EURONEWS
July 31 (UPI) -- Lithuanian Prime Minister Gintautas Paluckas resigned on Thursday following investigations of his unethical financial dealings that prompted protests.
"Just over an hour ago, I informed the president that I have made the decision to resign from the position of prime minister," Palcukas said in a statement. "I also announce that I have decided to step down from my position as leader of the LSDP."
His resignation is expected to trigger the fall of the Cabinet, as they are potentially leaving the country, leaving no government.
Paluckas was given a two-week ultimatum following his scandal involving EU loans and questionable business ties linked to his relatives, which led to an investigation.
"As prime minister, I do not feel that I have made any fundamental mistakes or violations. I have carried out my duties honestly, to the best of my understanding and ability," he said.
President Gitanas Nauseda said the coalition-building process is underway.
"There is more than one candidate who could fully carry out the duties of prime minister," Nausėda said, adding that the next candidate will be fully investigated to avoid "another situation like this."
The single-board computer was physically connected to the ATM network switch, creating an invisible channel into the bank's internal network, allowing the attackers to move laterally and deploy backdoors.
While LightBasin failed at that, the incident is a rare example of an advanced hybrid (physical+remote access) attack that employed several anti-forensics techniques to maintain a high degree of stealthiness.
The particular group is notorious for attacking banking systems, as Mandiant highlighted in a 2022 report presenting the then-new Unix kernel rootkit "Caketap," created for running on Oracle Solaris systems used in the financial sector.
Caketap manipulates Payment Hardware Security Module (HSM) responses, specifically the card verification messages, to authorize fraudulent transactions that the bank's systems would otherwise block.
Active since 2016, LightBasin has also successfully attacked telecommunication systems for years, using the TinyShell open-source backdoor to move traffic between networks and route it through specific mobile stations.
In the latest case, LightBasin gained physical access to a bank branch either on their own or by bribing a rogue employee who helped them to install a Raspberry Pi with a 4G modem on the same network switch as the ATM.
The device's outbound internet connectivity capabilities enabled the attackers to maintain persistent remote access to the bank's internal network while bypassing perimeter firewalls.
The Raspberry Pi hosted the TinyShell backdoor which the attacker leveraged for establishing an outbound command-and-control (C2) channel via mobile data.
In the subsequent phases of the attack, the threat actors moved laterally to the Network Monitoring Server, which had extensive connectivity to the bank's data center.
.jpg)
From there, the attacker also pivoted to the Mail Server, which had direct internet access, and enabled persistence even when the Raspberry Pi was discovered and removed.
The backdoors used in lateral movement were named as 'lightdm' to mimic the legitimate LightDM display manager found on Linux systems, hence appearing inoccuous.
Another element that contributed to the attack's high degree of stealth was LightBasin mounting alternative filesystems like tmpfs and ext4 over the '/proc/[pid]' paths of the malicious processes, essentially obscuring the related metadata from forensics tools.
Based on Group-IB's investigation, the Network Monitoring Server inside the bank network was found beaconing every 600 seconds to the Raspberry Pi on port 929, indicating that the device served as a pivot host.
The researchers say the attackers' ultimate goal was to deploy the Caketap rootkit, but that plan was foiled before it could materialize.
Microsoft has introduced Copilot Mode, an experimental feature designed to transform Microsoft Edge into a web browser powered by artificial intelligence (AI).
2
Orange, a French telecommunications company and one of the world's largest telecom operators, revealed that it detected a breached system on its network on Friday.
0
FBI Dallas has seized almost 23 Bitcoins from a cryptocurrency address belonging to a Chaos ransomware member that is linked to cyberattacks and extortion payments from Texas companies.
Inflation in the Federal Reserve’s preferred measurement ticked up to a 2.6 percent annual increase in June from 2.3 percent as cost increases from President Trump’s tariffs make their way into the economy.
The increase in the Commerce Department’s personal consumption expenditures price index exceeded economists’ expectations of a 2.5 percent increase.
SPOILER ALERT IN ADVANCE:
According to reports received by the SVR, US and British officials organized a secret meeting at an Alpine resort, which involved Andrey Yermak, head of the Ukrainian president’s office, Kirill Budanov, chief of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry’s Main Directorate of Intelligence, and Valery Zaluzhny, the country’s ex-commander-in-chief who now serves as Kiev’s ambassador to London.
According to the Russian intelligence agency, "the agreement reached in the Alps sheds light onto the underlying cause of the recent scandalous attempt of the ‘president’ to restrict the powers of the local anti-corruption mechanisms."
"Clearing the political field for Zaluzhny, Yermak had ‘set up’ Zelensky, convincing him that such a step would not spoil Kiev’s relations with the Western partners, but actually had created a pretext for the West to start a campaign aimed at removing the ‘expired’ president from power for his ‘encroachment upon democracy’," the statement notes.
