HOUSTON — Royal Dutch Shell sold its oil and gas production in the Permian Basin, the biggest American oil field, to ConocoPhillips for $9.5 billion in cash on Monday.
The deal marks a turning point for Shell, which had put considerable effort into developing the 225,000-acre field since buying it from Chesapeake Energy nine years ago, expanding its production to about 200,000 barrels a day.
The sale is the latest sign that Shell, like other European oil companies, is under pressure to sell off oil and gas production and move toward producing cleaner energy in response to growing concerns about climate change among investors and the general public.
Shell is retreating from the Permian as American shale oil production is recovering. The field yielded 4.7 million barrels a day in August — more than 40 percent of total American oil output and a nearly 400,000-barrel-a-day increase from January. Rising oil prices have enticed crews to return to the fields, where they use hydraulic fracturing — commonly known as fracking — to blast open shale rocks and force oil out of the ground.
A wave of acquisitions in the Permian began last year with the onset of the coronavirus pandemic as companies sought to cut costs. The scale of the Shell deal is similar to Conoco’s acquisition of Concho Resources for $9.7 billion in October, a deal that made Conoco a major player in the Permian, which straddles Texas and New Mexico. In April, Pioneer Natural Resources bought DoublePoint Energy for $6.4 billion.
With the acquisition of Shell’s acreage, Conoco consolidates its position as a top-tier Permian producer along with Pioneer, Occidental Petroleum, Exxon Mobil and Chevron.
Shell’s sale of its West Texas Permian holdings, which provided an estimated 6 percent of the company’s global oil and gas production last year, had been expected for months. Shell recently sold its stakes in offshore oil and gas fields in Malaysia and the Philippines. Its American operations include offshore production in the Gulf of Mexico along with refineries.
Shell has been talking about cutting emissions since 2017, and it has accelerated its shift to cleaner fuels over the last two years, although not enough to satisfy many environmentalists. In addition to a goal of net-zero emissions by 2050, it has set a target of reducing oil output up to 2 percent a year by 2030 through divestments and lower investments in exploration and production.
“We are very excited to enhance our position in one of the best basins in the world,” said Ryan M. Lance, Conoco’s chief executive. He hailed the deal as “a unique opportunity to add premium assets.”
Shell said it viewed the deal as “a compelling value proposition.”
“This decision once again reflects our focus on value over volumes,” Wael Sawan, Shell’s upstream director, said in announcing the deal. He said Shell had reviewed multiple strategies and options for the Permian acreage.
Business & Economy
Shell said cash proceeds from the transaction would fund $7 billion in distributions to shareholders as well as efforts toward “the energy transition.”
Shell plans to increase its investments in renewable energy and low-carbon technologies to roughly 25 percent of its budget by 2025.
At least some of the money from asset sales goes into Shell’s power businesses, including electric vehicle plug-in points, battery businesses and utilities. This week, Shell announced plans to build a biofuels facility in the Netherlands to use waste from used cooking oil and animal fat to make cleaner diesel and aviation fuel.
At least some of the impetus for Shell’s shedding of hydrocarbon assets came from a decision by a Dutch court in May ordering the company to cut greenhouse-gas emissions 45 percent by 2030 compared with 2019 levels, before the pandemic slashed oil and gas demand. Shell is appealing the ruling.
When Shell or other oil companies sell a field or petrochemical plant, the transaction does not automatically mean that global emissions will be reduced since other companies routinely pick up the production.
In a recent article on LinkedIn, Shell’s chief executive, Ben van Beurden, wrote that if Shell stopped selling transportation fuels “it would not help the world one bit” because “people would fill up their cars and delivery trucks at other service stations.”
Shell, like the entire oil and gas industry, has suffered through a rocky time of late. The pandemic forced the company to cut its dividend last year. But with oil and natural gas prices recovering, the company has returned to robust profitability, reporting earnings of $5.5 billion in the second quarter, up from $638 million a year earlier
TELLURIDE, Colo. — Jenny Slate is at a loss for words. It’s Friday night at the Telluride Film Festival and the actress has just deplaned from her first flight in 17 months, still foggy from quarantine, a period when she became the mother of two distinct but equally profound projects: a brand-new baby girl and a feature-length movie she spent a decade creating.
