Swiss defence ministry foils cyber attack

ZURICH: Switzerland’s defence ministry has foiled a cyber attack by malware similar to that used in other global hacking campaigns, the government said in a statement on Friday.

The attack was detected in July by software that operated much like the Turla malware family, it said.The government declined to give information about the origin of the attack or say if any damage including data theft had occurred. It cited security considerations.

Government specialists took counter measures and an investigation is underway, while criminal charges have been lodged with federal prosecutors against persons unknown to them.

The Turla spyware was detected in 2014 and suspected of infecting hundreds of government computers and military targets across Europe and the Middle East.

Several security researchers and Western intelligence officers say they believe the malware in those attacks was the work of the Russian government.

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Acharya appointed to NOC’s top post

The government has given the responsibility of the executive director of Nepal Oil Corporation (NOC) to Joint Secretary at Ministry of Supplies (MoS), Prem Prasad Acharya.A ministerial-level meeting at MoS today decided to give the responsibility of NOC’s top post to Acharya until further notice, according to Urmila KC, undersecretary at MoS. The post of executive director at NOC had become vacant after the government, on Monday, sacked the then executive director of the corporation Gopal Bahadur Khadka for his alleged involvement in financial irregularities while procuring land for the development of petroleum infrastructure.

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US trio win Nobel for finding Einstein’s gravitational waves

STOCKHOLM/LONDON: Three US scientists won the 2017 Nobel prize for physics on Tuesday for opening up a new era of astronomy by detecting gravitational waves, ripples in space and time foreseen by Albert Einstein a century ago. The work of Rainer Weiss, Barry Barish and Kip Thorne crowned half a century of experimental efforts by scientists and engineers.Measuring gravitational waves offers a new way to observe the cosmos, helping scientists explore the nature of mysterious objects including black holes and neutron stars. It may also provide insight into the universe’s very earliest moments. The first detection of the waves created a scientific sensation when it was announced early last year and the teams involved in the discovery had been widely seen as favourites for Tuesday’s prize. “We now witness the dawn of a new field: gravitational wave astronomy,” Nils Martensson, acting chairman of the Nobel Committee for Physics, told reporters. “This will teach us about the ...

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