Chinese ownership of agricultural land soars above 3 million hectares

Wollongong And Wentworth Cattle Station

The amount of agricultural land owned by Chinese interests has soared above 3 million hectares, more than double the 1.46 million declared by the Australian Taxation Office last month, according to a Fairfax Media analysis of reported land sales. This is a disaster in the making. Relinquishing ownership of our food supply is potentially suicidal!

https://www.westernadvocate.com.au/story/4275038/chinese-ownership-of-agricultural-land-soars-above-3-million-hectares/

State of Ransomware in the U.S.: 2019 Report for Q1 to Q3

In the first nine months of 2019, at least 621 government entities, healthcare service providers and school districts, colleges and universities were affected by ransomware. The attacks have caused massive disruption: municipal and emergency services have been interrupted, medical practices have permanently closed, ER patients have been diverted, property transactions halted, the collection of property taxes and water bills delayed, medical procedures canceled, schools closed and data lost.

Email and attachments and RDP continue to be the attack vectors of choice. The latter is vulnerable to ransomware via exploitation on unpatched systems, misconfigured security settings and brute force attacks on weak login credentials.

“There is no reason to believe that attacks will become less frequent in the near future,” said Fabian Wosar, CTO at Emsisoft. “Organizations have a very simple choice to make: prepare now or pay later.”

Hackers Can Use Lasers to ‘Speak’ to Your Amazon Echo or Google Home

Security Google Echo

Here is a REALLY interesting development!

In the spring of last year, cybersecurity researcher Takeshi Sugawara walked into the lab of Kevin Fu, a professor he was visiting at the University of Michigan. He wanted to show off a strange trick he’d discovered. Sugawara pointed a high-powered laser at the microphone of his iPad—all inside of a black metal box, to avoid burning or blinding anyone—and had Fu put on a pair of earbuds to listen to the sound the iPad’s mic picked up. As Sugawara varied the laser’s intensity over time in the shape of a sine wave, fluctuating at about 1,000 times a second, Fu picked up a distinct high-pitched tone. The iPad’s microphone had inexplicably converted the laser’s light into an electrical signal, just as it would with sound.

Six months later Sugawara—visiting from the Tokyo-based University of Electro-Communications—along with Fu and a group of University of Michigan researchers have honed that curious photoacoustic quirk into something far more disturbing. They can now use lasers to silently “speak” to any computer that receives voice commands—including smartphones, Amazon Echo speakers, Google Homes, and Facebook’s Portal video chat devices. That spy trick lets them send “light commands” from hundreds of feet away; they can open garages, make online purchases, and cause all manner of mischief or malevolence. The attack can easily pass through a window, when the device’s owner isn’t home to notice a telltale flashing speck of light or the target device’s responses.

“It’s possible to make microphones respond to light as if it were sound,” says Sugawara. “This means that anything that acts on sound commands will act on light commands.”

https://www.wired.com/story/lasers-hack-amazon-echo-google-home