Scientists confirm Einstein's supermassive black hole theory

FILE PHOTO: Artist's impression of the active galactic nucleus shows the supermassive black hole at the center of the accretion disk sending a narrow high-energy jet of matter into space, perpendicular to the disc in this image by Science Communication Lab in Kiel Germany, released on July 12, 2018. Courtesy DESY, Science Communication Lab/Handout via REUTERS

A team of international scientists observing a star in the Milky Way have for the first time confirmed Einstein's predictions of what happens to the motion of a star passing close to a supermassive black hole.

Einstein's 100-year-old general theory of relativity predicted that light from stars would be stretched to longer wavelengths by the extreme gravitational field of a black hole, and the star would appear redder, an effect known as gravitational red shift.

"This was the first time we could test directly Einstein's theory of general relativity near a supermassive black hole," Frank Eisenhauer, senior astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, told journalists.

"At the time of Einstein, he could not think or dream of what we are showing today," he said.

A team of scientists at the European Southern Observatory started monitoring the central area of the Milky Way using its Very Large Telescope to observe the motion of stars near the supermassive black hole 26 years ago.

The black hole is 26,000 light years away from Earth and has a mass 4 million times that of the Sun.

The scientists selected one star, S2, to follow. With an orbit of 16 years, they knew it would return close to the black hole in 2018.

Over 20 years, the accuracy of their instruments has improved and so in May 2018, they were able to take extremely precise measurements in conjunction with scientists from around the world.

This showed the star's orbital velocity increasing to more than 25 million kph (15.5 million mph) as it approached the black hole.

The star's wavelength stretched as it sought to escape the gravitational pull of the supermassive black hole, shifting its appearance from blue to red, Odele Straub from the Paris Observatory said.

The scientists now hope to observe other theories of black hole physics, she said.

"This is the first step on a long road that the team has done over many years and which we hope to continue in the next years," MPE's Reinhard Genzel, who led the international team, said.

FBI issues malware warning

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has recommended businesses and individuals worldwide to reboot the routers at office or home to counter a malware known as "VPNFilter" that is spreading fast.

The malware affects routers and collect users' information or shut down network traffic.

According to a FBI statement, foreign cyber actors have compromised hundreds of thousands of home and office routers and other networked devices worldwide.

The actors used "VPNFilter" malware to target small office and home office routers.

"The FBI recommends any owner of small office and home office routers power cycle (reboot) the devices," the FBI said.

The malware targets routers produced by several manufacturers and network-attached storage devices by at least one manufacturer. The initial infection vector for this malware is currently unknown.

"VPNFilter is able to render small office and home office routers inoperable. The malware can potentially also collect information passing through the router. Detection and analysis of the malware's network activity is complicated by its use of encryption and misattributable networks," the FBI said.

The FBI recommended people to reboot the routers to temporarily disrupt the malware and aid the potential identification of infected devices.

"Owners are advised to consider disabling remote management settings on devices and secure with strong passwords and encryption when enabled. Network devices should be upgraded to the latest available versions of firmware," the US agency noted.

Earlier, Iran's Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Centre issued a warning about the fast-spreading malware attack.

The attack is not limited to Iran and has impacted many computer users across the world, the centre warned.

It said it has advised the owners of many brands of routers to turn them off and on again, and download updates from the manufacturer to protect themselves.

The malware was initially detected by Cisco Systems Inc.

Increasing the security of web applications

With the expansion of social media, the usages of web applications have been increasing around the world. As a result, online attackers have transformed their mode of action on the internet to maximize on this phenomenon.
The hackers have over the years assailed networks and exploited system level vulnerabilities which has in turn been fueling demand for products like firewall and intrusion detection systems.
As these products mature and security teams for information technology  learn to better handle network security, the information security industry is seeing a visible increase in attacks moving up the stack to target application-level vulnerabilities.
Web Application Firewall (WAF) protects applications from attackers. Internet facing web applications make up a large part of the attack surface, and are where attackers have their attention focused, which is indicated by a prevalence of attacks on the platform being 35%.
In return, WAFs are designed to protect web applications. WAFs are a shielding safeguard intended to defend applications accessed via the Hypertext Transfer Protocol address.
They are capable of preventing attacks that network firewalls or intrusion prevention systems cannot.
WAFs sit in front of a web application or web site,monitor application activity and alert on or block traffic that is malicious or that does not comply with specific rules.
The intention is to catch application level attacks, such as SQL or Standardized Query Language which requesting information from a database injection and cross-site scripting along with attempts to manipulate web application behavior.
Unprotected web applications are the easiest point of entry for hackers and vulnerable to a number of attack types.
Sophisticated threats such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting, buffer overflows, and cookie poisoning malicious sources. DOS attack also includes layer 7 load balancing and accelerated SSL offloading for more efficient application delivery.
It has features like Vulnerability scanning and patching, IP reputation, web application attack signatures, credential stuffing defense, anti-virus, Sandbox, Real-time attack insights and reporting with advanced visual analytics tools, Behavioral attack detection, Advanced false positive and negative detection avoidance.
Amber IT Web Application Firewall (WAF) is a cloud-based service that reduces the complexity of application security with a unified platform to rapidly detect and virtually patch web application vulnerabilities. It's simple, scalable and adaptive approach, backed by Amber IT's security expertise, lets you quickly block web application attacks, prevent disclosure of sensitive information, and control when and where your applications are accessed.

