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The Homeland Security’s cybersecurity advisory division is cautioning Windows 10 users of the possibility of a wave of cyberattacks due to the recent publication of an exploit code.

“Malicious cyber actors are targeting unpatched systems with the new [threat],” the agency noted on the Homeland Security web site. The agency said it “strongly recommends using a firewall to block server message block ports from the internet and to apply patches to critical- and high-severity vulnerabilities as soon as possible.”

The agency also referred concerned parties to Microsoft’s security guidance posts and notes published by the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team at us-cert.gov.

For more than two years, the Pentagon’s research arm has been working with engineers to beef up the security of computer chips before they get deployed in weapons systems or other critical technologies.

Now, the research arm — the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) — is turning the hardware over to elite white-hat hackers who can earn up to $25,000 for bugs they find. The goal is to throw an array of attacks at the hardware so its foundations are more secure before production.

“We need the researchers to really roll their sleeves up and dig into what we’re doing and try to break it,” said Keith Rebello, a DARPA program manager. Hardware hacks often involve identifying vulnerabilities in how a computer chip handles information, like the flaw uncovered in Intel microprocessors in March that could have allowed attackers to run malicious code early in the boot process.

A flaw in a Bluetooth protocol is leaving millions of devices vulnerable to attacks, according to a study released by a Swiss research institute.

The vulnerability, called Bluetooth Impersonation AttackS (BIAS), allows an intrusion by an attacker posing as a previously trusted Bluetooth device.

“In this paper, we demonstrate that the Bluetooth standard contains vulnerabilities enabling an attacker to impersonate a device and to establish a with a victim, without possessing the long term key shared by the impersonated device and the victim,” researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne said in their report.