News
- Areas of Russia are experiencing mobile internet blackouts
- These are said to be necessary to combat Ukrainian drone attacks
- Many believe the blackouts may be a crack down on digital rights
Amidst the Russian invasion of Ukraine, technology has been a crucial point of leverage for both sides, with technological infrastructure like telecoms and mobile internet services targeted in disruptive offensives aimed at weakening the other side - even leading to Russia shutting down its own internet services in the name of national security.
A new report by non-profit Russian Internet Protection Society has outlined a record breaking 2,000 mobile internet service shutdowns in July, pointing to a dramatic increase in digital restrictions - and rights groups say that many of the blackouts don’t appear to be related to any threat.
Russian authorities have blocked the advertising of VPNs and Cloudflare subnets in a large-scale crackdown on digital rights. Platforms like Twitch, TikTok, YouTube, and even Duolingo are all inaccessible without a VPN.
Drone attacks blamedThese blackouts have a serious impact on life in parts of Russia and cut off access to things like maps, banking applications, buying fuel, or even communicating with loved ones - with talks of blocking WhatsApp suggesting the state pushing citizens onto highly monitored, government controlled messaging services.
Russia has cited a need to prevent and defend against Ukrainian drone attacks, but not everyone is convinced by this explanation. The economic losses from these disruptions are estimated by watchdogs to be around 26 billion rubles ($290 million) in July alone - and rural areas are left isolated.
Dmitry Gudkov, a former MP and co-founder of the Center for Analysis and Strategy in Europe told Le Monde that authorities are ‘gradually restricting freedoms’ through these outages;
"They are acclimating society to life without the internet. The day they need to cut the mobile network, for instance to stifle protests, they'll know they can do it."
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- Russia blocks almost 200 VPN services, but the Kremlin still wants to use them
- A new Linux malware variant offers advanced features and evasion mechanisms
- It has already infected thousands of devices around the world
- Passwords, credit card info, and more, at risk
A brand new Linux malware has been found infecting thousands of computers around the world, stealing people’s login credentials, payment information, and browser cookies, security researchers are warning.
SentinelLabs and Beazley Security issued a joint report detailing the activities of PXA Stealer, a new Python-based infostealer for the Linux platform.
It was first spotted in late 2024, and has since grown into a formidable threat, successfully evading defense tools while wreaking havoc across the globe.
Side-loadingSince its inception, PSA Stealer has seen multiple iterations, with the latest one stealing information from roughly 40 browsers - saved passwords, cookies, personally identifiable information (PII), autofill data, authentication tokens, and more.
It can target browser extensions for various crypto wallets, including Exodus, Magic Eden, Crypto.com, and many others, and can pull data from sites such as Coinbase, Kraken, and PayPal. Finally, it can inject a DLL into running browser instances to bypass encryption mechanisms.
PSA Stealer is apparently being distributed through phishing emails and malicious landing pages. The malicious attachments contain a legitimate program (such as a PDF reader) and a weaponized DLL. The program sideloads the DLL, successfully deploying the malware while not raising any alarms.
More than 4,000 computers were infected with PSA Stealer in 62 countries, the two companies said, suggesting that the campaign is rather successful.
However, the attackers - who seem to be of Vietnamese origin - aren’t interested in using the stolen data themselves, and instead are selling it on the black market - in a Telegram group.
The majority of the victims are located in South Korea, the US, the Netherlands, Hungary, and Austria.
"Initially surfacing in late 2024, this threat has since matured into a highly evasive, multi-stage operation driven by Vietnamese-speaking actors with apparent ties to an organized cybercriminal Telegram-based marketplace that sells stolen victim data," the researchers explained. So far, more than 200,000 were stolen passwords, as well as hundreds of credit card information and more than four million cookies.
Via The Register
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- Battlefield 6 will be a "gritty and real" experience like earlier entries in the series
- Battlefield Studios UX director Alan Pimm said the game will have a different atmosphere to Battlefield 2042
- The developer also said it's "not a military sim" but "it's got enough of that grit that you feel it's believable"
According to EA, Battlefield 6 will be a modern military shooter inspired by earlier entries in the series and designed to be a "gritty and real" experience for players.
Speaking in an interview with TechRadar Gaming at the Battlefield 6 multiplayer reveal event, Battlefield Studios user experience director Alan Pimm said that the game's return to a modern setting after the futuristic Battlefield 2042 was something that the studio knew players wanted.
"Battlefield 3 and 4 were our strongest muses," Pimm said. "They were the ones that were in that same kind of modern frame, which is what people want. They don't want ultra-modern or futuristic. They want the weapons of today, that was the strong thing that came out of the research."
The developer said the upcoming shooter will look very different from 2042, particularly in terms of color palette and overall atmosphere, and will return "back to the grit" the series is best known for.
(Image credit: EA)"It's remembering that dirt should be dirty. We're not a pristine, sterile environment anymore. You've got the dust, the particles, the mud... You're not running around in a hero cape," Pimm explained.
"You're not running around in a hero cape. You know you are the soldier on the battlefield with your friends in amongst the muck and the dust and the explosions. The fiber of everything we've done in this is going 'let's make it gritty. Let's make it gritty and real.'
"It's not military sim, that's not where we go, it's fun still, but it's got enough of that grit that you feel it's believable."
Battlefield 6 will launch on October 10, 2025, for PS5, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, and PC.
An early access period will begin on August 7-8, followed by open beta weekends on August 9-10 and on August 14-17.
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- Perplexity seen to be ignoring signals like robot.txt to scrape online sites
- It even found protected and hidden test sites from Cloudflare
- OpenAI adheres to responsible crawling, but Perplexity quiet for now
Cloudflare has accused AI giant Perplexity of scraping websites which explicitly disallowed crawling via robots.txt and other network-level rules by hiding its identity and conducting obfuscated crawling activity.
Researchers from the company said they observed Perplexity using multiple user agents, including one impersonating Google Chrome on macOS, as well as rotating IP addresses and ASNs to evade detection.
Alarmingly, Cloudflare detected millions of daily requests across tens of thousands of domains, highlighting the sheer scale of illegitimate scraping by one of the biggest companies in the space.
Perplexity is scraping sites it shouldn't beAccording to Cloudflare's analysis, in many cases, Perplexity ignored or didn't fetch robots.txt files - which are plain-text files placed at the root of a site to tell automated agents (like search engines, AI crawlers and link checkers) which URLs may or may not be fetched.
Tellingly, Perplexity also attempted to access test websites Cloudflare created, even though they were blocked via robots.txt and not publicly discoverable, while using undeclared crawlers that weren't even associated with its official IP range.
"Although Perplexity initially crawls from their declared user agent, when they are presented with a network block, they appear to obscure their crawling identity in an attempt to circumvent the website’s preferences," the researchers write.
In response to its findings, Cloudflare has de-listed Perplexity's bots from its verified bots list. The company has also added new managed rule heuristics to detect and block stealth crawling.
In contrast, OpenAI's crawlers have so far respected robots.txt and block pages, using transparent identifiers and documented behavior to obtain information.
Perplexity denied wrongdoing, calling Cloudflare's post a "sales pitch", adding the identified bots weren't even theirs. TechRadar Pro has asked Perplexity for its comment.
Cloudflare urges bot operators to respect website preferences by being transparent, being well-behaved netizens, serving a clear purpose, using separate bots for separate activities and following rules and signals like robots.txt.
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