Author: kenmay

Acer admits hackers stole up to 34,000 customer credit cards

If you bought an Acer device from the company’s store in the last year, there’s a chance that your credit card info was hijacked. The Taiwan-based company informed California’s attorney general that attackers made off with the “name, address, card number, expiration date and three-digit security codes” of users between May 12, 2015 and April 28, 2016. It sent form letters to the 34, 500 affected customers, all of whom are in the US, Canada and Puerto Rico. The theft isn’t particularly large and no social security numbers were taken. However, it’s one of the few we’ve seen involving a major PC company’s online store. Acer hasn’t yet revealed how it happened, but such breaches are usually a result of employees opening infected email, not any fancy hacking . While the breach was still ongoing, Acer recently held an event to reveal its latest laptops and desktop computers. If you bought something from its stores soon after, you may want to ensure that your credentials weren’t stolen. Via: ZDNet Source: US Attorney General

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Acer admits hackers stole up to 34,000 customer credit cards

Roland Emmerich is Rebooting the Stargate Franchise From Scratch

We’ve known that Roland Emmerich has been planning on continuing his 1994 film Stargate for a while , but while chatting with the press about Independence Day: Resurgence , he and producer Dean Devlin have been dropping some more hints about what’s next for the franchise. Read more…

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Roland Emmerich is Rebooting the Stargate Franchise From Scratch

South Australia Refuses To Stop Using An Expired, MS-DOS-Based Health Software

jaa101 writes: The Australian state of South Australia is being sued for refusing to stop using CHIRON, an MS-DOS-based software from the ’90s that stores patient records. Their license expired in March of 2015, but they claim it would be risky to stop using it. CHIRON’s vendor, Working Systems, says SA Health has been the only user of CHIRON since 2008 when they declined to migrate to the successor product MasterCare ePAS. SA Health has 64 sites across South Australia — all of which are apparently still using the MS-DOS-based health software from the 1990s. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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South Australia Refuses To Stop Using An Expired, MS-DOS-Based Health Software

One Million IP Addresses Used In Brute-Force Attack On A Bank

Cisco says in just one week in February they detected 1, 127, 818 different IP addresses being used to launch 744, 361, 093 login attempts on 220, 758, 340 different email addresses — and that 93% of those attacks were directed at two financial institutions in a massive Account Takeover (ATO) campaign. An anonymous reader writes: Crooks used 993, 547 distinct IPs to check login credentials for 427, 444, 261 accounts. For most of these attacks, the crooks used proxy servers, but also two botnets, one of compromised Arris cable modems, and one of ZyXel routers/modems. Most of these credentials have been acquired from public breaches or underground hacking forums. This happened before the recent huge data breaches such as MySpace, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and VK.com. It’s apparently similar to the stolen-credentials-from-other-sites attack that was launched against GitHub earlier this week. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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One Million IP Addresses Used In Brute-Force Attack On A Bank

Cryptocurrency raider takes $60 million in digital cash

A cryptocurrency is only as reliable as the technology that keeps it running, and Ethereum is learning this the hard way. An attacker has taken an estimated $60 million in Ethereum’s digital money (Ether) by exploiting vulnerabilities in the Decentralized Autonomous Organization, an investment collective. The raider took advantage of a “recursive call” flaw in the DAO’s code-based smart contracts, which administer the funds, to scoop up Ether many times in a single pass. Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin (pictured above) has revealed a planned software fork that would prevent the intruder from using the ill-gotten goods, but there are still plenty of headaches in store for both contract creators and investors. Contract makers will have to take extra care to avoid the flaw and limit the value of their contracts so that a bad actor doesn’t make off with a huge sum of cash. Buterin says that Ethereum itself is safe — miners can carry on, and users should “sit tight and remain calm” while they wait to trade again. Still, it’s easy to imagine everyone being nervous. The kicker? People were convinced that the bug posed no risk to DAO funds just a few days prior. Clearly, that wasn’t true. While the invader didn’t get away scot-free, the breach has caused a lot of chaos. And while one person’s claims that they legitimately took the funds is sketchy, Bloomberg notes that the code defining the smart contracts may have explicitly allowed this attack even if that’s not what the DAO wanted. This may not be so much a hack as exploitation of poorly-defined terms, and there may not be a legal recourse. In short: basing an investment framework around code instead of human-made contracts may have been too optimistic. Via: Coindesk , Bloomberg , The Verge Source: Vitalik Buterin (Reddit) , Etherscan , Ethereum

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Cryptocurrency raider takes $60 million in digital cash

Facebook Live death highlights the risks of livestreaming

Facebook Live is great for capturing events as they happen . However, like any other live internet broadcast, it’s becoming clear that there’s also a dark side . Police have confirmed to the New York Times that Chicago man Antonio Perkins was shot to death on June 15th while he was using Facebook Live to share an otherwise normal evening. The incident isn’t strictly unique (there have sadly been other incidents of livestreamed violence before), but it underscores the lack of filters for livestreaming. Unlike similar scenes on live TV, there’s no one to cut away when horror occurs on-camera. Notably, Facebook isn’t taking the Perkins video down. While it will remove clips that sensationalize violence, it’s leaving this and other footage that it believes will boost awareness of violence and its consequences. There’s a “graphic video” warning before you start watching, but there’s otherwise nothing stopping you. As it stands, it’s doubtful that Facebook is about to have second thoughts about livestreaming. Any live video service has the potential to show something terrible — and when Facebook has over 1.6 billion active users every month, that potential is stronger than usual. If the company wants to offer livestreaming at all, it’ll have to accept that some videos are likely to be tragic. Source: New York Times

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Facebook Live death highlights the risks of livestreaming

Businesses Lose $3.1 Billion to Email Scams, FBI Warns

Business have lost over $3 billion because of compromised e-mail accounts, the FBI reports, citing “a sophisticated scam targeting businesses working with foreign suppliers and/or businesses that regularly perform wire transfer payments.” 22, 143 business have been affected — 14, 302 within the U.S. — with a total dollar loss of $3, 086, 250, 090, representing an increase of 1, 300% since January of 2015. Using social engineering or “computer intrusion techniques, ” the attackers target employees responsible for wire transfers (or issuing checks) using five scenarios, which include bogus invoices or executive requests for a wire transfer of funds, with some attackers even impersonating a corporate law firm. “Victims report that IP addresses frequently trace back to free domain registrars, ” warns the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, which also urges businesses to avoid free web-based e-mail accounts. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Businesses Lose $3.1 Billion to Email Scams, FBI Warns

Check Your Ticketmaster Account, You Probably Have Free Tickets Waiting

Last month, Ticketmaster settled a $400 million class action lawsuit over its exorbitant fees. This month, they’re paying it out—in the form of discount codes and vouchers. Chances are, you have a free show or two sitting in your inbox. Read more…

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Check Your Ticketmaster Account, You Probably Have Free Tickets Waiting

Download Tons of Free Coursera Courses Before They Disappear Forever

Coursera , one of the best sources of MOOCs (Massive Online Open Courses), is shutting down their old platform on June 30, and removing hundreds of courses in the process. Here are two ways you can save all the course materials before they’re gone for good. Read more…

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Download Tons of Free Coursera Courses Before They Disappear Forever