Slate is here because of her voice work on Marcel the Shell, the unlikeliest of internet sensations. No bigger than a nickel, this stop-motion mollusk with a single googly eye and shoes pilfered from a Polly Pocket doll set the web afire when she and the filmmaker Dean Fleischer Camp uploaded a three-minute video to YouTube back in 2010. That short, which illustrated Marcel’s quiet optimism — “I like myself and I have a lot of other great qualities” — generated immediate interest, ultimately garnering more than 31 million views in all. (Two more shorts followed in 2011 and 2014.)
Marcel’s voice is distinct from Slate’s other animation work, whether it’s Harley Quinn in “Lego Batman” or Tammy Larsen in “Bob’s Burgers.” (She voiced Missy Foreman-Greenwald in “Big Mouth,” until 2020 when she stepped down, saying, “Black characters on an animated show should be played by Black people.”) Marcel has a high-pitched, melancholic timbre that could make you cry as easily as laugh. (“Some people say my head is too big for my body and I say, ‘Compared to what?’”) And it was so infectious, it prompted appearances on the late-night talk show circuit, two best-selling books, memes, tattoos and offers for television shows and commercial sponsorships.
But Slate and Camp, who first created Marcel as a married couple but are now involved in other relationships, were so protective of Marcel that rather than take an easy payday — offers Slate admits would have helped them when they were struggling artists — they spent the next decade turning him into a feature film.
It was a painstaking process that involved a troop of animators and designers. Friday night marked the culmination of all that work when “Marcel the Shell With Shoes On” had its world premiere. The 90-minute mockumentary tracks an emerging documentary filmmaker, Dean (Camp), who moves into an Airbnb only to discover the one-inch Marcel, along with his memory-challenged grandmother Nana Connie (voiced by Isabella Rossellini) and his pet lint, named Alan, grieving after a mysterious tragedy has taken the rest of their community from their cozy abode.
Slate compares the process of making the film to watching one of those science videos of a flower blooming in fast motion.
“You just wake up one morning and there’s a flower and it’s blue,” Slate said. “That’s what this feels like.”
Slate, a bit shyer and more reserved than you would expect, is still contemplating her post-pandemic life. More content than when she and Camp first created Marcel as a funny bit for a friend’s comedy show, Slate says she no longer feels the need to make people laugh (not even her therapist) and is less interested in pleasing others, an emotion she believes is the result of the “love infinity loop” she is currently experiencing with her infant and her fiancé, Ben Shattuck.
“We were in process for so long and this character has had so many different functions for me,” she added. “At first, I think I just needed to prove to myself again that I’m funny. And then I realized that I was doing something that actually was very personal to me. So making the movie was trying to show this very interior part of myself. I just can’t believe that it worked.”
And worked it has. The Hollywood Reporter called it “a sweet, uncomplicated film whose message about self-compassion and community feels especially prescient.” And IndieWire deemed it a critic’s pick, naming it “the cutest film about familial grief you’ll see all year, perhaps ever.”
“Marcel” is one of a handful of films debuting at Telluride that is looking for a buyer. And despite it being in the works for nearly a decade, it’s one of many films at the festival, including Mike Mills’s “C’mon, C’mon,” Joe Wright’s “Cyrano” and Peter Hedges’ “The Same Storm,” that feel like a response to our current mood of anxiety and alienation. “I’m really pleased that the film is arriving at this moment,” said Camp, who argues that the serendipitous timing suggests that “we were already feeling increasingly isolated and vulnerable even before Covid hit.”
Back in 2010, when Marcel first emerged, Slate said, she was “waiting to get fired from ‘Saturday Night Live,’” which she worked on for one unhappy year. Yet the voice that activates Marcel was one she never used on the sketch show.
“I felt like I had done every voice that I could have done in order to save myself there and then suddenly, this voice that I had never done before, came out of my mouth,” she said. “Looking back on it, it was a real choice to use it just for myself, privately. This wouldn’t have belonged on ‘S.N.L.’ anyway and it was this very lovely opening to a belief that there is a world outside of the tiny, narrow hallway that contains what you perceive as your own failure.”
To make the film, Slate and Camp spent a year and a half recording improved audio sessions. Then their co-writer and editor, Nick Paley, and Camp dedicated an equal amount of time turning those snippets of improv into screenplay form. That eventually became an animatic (audio with music and storyboarded visuals) they could watch and screen for test audiences to make sure it all worked before they shot the live action and then, finally, the stop-motion animation. “Ultimately, we sort of backed into an indie version of the Pixar process,” Camp said.
