Cyberattacks are an existential risk, with 89% of organizations ranking ransomware as one of the top five threats to their viability, according to a November 2023 report from TechTarget's Enterprise Strategy Group, a leading analyst firm. And this is just one of many risks to corporate data—insider threats, data exfiltration, hardware failures, and natural disasters also pose significant danger. Moreover, as the just-released 2024 IBM X-Force Threat Intelligence Index states, as the generative AI market becomes more established, it could trigger the maturity of AI as an attack surface, mobilizing even further investment in new tools from cybercriminals. The report notes that enterprises should also recognize that their existing underlying infrastructure is a gateway to their AI models that doesn't require novel tactics from attackers to target.

To help clients counter these threats with earlier and more accurate detection, we're announcing new AI-enhanced versions of the IBM FlashCore Module technology available inside new IBM Storage FlashSystem products and a new version of IBM Storage Defender software to help organizations improve their ability to detect and respond to ransomware and other cyberattacks that threaten their data. The newly available fourth generation of FlashCore Module (FCM) technology enables artificial intelligence capabilities within the IBM Storage FlashSystem family. FCM works with Storage Defender to provide end-to-end data resilience across primary and secondary workloads with AI-powered sensors designed for earlier notification of cyber threats to help enterprises recover faster.

Ave Imperator, Force Commander! We are thrilled to announce that Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate - Daemonhunters is coming to Xbox and PlayStation on 20 February! A deadly new threat courses through the galaxy. Nurgle's champions are spreading disease and plague in the form of a new contagion, The Bloom. This infectious influence corrupts whole planets and their lifeforms into twisted reflections of the Plague God's designs. Lead the Grey Knights to exterminate the forces of Chaos in fast-paced, brutal, turn-based tactical combat. Personalize and equip your elite squad of Daemonhunters to purge the deadly corruption of The Bloom as it spreads in a galaxy-spanning campaign. This will be available on PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X|S and Xbox One consoles on 20 February. The original Windows PC version is already out on Steam and Epic.

Take the helm of the Baleful Edict to command Strike Team Xiphos, a force of humanity's greatest weapon, the Grey Knights, to eliminate The Bloom. Upgrade to the Purifier Edition and the mighty Castellan Garran Crowe will deign to join your ranks following a timeline event during the Campaign. This legendary Grey Knight wields unique skills and equipment including the Black Blade of Antwyr, a powerful relic which incessantly whispers temptations to its wielder.

The homebrew and modification community has delved deeper into the recent bout of bricked Nintendo Wii U consoles, unlucky owners are seeing their systems throwing up error codes that indicate an internal memory failure. As covered on TPU almost two weeks ago, it was speculated that leaving a Wii U in a long-term state of unuse was a root cause of the problem. It is now theorized that a simple choice of memory chip is the real issue behind the corruptions, and not a case of leaving your unplugged Wii U stashed in a box somewhere.

An online database has been established on hackmd.io, and a member is collecting hard data from Wii U owners across various online communities and sources. Early indications show that consoles fitted with a Hynix eMMC are leading the pack in terms of number of system failures, Samsung-equipped models are placed in a distant second place, and the Toshiba variant is reported as having zero problems.

It has been reported by multiple users across several online communities that their Wii U consoles are no longer functioning properly. The error codes 160-0103 and 160-2155 are the dreaded indicators of memory corruption. It has been discovered that the NAND Flash within the Wii U's internal eMMC is prone to failure. According to details gleaned from teardowns of the console's hardware, Nintendo has implemented either Toshiba or Samsung flash storage boards for the various revisions of the console. There has been an uptick in the rate of bricked Wii U consoles across recent months, but the problems seem to have occurred as far back as 2015, according to archived posts on the GBA Temp forum. It is speculated that leaving the Wii U inactive for long periods of time can lead to the memory corruption issues.

