The James Webb Space Telescope gets its highest resolution with the aperture masking interferometer (or AMI), "a tiny piece of precisely machined metal that slots into one of the telescope's cameras," according to a new article by Benjamin Pope, an associated math professor at Macquarie University. "We can finally present its first successful observations of stars, planets, moons and even black hole jets." [AMI] was put on Webb to diagnose and measure any blur in its images. Even nanometres of distortion in Webb's 18 hexagonal primary mirrors and many internal surfaces will blur the images enough to hinder the study of planets or black holes, where sensitivity and resolution are key. AMI filters the light with a carefully structured pattern of holes in a simple metal plate, to make it much easier to tell if there are any optical misalignments. We wanted to use this mode to observe the birth places of planets, as well as material being sucked into black holes. But before any of this, AMI showed Webb wasn't working entirely as hoped. At very fine resolution — at the level of individual pixels — all the images were slightly blurry due to an electronic effect: brighter pixels leaking into their darker neighbours. This is not a mistake or flaw, but a fundamental feature of infrared cameras that turned out to be unexpectedly serious for Webb. This was a dealbreaker for seeing distant planets many thousands of times fainter than their stars a few pixels away: my colleagues quickly showed that its limits were more than ten times worse than hoped. So, we set out to correct it... We built a computer model to simulate AMI's optical physics, with flexibility about the shapes of the mirrors and apertures and about the colours of the stars. We connected this to a machine learning model to represent the electronics with an "effective detector model" — where we only care about how well it can reproduce the data, not about why. After training and validation on some test stars, this setup allowed us to calculate and undo the blur in other data, restoring AMI to full function. It doesn't change what Webb does in space, but rather corrects the data during processing. It worked beautifully — the star HD 206893 hosts a faint planet and the reddest-known brown dwarf (an object between a star and a planet). They were known but out of reach with Webb before applying this correction. Now, both little dots popped out clearly in our new maps of the system... With the new correction, we brought Jupiter's moon Io into focus, clearly tracking its volcanoes as it rotates over an hour-long timelapse. "This correction has opened the door to using AMI to prospect for unknown planets at previously impossible resolutions and sensitivities..." the article points out. "Our results on painstakingly testing and enhancing AMI are now released on the open-access archive arXiv in a pair of papers." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.

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How much private and sensitive data can you get by pointing $600 worth of satellite equipment at the sky?

Quite a bit, it turns out.

Researchers from the University of Maryland and the University of California, San Diego say they were able to intercept sensitive data from the U.S. military, telecommunications firms, major businesses and organizations by passively scanning and collecting unencrypted data from the satellites responsible for beaming that information across the globe.

The satellites they focused on — geostationary satellites — provide modern high-speed communications and services to rural or remote parts of the globe, including television, IP communications, internet and in-flight Wi-Fi capabilities. They also provide backhaul internet services — the links between a core telecom or internet network and its end users — for private networks operating sensitive remote commercial and military equipment.

Using cheap, commercially available equipment, researchers scanned 39 satellites across 25 distinct longitudinal points over seven months.

The goal was to see how much sensitive data they could intercept by “passively scanning as many GEO transmissions from a single vantage point on Earth as possible.” It was also to prove that you don’t need to be a well-resourced foreign intelligence service or have deep pockets to pull it off.

What they found was unsettling: “Many organizations appear to treat satellite[s] as any other internal link in their private networks. Our study provides concrete evidence that network-layer encryption protocols like IPSec are far from standard on internal networks,” write authors Wenyi Zhang, Annie Dai, Keegan Ryan, Dave Levin, Nadia Heninger and Aaron Schulman.

They note that “severity” of their findings suggest “many organizations do not routinely monitor the security of their own satellite communication links” and that content scrambling “is surprisingly unlikely to be used for private networks using GEO satellite to backhaul IP network traffic from remote areas.”

“Given that any individual with a clear view of the sky and $600 can set up their own GEO interception station from Earth, one would expect that GEO satellite links carrying sensitive commercial and government network traffic would use standardized link and/or network layer encryption to prevent eavesdroppers,” the researchers wrote.

Wired first reported on the academic study.

Researchers reached out to major businesses and organizations that were leaking data via satellite communications to notify them and address the vulnerabilities, but said they declined to engage in any bug bounties that included a nondisclosure agreement.  

The researchers said discussions with the U.S. military, the Mexican government, T-Mobile, AT&T, IntelSat, Panasonic Avionics, WiBo and KPU all took place between December 2024 and July 2025 as the study was ongoing.

