More security gaps on school servers in NRW
The North Rhine-Westphalian Ministry of Education has admitted even more vulnerabilities after downloading difficulties of its Abitur exams and then discovered security gaps on a server of the Quality Agency – State Institute for Schools and Education (QUA-LiS for short). The Ministry of Education states that the newly found security gaps have probably existed for years. The QUA-LiS server that has now been shut down is said to have been used by employees as a shared work platform – among other things for the exchange and joint work on documents, for example for the curriculum work or in the area of further training. It cannot be ruled out that more weak points will be found, according to the ministry.
Our weekday news podcast delivers the most important news of the day compressed to 2 minutes. Anyone who uses language assistants such as Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant can also hear or see the news there. Simply activate the skill with Alexa or say to Google Assistant: “Play heise Top”.
Vorwerk closes Neato Robotics
The Vorwerk Group, known for its vacuum cleaners and the kitchen assistant Thermomix, will close the US vacuum cleaner robot company Neato Robotics. Vorwerk took over the company completely in 2017. In the future, the development of cleaning robots will be centralized in the “Competence Center Robotics” at the Wuppertal Laaken site. There, cleaning robot systems for the consumer and B2B sectors are designed under the motto “Engineered in Germany”. 14 employees of a Neato branch from Milan are to ensure the security of Neato’s cloud services for “at least five years”.
Cyber extortionists threaten Western Digital
The cyber extortionists who broke into Western Digital earlier last month are renewing their threats. They posted screenshots and a new ransom note on the AlphV cybergang’s darknet website. There is an eight-figure ransom demand. Apparently, Western Digital has not been intimidated so far and is not responding to the scammers, as the message released now shows. Insults and insults as well as racist remarks are interspersed in several places in the text. Whether there is more to the repeated threats remains to be seen. Western Digital’s services have been available again for more than two weeks.
AI image generator DeepFloyd If
The current generation of AI-supported image generators does amazing things, but also has some deficits. One of them is the generation of lettering in images, for example “Bar and Restaurant” or “Hotel, no vacancy” on a building. The AI laboratory DeepFloyd has developed the AI image generator If, which is supposed to understand exactly this. DeepFloyd is supported by the software manufacturer Stability AI, which is known for the image generator Stable Diffusion it developed. In addition to photorealistic representations with lettering, If should also be suitable for graphic tasks such as logo design.
(igr)
