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Hacking

This guy hacked his DJI Mini 2’s LEDs to add remote control payload delivery

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Making things work in a way they’re not supposed to (or at least, a way they’re not designed to) is always fascinating to me. And this one is particularly ingenious. Payload delivery systems are widely available for drones, although they typically require separate radio transmission systems. That’s a pain on a tiny drone like the DJI Mini 2.

You wouldn’t think the Mini 2 could handle carrying much extra weight, but it’s thrust to weight ratio makes it pretty strong. Everett Bradford, realised that with a little modification and tinkering, he could take advantage of the Mini 2’s remotely controlled multicoloured LEDs to tie a payload delivery system directly into DJI’s own software natively. Sort of.

Over 30 Canon DSLR, Mirrorless and compact camera models found vulnerable to ransomware

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Canon has issued a global security advisory relating to Canon digital cameras which feature the Picture Transfer Protocol (PTP) communication system. It’s a pretty long list of 32 cameras, including popular DSLRs like the 5D Mark III, 5D Mark IV, 6D and 6D Mark II, as well as their full-frame mirrorless cameras, the EOS R and EOS RP.

The vulnerability was discovered by Check Point Software Technologies, Ltd. They used information from the Magic Lantern forums in order to open up the firmware and uncover the flaws.

Millions of private photographs leaked in Ricoh Theta360 data breach

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vpnMentor reports that its research team discovered that Theta360’s photo-sharing platform has suffered something of a pretty major data breach. The leak, they say, has exposed at least 11 million public and private photographs on the system.

They say that while most personal information was not released, usernames, first and last names along with the captions were exposed in the database alongside the images. Images that many users had chosen to keep private.

iPhone X bug lets hackers steal deleted photos from your phone

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For one reason or the other, all of us delete plenty of photos from our phones while choosing the keepers. If you have an iPhone X, your “deleted” images are not entirely gone. As a result – they may be accessible to hackers. Two researchers have recently found a vulnerability that could let hackers access your images, even if you previously deleted them.

MIT Tricks Google’s Vision AI into thinking a turtle is a gun

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There have been a lot of positive. useful and sometimes amusing stories about various image AI & machine learning systems over the past couple of years. There have also been some that are either quite creepy or simply the stuff of nightmares. Whatever you use image recognition AI for, though, it seems it can be easily fooled, with a little bit of work.

A team at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratoy (CSAIL) these systems are even easier to fool than they thought. In a new paper, they’ve developed a system that is up to 1,000 times faster than existing methods. And it works with “black box” systems, too – these are closed source systems to which a hacker has no access to the code.

Hacking hard cases to provide more storage

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Rugged cases like Pelicans are great at protecting your gear. They’re waterproof, climate proof, indestructible and makes a great apple box when you need to sit or stand on something. After having more camera equipment than I am willing to carry on my shoulders, I bought a Pelican 1560 with padded dividers to carry it all.

The way the cases are structured, it is very difficult to put anything large inside, like reflectors or umbrellas into the case, and it is also very space consuming / uneconomical to put things like clamps and power cables and grip equipment inside the case, and almost always stupid to put water bottles inside the watertight case.

It was cameras that killed the Internet last week

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Chinese electronics component manufacturer Hangzhou Xiongmai Technology (Xiongmai) has said that its products inadvertently played a roll in Friday’s massive cyber attack that disrupted major internet sites including Twitter, Spotify and PayPal throughout the USA and other parts of the world on Friday.

Xiongmai are a vendor of Internet-connected cameras and DVRs. The company admitted that security vulnerabilities involving weak and unchanged passwords were partly to blame for the attacks. According to security researchers, an Internet of Things (IoT) bot called Mirai is responsible. It’s estimated that Mirai infects over 500,000 devices, and around 10% of these were used in Friday’s DDoS attack.

Hackers can now use social media photos to bypass face detection security

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The internet is slowly (and painfully) discovering that security is a hard mistress. I mean fingerprints have been hacked, and passwords have not been delivering for a long time. Next step was having a camera look at your face to see if you are really you.

Of course, the early systems could be hacked with a high quality printed photo. So security added a “check if it’s alive” method. That in turn was hacked using tablets and videos. The next step was to check if the received images makes sense (so videos were out). But then hackers started using 3D printed masks.

But 3D masks are hard to create. Why not just grab a few of your social media photos, and use those to create a model that looks so real that it fools security systems.

And this is what the team at University of North Carolina did.

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