Satellites are outfitted with multiple transponders to collect different kinds of telemetry, and here the research focuses on a single type — Ku-Band transponders — that are heavily used for internet and television services. Using their consumer-grade equipment, the researchers were able to tap into 411 different transponders around the globe, collecting reams of sensitive data in the process.

They observed unencrypted data for T-Mobile users, including plaintext user SMS messages, voice call contents, user internet traffic, metadata, browsing history and cellular network signaling protocols, leaking out over the skies. Over a single, nine-hour listening session, the dish picked up phone numbers and metadata for 2,711 individuals. Similar leakages were spotted for calls over Mexican telecoms TelMex and WiBo, and Alaskan telecom KPU Telecommunications.

They also picked up unencrypted and encrypted traffic coming from U.S. military sea vessels, including plaintext that included the ships’ names — something the researchers said allowed them to determine they were all “formerly privately-owned ships” that are now owned by the government. Meanwhile, unencrypted HTTP traffic leaking out through the satellites gave them details into internal applications and systems used for infrastructure, logistics and administrative management.

The researchers say that while this kind of capability isn’t novel, previous research has suggested that only foreign governments and well-resourced companies have the capabilities to conduct such widespread monitoring. Their study, which developed a new way to parse through issues around signal quality, suggests that the barrier of entry is far lower than previously thought, requiring technical knowhow and just a few hundred dollars worth of commercial tech.

“To our knowledge, our threat model of using low-cost consumer grade satellite equipment to comprehensively survey GEO satellite usage has not been explored before in the academic literature.”

The findings underscore how much governments and businesses rely on standard satellite communications today to move their data around, and the lack of security attention these critical nodes receive compared to other technologies.The federal government has designated 16 sectors of society and industry as “critical infrastructure” and prioritized these sectors for additional security investment and assistance. Space is not one of those sectors, though policymakers have pushed the idea as a means to quickly retrofit our space-based communications for security. 

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If we could remove the 50 most concerning pieces of space debris in low-Earth orbit, there'd be a 50% reduction in the overall debris-generating potential, reports Ars Technica. That's according to Darren McKnight, lead author of a paper presented Friday at the International Astronautical Congress in Sydney, which calculated the objects most likely to collide with other fragments and create more debris. (Russia and the Soviet Union lead with 34 objects, followed by China with 10, the U.S. with three, Europe with two, and Japan with one.) Even just the top 10 were removed, the debris-generating potential drops by 30%. "The things left before 2000 are still the majority of the problem," he points out, and "76% of the objects in the top 50 were deposited last century." 88% of the objects are post-mission rocket bodies left behind to hurtle through space. "The bad news is, since January 1, 2024, we've had 26 rocket bodies abandoned in low-Earth orbit that will stay in orbit for more than 25 years," McKnight told Ars... China launched 21 of the 26 hazardous new rocket bodies over the last 21 months, each averaging more than 4 metric tons (8,800 pounds). Two more came from US launchers, one from Russia, one from India, and one from Iran. This trend is likely to continue as China steps up deployment of two megaconstellations — Guowang and Thousand Sails — with thousands of communications satellites in low-Earth orbit. Launches of these constellations began last year. The Guowang and Thousand Sails satellites are relatively small and likely capable of maneuvering out of the way of space debris, although China has not disclosed their exact capabilities. However, most of the rockets used for Guowang and Thousand Sails launches have left their upper stages in orbit. McKnight said nine upper stages China has abandoned after launching Guowang and Thousand Sails satellites will stay in orbit for more than 25 years, violating the international guidelines. It will take hundreds of rockets to fully populate China's two major megaconstellations. The prospect of so much new space debris is worrisome, McKnight said. "In the next few years, if they continue the same trend, they're going to leave well over 100 rocket bodies over the 25-year rule if they continue to deploy these constellations," he said. "So, the trend is not good...." Since 2000, China has accumulated more dead rocket mass in long-lived orbits than the rest of the world combined, according to McKnight. "But now we're at a point where it's actually kind of accelerating in the last two years as these constellations are getting deployed." A deputy head of China's national space agency recently said China is "currently researching" how to remove space debris from orbit, according to the article. ("One of the missions China claims is testing space debris mitigation techniques has docked with multiple spacecraft in orbit, but U.S. officials see it as a military threat. The same basic technologies needed for space debris cleanup — rendezvous and docking systems, robotic arms, and onboard automation — could be used to latch on to an adversary's satellite.")