Yet, the basic premise always remained: Marcel had lost the majority of his shell family because of an argument involving humans.
“We always liked that the overflow of the emotionality from the human world had caused this major disruption in the shell world,” said Slate, adding that the creation of Nana Connie was long part of the plan. “The idea was what do you do when your life as you know it has been broken apart, and the only person that remembers it would be starting to not remember at all.”
It’s that poignancy and heartbreak that gives the movie its center. It’s also the creative project that Slate is most proud of. Nowadays she sings songs to her daughter in Marcel’s voice. (She believes he is a better singer than she.) And though she doesn’t know what is next for this sweet but stubborn avatar of herself, it’s clear Marcel has burrowed himself deep inside her.
“I always think of Marcel as my truest self, and what I would really like to be like if my ego, and the trappings of being a woman in patriarchy, didn’t get in the way.”
Artist’s rendering showing a cutaway view into the interior of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. A plume of ice particles, water vapor, and organic molecules sprays from fractures in the moon’s south polar region. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Buried beneath 20 kilometers of ice, the subsurface ocean of Enceladus—one of Saturn’s moons—appears to be churning with currents akin to those on Earth.
The theory, derived from the shape of Enceladus’s ice shell, challenges the current thinking that the moon’s global ocean is homogenous, apart from some vertical mixing driven by the warmth of the moon’s core.
Enceladus, a tiny frozen ball about 500 kilometers in diameter (about 1/7th the diameter of Earth’s moon), is the sixth largest moon of Saturn. Despite its small size, Enceladus attracted the attention of scientists in 2014 when a flyby of the Cassini spacecraft discovered evidence of its large subsurface ocean and sampled water from geyser-like eruptions that occur through fissures in the ice at the south pole. It is one of the few locations in the solar system with liquid water (another is Jupiter’s moon Europa), making it a target of interest for astrobiologists searching for signs of life.
This illustration shows Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus with the plume of ice particles, water vapor, and organic molecules that sprays from fractures in the moon’s south polar region. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
The ocean on Enceladus is almost entirely unlike Earth’s. Earth’s ocean is relatively shallow (an average of 3.6 km deep), covers three-quarters of the planet’s surface, is warmer at the top from the sun’s rays and colder in the depths near the seafloor, and has currents that are affected by wind; Enceladus, meanwhile, appears to have a globe-spanning and completely subsurface ocean that is at least 30 km deep and is cooled at the top near the ice shell and warmed at the bottom by heat from the moon’s core.
Despite their differences, Caltech graduate student Ana Lobo (MS ’17) suggests that oceans on Enceladus have currents akin to those on Earth. The work builds on measurements by Cassini as well as the research of Andrew Thompson, professor of environmental science and engineering, who has been studying the way that ice and water interact to drive ocean mixing around Antarctica.
The oceans of Enceladus and Earth share one important characteristic: they are salty. And as shown by findings published in Nature Geoscience is a monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal published by the Nature Publishing Group that covers all aspects of the Earth sciences, including theoretical research, modeling, and fieldwork. Other related work is also published in fields that include atmospheric sciences, geology, geophysics, climatology, oceanography, paleontology, and space science. It was established in January 2008. ” class=”glossaryLink “>Nature Geoscience on March 25, variations in salinity could serve as drivers of the ocean circulation on Enceladus, much as they do in Earth’s Southern Ocean, which surrounds Antarctica.
Lobo and Thompson collaborated on the work with Steven Vance and Saikiran Tharimena of JPL, which Caltech manages for NASA.
Gravitational measurements and heat calculations from Cassini had already revealed that the ice shell is thinner at the poles than at the equator. Regions of thin ice at the poles are likely associated with melting and regions of thick ice at the equator with freezing, Thompson says. This affects the ocean currents because when salty water freezes, it releases the salts and makes the surrounding water heavier, causing it to sink. The opposite happens in regions of melt.
“Knowing the distribution of ice allows us to place constraints on circulation patterns,” Lobo explains. An idealized computer model, based on Thompson’s studies of Antarctica, suggests that the regions of freezing and melting, identified by the ice structure, would be connected by the ocean currents. This would create a pole-to-equator circulation that influences the distribution of heat and nutrients.
