program. (Coincidentally, that relationship is very complicated right now.) Stuxnet became public knowledge after it malfunctioned -- or worked a little too well -- and infected millions of computers worldwide.

An interesting thing to note about the Russian cases is how neither system was connected to the internet when the infections occurred, suggesting the virus was deliberately planted by a foreign agent.

Read the full story at Atlantic Wire.

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Hacker Arrested for Compromising Federal Employee and Service Member Info

Connor Simpson, The Wire — Mon, 28 Oct 2013 15:00:30 -0400

There's a good chance federal authorities enjoyed arresting Lauri Love, a 28-year-old British man accused of hacking into multiple government agencies over the last year to steal confidential employee information in order to publish it.

New Jersey U.S. Attorney Paul J. Fishman announced the arrest in a statement Monday. Love is charged with one count of "accessing a U.S. department or agency computer without authorization and one count of conspiring to do the same." The U.S. attorney's office says Love faces "five years in prison and a $250,000 fine, or twice the gross gain or loss from the offense, on each of the two counts with which he is charged." He was arrested Friday at his home in Stradishall, England by the British Cyber Crime Unit of the National Crime Agency (NCA) after a long investigation with help from the FBI, according to theNew Jersey Star-Ledger.

Love and his merry band of compu-anarchist co-conspirators have been hacking multiple U.S. government agencies, including NASA and the Missile Command Agency, since October 2012 up until this month. The group was using secure servers, sometimes ones on the notorious Tor network, to launch attacks on multiple government networks. Once inside, Love and his team would leave "back door" malware code behind, allowing them to reenter the government networks with relative ease. The team coordinated their attacks in secure online chat rooms.

Or, so they thought.

Read the rest at TheAtlanticWire.com.

(Image via Jeff Wasserman/Shutterstock.com)

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Why Was NSA's Website Down for 11 Hours?

Connor Simpson, The Wire — Mon, 28 Oct 2013 10:02:46 -0400

The National Security Agency's website was down for several hours on Friday. But no one will confirm whether the outage was caused by a group of brash hackers attacking the website or if the hamster who normally keeps the place running simply stopped spinning on its wheel.

NSA.gov went out of service Friday shortly after 3 p.m., according to Gizmodo. Almost immediately some Twitter accounts loosely affiliated with Anonymous, the notorious hacktivist group known for executing distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, started taking credit for the attack. Some other hacking groups claimed responsibility as well. But those all felt more like desperate stabs at undeserved Internet credibility than any hacker taking proper ownership for his or work. Some of hackers who jumped have reputations for falsely taking credit for attacks, too.

Read the fully story at TheAtlanticWire.com.

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Report: NSA Director to Step Down by April

Connor Simpson, The Wire — Wed, 16 Oct 2013 17:48:44 -0400

National Security Agency Director Gen. Keith Alexander and his number two are on the way out, according to a new Reuters report.

Reuters' Warren Strobel and Mark Hosenball report the Army General will reportedly be out as head of the spy agency by next March or April at the very latest. Alexander's deputy director, John "Chris" Inglis, allegedly has formalized plans to retire by the end of next year.

Alexander and Inglis (right) became common faces on Capitol Hill after the so-hot-right-now Glenn Greenwald exposed the NSA's massive surveillance operation with help from documents leaked by former contractor Edward Snowden. The two have testified on multiple occasions, answering lawmakers questions about the size and scope of the agency's spying operations and how the Patriot Act and Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act affects their work.

Read the full story at Atlantic Wire.

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It Took Hackers This Long to Crack the iPhone's Fingerprint Security

Connor Simpson, The Wire — Mon, 23 Sep 2013 11:15:13 -0400

The iPhone 5S was released to the general public on Friday. Little more than 48 hours later, a group of hackers found a way to bypass the device's fingerprint-based security system that doesn't involve messy decapitation.

The Chaos Computer Club's Starbug was able to get past the iPhone's 5S TouchID security system by using a photo of your fingerprint and using glue or plastic to create a copy, like you've seen in countless spy movies. He modified existing biometric hacking methods slightly for the iPhone's TouchID. "In reality, Apple's sensor has just a higher resolution compared to the sensors so far. So we only needed to ramp up the resolution of our fake," Starbug says.

Read the full story at TheAtlanticWire.com.

(Image via Maksim Kabakou/Shutterstock.com)

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Intercepted Al Qaeda Conference Call Triggered U.S. Embassy Closures

Connor Simpson, The Wire — Wed, 07 Aug 2013 09:34:52 -0400

The continued closure of embassies and the travel alerts across the Middle East was apparently prompted not by a simple conversation between two top Al Qaeda leaders, but by an intercepted conference call between top leadership and affiliates across the region. That's been followed by a noticeable uptick in drone strikes over the past few days.