AMD has released its latest Adrenalin drivers for Radeon graphics cards. With support dating back to RX 400, the latest Adrenalin 23.3.1 WHQL drivers bring a lot of improvements to the table, as well as support for Halo Infinite Ray Tracing Update and Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty game. Most importantly, the new driver has a series of fixes, including intermittent driver timeout, system freeze, or BSOD, with the latest Radeon RX 7000 series. Problems in games such as Premium Gold Packs in EA SPORTS FIFA 23 and Dying Light 2 lighting effects corruption have been fixed. As far as Radeon RX 6000 series goes, this driver release manages to fix corruption in certain scenes with ray tracing enabled observed in the Returnal game. Check the list below for the entire set of changes.Download: AMD Radeon Graphics Drivers 23.3.1 WHQL here.

Apple M1 chips are a part of the Apple Silicon family that represents a new transition to Arm-based cores with new power and performance targets for Apple devices. A portion of building a processor is designing its security enclave, and today we have evidence that M1 processors got a new vulnerability. The PACMAN is a hardware attack that can bypass Pointer Authentication (PAC) on M1 processors. Security researchers took an existing concept of Spectre and its application in the x86 realm and now applied it to the Arm-based Apple silicon. PACMAN exploits a current software bug to perform pointer authentication bypass, which may lead to arbitrary code execution.

The vulnerability is a hardware/software co-design that exploits microarchitectural construction to execute arbitrary codes. PACMAN creates a PAC Oracle to check if a specific pointer matches its authentication. It must never crash if an incorrect guess is supplied and the attack brute-forces all the possible PAC values using the PAC Oracle. To suppress crashes, PAC Oracles are delivered speculatively. And to learn if the PAC value was correct, researchers used uArch side channeling. In the CPU resides translation lookaside buffers (TLBs), where PACMAN tries to load the pointer speculatively and verify success using the prime+probe technique. TLBs are filled with minimal addresses required to supply a particular TLB section. If any address is evicted from the TLB, it is likely a load success, and the bug can take over with a falsely authenticated memory address.

AMD today released the latest version of Radeon Software Adrenalin. Version 21.8.2 beta comes with optimization for "Myst," with up to 6% performance improvement seen at 4K medium settings on a machine powered by a Radeon RX 6800 XT, compared to the previous 21.8.1 drivers. The drivers also feature optimization for "Aliens: Fireteam Elite."

The drivers also fix a handful of issues. Difficulties ending an OBS recording session with h.265 or HEVC codec on some of the newer Radeon GPUs, such as the RX 6800 XT, have been fixed. An image corruption bug with split-screen multiplayer on "F1 2021," has been fixed. Unresponsive behavior with Radeon Software in rare cases, has been fixed. Lighting corruption noticed in "Control" with DirectX 12 on cards such as the RX 6600 XT, has been fixed. Upgrading to the lastest Radeon Software causing auto-updates in Ryzen Master to stop working, has been fixed. Grab the drivers from the link below.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 21.8.2 beta

India is building a large AI machine learning data-center that can crunch through trillions of financial transactions per hour to process income tax returns of India's billion-strong income tax assessee base. India's Income Tax Department has relied on human tax assessment officers that are randomly selected by a computer to assess tax returned filed by individuals, in an increasingly inefficient system that's prone to both evasion and corruption. India has already been using machine learning since 2017 to fish out cases of tax-evasion for further human scrutiny. The AI now replaces human assessment officers, relegating them up an escalation matrix.

The AI/ML assessment system is a logical next step to two big policy decisions the Indian government has taken in recent years: one of 100% data-localization by foreign entities conducting commerce in India; and getting India's vast population to use electronic payment instruments, away from paper-money, by de-monetizing high-value currency, and replacing it with a scarce supply of newer bank-notes that effectively force people to use electronic instruments. Contributing to these efforts are some of the lowest 4G mobile data prices in the world (as low as $1.50 for 40 GB of 4G LTE data), and low-cost smartphone handsets. It's also free to open a basic bank account with no minimum balance requirements.

It appears that although MLC NAND-based SSDs have many advantages to HDD's from a physical-reliability point of view, the old spinning rust drives might still have one advantage over SSDs: A specially crafted write operation can't corrupt your data.