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The aerospace and defense giant has disclosed the cyberattack in a filing with the SEC.

The post RTX Confirms Airport Services Hit by Ransomware appeared first on SecurityWeek.

The AP reports: A man in his 40s was arrested in southern England over an alleged cyberattack that disrupted several European airports in recent days, including at London Heathrow, law enforcement officials said Wednesday. The U.K.’s National Crime Agency said the suspect was held in West Sussex on Tuesday on suspicion of offenses involving the misuse of...

Source

Cybersecurity researchers believe the attack on Collins Aerospace involved a piece of ransomware known as HardBit.

The post European Airport Cyberattack Linked to Obscure Ransomware, Suspect Arrested appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Collins Aerospace is reportedly having difficulties recovering from the ransomware attack.

The post European Airport Disruptions Caused by Ransomware Attack appeared first on SecurityWeek.

“Goodbye isn’t the end. It’s the beginning of what happens next.” — Joshua Shaw Reading the news, I see some headlines suggesting that “Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters” lied in their “Goodbye” message. One headline read, “Security Industry Skeptical of Scattered Spider-ShinyHunters Retirement Claims.” Another read, “Scattered Spider Resurfaces With Financial Sector Attacks Despite Retirement Claims,” and...

Source

The cyberattack affected software of Collins Aerospace, whose systems help passengers check in, print boarding passes and bag tags, and dispatch their luggage.

The post Airport Cyberattack Disrupts More Flights Across Europe appeared first on SecurityWeek.

"Betelgeuse may have competition for the most exciting star about to go nova near Earth," writes Space.com. "Astronomers have discovered the secret of a strange star system that has baffled them for years, finding it contains a dead star about to erupt after overfeeding on a stellar companion." The supernova explosion of this cosmic cannibal could be as bright as the moon, making it visible with the naked eye over Earth even in broad daylight. The system in question is the double star V Sagittae located around 10,000 light-years from Earth, containing a white dwarf stellar remnant and its victim companion star, which orbit each other roughly twice every Earth day. The new research and the revelation of this white dwarf's imminent catastrophic fate answer questions about V Sagittae that have lingered for 123 years... White dwarfs represent the final stage of stars with masses around that of the sun, occurring when they run out of fuel for nuclear fusion... [W]hite dwarfs that have a stellar companion can get a second lease on life and a more conclusive and explosive end... [T]he stolen stellar material piles up on the surface of the white dwarf until it pushes this stellar remnant past the so-called Chandrasekhar limit of 1.4 solar masses. This is the mass limit that a stellar remnant has to exceed to trigger a supernova... However, this team found something very different and extraordinary happening with the stellar material being stolen by the white dwarf in V Sagittae... This investigation revealed that there is a giant halo of gas comprised of material stolen from the companion star wrapped around both the cannibal white dwarf and its stellar victim... "The white dwarf cannot consume all the mass being transferred from its hot star twin, so it creates this bright cosmic ring," team member Pasi Hakala from the University of Turku said. "The speed at which this doomed stellar system is lurching wildly, likely due to the extreme brightness, is a frantic sign of its imminent, violent end." "The matter accumulating on the white dwarf is likely to produce a nova outburst in the coming years, during which V Sagittae would become visible with the naked eye," Pablo Rodríguez-Gil from Spain's Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias said. "But when the two stars finally smash into each other and explode, this would be a supernova explosion so bright it'll be visible from Earth even in the daytime." The research was conducted with the Very Large Telescope (four individual telescopes high in the mountains of Chile) — and published last week in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