“Understanding which regions of the subsurface ocean might be the most hospitable to life as we know it could one day inform efforts to search for signs of life,” Thompson says.
Reference: “A pole-to-equator ocean overturning circulation on Enceladus” by Ana H. Lobo, Andrew F. Thompson, Steven D. Vance and Saikiran Tharimena, 25 March 2021, Nature Geoscience. DOI: 10.1038/s41561-021-00706-3
The paper is titled “A pole-to-equator ocean overturning circulation on Enceladus.” This work was supported by JPL’s Strategic Research and Technology Development program; the Icy Worlds node of NASA’s Astrobiology Institute; and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.
Enlarge / Archaeologists in 1931 found the conch shell near the entrance of Marsoulas Cave. This is a reconstruction of where and how the shell might have been played.
G. Tosello
After 18,000 years of silence, an ancient musical instrument played its first notes. The last time anyone heard a sound from the conch shell trumpet, thick sheets of ice still covered most of Europe.
University of Toulouse archaeologist Carole Fritz and her colleagues recently recognized the shell as a musical instrument. To understand more about how ancient people crafted a trumpet from a 31cm (1 foot) long conch shell, the archaeologists used high-resolution CT scans to examine the shell’s inner structure: delicate-looking whorls of shell and open chambers, coiled around a central axis, or columella. A series of overlapping photographs and careful measurements became a full-color, 3D digital model of the shell, and image enhancement software helped reveal how Magdalenian people had decorated the instrument with red ocher dots.
And in a lab at the University of Toulouse, a horn player and musicology researcher became the first person in 18,000 years to play the conch shell. The musician blew into the broken tip, or apex, of the shell and vibrated his lips as if he were playing a trumpet or trombone. Very carefully, he coaxed three loud, clear, resonant notes from the ancient instrument:
The three notes you hear are at 256Hz, 265Hz, and 285Hz, approximately a C, a C-sharp, and a D in modern terms. Wind instruments work because the air inside them vibrates, producing sound waves. At the right frequency, called a natural or resonant frequency, this causes the body of the instrument to vibrate, which amplifies the sound waves and makes the sounds we recognize as music. The three notes in the recording are the sound of the shell vibrating at its resonant frequencies.
Because the cavity of the conch shell forms a spiral, Fritz and her colleagues say its acoustics are pretty similar to an instrument with a conical chamber, like a French horn.
What’s less apparent in the recording is how loud the shell trumpet is. At 1 meter (3 feet) away from the shell, the volume of the notes measured about 100 decibels. The result was powerful in more ways than one. “It was, for me, a big emotion,” said Fritz. “For me, this sound is a direct link with Magdalenian people.”
A second look at an old discovery
The Magdalenian people were hunter gatherers, and they occupied the Marsoulas Cave near Toulouse, France, where archaeologists found the shell in 1931. Fritz and co-author Gilles Tosello, also an archaeologist at the University of Toulouse, were studying artifacts from the cave when they found the conch shell in the collection of the Natural History Museum of Toulouse.
They had been looking for tools related to the paintings on the cave walls, but they decided to give the conch shell a closer look. The archaeologists who originally unearthed the artifact in 1931 decided it had probably been used as a ceremonial drinking cup, and its apex (the pointy tip of the shell) had broken off naturally. But Fritz and Tosello noticed that the shell actually seemed to have been carefully crafted into a musical instrument.
“Some people already thought that it was a music instrument, but it is because we can also demonstrate that this shell was strongly modified, according to what is usually done for a music instrument made with a conch shell, that we can continue with this idea,” said co-author Philippe Walter, a chemist at CNRS and Sorbonne University.
According to malacologists—biologists who study mollusks like conchs—the apex of a large conch shell would be too thick and sturdy to break accidentally; ocean waves and seafloor impacts might crack other parts of the shell, but not the 0.8 centimeter (0.3 inch) thick walls of calcium carbonate that form the apex.
Stradivarius for the Stone Age
The CT images enabled Fritz and her colleagues to look more closely for small, subtle evidence that the shell had been worked with tools rather than battered by time and chance. They found a series of small impact marks in a ring around the broken edge, as if a tool had been used to strike the shell and break it at just that spot. The result was a 3.5 centimeter (1.4 inch) wide hole at the end of the conch shell, leading into the shell’s spiraling inner chambers. The hole would have been the first step in turning the shell into a wind instrument; it allowed the player to blow air into the shell.
