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High-capacity benchtop video measurement system

Optical Gaging Products has introduced the SmartScope^® E18, a compact, benchtop video measurement system. Featuring a 12" x 12" stage, IntelliCentric™-E fixed-lens optics, and VIRTUAL ZOOM™ technology, it offers fully automatic 3-axis performance without taking up floor space. Standard LED lighting, a rigid fixed-bridge design, optional touch probes, and advanced metrology software ensure accurate, repeatable inspection.
Learn more.

Tech Tip: Fan selection - Why airflow is not just CFM

For many engineers, fan selection starts and ends with a single number: CFM (cubic feet per minute). Higher CFM feels like a clear win. More air moved must mean better cooling. However, in practice, this assumption is one of the most common causes of thermal problems, excess noise, and late-stage redesigns. Find out why.
Read this Orion Fans technical article.

Useful! Snap-together LED enclosure lighting

Seifert StripLite SL 4000 Series LED enclosure lighting provides bright illumination to 700 lumens. On/off switch and motion sensor models are available. Easily daisy chain up to 16 light strips. Magnetic or clip mounting. See video/info on website or contact Bristol Instruments for more information.
Learn about snap-together lighting.

The hidden hardware helping AI's heat problem: PCHEs

Across AI infrastructure, thermal constraints now connect semiconductor design with power and cooling systems. More compact, lighter, and efficient than conventional shell-and-tube models, printed circuit heat exchangers save floor space, reduce energy costs, and improve overall efficiency in dense, hyperscale environments.
Read the full article.

Nearly 1,000 parts: Industrial enclosure range expanded

Altech Corp. has expanded its industrial enclosure lineup to 10 unique series with nearly 1,000 parts! Designed for control, junction, and terminal applications, these plastic and aluminum housings offer up to IP69 protection. They mount directly to walls or panels, resisting chemicals, corrosion, flames, impacts, and severe outdoor conditions without sacrificing aesthetics.
Find your perfect enclosure today.

Cool Tools: MetraSCAN BLACK2 -- Next-gen shop-floor 3D inspection

You'll gain some superhero powers when you brandish FARO CREAFORM's new MetraSCAN BLACK2, a next-gen portable metrology-grade optical 3D scanner engineered to deliver total inspection flexibility on the shop floor. This unit boasts a 3-in-1 architecture that combines C-Track scanning, stand-alone scanning, and probing in a single metrology-grade system.
Read the full article.

Compact, touchless position sensors: Wear-free operation in tight spaces

Novotechnik's TFD-4000 Series of touchless linear position sensors delivers wear-free measurement in tight spaces. Featuring ranges up to 50 mm, IP67 protection, 12-bit resolution, and analog outputs, these reliable sensors operate from -40 C to 125 C across diverse industrial, mobile, and medical applications such as short-stroke linear valve positioning, solenoid valves, off-highway brake actuation, and more.
Learn more.

World's first 10-m safety laser scanner: See farther, protect more

Datasensing, Datalogic's Sensor & Safety and Machine Vision business unit, has launched the SLS10 Safety Laser Scanner, the world's first 10-meter safety laser scanner. Delivering a 275-degree scanning angle, 240-m² of coverage, and an 84-msec response time, the SLS10 protects larger workspaces with fewer devices. It features best-in-class angular resolution for precise AGV navigation, SIL-2/PLd compliance, dust immunity, and the new ONEGUI platform for simplified configuration.
Learn more and see it in action.

Accelerate AI-driven machine vision systems

BitFlow has announced full production of its Claxon CXP-12 frame grabbers, designed for NVIDIA GPU-accelerated machine vision. Across five models, the CoaXPress 2.0 lineup delivers up to 50 Gbps -- five times 10 GigE Vision -- eliminating data bottlenecks. The full CXP-12 specification ensures deterministic, high-bandwidth streaming to unleash modern AI inference models.
Learn more.

Millimeter-wave imaging inspection in real time

With its new quality and inspection R&S IMAGER millimeter-wave scanner, Rohde & Schwarz aims to simplify the industrial inspection of packaged products. The system sees through common packaging materials at production speed without using X-rays, protecting both products and operators. The high-contrast 3D images are used as digital twins and can be automatically integrated into AI-powered fault-detection systems. Sees through plastics, cardboard, and composites. Applications include food and beverage, pharmaceuticals, logistics.
Learn more.

What are single-loop process controllers?

PLCs are powerful, but complex control isn't always necessary. For standalone processes requiring single-variable monitoring -- like temperature, pressure, or flow -- a single-loop controller is ideal. See how single-loop controllers can streamline your next project.
Read the AutomationDirect tech tip.

Great Resources: Flexible circuit design guide

Tech-Etch uses advanced techniques to manufacture flex and rigid-flex circuits to exacting customer specs. Special processes include selective plating a single circuit with two different finishes, contoured circuits with variable metal thickness, semi-additive and subtractive techniques, open window or cantilevered contact leads, plus SMT for component assembly. Tech-Etch specializes in flexible circuits for medical, telecommunications, aerospace, semiconductor, and other high-reliability electronic applications.
Learn about flex circuits and get the guide (no registration required).