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One of the worlds in the TRAPPIST-1 system, a mere 40 light-years away, just might be clad in a life-supporting atmosphere," reports ScienceAlert. "In exciting new JWST observations, the Earth-sized exoplanet TRAPPIST-1e shows hints of a gaseous envelope similar to our own, one that could facilitate liquid water on the surface." Although the detection is ambiguous and needs extensive follow-up to find out what the deal is, it's the closest astronomers have come yet in their quest to find a second Earth... [T]he first step is finding exoplanets that are the right distance from their host star, occupying a zone where water neither freezes under extreme cold nor evaporates under extreme heat. Announced in 2016, the discovery of the TRAPPIST-1 system was immediately exciting for this reason. The red dwarf star hosts seven exoplanets that have a rocky composition (as opposed to gas or ice giants), several of which are bang in the star's habitable, liquid water zone... Red dwarf stars are also much more active than Sun-like stars, rampant with flare activity that, scientists have speculated, may have stripped any planetary atmospheres in the vicinity. Closer inspections of TRAPPIST-1d, one of the other worlds in the star's habitable zone, have turned up no trace of an atmosphere. But TRAPPIST-1e is a little more comfortably located, at a slightly greater distance from the star... [T]he spectrum is consistent with an atmosphere rich in molecular nitrogen, with trace amounts of carbon dioxide and methane. This is pretty tantalizing. Earth's atmosphere is roughly 78 percent molecular nitrogen. If the results can be validated, TRAPPIST-1e might just be the most Earth-like exoplanet discovered to date. That is not a small if, though. Luckily, more JWST observations are in the pipeline, and the researchers should be able to validate or rule out an atmosphere very soon. After analyzing four transits of TRAPPIST-1e across TRAPPIST-1, "We are seeing two possible explanations," says astrophysicist Ryan MacDonald of the University of St Andrews in the UK. "The most exciting possibility is that TRAPPIST-1e could have a so-called secondary atmosphere containing heavy gases like nitrogen. "But our initial observations cannot yet rule out a bare rock with no atmosphere..." Astrophysicist Ana Glidden of MIT led the second team interpreting the results, and says "We are really still in the early stages of learning what kind of amazing science we can do with Webb. It's incredible to measure the details of starlight around Earth-sized planets 40 light-years away and learn what it might be like there, if life could be possible there." "We're in a new age of exploration that's very exciting to be a part of."

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Salesloft Drift customers are compromised in a much more expansive downstream attack spree than previously thought, potentially ensnaring any user that integrated the AI chat agent platform to another service.

“We’re telling organizations to treat any Drift integration into any platform as potentially compromised, so that increases the scope of victims,” Mandiant Consulting CTO Charles Carmakal told CyberScoop. This expanded attack radius includes Google Workspace customers that integrated Salesloft Drift into their instances. Victims have been notified that Google has found evidence of compromise.

Freshly uncovered evidence proves the threat actors, which Google tracks as UNC6395, didn’t just hit Salesforce customers who used Salesloft Drift, as Salesloft claimed Tuesday. 

“This just really blows wide open the scope here,” said Austin Larsen, principal threat analyst at Google Threat Intelligence Group.

Salesloft Drift provides integrations with 58 third-party tools for customer relationship management, automation, analytics, sales, communications and support, according to a third-party integration guide the vendor updated last month.

Salesloft updated its security blog to confirm that impact is much more severe and widespread. The company said it’s working with Mandiant, Google Cloud’s incident response division, and cyber insurer Coalition to assist in an ongoing investigation.

The sales engagement platform, a variant of CRM, is now recommending all Drift customers who manage connections to third-party applications via API key to revoke the existing key and rotate to a new key. Salesloft, which acquired Drift in February 2024, did not respond to a request for comment. 

In response to the widening security incident, Salesforce said late Wednesday it disabled the connection between Drift and Salesforce, rendering those integrations defunct. Salesforce declined to answer questions and maintains the issue does not involve a vulnerability in the Salesforce platform.

While the number of victims has grown, Google is sticking to the estimates it shared Tuesday, reiterating that more than 700 organizations are potentially impacted. Yet, it’s clear researchers are still working to identify all potential paths of compromise. 

“We’ve seen evidence of other platforms that were impacted as well,” Carmakal said.

The exposure could also involve former Drift customers. Mandiant identified one victim that may have been a former Drift customer, but researchers are still working to confirm those details. 

GTIG said the financially motivated threat group UNC6395 has also retrieved OAuth tokens for multiple services, including some that allowed it to “access email from a very small number of Google Workspace accounts.” The attackers primarily sought to steal credentials to compromise other systems connected to initial victims, as it specifically searched for Amazon Web Services access keys, virtual private network credentials and Snowflake credentials.

The root cause of the attacks, specifically how UNC6395 gained initial access to Salesloft Drift, remains unconfirmed. Researchers are also working to determine the full extent of the compromise within Salesloft Drift’s infrastructure.

“We are working with Salesloft Drift to investigate the root cause of what occurred and then it’ll be up to them to publish that,” Carmakal said. “There will be a lot more tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day.”

