The first use of drone-based lidar in Central Asia has enabled archaeologists to uncover details of two newly discovered medieval trade cities high in the mountains of Uzbekistan.

The team used this cutting-edge technology to map the archaeological scale and layout of the cities, which are among the largest ever documented in the mountainous parts of the Silk Road, a broad network of ancient trade routes that connected Europe and Eastern Asia.

The research, led by Michael Frachetti, professor of archaeology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, and Farhod Maksudov, director of the National Center of Archaeology in Uzbekistan, was recently published in Nature.

High-Resolution Insights into Ancient Urbanism

The drone-lidar scans provided remarkably detailed views of the plazas, fortifications, roads, and habitations that shaped the lives and economies of highland communities, traders, and travelers from the sixth through 11th centuries in Central Asia. The two cities are located in rugged terrain 2,000 to 2,200 meters above sea level (roughly comparable to Machu Picchu in Peru), making them unusual examples of thriving mountain urbanism.

Unveiling the Complexities of Mountain Urbanism

The smaller city, today called Tashbulak, covered about 12 hectares, while the larger city of Tugunbulak reached 120 hectares, “making it one of the largest regional cities of its time,” Frachetti said.

“These would have been important urban hubs in central Asia, especially as you moved out of lowland oases and into more challenging high-altitude settings,” he said. “While typically seen as barriers to Silk Road trade and movement, the mountains actually were host to major centers for interaction. Animals, ores, and other precious resources likely drove their prosperity.”

“This site had an elaborate urban structure with specific material culture that greatly varied from the lowland sedentary culture,” Maksudov said. “It’s clear that the people inhabiting Tugunbulak for more than a thousand years ago were nomadic pastoralists who maintained their own distinct, independent culture and political economy.”

Technological Advancements in Archaeological Exploration

Lidar technology is commonly used to map archaeological landscapes blocked by dense vegetation, but it has additional value where vegetation is sparse, such as the mountains of Uzbekistan. “Drone operation is strictly regulated in Uzbekistan, so this discovery is also thanks to the political support and permissions we received through local partners and government,” Frachetti said.

The centimeter-level scans allowed for advanced computer analysis of the ancient archaeological surfaces, providing an unprecedented view of the cities’ architecture and organization. “These are some of the highest-resolution lidar images of archeological sites ever published,” Frachetti said. “They were made possible, in part, because of the unique erosion dynamics in this mountain setting.”

A Blend of Modern Tech and Ancient Discovery

Frachetti, Maksudov, and their team first discovered the highland cities using predictive computer models and old-fashioned foot surveys between 2011 and 2015, tracing presumed routes of the Silk Road in southeastern Uzbekistan. The project took years to materialize. The extra time ultimately proved to be a blessing, allowing the researchers to make the most of the latest advances in drone-based lidar. “The final high-res maps were a composite of more than 17 drone flights over three weeks,” Frachetti said. “It would have taken us a decade to map such large sites manually.”

Frachetti and graduate students in his Spatial Analysis, Interpretation, and Exploration (SAIE) Lab compiled the drone-lidar data into 3D models, which were passed to Tao Ju, a professor of computer science and engineering, and Xiaoyi Liu, an undergraduate student, both at the McKelvey School of Engineering at WashU. Ju and Liu applied computational algorithms to analyze the archaeological surfaces and auto-trace millions of lines to predict likely architectural alignments. The final step was to match the digital output with comparable architectural cases, revealing a huge ancient city otherwise invisible to the naked eye. “The project reflects a truly interdisciplinary effort,” Ju said. “The analysis techniques have potential applications in many domains that utilize lidar scans.”

Future Excavations and Implications

Both cities warrant much closer inspection, Frachetti said. Preliminary digging at one of the fortified structures at Tugunbulak suggests that the fortress — a building protected by three-meter-thick rammed earth walls — might have been a factory where local metalsmiths turned rich deposits of iron ore into steel. Such industry would have been a key feature of the city and its economy.