Scientists turn food poisoning microbe into powerful cancer fighter

Scientists have modified Salmonella bacteria to trigger a particularly powerful immune response against human cancer cells implanted in mice, shrinking the tumors and—for the first time—preventing them from metastasizing.

 Genetically modified Salmonella bacteria target tumors and make the immune system extra aggressive toward cancer         cells. Photo courtesy: Younghee Lee/CUBE3D Graphic/ via Science

Cancer tends to stick around because it’s practically invisible to the body’s own defenses: The immune system doesn’t recognize the rogue cells because they aren’t foreign invaders. To activate the immune system to attack cancer, scientists had tried all sorts of tricks, including infecting cancerous tissue with bacteria. Now, if this technique of modified Salmonella bacteria can be replicated in humans, it would be a significant step forward for the field of bacterial cancer therapy.

“This team did very solid work, very rigorous,” says Roy Curtiss III, an infectious diseases researcher at the University of Florida in Gainesville, who has pioneered similar bacterial techniques to combat cancer.

Because bacteria often home in on necrotic, oxygen-depleted tissue—present in most solid tumors—scientists can easily “target” cancerous tissue with the microbes. Only one such treatment has so far received Food and Drug Administration approval (a therapy to treat bladder cancer), though others are in the pipeline. But even with the most effective of these techniques, tumors tend to come back and the bacteria themselves can be toxic.

Enter Salmonella, a rod-shaped microbe notorious for causing most cases of food poisoning. In 2006, researchers at Chonnam National University in Gwangju, South Korea, were looking to create a new cancer-fighting agent. They were also searching for a vaccine for the bacterium Vibrio vulnificus, which infects shellfish off the South Korean coast. As they worked with Vibrio, they noticed that a protein in its flagellum—a whiplike tail used for swimming—triggered a particularly strong response from immune cells. So they took a harmless version of Salmonella typhimurium and “weaponized” it, genetically modifying it to secrete the protein, known as FlaB.

The team, led by biologists Jung-Joon Min and Joon Haeng Rhee, then set out to test the effects of the modified Salmonella on cancer. In one set of experiments, they injected it into 20 mice with human colon cancers. Three days later, the scientists discovered that although the mice had cleared the bacteria from their livers, lungs, and spleens, the tumorous tissue in their colons was crawling with Salmonella. After 120 days, tumors were undetectable in 11 of the 20 mice, which remained healthy throughout the experiment. Control mice, infected with bacteria that did not secrete FlaB, eventually succumbed to their cancers.

Next, the researchers transplanted metastasizing human colon cancer cells into a different set of mice. They treated eight with the FlaB-secreting Salmonella and six with a non-FlaB version. An additional seven mice went untreated. After 27 days, both the untreated mice and those with the non-FlaB version of S. typhimurium had dozens of metastases. But the eight mice that got the FlaB-secreting bacteria had just four secondary tumors in total, with several showing no evidence of metastasis, the researchers report today in Science Translational Medicine.

The FlaB protein probably gets the credit for halting the spread of the cancer, Min and Rhee wrote in an e-mail. FlaB appears to be especially good at activating a secondary molecule, TLR5, that seems to make immune cells more aggressive, “changing them from Dr Jekyll to Mr Hyde,” the researchers wrote.

For now, the team will continue to refine the technique with animal models. But sometime within the next few years, Min and Rhee plan to run clinical trials in humans to see whether FlaB-enhanced bacteria could work as a safe, effective anticancer therapy.