The post Salesloft Drift compromised en masse, impacting all third-party integrations appeared first on CyberScoop.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: SpaceX has long marketed Starship as a fully and rapidly reusable rocket that's designed to deliver thousands of pounds of cargo to Mars and make life multiplanetary. But reusability at scale means a space vehicle that can tolerate mishaps and faults, so that a single failure doesn't spell a mission-ending catastrophe. The 10th test flight on Tuesday evening demonstrated SpaceX's focus on fault tolerance. In a post-flight update, SpaceX said the test stressed "the limits of vehicle capabilities." Understanding these edges will be critical for the company's plans to eventually use Starship to launch Starlink satellites, commercial payloads, and eventually astronauts. When the massive Starship rocket lifted off on its 10th test flight Tuesday evening, SpaceX did more than achieve new milestones. It purposefully introduced several faults to test the heat shield, propulsion redundancy, and the relighting of its Raptor engine. The heat shield is among the toughest engineering challenges facing SpaceX. As Elon Musk acknowledged on X in May 2024, a reusable orbital return heat shield is the "biggest remaining problem" to 100% rocket reusability. The belly of the upper stage, also called Starship, is covered in thousands of hexagonal ceramic and metallic tiles, which make up the heat shield. Flight 10 was all about learning how much damage the ship can accept and survive when it goes through atmospheric heating. During the tenth test, engineers intentionally removed tiles from some sections of the ship, and experimented with a new type of actively cooled tile, to gather real-world data and refine designs. [...] Propulsion redundancy was also put to the test. The Super Heavy booster's landing burn configuration appeared to be a rehearsal for engine failure. Engineers intentionally disabled one of the three center Raptor engines during the final phase of the burn and used a backup engine in its place. That was a successful rehearsal for an engine-out event. Finally, SpaceX reported the in-space relight of a Raptor engine, described on the launch broadcast as the second time SpaceX has pulled this off. Reliable engine restarts will be necessary for deep-space missions, propellant transfers, and possibly some payload deployment missions. [...] The next step is translating Flight 10 data into future hardware upgrades to move closer to routine operations and days when, as Musk envisioned, "Starship launches more than 24 times in 24 hours."

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The mysterious X-37B space-plane — the U.S. military's orbital test vehicle — "serves partly as a platform for cutting-edge experiments," writes Space.com And "one of these experiments is a potential alternative to GPS that makes use of quantum science as a tool for navigation: a quantum inertial sensor." This technology could revolutionize how spacecraft, airplanes, ships and submarines navigate in environments where GPS is unavailable or compromised. In space, especially beyond Earth's orbit, GPS signals become unreliable or simply vanish. The same applies underwater, where submarines cannot access GPS at all. And even on Earth, GPS signals can be jammed (blocked), spoofed (making a GPS receiver think it is in a different location) or disabled — for instance, during a conflict... Traditional inertial navigation systems, which use accelerometers and gyroscopes to measure a vehicle's acceleration and rotation, do provide independent navigation, as they can estimate position by tracking how the vehicle moves over time... Eventually though, without visual cues, small errors will accumulate and you will entirely lose your positioning... At very low temperatures, atoms obey the rules of quantum mechanics: they behave like waves and can exist in multiple states simultaneously — two properties that lie at the heart of quantum inertial sensors. The quantum inertial sensor aboard the X-37B uses a technique called atom interferometry, where atoms are cooled to the temperature of near absolute zero, so they behave like waves. Using fine-tuned lasers, each atom is split into what's called a superposition state, similar to Schrödinger's cat, so that it simultaneously travels along two paths, which are then recombined. Since the atom behaves like a wave in quantum mechanics, these two paths interfere with each other, creating a pattern similar to overlapping ripples on water. Encoded in this pattern is detailed information about how the atom's environment has affected its journey. In particular, the tiniest shifts in motion, like sensor rotations or accelerations, leave detectable marks on these atomic "waves". Compared to classical inertial navigation systems, quantum sensors offer orders of magnitude greater sensitivity. Because atoms are identical and do not change, unlike mechanical components or electronics, they are far less prone to drift or bias. The result is long duration and high accuracy navigation without the need for external references. The upcoming X-37B mission will be the first time this level of quantum inertial navigation is tested in space. The article points out that a quantum navigation system could be crucial "for future space exploration, such as to the Moon, Mars or even deep space," where autonomy is key and when signals from Earth are unavailable. "While quantum computing and quantum communication often steal headlines, systems like quantum clocks and quantum sensors are likely to be the first to see widespread use."

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