A thin brownish residue on the inner and outer surfaces of the apex might once have helped hold a mouthpiece in place, say Fritz and her colleagues. Other cultures around the world use resin or wax to attach mouthpieces to their seashell trumpets. Not enough of the material survived to identify, said Tosello.
“During the experiment, the musician remarked that the apex in its current chipped form is not functional because it could injure the lips of the instrumentalist,” wrote Fritz and her colleagues. “He proposed the hypothesis that a mouthpiece was present when it was used during the Magdalenian Period.”
Fritz also carefully inserted a tiny medical camera into the shell, where she found a small hole in the columella, connecting the broken apex to the shell’s interior spaces. In the CT images, the hole was marked with striations from the tool that had been used to drill or file it.
“It’s really a complex technical operation,” said Tosello. “The broken part of the apex is very narrow, and the hole inside is really perfectly round with a regular edge that indicates probably there was a sort of drill used, but with a stick probably to direct the action from the outside. It’s a pretty elaborate technique.”
Most wind instruments also have some way to change how air flows through the instrument: holes to cover, buttons to press, or a slide to move. Modern shell trumpet players often place their hands into the mouth of the shell to modulate the sound. Fritz and her colleagues found a series of regular impact points along the outer edge of the shell—a curled liplike structure called the labrum—which they think made it smoother and easier to use.
Hearing the sea in a landlocked cave
People around the world have made music with conch shells for thousands of years, and many groups still do, in places as far apart as Oceania, New Guinea, Japan, India, Tibet, and Greece—and even an ancient example in Syria. Today, many people associate conch shell trumpets with more tropical cultures, especially around the Pacific Ocean, so it’s strange to imagine a conch shell instrument played in France in the midst of an Ice Age, observed Tosello.
That’s especially true because Marsoulas Cave is roughly 80km (50 miles) from the coast. The conch species Charenia lampas (the original inhabitant of the shell) lives in the northern Atlantic and North Sea, in chilly waters up to 80 meters deep, so its presence in France isn’t such a shock, but it shows us that people at Marsoulas must have had far-flung trade connections with people on the coast. We can also see those links in the form of a whale-bone spear point and at least two other seashells unearthed from the cave.
“We know now that some Magdalenian people, who lived in this region, have a very important link with the Atlantic coast and especially with the Cantabrian region in Spain,” said Fritz. “It’s one more element for understanding this link between ocean and land, and it’s very important because you have the ocean in the cave with this artifact, and it’s very symbolic for the sound, I think.”
Archaeologists originally interpreted this conch shell as a broken drinking cup.
Fritz et al. 2021
This illustration shows where someone knocked the outer lip off the shell with a series of strokes, then destroyed the apex.
Fritz et al. 2021
This conch trumpet from New Zealand has a bone tube mouthpiece.
usée du Quai Branly, Jacques Chirac
This opening was made by chipping off the solid apex of the shell to create a hole for air to flow in through.
C. Fritz, G. Tosello, Muséum d’Histoire naturelle de Toulouse
Archaeologists study one of the many paintings on the walls of Marsoulas Cave.
R. Apajou
This is one of the many painted panels on the walls of Marsoulas Cave, decorated with red ocher pigment in a style similar to the dotted pattern on the conch shell.
C. Fritz
Archaeologists in 1931 found the conch shell near the entrance of Marsoulas Cave. This is a reconstruction of where and how the shell might have been played.
G. Tosello
The Paleolithic soundscape
When they came across the shell, Fritz and Tosello were looking for tools associated with the paintings in Marsoulas Cave, which included a large bison stippled with 300 red fingerprint-sized dots. And it turns out that the seashell may have been very connected to the art on the walls of the cave.
Fritz and her colleagues could see tiny traces of red pigment still clinging to the inner surface of the shell, but when they enhanced the digital images of the shell’s surface using software called DStretch, those tiny traces became the outline of round, fingertip-sized dots.
“It reminded us of the red dots made with fingertips on the walls of the cave, and we are supposing that the shell was decorated with the same pattern that is used in the cave art of Marsoulas,” said Tosello. “That to our knowledge is the first time that we can see and put in evidence of such a relationship between music and cave art in European prehistory.”
Portable X-ray fluorescence revealed that the pigment was ocher, a favorite pigment of cultures all over the world for tens of thousands of years. Ocher was also the material of choice for the cave paintings, but there wasn’t enough on the shell to tell if it came from the same deposit.