The SVR also noted that the decision "became the main condition for ‘resetting’ Kiev’s relations with the Western partners, first of all Washington, and for a continuation of the Western aid to Ukraine in its confrontation with Russia."
What's that mean right now?..It's good enough Xi Ping - export controls are national security issues
...stay turned for an un-solvable culture clash
Decades of satellite observations show that the aquifers in Arizona — which about 40 million people rely on for water — are rapidly losing groundwater.
By measuring the gravitational pull of water for more than two decades, NASA satellites have peered beneath the surface and measured changes in the groundwater supplies of the Colorado River Basin. In a recent analysis of the satellite data, Arizona State University researchers reported rapid and accelerating losses of groundwater in the basin’s underground aquifers between 2002 and 2024. Some 40 million people rely on water from the aquifers, which include parts of Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming.
The basin lost about 27.8 million acre-feet of groundwater during the study period. “That’s an amount roughly equal to the storage capacity of Lake Mead,” said Karem Abdelmohsen, an associate research scientist at Arizona State University who authored the study.
About 68 percent of the losses occurred in the lower part of the basin, which lies mostly in Arizona. The research is based on data collected by the GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) and GRACE-FO (GRACE Follow-On) missions. The data were integrated with output from land surface models, such as NASA’s North American Land Data Assimilation System, and in-situ precipitation data to calculate groundwater losses.
The conclusions were similar to those arrived at by Arizona State University Global Futures Professor Jay Famiglietti in an analysis of the Colorado River Basin published in 2014, when his team was at the University of California, Irvine. "If left unmanaged for another decade, groundwater levels will continue to drop, putting Arizona’s water security and food production at far greater risk than is being acknowledged,” said Famiglietti, previously a senior water scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the principal investigator of both studies.
The maps above underscore the accelerating rate of groundwater loss detected by the GRACE missions. In the first decade of the analysis, between 2002 and 2014, parts of the basin in western Arizona in La Paz and Mohave counties and in southeastern Arizona in Cochise County lost groundwater at a rate of about 5 millimeters (0.2 inches) per year. Between 2015 and 2024, the rate of groundwater loss more than doubled to 12 millimeters (0.5 inches) per year.
Two key factors likely explain the acceleration, the researchers said. First, there was a global transition from one of the strongest El Niños on record in 2014-2016 to a period when La Niña reasserted control, including the arrival of a “triple-dip” La Niña between 2020 and 2023. La Niña typically shifts winter precipitation patterns in a way that reduces rainfall over the Southwest and slows the replenishment of aquifers.
Second, there was an increase in the amount of groundwater being used for agriculture. “2014 was about the time that industrial agriculture took off in Arizona,” Famiglietti said, noting that large alfalfa farms arrived in La Paz and other parts of southern Arizona around that time. Dairies and orchards in southeastern Arizona likely impacted groundwater supplies as well, he added. Other “thirsty” crops grown widely in the state include cotton, corn, and pecans. Data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Cropland Data Layer (CDL) shows that these crops are common in several parts of southern Arizona, including Maricopa, Pinal, and Cochise counties.
Irrigated agriculture consumes about 72 percent of Arizona’s available water supply; cities and industry account for 22 percent and 6 percent, respectively, according to Arizona Department of Water Resources data. Many farms use what Famiglietti described as “vast” amounts of groundwater in part because they use a water-intensive type of irrigation known as flood irrigation (or sometimes furrow irrigation), a technique where water is released into trenches that run through crop fields. The long-standing practice is typically the cheapest option and is widely used for alfalfa and cotton, but it can lead to more water loss and evaporation than other irrigation techniques, such as overhead sprinklers or dripping water from plastic tubing.
The satellite image above, captured by the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 8, shows desert agriculture in La Paz and Maricopa counties on July 12, 2025. CDL data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture indicates that most of the rectangular fields around Vicksburg and Wenden are used to grow alfalfa, while the fields around Aguila are typically used for fruits and vegetables, such as melons, broccoli, and leafy greens. Some of the alfalfa fields in Butler Valley (upper part of the image) have gone fallow in recent years following the termination of leases due to concerns from the Arizona State Land Department about groundwater pumping.
The new analysis found some evidence that managing groundwater can help keep Arizona aquifers healthier. For instance, the active management areas and irrigation non-expansion areas established as part of the Arizona Groundwater Management Act of 1980 lessened water losses in some areas.
NASA supports several missions, tools, and datasets relevant to water resource management.
NASA Earth Observatory images by Wanmei Liang, using data from Abdelmohsen, K., et al. (2025), boundary data from Colorado River Basin GIS Open Data Portal, and Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Oceanic Niño Index chart based on data from the Climate Prediction Center at NOAA. Story by Adam Voiland.
Watch: Powell Says Fed Has Made No Decision About September Meeting
Subscriber Only
