iOS users will have to wait longer for Nintendo’s next major smartphone game release. Nintendo’s push towards smartphone gaming will continue on February 2 with the launch of Fire Emblem Heroes , a touch-only take on the company’s longtime tactical RPG series—and possibly the company’s most micro-transaction driven game yet. Like Super Mario Run before it, Fire Emblem Heroes will have a period of platform exclusivity—but in a surprise twist, that exclusivity is reversed. Android users will get first crack at Heroes on that release date, while iOS users have been told their version is coming “soon.” (For an estimate of how long the left-behind platform might have to wait, remember: Super Mario Run has yet to launch on Android over a month after its iOS release.) During this announcement, Nintendo did not mention Animal Crossing , the other series set to receive a smartphone port in the near future. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Nintendo’s Fire Emblem Heroes will launch on Android before iOS
wiredmikey writes: Security researchers have a uncovered a Mac OS based espionage malware they have named “Quimitchin.” The malware is what they consider to be “the first Mac malware of 2017, ” which appears to be a classic espionage tool. While it has some old code and appears to have existed undetected for some time, it works. It was discovered when an IT admin noticed unusual traffic coming from a particular Mac, and has been seen infecting Macs at biomedical facilities. From SecurityWeek.com: “Quimitchin comprises just two files: a .plist file that simply keeps the .client running at all times, and the .client file containing the payload. The latter is a ‘minified and obfuscated’ perl script that is more novel in design. It combines three components, Thomas Reed, director of Mac offerings at Malwarebytes and author of the blog post told SecurityWeek: ‘a Mac binary, another perl script and a Java class tacked on at the end in the __DATA__ section of the main perl script. The script extracts these, writes them to /tmp/ and executes them.’ Its primary purpose seems to be screen captures and webcam access, making it a classic espionage tool. Somewhat surprisingly the code uses antique system calls. ‘These are some truly ancient functions, as far as the tech world is concerned, dating back to pre-OS X days, ‘ he wrote in the blog post. ‘In addition, the binary also includes the open source libjpeg code, which was last updated in 1998.’ The script also contains Linux shell commands. Running the malware on a Linux machine, Malwarebytes ‘found that — with the exception of the Mach-O binary — everything ran just fine.’ It is possible that there is a specific Linux variant of the malware in existence — but the researchers have not been able to find one. It did find two Windows executable files, courtesy of VirusTotal, that communicated with the same CC server. One of them even used the same libjpeg library, which hasn’t been updated since 1998, as that used by Quimitchin.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
