Mandiant's open source platform is fit for enterprises requiring incident response at scale, and can run off a laptop for many investigations.ANZ bank security analysts Daniel Eden and Roshan Maskey published their work to GitHubThe custom asynchronous forensic tool depends on Mandiant Redline and operates on ElasticSearch backend.The application was born out of the inability to control multiple investigations or hundreds of endpoints in a single pane of glass, the pair say.Eden steps through the application's features in a demonstration video adding that the platform is available as a dependancy-preloaded CentOS ISO install.The application can return about 1000 large documents without load strain after which point server-side processing is required.Their work sports a slick user interface with process trees that allow forensics types to view variables including arguments, paths, and start times.The bank boffins are continuing to work on the tool including real-time tagging and commenting which can be viewable by other incident responders within nightHawk, and features that will improve reporting. According to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), that error [PDF] resulted in the financial regulator being sent incomplete blue sheet information for a remarkable 15 years – from May 1999 to April 2014.

The mistake was discovered by Citigroup itself when it was asked to send a large but precise chunk of trading data to the SEC in April 2014 and asked its technical support team to help identify which internal ID numbers they should run a request on.That team quickly noticed that some branches' trades were not being included in the automated system and alerted those above them. Four days later a patch was in place, but it wasn't until eight months later that the company received a formal report noting that the error had affected SEC reports going back more than a decade. The next month, January 2015, Citigroup fessed up to the SEC.It turned out that the error was a result of how the company introduced new alphanumeric branch codes.When the system was introduced in the mid-1990s, the program code filtered out any transactions that were given three-digit branch codes from 089 to 100 and used those prefixes for testing purposes.But in 1998, the company started using alphanumeric branch codes as it expanded its business. Among them were the codes 10B, 10C and so on, which the system treated as being within the excluded range, and so their transactions were removed from any reports sent to the SEC.

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The SEC routinely sends requests to financial institutions asking them to send all details on transactions between specific dates as a way of checking that nothing untoward is going on. The coding error had resulted in Citigroup failing to send information on 26,810 transactions in over 2,300 such requests.The SEC was not impressed and said in a statement announcing the fine that the failure to discover the coding error and to produce the missing data for many years potentially impacted numerous Commission investigations.Broker-dealers have a core responsibility to promptly provide the SEC with accurate and complete trading data for us to analyze during enforcement investigations, said Robert Cohen, co-chief of the SEC enforcement division’s market abuse unit. Citigroup did not live up to that responsibility for an inexcusably long period of time, and it must pay the largest penalty to date for blue sheet violations. The APT notification ran rate was disclosed by Google senior vice president and Alphabet board member Diane Greene during a Fortune magazine tech conference in Aspen, Colorado, Reuters reports.Google began notifying users about suspected incidents of government-backed hacking attempts since 2012, in response to hacking attacks against it and other tech giants subsequently blamed on China. Other household names in tech including Facebook and Twitter followed suit with state-sponsored hack alerts for customers late last year.

The chief of the monopoly music royalties society PRS for Music earned almost £1m last year. Company house filings show that CEO Robert Ashcroft took home a salary of £989,000, up from £765,000.The remuneration package includes a deferred bonus of £257,000, according to Companies House filings. That means the chief has almost doubled his income in four years.The society holds the monopoly on the collection of royalties for both songwriters and publishers from the public performance of music, and the mechanical royalties owed to songwriters from recorded music sales. (The PPL collects royalties from public performance to the owners of recordings). Overall, royalties collected by PRS rose 4.7 per cent to £537.4m, of which £472.5m was net distributable income.Researchers at the University of Washington (UW) and Microsoft have managed to write data directly onto DNA, a format with dramatic storage densities and a very long life.The team wrote 200MB onto strands of synthetic DNA, including video footage of the band OK Go, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in more than 100 languages, the top 100 books of Project Gutenberg and the Crop Trust's seed database. They were then able to successfully read back the data using error correction code developed by Microsoft, and could do so again long in the future.

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We've seen evidence that this could last intact for thousands of years, Karin Strauss, Microsoft's lead researcher on the project, told The Register on Thursday. Synthetic encapsulation is very temperature-dependent, but at 10 degrees Celsius the DNA won't degrade for around 2,000 years, and at -18 degrees it could last for millions.The technique uses a DNA synthesizer that encodes information onto the four bases in DNA – adenine, guanine, cytosine and thymine – allowing large volumes of data to be stored at microscopic detail. The 200MB archive was stored on a piece of DNA the size of a couple of grains of sugar. The synthetic material was encapsulated to protect it and to prevent degradation.Previous research by UW and Microsoft has estimated that the raw storage limit of DNA is an exabyte per cubic millimeter. That said, it takes a long time to actually read the data – hours at a time – so this isn't going to replace Flash any time soon.

Given a medium so delicate, getting the data read again means dealing with error rates, and so Microsoft's coders came up with an error correction system that allows the data to be taken off the DNA storage system in a usable format.Don't expect this type of technology in your laptop for a good few years yet – the machinery needed to synthesize DNA to write data, and then sequence it to read the information back – is still massively expensive. But that is changing.DNA sequencing costs are lowering way faster than Moore's Law has cut the cost of computing, Luis Ceze, the UW's Torode Family Career Development professor of computer science, told The Reg.The technology for reading DNA is also improving fast. We don't see any reason why it can't be fast and cheap enough for commercial storage – particularly as by showing DNA storage is viable will create a greater incentive to use it.

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