EMI Investigations: New immunity development system

Saelig Company announces the Langer E1 Immunity Development System for EMI investigations. This compact, affordable kit simulates burst and ESD interference to pinpoint layout weak spots down to IC pins. By eliminating "black box" guesswork early in development, engineers can efficiently identify coupling mechanisms, test measures, and resolve immunity issues before compliance failure.
Learn more and see it in action.

Battery packs for unmanned aerial vehicles

Re:Build Manufacturing has launched U.S.-assembled, NDAA-compliant lithium-ion battery packs for commercial, public safety, and defense UAV applications. Available in Core, Power, and Performance series, the packs use non-FEOC cells and are produced at Re:Build's advanced facility in New Kensington, PA. Re:Build also offers custom pack and battery management system development.
Learn more.

Easy-to-use precision measurement system

Optical Gaging Products has announced the StarLite S1, a compact, semi-automatic 3-axis video measurement system. It combines fully automatic video measurements with manual stage motion and features an IntelliCentric-S optical system for high-resolution images. Powered by Measure-X software, this system delivers fast, repeatable, high-accuracy results, making it ideal for both shop-floor and quality-control applications.
Learn more.

Georgia Tech study finds 'lurking malice' in cloud hosting services

By John Toon

A study of 20 major cloud hosting services has found that as many as 10 percent of the repositories hosted by them had been compromised -- with several hundred of the "buckets" actively providing malware. Such bad content could be challenging to find, however, because it can be rapidly assembled from stored components that individually may not appear to be malicious.

To identify the bad content, researchers created a scanning tool that looks for features unique to the bad repositories, known as "Bars." The features included certain types of redirection schemes and "gatekeeper" elements designed to protect the malware from scanners. Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Indiana University Bloomington, and the University of California Santa Barbara conducted the study.

Believed to be the first systematic study of cloud-based malicious activity, the research was presented October 24 at the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security in Vienna, Austria. The work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation.

"Bad actors have migrated to the cloud along with everybody else," said Raheem Beyah, a professor in Georgia Tech's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. "The bad guys are using the cloud to deliver malware and other nefarious things while remaining undetected. The resources they use are compromised in a variety of ways, from traditional exploits to simply taking advantage of poor configurations."

Beyah and graduate student Xiaojing Liao found that the bad actors could hide their activities by keeping components of their malware in separate repositories that by themselves didn't trigger traditional scanners. Only when they were needed to launch an attack were the different parts of this malware assembled.

"Some exploits appear to be benign until they are assembled in a certain way," explained Beyah, who is the Motorola Foundation Professor and associate chair for strategic initiatives and innovation in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. "When you scan the components in a piecemeal kind of way, you only see part of the malware, and the part you see may not be malicious."

In the cloud, malicious actors take advantage of how difficult it can be to scan so much storage. Operators of cloud hosting services may not have the resources to do the deep scans that may be necessary to find the Bars -- and their monitoring of repositories may be limited by service-level agreements.

This map shows locations where the impacts of bad repositories (Bars) occur. [Credit: Xiaojing Liao, Georgia Tech]

 

 

While splitting the malicious software up helped hide it, the strategy also created a technique for finding the "bad buckets" hosting it, Beyah said. Many of the bad actors had redundant repositories connected by specific kinds of redirection schemes that allowed attacks to continue if one bucket were lost. The bad buckets also usually had "gatekeepers" designed to keep scanners out of the repositories, and where webpages were served, they had simple structures that were easy to propagate.

"We observed that there is an inherent structure associated with how these attackers have set things up," he explained. "For instance, the bad guys all had bodyguards at the door. That's not normal for cloud storage, and we used that structure to detect them."

The researchers began by studying a small number of known bad repositories to understand how they were being used. Based on what they learned, they created "BarFinder," a scanner tool that automatically searches for and detects features common to the bad repositories.

Overall, the researchers scanned more than 140,000 sites on 20 cloud hosting sites and found about 700 active repositories for malicious content. In total, about 10 percent of cloud repositories the team studied had been compromised in some way. The researchers notified the cloud hosting companies of their findings before publication of the study.

"It's pervasive in the cloud," said Beyah. "We found problems in every last one of the hosting services we studied. We believe this is a significant problem for the cloud hosting industry."

In some cases, the bad actors simply opened an inexpensive account and began hosting their software. In other cases, the malicious content was hidden in the cloud-based domains of well-known brands. Intermingling the bad content with good content in the brand domains protected the malware from blacklisting of the domain.

Beyah and Liao saw a wide range of attacks in the cloud-hosted repositories, ranging from phishing and common drive-by downloads to fake antivirus and computer update sites. "They can attack you directly from these buckets, or they can redirect you to other malicious buckets or a series of malicious buckets," he said. "It can be difficult to see where the code is redirecting you."

To protect cloud-based repositories from these attacks, Beyah recommends the usual defenses, including patching of systems and proper configuration settings.

Looking ahead, the researchers hope to make BarFinder available to a broader audience. That could include licensing the technology to a security company, or making it available as an open-source tool.

"Attackers are very clever, and as we secure things and make the cloud infrastructure more challenging for them to attack, they will move onto something else," he said. "In the meantime, every system that we can secure makes the internet just a little bit safer."

Source: Georgia Tech

Published October 2016

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