The U.S. and Britain evacuated their embassies in Yemen yesterday and urged nationals to leave the country as soon as possible over their fears of an imminent al-Qaeda attack. It had previously been reported that U.S. intelligence picked up a conversation between al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri and Nasser al-Wuhayshi, his top counterpart in Yemen, discussing Zawahiri's wish to see a terrorist attack launched from the region.

But apparently the intelligence that was intercepted was much more than that. "This was like a meeting of the Legion of Doom," an intelligence source told The Daily Beast's Josh Rogin and Eli Lake. U.S. intelligence intercepted a major conference call between up to 20 al-Qaeda affiliates across the Middle East during which Zawahiri promoted Wuhayushi to a "general manager" position, giving him control over most of the group's smaller operations in the region. The top al-Qaeda leaders said teams were already in place for an attack, though they were vague when discussing the target, which prompted the swift and wide-ranging response from the U.S.

In the wake of the attacks, the drone operation in Yemen has also been taken up a notch. There have been five drone strikes over the last five days targeting suspected al-Qaeda operatives, breaking a seven week stretch of drone silence in the area. The BBC also reports that Yemeni officials claim to have broken up an al-Qaeda plot to take over the country's oil pipelines. Whether or not that was the attack U.S. officials have been planning against is unclear.

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The President Blocks an Apple Sales Ban at the Last Minute

Connor Simpson, The Wire — Mon, 05 Aug 2013 09:47:01 -0400

The Wall Street Journal reports the administration just awarded Apple with a significant victory in their patent war with Samsung. A looming sales ban on older generations of iPhones and iPads wasblocked by the White House, Apple's only hope, at the last minute. The International Trade Commission ruled at the beginning of June to block the sale of some older Apple products because they infringed on a Samsung patent concerning simultaneous transmissions on 3G networks. The President, or a Federal Circuit Court, was Apple's only hope. Today was the last day the administration could reverse the ITC's decision.

U.S. trade representative Michael Froman ruled to block the sales ban because it would give patent holders "undue leverage," but said Samsung could still press the issue further in court. The ban would have blocked the sales of AT&T and T-Mobile models of the iPhone 4 and 3GS, and AT&T-enabled 3G versions of the iPads 1 and 2. If you think those products don't make money anymore,you are wrong.

This is undoubtedly a huge win for Apple in their ongoing sparring session with Samsung over patents, and if their arguments in this case are any indication this dispute won't be settled anytime soon.

Not so Fast, Google: the FTC Wants to Review That Waze Deal

Connor Simpson, The Wire — Mon, 24 Jun 2013 10:57:59 -0400

Google's billion dollar deal for Waze was a win, with Apple and Facebook left behind, but the excitement at Google's Santa Clara headquarters will be put on hold while the Federal Trade Commission takes a good, long look at the deal. The New York Post reported the FTC would be scrutinizing the Waze deal, despite the fact that the deal closed on June 11, and Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal confirmed the news with Google.

The California tech giant won't be able to integrate any of the crowd-sourcing technology that made Waze the toast of the map app world until regulators have determined everything is on the up-and-up. Waze quickly became the toast of the tech world before Google scooped it up, garnering attention from Apple and Facebook, too. And it's because of this wide-spread interest among tech titans that the FTC will be looking at closely, as the Journal explains:

The FTC would have to determine whether Waze would have become a head-to-head competitor with Google, whose Google Maps software is the dominant digital mapping and navigation service around the world, or whether there is any evidence, such as emails, that showed Google wanted to acquire the company only to keep it from rivals.

Before the purchase, Waze was seen as the first competitor who stood a chance of potentially taking down Google Maps as the go-to map app.

Tesla Is First Green Tech Firm to Pay Back Its Energy Dept. Loan

Connor Simpson, The Wire — Thu, 23 May 2013 09:26:59 -0400

Tesla no longer owes the federal government a dime. On Wednesday the company announced it had repaid the outsanding balance of $451.8 million, with interest, on its 2009 Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing loan from the Department of Energy. That means taxpayers earned a very, very small $12 million profit on the loan.

"I would like to thank the Department of Energy and the members of Congress... and particularly the American taxpayer from whom these funds originate," Tesla CEO Elon Musk said. "I hope we did you proud."

The company produced a quarterly profit for the first time in the first three months of this year, pocketing $11.2 million on $561.8 million in revenues. While Tesla started paying off the loan last year (company filings showed they paid at least $25 million back), the real reason it had cash around to pay back the loan was that last week it raised more than $1 billion in a stock offering. Tesla CEO Elon Musk advertised they would likely be paying back their loans in a tweet, of all places, he sent out on Monday.

Read the rest at TheAtlanticWire.com.

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Student Spies Trade NIH Research to China in Exchange for Tuition

Connor Simpson, The Wire — Wed, 22 May 2013 12:51:42 -0400

Three scientists working at New York University's Langone Medical Center are accused of passing research funded by the National Institutes of Health to a rival research institute funded by the Chinese government. For one scientist, his compensation was pre-paid grad school tuition.

