Coffee Break // Cyber News 013

A hot cup of decaf again today. The taste of a hot beverage helps me slide into the second half of the day, even without the caffeine.

D’you know what’s a funny word? Timestomping. Easily misread as timestamping, timestomping is when a threat actor alters the timestamps in logs/files in order to hide evidence of their activity, or help their malicious files blend in with legitimate data. What a fun bit of trivia… Happy Friday everyone.

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In the news.

The online services damaged by the data-center fire in South Korea are slowly but surely being restored. The Korea Herald reports that 30% of the services the data-center supported are back online.

I want to draw a thematic link between that data-center fire and this op-ed on the criticality of our own supply chain. In it, Lt. Col. Jesse R. Humpal expresses his support for a supply chain bill that he argues will help dedicate resources to protecting our supply chain.
I personally don’t know enough about the legislation itself to say whether or not it is a good idea, but he makes a strong argument. His best line is drawn from another article from the same publication:

“The Pentagon’s arsenal and defense industrial base is built on materials that China can turn off like a light switch.”

In other news, a story from earlier in the week on a novel surveillance method: using a person’s mouse as a microphone. The project, nicknamed Mic-E-Mouse by the researchers developing it, uses the mouse’s polling data in conjunction with a neural network to (somewhat) accurately derive conversations and sound from the surrounding space.
This is pretty cool, but it’s worth mentioning that using light to pick up sound is a technique that goes all the way back to the KGB in the 1940s.