And the connection probably wasn’t just visual. Some anthropologists who study Paleolithic cultures have focused on the acoustics of caves, trying to understand what the distant past sounded like and how those sounds were woven into people’s lives. Fritz and her colleagues hope to find out what the conch shell trumpet sounds like inside the cave, or right at the entrance, where it sat for 18,000 years.
“For me, it is beautiful to think about the possibility to have such strong sounds in the Pyrenees, in the mountains, inside the cave, so maybe it is also something that we can try to help produce in the future,” said Walter. That might be as close as we can get to the soundscape of Paleolithic life.
We haven’t heard the last of this
Three haunting notes from the 18,000-year-old shell trumpet offer a hint of what the distant past sounded like, but they can’t resurrect the songs ancient musicians might have played—or their meaning. The notes are like building blocks, but the blueprints have been lost to time. Experiments like Fritz and her colleagues’ can only suggest possibilities.
But Walter wants to see what modern musicians can make of those possibilities. Photogrammetry and the CT data produced a 3D digital model of the shell, and at a press conference on Tuesday, Fritz held up a 3D-printed model that had been fitted with a duck bone mouthpiece. Fritz and her colleagues plan to use digital and 3D-printed models to tinker with different mouthpiece materials to see how ancient craftspeople might have put the instrument together. They also want to digitally model the airflow and sound inside the shell.
Walter hopes to offer the digital model to modern musicians and ask them to compose their own music with the ancient instrument. “It will be far away from the original sounds during the Magdalenian period, but it will be very interesting to try to make a link between this very ancient musical instrument, 18,000 years old, and modern music,” he said.
Security personnel at Microsoft are seeing a big increase in the use of Web shells, the light-weight programs that hackers install so they can burrow further into compromised websites.
The average number of Web shells installed from August, 2020 to January of this year was 144,000, almost twice that for the same months in 2019 and 2020. The spike represents an acceleration in growth that the same Microsoft researchers saw throughout last year.
Microsoft
A Swiss Army knife for hackers
The growth is a sign of just how useful and hard to detect these simple programs can be. A Web shell is an interface that allows hackers to execute standard commands on Web servers once the servers have been compromised. Web shells are built using Web-based programming languages such as PHP, JSP, or ASP. The command interfaces work much the way browsers do.
Once installed successfully, Web shells allow remote hackers to do most of the same things legitimate administrators can do. Hackers can use them to run commands that steal data, execute malicious code, and provide system information that allows lateral movement further into a compromised network. The programs can also provide a persistent means of backdoor access that despite their effectiveness remain surprisingly hard to detect.
In a blog post published on Thursday, members of Microsoft’s Detection and Response Team and the Microsoft 365 Defender Research Team wrote:
Once installed on a server, web shells serve as one of the most effective means of persistence in an enterprise. We frequently see cases where web shells are used solely as a persistence mechanism. Web shells guarantee that a backdoor exists in a compromised network, because an attacker leaves a malicious implant after establishing an initial foothold on a server. If left undetected, web shells provide a way for attackers to continue to gather data from and monetize the networks that they have access to.
Compromise recovery cannot be successful and enduring without locating and removing attacker persistence mechanisms. And while rebuilding a single compromised system is a great solution, restoring existing assets is the only feasible option for many. So, finding and removing all backdoors is a critical aspect of compromise recovery.
Case studies
Early last July, the Metasploit hacking framework added a module that exploited a critical vulnerability in the Big-IP advanced delivery controller, a device made by F5 that’s typically placed between a perimeter firewall and a Web application to handle load balancing and other tasks. One day later, Microsoft researchers started seeing hackers using the exploit to install Web shells on vulnerable servers.
Initially, hackers used the Web shells to install malware that leveraged the servers’ computing power to mine cryptocurrency. Less than a week later, researchers saw hackers exploiting the Big-IP vulnerability to install Web shells for a much wider assortment of uses on servers belonging to both the US government and private industry.
In another case from last year, Microsoft said it conducted an incident response after an organization in the public sector discovered that hackers had installed a Web shell on one of its Internet-facing servers. The hackers had “uploaded a Web shell in multiple folders on the Web server, leading to the subsequent compromise of service accounts and domain admin accounts,” Microsoft researchers wrote. “This allowed the attackers to perform reconnaissance using net.exe, scan for additional target systems using nbtstat.exe, and eventually move laterally using PsExec.”