NYU hired Yudong Zhu, a 44-year-old "accomplished researcher and innovator" in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technology, as an associate research professor in the school's radiology department in 2008. Zhu arranged for Xing Yang and Ye Li, both 31-years-old, to move from China to New York to work with him in 2010 after he had just been earned a $4 million dollar grant from the National Institutes of Health to conduct his MRI research for the next five years. They were research engineers, according to the university. Yang came to the U.S. on a student visa.

But according to the the U.S. Attorney for Manhattan, Preet Bharara, said in a statement the university was "inviting and paying for foxes in the henhouse." The three men are now being charged with commercial bribery conspiracy.

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Syria's Internet Is Offline Again

Connor Simpson, The Wire — Wed, 15 May 2013 11:34:11 -0400

For the second time in as many weeks, the Internet usage in Syria disappeared mysteriously around 10 a.m. local time Wednesday with little to no warning. So, is it another case of the Assad regime trying to disrupt rebel communications or are they really having technical difficulties?

There were some early reports from Akamai that the Internet had once again disappeared. "Syria Internet is offline again, following last week's 19-hour outage," they reported. And Google's Transparency reportseems to confirm as much.

That sharp drop at the end there, and the following flatline, that's the internet going out for the whole country. The Renesys Corporation seems to be running point on the explanations, though. "BGP [border gateway patrol] down, inbound traceroutes failing, nameservers and gov websites down," they said. One of their employees seems to think the Internet outage could last for a few hours because the regime istrying to black out news of the U.N.'s impending decision.

Read more at The Atlantic Wire.

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Freedom: BlackBerry's BBM Is Coming to the iPhone

Connor Simpson, The Wire — Tue, 14 May 2013 13:42:26 -0400

Considering there's a large swath of people who hate iMessage for its frequent downtime and unreliability, you would think BlackBerry would be smart enough to launch its long-popular BlackBerry Messenger app for the iPhone. Oh, they're doing that now? And for Android, too? Good. Finally. Now here's how they're going to make money off you.

Some might call this one of the smartest things Blackberry's done in years. Granted, they've done a lot of not-so-smart things over the last few years, and they've been trying desperately to bring their cellphone business back to life. But during a company keynote address today, BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins announced the expansion of BBM to iOs and Android, for free, coming this summer. BBM for your iPhone and Android will be limited at first — you'll only be able to message people and make groups — but soon enough the app will have the voice and screen sharing options that BBM's reported 60 million users are so used to using. (And, you know, that all the former BlackBerry owners have been missing since they switched to the iPhone.)

Read more at The Atlantic Wire.

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Astronauts at the International Space Station Successfully Fixed Leaky Pump

Connor Simpson, The Wire — Mon, 13 May 2013 10:31:44 -0400

Astronauts Chris Cassidy and Tom Marshburn completed the most impromptu spacewalk in NASA history ahead of schedule. The two men spent roughly five hours outside of the International Space Station repairing an ammonia pump used to cool the laboratory's engine system.

The ammonia pump was the chief suspect when little flecks were spotted leaving the ISS two days ago by commander Chris Hadfield. Cassidy and Marshburn only had two days to prepare for the spacewalk, a terrifyingly small amount of time considering they have to go out into space. But this is one of the emergency scenarios they were trained for before being posted to the ISS.

NASA scientists on the ground walked the two men through the pain-staking process of replacing the pump Saturday morning. They stayed outside while the pump was activated to make sure no flecks were seen forming around the newly installed pump. "No evidence of any ammonia leakage whatsoever. We have an airtight system — at the moment," Mission Control reported. After about an hour of observation the two were brought back inside. It was a job well done. "No leaks! We're bringing Tom & Chris back inside," Hadfield tweeted.

The emergency situation thankfully never put the astronauts life in danger, but it was a stressful way for Hadfield and Marshburn to spend their last few days on the ISS. The two return to earth in a Russian Soyuz spaceship on Monday.

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Boston Bombers Didn't Use Cellphones Detonators -- but Could Have

Connor Simpson, The Wire — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 09:00:14 -0400

The Associated Press reported Wednesday afternoon that bombing suspects Tamerlan and Dzhokhr Tsarnaev used a remote control of some sort to detonate their two homemade pressure cooker bombs at the Boston Marathon last Monday. The type of detonator the two men used remains unclear, but the Justice Department complaint outlining the charges against Dzhokhar makes very clear that he may have been "manipulating the phone," and that he kept his cellphone to his ear during the first explosion. (Police instructed officers and the press to turn off their phones during the shootout that killed Tamerlan late Thursday night.)