That's what a new report from Carnegie Mellon University, Seagate, and ETH Zürich is showing: That MLC-based SSD Drives are vulnerable to data-corrupting attacks as simple as a specially crafted write operation.

Yes, that's right, SOPA might have been set back for now, but the vested interests from the big media corporations (music/movies/news etc) that want it implemented unsurprisingly aren't sitting idle and are pushing for ever more draconian measures aka 'SOPA Plus'. A digital music report (PDF) asks for everything that was in the original SOPA and then some, with a wishlist of seven 'fixes':

Almost everyone who understands something about technology will have heard of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) (H.R.3261) currently being debated in the U.S. House. This is internet censorship legislation by any other name and anyone that doesn't have a vested interest in it like the big media cartels is against it. This is because it hands almost total control of the internet to powerful (read: money) special interest groups, allowing them to shut down websites at the mere whiff of an accusation of 'piracy', however small and however unfounded. This will easily ruin many legitimate businesses, all on the pretext of 'protecting copyright' from supposed 'financial losses' due to content 'theft'. It also does an awful lot of other things, all of them bad, which are fully detailed in the link above. Now, if anyone thinks that this is far-fetched, just look at how the current 'darling' of the internet, GoDaddy operates: they pulled the DNS records of weebly.com, because of one little complaint against the site and without even contacting the domain owner first to advise of the situation. Disgraceful. Give them SOPA and a webmaster doesn't stand a chance, regardless of their size.

The latest beta drivers and the first in the 290 series have been released by NVIDIA today, supporting all graphics cards since the venerable 6-series. Their main new feature are official support for enabling ambient occlusion settings in the control panel separately for specific games and enabling NVIDIA Surround on the new X79 SLI-certified motherboards. Ambient occlusion (AO) is settable for uber-popular games The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. So, what does AO do? We'll let Andrew Burns of NVIDIA explain:

If you're unfamiliar with Ambient Occlusion, it is most easily described as a way to make in-game shadowing more realistic, and therefore better.

What he doesn't say of course, is how it kills your frame rate, especially on lower end hardware. Anyway, there's all the usual goodies in this release: 3D Vision game profiles for games such as MW3, Diablo 3 & LEGO Harry Potter: Years 5-7 (yes really). There's a HD audio update and nine fixes too, including one for random flickering of the Windows boot logo as it's loading or fading away and a fix for the mouse cursor flickering and shaking in games such as Crysis 2 & Deus Ex when SLI is enabled when using 3DTV Play. The NVIDIA product release page is here and they have a snazzy-looking driver selector here. The release notes follow.

It looks like developer DICE has been doing a lot of listening to its customers, as the large number of complaints over in-game glitches has produced an almighty patch, fixing just about everything, including the kitchen sink, while making lots of little tweaks to improve gameplay and the user interface. On top of that, the patch is PC only for now as the console versions are taking "a bit longer due to [the] console certification process".

Bugfixes include such goodies as a "Black Screen" fix for an issue occurring on some PC Configurations; spawn protection improvements; increasing the damage from the 44 Magnum slightly; sharing your profile and stats with new Battlelog functionality; profile integration with Facebook, Google+ and Twitter and lots more. The full list appears below.

Well, this 11.11 release doesn't list any performance improvements unfortunately. It contains just one new unexciting feature and a few fixes, but still has quite a long list of known issues. The new feature is Adobe Flash Player 11 hardware accelerated graphics support, including the A-series and E-series APUs. Fixes include things like Rage texture corruption, bezel compensation working correctly in Far Cry 2 and a screen tearing fix for displays in clone mode. Therefore, if your setup is working fine, there's no rush to update to this driver in case it breaks something. Note the following CAP 1 profile updates added to this release:

- Battlefield 3: Tweaks to the CrossFire profile
- Global Ops: Commando Libya: Improves CrossFire performance
- Driver San Francisco: Disables CrossFire

DOWNLOAD: AMD Catalyst 11.11 WHQL for Windows 7/Vista 64-bit, Windows 7/Vista 32-bit, Windows XP 32-bit, Windows XP 64-bit

DOWNLOAD: Release Notes