PCPJack built a 230-node SMTP relay from hijacked cloud servers, syncing verified proxies every five minutes for scalable abuse.
Category: futurism
Cisco Patches CVE-2026–20230 in Unified CM as Exploit Code Goes Public
Cisco has patched a bug in Unified Communications Manager that lets an unauthenticated attacker on the network write files to the box and, from there, climb to root.
It is tracked as CVE-2026–20230, and proof-of-concept exploit code is already public. Cisco’s PSIRT says it has not seen the flaw used in attacks yet. The PoC shortens that runway.
The flaw is a server-side request forgery. Unified CM and its Session Management Edition fail to validate certain HTTP requests properly, so a crafted request can push the server into writing arbitrary files onto the underlying OS. Those files are the foothold. Cisco says they can be used later to escalate to root, the top privilege on the system.
Discovering That Hair Greying is Reversible
Looking at my reflection in the rearview mirror with morning sunlight streaming through the windows, it’s now hard to ignore the shimmering strands of silver that seem to be multiplying on my head. You may have seen this happen to your parents, friends, pets, and perhaps even yourself?
Is hair greying linked to life stress?
What if this was reversible?
Hormone therapy use for menopause declines despite proven benefits, study finds
Hormone therapy use among women in the U.S. remains low, even though it’s an effective treatment for many menopause symptoms, according to a new Mayo Clinic study published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings.
Menopause affects more than one million women each year in the U.S., and up to 75% experience symptoms such as hot flashes and night sweats that can last for years. Yet researchers have found that use of menopausal hormone therapy has steadily declined over time.
The new study found that hormone therapy use dropped from 4.4% in 2007 to 1.7% in 2023. Even among women most likely to benefit—those ages 50 to 59—only about 3.5% were using hormone therapy in 2023.
Finding the best ways for humans and robots to work together requires ‘swarm’ thinking
If the future of warehouse work belongs to humans and robots working side by side, a key question remains: What is the most effective way for them to collaborate?
Research published in Transportation Science suggests that the answer may be more flexible than many warehouse operators expect. The study, “Picking the Best Bot: Collaboration Strategies for Humans and Bots in Order Pick Systems with Traveling Salesman Problem Routing,” found that under many real-world conditions, warehouse workers achieve higher productivity when they dynamically switch among multiple autonomous mobile robots rather than work exclusively with a single robot.
The findings challenge a common assumption that fixed human–robot pairings are the most efficient approach.
The Colorado River Is Drying Out. I Paddled it to See What’s at Stake
With flows nearing record lows, the Colorado River and the people who depend on it are in for a rough summer. On a packrafting trip down a popular stretch of the river, a Backpacker editor finds a still-gorgeous landscape—and motivation to keep up the fight for one of America’s most important waterways.
Neuron ‘ground plans’ could simplify brain and behavior research
While E. Josie Clowney would never suggest that neuroscience is simple, a new study by her team at the University of Michigan could drastically reduce complexity in future studies. Their work focused on instinctual behaviors in fruit flies, but it has the potential to accelerate work to better understand the neurobiology that underlies behavior and decision-making in mammals, including humans.
The research establishes a new way to understand neurons, their connectivity and the behaviors they control. Within this new framework, the researchers can circumvent the conventional approach of considering each type of neuron individually and instead focus on groupings defined by shared structure and by two sets of regulatory genes. The work is published in the journal Nature.
While there are more than 8,000 kinds of neurons in the fruit fly cerebrum —the part of its brain where instinctual behaviors are hardwired—there are less than 200 major structural groups, or ground plans. Led by Najia Elkahlah, who recently defended her doctoral thesis in the Clowney lab, the team’s discoveries revealed how these ground plans get set up. There is a sort of order or hierarchy, where one set of genes coordinates the formation of the ground plan, and the other set produces small differences in shape and connectivity among neurons within each ground plan.
Artificial General Intelligence: So Close Yet So Far?
Despite its rapid development and widespread adoption, AI is a nascent technology with vast potential for enormous growth in the coming years.
Decades of science fiction make it easy to imagine a future in which AI evolves beyond task-focused point applications to offer broad, human-like intelligence. Although artificial general intelligence (AGI) is theoretical, the road to real AGI is fraught with serious technological and societal challenges. AGI developers face the daunting hurdles of making AGI work effectively, accurately, reliably — and, most of all, safely.