It’s already clear that Tashbulak and Tugunbulak weren’t just remote outposts or rest stops. “The Silk Road wasn’t just about the endpoints of China and the West,” Frachetti said. “Major political forces were at play in Central Asia. The complex heart of the network was also a driver of innovation.”

Frachetti hopes to use the same combination of on-the-ground detective work and drone-based lidar to get pictures of other high-altitude settlements along the Silk Road and beyond. “We could really change the map of urban development in medieval Asia,” he said.

Reference: “Large-scale medieval urbanism traced by UAV–lidar in highland Central Asia” by Michael D. Frachetti, Jack Berner, Xiaoyi Liu, Edward R. Henry, Farhod Maksudov and Tao Ju, 23 October 2024, Nature.
DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-08086-5

The expedition was supported by the National Geographic Society.

Source

The post Researchers Discover Enormous Ancient Cities Hidden in Uzbekistan’s Mountains appeared first on Tashkent Citizen.

A relatively new threat actor known as YoroTrooper is likely made of operators originating from Kazakhstan.

The assessment, which comes from Cisco Talos, is based on their fluency in Kazakh and Russian, use of Tenge to pay for operating infrastructure, and very limited targeting of Kazakhstani entities, barring the government’s Anti-Corruption Agency.

“YoroTrooper attempts to obfuscate the origin of their operations, employing various tactics to make its malicious activity appear to emanate from Azerbaijan, such as using VPN exit nodes local to that region,” security researchers Asheer Malhotra and Vitor Ventura said.

First documented by the cybersecurity company in March 2023, the adversary is known to be active since at least June 2022, singling out various state-owned entities in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries. Slovak cybersecurity firm ESET is tracking the activity under the name SturgeonPhisher.

YoroTrooper’s attack cycles primarily rely on spear-phishing to distribute a medley of commodity and open source stealer malware, although the group has also been observed using the initial access vector to direct victims to attacker-controlled credential harvesting sites.

“The practice of credential-harvesting runs complementary to YoroTrooper’s malware-based operations with the end goal being data theft,” the researchers said.

Public disclosure of the threat actor’s campaigns has prompted a tactical revamp of its arsenal, pivoting from commodity malware to custom tools programmed in Python, PowerShell, Golang, and Rust.

The actor’s strong ties to Kazakhstan stem from the fact that it regularly conducts security scans of the state-owned email service, mail[.]kz, indicating continued efforts to monitor the website for potential security vulnerabilities.

It also periodically checks for currency conversion rates between Tenge and Bitcoin on Google (“btc to kzt”) and uses alfachange[.]com to convert Tenge to Bitcoin and pay for infrastructure upkeep.

Beginning in June 2023, YoroTrooper’s targeting of CIS countries has been accompanied by an increased focus on bespoke implants, while simultaneously using vulnerability scanners such as Acunetix and open-source data from search engines like Shodan to locate and infiltrate victim networks.

Some of the targets included Tajikistan’s Chamber of Commerce, the Drug Control Agency, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Kyrgyzstan’s KyrgyzKomur, and the Ministry of Energy of the Republic of Uzbekistan.

Another notable aspect is the use of email accounts to register and purchase tools and services, including a NordVPN subscription and a VPS instance from netx[.]hosting for $16 a month.

A major update to the infection chain entails porting its Python-based remote access trojan (RAT) to PowerShell as well as employing a custom-built interactive reverse shell to run commands on infected endpoints via cmd.exe. The PowerShell RAT is designed to accept incoming commands and exfiltrate data via Telegram.

In addition to experimenting with multiple types of delivery vehicles for their backdoors, YoroTrooper is said to have added Golang- and Rust-based malware as of September 2023, allowing it to establish a reverse shell and harvest sensitive data.

“Their Golang-based implants are ports of the Python-based RAT that uses Telegram channels for file exfiltration and C2 communication,” the researchers explained.

Source: The Hacker News

The post Yorotrooper: Researchers Warn of Kazakhstan’s Stealthy Cyber Espionage Group appeared first on Tashkent Citizen.