We see cellphone detonators all the time in the movies and on television, which sometimes seem to stretch the limits of even fictional terrorist technology. (Homeland, most recently.) But could two brothers living in Massachusetts have learned to make one — and make it work?

We're not going to get into the complexities of Inspire, the English-language online magazine said to be part of the brothers Tsarnaev's guide to killing four people and injuring scores more — nobody needs more information on how to build bombs. But it seems a little too easy, a little too unsettling, that something carried around by so many nonviolent people could be so easily converted into something so sinister.

Read the rest at TheAtlanticWire.com.

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The Bird Flu Has Spread Beyond China, and It's 'One of the Most Lethal' Ever

Connor Simpson, The Wire — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 13:47:39 -0400

The new strain of bird flu infecting and killing people in China is on the move. All of the reported cases had been contained to a relative few hotspots, but the first reported case of a human infection outside mainland China arrived Wednesday, and that's got the world's top scientists pretty worried about this H7N9 strain—even if it's not being transmitted from person to person.

A 53-year-old man from Taiwan recently returned from a trip to mainland China and showed signs of being infected with the new bird flu virus three days after landing home. (Taiwan is technically part of the larger Republic of China, but also its own country. It's complicated.) He's in critical condition and remains in quarantined at a Taiwanese hospital, where he's been since April 16. "This is the first confirmed H7N9 case in Taiwan who was infected abroad," Taiwan's Health Minister Chiu Wen-ta told reporters.

This is also very concerning because the World Health Organization just finished their own investigation into the H7N9 virus and they're worried it could be even worse than SARS or the H591 bird flu. Remember SARS and the first bird flu? They weren't fun. "This is one of the most lethal influenza viruses we have seen so far," the WHO's assistant director-general for health security, Dr. Keiji Fukuda, said at briefing Wednesday. "This is an unusually dangerous virus for humans," he added.

Read more at The Atlantic Wire.

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Google Fiber Is Coming to Provo, Utah — Because It Already Had Fancy Internet

Connor Simpson, The Wire — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 14:02:17 -0400

Last Tuesday, Google announced another reason to be jealous of Austin, Texas — the city became the second place in the U.S. where Google would offer its super fast, affordable fiber Internet service. Well, this week you can be jealous of Provo, Utah.

Yes, a little place called Provo (population: 112,000) in Utah is the third city in the country where Google will roll out its fiberoptic Internet service later this year, hopefully. As Google explained on its company blog, the deal hinges on the town's approval of its purchasing iProvo, the town's existing fiber Internet service provider. As our Rebecca Greenberg explained last week, the cost of laying down new fiber cords in a new city is insanely high. It cost around $84 million to put fiber cables in Kansas City, the first place to receive the service. For Provans, they will have to pay a $30 activation fee to activate the Google service, which presumably will cover the costs of bolstering the town's the existing network to Google's standards.

Read more at The Atlantic Wire.

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Obama's Big Bucks to Get Inside Our BRAIN

Connor Simpson — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 12:25:48 -0400

President Obama is tired of turning left at Albuquerque when following the current brain map, so he proposed a new $100 million, long-term investment initiative Tuesday: the Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies, or BRAIN for short, so scientists may better understand our noggin'.

The New York Times had the details early this morning, and the President unveiled them at an event at the White House Tuesday morning. Obama will propose as part of his budget to be unveiled next week that the federal government — in a split between the NIH, DARPA, and the NSF, as well as a cooperation with public institutions — should invest $100 million into the project in 2014, in hopes to map the activity of all 100 billion neurons that make up your brain — and, eventually, perhaps lead to answers on Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases. "Ideas are what power our economy. It's what sets us apart. It's what America is all about," the President said during his announcement.

Read more at Atlantic Wire.

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The Case of the Missing Deadly Virus Is Only a Problem If You Own Rats

Connor Simpson, The Wire — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 17:45:57 -0400

OK, this sounds worse than it is: A vial containing a potentially deadly virus has gone missing from a Texas laboratory. But you really shouldn't freak out because everything is going to be fine and it won't affect you, unless you have some very strange pets.

CBS News reports University of Texas Medical Branch officials discovered the missing vial containing less than a teaspoon of Guanarito virus during a routine inspection last week. The university is supposed to have five vials of Guanarito virus, but one is currently missing. Which sounds like the beginning of a Jame Bond movie, especially since the virus has been prioritized for research by the Centers for Disease Control for research because of its potential bioterrorism risk. But, seriously, there's nothing to worry about.

UTMB scientific director Scott Weaver promised the Houston Chronicle there's nothing to worry about. "The only way it could pose a risk is if it were stolen and that's unlikely," Weaver told the Chronicle. Weaver contends the vial was likely destroyed by accident during a routine cleaning process. The research facility found there hasn't been a breach of security recently, and the team behind the studies don't suspect anything fishy to be afoot.

Read more at The Atlantic Wire.

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