The hackers went on to install a backdoor on an Outlook server that intercepted all incoming and outgoing emails, performed additional reconnaissance, and downloaded other malicious payloads. Among other things, the hack allowed the hackers to send special emails that the backdoor interpreted as commands.
Needle in a haystack
Because they use standard Web development languages, Web shells can be hard to detect. Adding to the difficulty, Web shells have multiple means of executing commands. Attackers can also hide commands inside of user agent strings and parameters that get passed during an exchange between an attacker and the compromised website. As if that wasn’t enough, Web shells can be stashed inside of media files or other non-executable file formats.
“When this file is loaded and analyzed on a workstation, the photo is harmless,” Microsoft researchers wrote. “But when a Web browser asks a server for this file, malicious code executes server side. These challenges in detecting Web shells contribute to their increasing popularity as an attack tool.”
Thursday’s post lists a variety of steps administrators can take to prevent Web shells from making their way onto a server. They include:
Identify and remediate vulnerabilities or misconfigurations in web applications and web servers. Use Threat and Vulnerability Management to discover and fix these weaknesses. Deploy the latest security updates as soon as they become available.
Implement proper segmentation of your perimeter network, such that a compromised web server does not lead to the compromise of the enterprise network.
Enable antivirus protection on web servers. Turn on cloud-delivered protection to get the latest defenses against new and emerging threats. Users should only be able to upload files in directories that can be scanned by antivirus and configured to not allow server-side scripting or execution.
Audit and review logs from web servers frequently. Be aware of all systems you expose directly to the internet.
Utilize the Windows Defender Firewall, intrusion prevention devices, and your network firewall to prevent command-and-control server communication among endpoints whenever possible, limiting lateral movement, as well as other attack activities.
Check your perimeter firewall and proxy to restrict unnecessary access to services, including access to services through non-standard ports.
Practice good credential hygiene. Limit the use of accounts with local or domain admin level privileges.
The National Security Agency has published tools here that help admins detect and remove Web shells on their networks.
A 17,000-year-old conch shell that lay forgotten for more than 80 years in a museum collection has been discovered to be the oldest known wind instrument of its type, after researchers found it had been modified by its prehistoric owners to be played like a horn.
First unearthed in a richly decorated cave in the Pyrenees in 1931, the large shell was initially overlooked by archaeologists, who assumed it was a communal “loving cup” used by the Palaeolithic people whose wall art adorns the space.
But a re-examination of the conch, carried out during a recent inventory of items held at the Muséum de Toulouse in southern France, has revealed that it had in fact been carefully drilled and shaped to hold what experts now believe was a mouthpiece.
Remarkably, a skilled horn player enlisted by the multi-disciplinary team of French scientists was able to produce three clear notes of C, D and C sharp from the artefact, offering a tantalising hint of how it sounded to its original owners.
The conch, the team discovered, had also been decorated in its inner whorls with red pigment marks strikingly similar to fingerprint artworks on the walls of the cave. “We are supposing that the shell was decorated with the same pattern as was used in the cave art of Marsoulas, which establishes a strong link between the music played [by] the conch and the images on the walls,” said Gilles Tosello, an archaeologist and cave art specialist who was part of the investigating team.
Experts believe the shell was shaped to hold a mouthpiece. Photograph: Carole Fritz et al. 2021/CNRS – the French National Centre for Scientific Research
“That, to our knowledge, is the first time that we can see [evidence of] such a relationship between music and cave art in European prehistory.”
Societies from Oceania to Europe, India to Japan have been known to use conch shells as musical instruments, calling devices or sacred objects. But while bone flutes were used as early as 35,000 years ago, Tosello said, no known example of a conch instrument dates to such an early period.
Carbon dating of the Marsoulas conch, named after the cave near Toulouse in which it was found, established it was about 17,000 years old, from a time when Magdalenian hunter-gatherers hunted bison and deer at the end of the last ice age.
The apex of the shell has been purposely removed, creating a round aperture through which a narrow stick was inserted to drill a hole, described by the scientists as “a really complex technical operation”. The outermost lip of the shell had also been trimmed, potentially to allow a player to insert his or her hand to modulate the sound.
Traces of a brown organic substance were also detected around the apex hole, which the researchers believe may have been a form of glue used to attach the mouthpiece.
