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Chinese security outfit Qihoo 360 Netlab on Wednesday said it has identified Linux backdoor malware that has remained undetected for a number of years.The firm said its bot monitoring system spotted on March 25 a suspicious ELF program that interacted with four command-and-control (C2) domains over the TCP HTTPS port 443 even though the protocol used isn't actually TLS/SSL."A close look at the sample revealed it to be a backdoor targeting Linux X64 systems, a family that has been around for at least three years," Netlab researchers Alex Turing and Hui Wang said in an advisory.An MD5 signature for the...

... A researcher has found a way to exploit popular archival utility WinRAR to remotely execute malicious code on users' computers, without any interaction being required. Iranian researcher Mohammad Reza Espargham found that it was possible to use WinRAR SFX 2.51 to add malicious payloads that would execute when users decompress archives. A specially crafted hyper text mark-up language (HTML) text file that is parsed and which attempts to download and run potentially malicious code can be included in WinRAR SFX archives, Espargham noted. The researcher suggested secure parsing of the text file, and encoding of the URL value parameter...

Every three days, more Americans die from sudden cardiac arrest than the number who died in the 9-11 attacks. You can lessen this recurring loss by learning Continuous Chest Compression CPR, a hands-only CPR method that doubles a person’s chance of surviving cardiac arrest. It’s easy and does not require mouth-to-mouth contact, making it more likely bystanders will try to help, and it was developed at the University of Arizona College of Medicine. "This video is worth sharing," said Gordon A. Ewy, MD, director of the UA Sarver Heart Center and one of the research pioneers who developed this method....

By Katherine Hannaford Tech Digest Thursday, April 3 03:30 pm How many clowns can you fit in a car? I'm still not sure, but supposedly we'll soon all be able to compress the sh*t out of our MP3s and get 20 million onto an iPod. Good luck finding 20 million songs you actually like... If the evil anti-audiophilic professors at the University of Rochester manage to release their new compression technology without Arcam and Denon product managers hacking into their PCs and deleting the relevant witchcraft files. They're working on technology which will shrink MP3 file size down to a...

Chest compressions — not mouth-to-mouth resuscitation — seem to be the key in helping someone recover from cardiac arrest, according to new research that further bolsters advice from heart experts. A study in Japan showed that people were more likely to recover without brain damage if rescuers focused on chest compressions rather than on rescue breaths, and some experts advised dropping the mouth-to-mouth part of CPR altogether. The study was published yesterday in The Lancet. More than a year ago, the American Heart Association revised CPR guidelines to put more emphasis on chest presses, recommending 30 instead of 15 for...

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2002 October 8 The X-Ray Jets of XTE J1550 Image Credit: CXC, NASA; Illustration Credit: M. Weiss (CXC) Explanation: The motion of ultra-fast jets shooting out from a candidate black hole star system have now been documented by observations from the orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory. In 1998, X-ray source XTE J1550-564 underwent a tremendous outburst. Jets of material sent streaming into space at near light-speed impacted existing gas...