Would you buy a broken device, fix it, then return the repaired item? [Team Repair] hopes you will.

Many people would rather repair what they have than have to get a new device and deal with all the annoyances of shopping and getting used to a new item. The problem is, most people don’t have any experience fixing their broken electronics and are intimidated by the process. [Team Repair] has found that helping people through the process the first time is a big confidence boost, especially when they have a test piece to work with.

[Team Repair] started with workshops and now has a “Fixers Club” subscription box for 8-14 year olds where they will send a broken device every three months to fix. After the device is repaired, it gets sent back into Team Repair, or iFixit in the US, to be broken again and sent to the next fixer. For grownups, there is a similar smartphone repair kit, but it’s currently waitlisted. If you’re in the UK, they even have a classroom program if you want to recruit larger groups into your fixer corps.

Curious about other ways to get into repairing your own things? We don’t recommend starting with smart rings, but learning analog repairs like zippers or turning a laptop into a desktop could be good places to start?

One of the Russian government’s most elite hacking groups has adopted an attack, known as Clickfix, to compromise devices belonging to sensitive organizations in Ukraine, the latter country’s CERT center is warning.

Clickfix has emerged as an effective attack technique that attackers, primarily financially motivated criminals, began using in the last year or so. Websites under the control of the attackers display a CAPTCHA that requires the visitor to copy a jumble of text and paste it into the terminal. The text contains scripts that, once entered, perform malicious actions, typically by installing malware or exfiltrating sensitive data. Ukraine’s CERT said Wednesday that Sandworm, an advanced hacking unit inside the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence arm, is now using the technique.

"GhettoVibe," "ScoutCurl," and many more

The Clickfix attacks began in the spring and have continued through the summer. The campaign has resulted in the network compromise of at least one organization when a connected device was found to be infected by FreakyPoll, the name of one of Sandworm’s custom malware packages. Ukrainian authorities discovered 10 compromised websites that displayed a PowerShell command as part of a fake CAPTCHA that said it had to be passed to ensure a real human was behind the visiting device’s keyboard.

Read full article

Comments