The shell itself, which is 31cm long, belongs to an Atlantic mollusk species called Charonia lampas which, while rare, can still be found in the Bay of Biscay. The Magdalenian people are known to have links with the Atlantic coast and the region of Cantabria in northern Spain, said Carole Fritz, the lead archaeologist based at the University of Toulouse.
The team hope to experiment playing the conch in the cave where it would first have been sounded, which Tosello said he expected would be “a moment of great emotion”.
The research is published in the journal Science Advances.
If anxious humans have nightmares of being naked in public, an anxious ammonite may have dreamed about swimming around without its shell, its soft body exposed to the elements and the leering eyes of predators.
For one unfortunate ammonite in the Late Jurassic, this was no dream but a harsh reality. The animal died utterly unclad, outside its whorled shell, and was buried this way. According to a study published recently in the Swiss Journal of Palaeontology, the ammonite’s death made it an extraordinary fossil — one of very few records of soft tissue in a creature that is most often immortalized as a shell.
“We know millions and millions of ammonites that have been preserved from their shell, so something exceptional had to happen here,” said Thomas Clements, a paleobiologist at the University of Birmingham in England who was not involved with the research. “It’s like finding ——” Dr. Clements said, trailing off. “Well, I don’t even know what it’s like finding, it’s that bizarre.”
René Hoffmann, an ammonitologist at the Ruhr-University Bochum in Germany who reviewed the study, called the fossil a “paleontological jackpot you have only once in a lifetime.”
To the untrained eye, the fossil looks more like an Impressionist painting than an ammonite: a pink, bean-shape smear surrounded by bulges, veins and ovals. It was discovered in the Solnhofen-Eichstätt region of southern Germany which was, in the ammonite’s day, around 150 million years ago, an archipelago studded with serene, oxygen-deprived lagoons. These conditions allowed soft, dead creatures to sink into the mud unscathed by predators or bacteria, according to Christian Klug, a paleontologist at the University of Zurich in Switzerland and the first author of the paper.
When Dr. Klug first saw the fossil, he knew it represented the soft parts of an ammonite, but exactly which soft parts, he did not know. He left it alone for months until Helmut Tischlinger, a fossil collector and an author on the paper, sent him photos of the fossil taken with ultraviolet light, which revealed the minute elevations and mineral stainings in the fossil.
Dr. Klug reconstructed the creature’s anatomy sequentially, from the most visible organs to the most obscure. First he identified the aptychus, a shelly lower jaw that indicated the fossil was an ammonite. Behind the jaws, he found the chitinous layer of the esophagus, and then a lump that suggested a digestive tract with a cololite — fecal matter (he used a different word) “that is still within the intestine,” Dr. Klug clarified.
“For the most part, the soft body reconstruction makes perfect sense,” said Margaret Yacobucci, a paleobiologist at Bowling Green State University in Ohio who was not involved with the research.
Solving the fossil’s other mystery — how the ammonite came to be separated from its shell — was far more difficult. The soft parts were so intact that they appeared to still be coiled. The authors propose several alternate endings to the ammonite’s life, each possible but uncertain. One suggests that the soft parts of a dead ammonite slipped out when the tissue connecting its body to its conch began to decay.
Another, more elaborate explanation imagines a predator breaking the ammonite’s shell from behind and sucking out its body only to drop the naked ammonite. “The best explanation is that some squid-like organism pulled out the soft parts and could not retrieve it,” Dr. Klug said.
Dr. Clements finds the clumsy predator theory “awesome” if unlikely; presumably a chomped-on ammonite body would show more visible damage. But he has no good alternative. Interpreting a fossil always invites some degree of doubt, and Dr. Clements predicts that the unarmed ammonite will be analyzed again in the future with robust chemical analyses.
Curiously, the fossilized ammonite is missing its arms, leaving unresolved one of the outstanding mysteries of ammonite anatomy. “Did they have many thin, delicate arms, like modern nautiluses, or a few strong arms, like modern coleoids?” Dr. Yacobucci asked. “If I gained access to a time machine, the very first thing I would do is zip back to the Jurassic to see what kind of arms ammonoids had.”
If a squid-like predator did in fact free the ammonite from its shell, it may have munched on the creature’s unknown quantity of arms as a consolation prize, nourishing both ancient cephalopods and the scientists who study them.
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