KATHMANDU – In December 2022, Hiru Lal Dangaura, Vikram Tiwari and Subam Chaudhary were conducting a routine check on a vulture colony in the western plains of Nepal, when they witnessed a stunning spectacle: a huge flock of pigeons. There were so many of the birds that the swarm stretched across the sky, forming a dynamic canvas of gray and white. The observers recalled hearing the rhythmic flapping of wings and the soft cooing of the birds, as they looked at them in wonder and fascination.

The discovery of the flock, estimated at some 6,500 pigeons on Dec. 14, and 7,500 the next day, has been touted as a rare phenomenon that has puzzled local researchers and bird-watchers alike, Dangaura and his colleagues wrote in a recently published study in the Nepalese Journal of Zoology.

“We had never encountered such a large assembly of pigeons in our careers,” Dangaura, a project field officer at the NGO Bird Conservation Nepal (BCN), told Mongabay.

The observation coincided with the period when in the plains started irrigating their land for their winter wheat crop.

“When water enters the fields, bird prey such as worms and insects come to the surface. The pigeons we saw were feeding on those types of prey,” Dangaura said.

The flock was made up of the South-Central Asian subspecies of the common woodpigeon, Columba palumbus casiotis, which the study authors identified from the birds’ cinnamon-colored neck. Woodpigeons aren’t considered a threatened species, since they occur in large numbers across a broad range, from Europe to West Asia and North Africa. In Nepal, the pigeon is a migratory species, and has routinely been spotted during the winter.

“However, we had never seen a flock this big,” said ornithologist Krishan Prasad Bhusal, who wasn’t involved in the study.

“The high count of this species observed by our team exceeds any known reports for this subspecies,” the study authors noted. The previous biggest flock observed by ornithologists in Nepal was around 300.

And for this particular subspecies, the size of the flock is unprecedented across its range in this part of the world, the study said. Other significant observations of the species, which the authors obntained from the citizen-science platform eBird, showed flocks of about 500 pigeons in India and 250 in Pakistan. Smaller flocks were recorded in southern Iran (40) and northeastern Iran (100).

The European subspecies, C. p. palumbus, however, has been observed in massive flocks of around 50,000 birds, said study co-author Anand Chaudhary. He added he believes the birds they saw in Nepal’s plains were likely on the Central Asian Flyway, the migration route used by large numbers of birds to overwintering and breeding grounds throughout Eurasia, the Arctic Ocean, the Indian Ocean and the associated island chains.

Various factors such as food availability, weather conditions, predator avoidance and social attraction may have led to such a large number coming together at once as they passed through Nepal, Chaudhary said.

“We don’t know [for certain] what brought the flocks in such numbers to Nepal,” he said. “There hasn’t been much research into how these birds use the flyway.”

Dangaura said that changes in climatic and environmental variables such as wind patterns and precipitation due to warming of the planet could have been a factor.

“We also considered possibilities such as the massive floods that took place in Pakistan in the summer of 2022,” the study authors said. Although most of the flood-hit areas aren’t wintering grounds for the woodpigeon, their habitats may have been affected by heavy rainfall spread across the country, the study says.

“However, to correlate the Pakistan floods to common wood pigeon irruption in Nepal is no more than speculative,” it notes. It adds such migrations may be common for the subspecies, but may not have been recorded previously due to a limited number of bird-watchers and ornithologists in the South and Central Asian region.

Chaudhary said the results call for greater effort to monitor and conserve birds along the Central Asian Flyway, and assess the potential impacts of climatic factors.

However, Bhusal said he doubts the pigeons were on the Central Asian Flyway, which he noted is frequented by waterbirds and birds of prey such as vultures. He agreed, though, that more research is needed to clear up the question.

Meanwhile, Dangaura and his team are eagerly awaiting the arrival of the coming winter to see if the pigeons return in huge numbers like last year. They tried to count them the last time around, he said, and this time plan to get a better understanding of what’s actually going on.

Source: Mongabay

The post Super Flock of Pigeons Leaves Nepali Researchers Asking What Happened appeared first on Tashkent Citizen.