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Hackers Are Finding New Ways to Hide Malware in DNS Records

Hackers are stashing malware in a place that’s largely out of the reach of most defenses—inside domain name system (DNS) records that map domain names to their corresponding numerical IP addresses. The practice allows malicious scripts and early-stage malware to fetch binary files without having to download them from suspicious sites or attach them to emails, where they frequently get quarantined by antivirus software. That’s because traffic for DNS lookups often goes largely unmonitored by man

Beware! Research shows Gmail’s AI email summaries can be hacked

Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority TL;DR A researcher recently demonstrated a Gemini flaw that could be exploited to inject malicious instructions while using Gmail’s email summary feature. These instructions were hidden in plain text under the body of the email. Google responded to the research, stating that it had updated its models to identify such prompt engineering measures and block phishing links. Big tech companies have been billing AI as the ubiquitous tool that frees us from munda

Species at 30 makes for a great guilty pleasure

Earlier this month, Hollywood mourned the passing of Michael Madsen, a gifted actor best known for his critically acclaimed roles in Reservoir Dogs, Kill Bill, and Donnie Brasco, among others. Few obituaries have mentioned one of his lesser-known roles: a black ops mercenary hired to help hunt down an escaped human/alien hybrid in 1995's Species. The sci-fi thriller turns 30 this year and while it garnered decidedly mixed reviews upon release, the film holds up quite well as a not-quite-campy B

Understand CPU Branch Instructions Better

Branch instructions are the primary means by which a program running on a CPU makes a decision. This post is part of a series of posts on CPU performance, as part of the Pointer Wars: Linked List Edition challenge. This challenge is great for undergraduates, graduate students, and new engineers who want feedback about writing high performance C or C++ code. Much more info here. The Sequential Execution Model and Branch Instructions Programs written to execute on a CPU follow something called

Performance Debugging with LLVM-mca: Simulating the CPU

Some time ago I had a performance problem that wasn’t easy to explain by just looking at the code, since the version I expected to be faster was actually slower. Since the problem is simple yet illustrative, I am using it as a showcase on how to debug performance issues using llvm-mca. According to it’s documentation llvm-mca is a performance analysis tool that uses information available in LLVM (e.g. scheduling models) to statically measure the performance of machine code in a specific CPU. In

PJ5 TTL CPU

Well, we did it… we cracked 4MIPS on our TTL CPU. I have to admit I’m both relieved and surprised. The key parts to achieving this was to decrease the latency for the instruction decode and also the flag register writing. The time to decode an instruction, perform a bit of math and then write to the flags was at around 270nS. With the changes we made, the instruction decode had a radical reworking and the flag writing had some big changes as well, means we go this down to under 200nS. Which m

What I talk about when I talk about IRs

I have a lot of thoughts about the design of compiler intermediate representations (IRs). In this post I’m going to try and communicate some of those ideas and why I think they are important. The overarching idea is being able to make decisions with only local information. That comes in a couple of different flavors. We’ll assume that we’re compiling a method at a time, instead of a something more trace-like (tracing, tracelets, basic block versioning, etc). Control-flow graphs A function wi