digest – Page 8 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

T-Mobile added another 8.3 million customers in 2015

T-Mobile USA added 8.3 million customers last year, including 2.1 million in the fourth quarter, solidifying its position as the country’s number three wireless carrier ahead of Sprint and behind Verizon Wireless and AT&T. T-Mobile had 63.3 million customers as of December 31, 2015, up from 55 million customers at the end of 2014, the company announced today in a preliminary earnings report. In total, T-Mobile now has 29.4 million postpaid phone customers, 2.3 million postpaid mobile broadband customers, 17.6 million prepaid customers, and 14 million wholesale customers. This was the second consecutive year that T-Mobile boosted its customer total by more than 8 million. (credit: T-Mobile) T-Mobile has also improved its churn rate—the percentage of subscribers who discontinued service—meaning that fewer customers are leaving for other carriers. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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T-Mobile added another 8.3 million customers in 2015

General Motors pledges $500 million to Lyft for driverless taxi research

On Monday, General Motors and ride-sharing company Lyft announced a new partnership to develop a network of driverless taxis. GM has invested $500 million in Lyft as part of a $1 billion funding round. The partnership includes a seat for GM on Lyft’s board of directors. Neither Lyft nor GM mentioned how soon they expect to realize their driverless taxi dream. In a press release , GM said it would work with Lyft to “leverage GM’s deep knowledge of autonomous technology.” Lyft promised “to build a network of on demand autonomous vehicles that will make getting around more affordable, accessible and enjoyable.” GM’s labs have been testing the waters with autonomous concept cars , even hinting in October that the company’s strategy in 2016 would be “aggressive” and would include a fleet of self driving Chevrolet Volts . Lyft declined to comment publicly on how a fleet of driverless taxis would impact current Lyft drivers. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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General Motors pledges $500 million to Lyft for driverless taxi research

First known hacker-caused power outage signals troubling escalation

(credit: Krzysztof Lasoń ) Highly destructive malware that infected at least three regional power authorities in Ukraine led to a power failure that left hundreds of thousands of homes without electricity last week, researchers said. The outage left about half of the homes in the Ivano-Frankivsk region of Ukraine without electricity, Ukrainian news service TSN reported in an article posted a day after the December 23 failure . The report went on to say that the outage was the result of malware that disconnected electrical substations. On Monday, researchers from security firm iSIGHT Partners said they had obtained samples of the malicious code that infected at least three regional operators. They said the malware led to “destructive events” that in turn caused the blackout. If confirmed it would be the first known instance of someone using malware to generate a power outage. “It’s a milestone because we’ve definitely seen targeted destructive events against energy before—oil firms, for instance—but never the event which causes the blackout,” John Hultquist, head of iSIGHT’s cyber espionage intelligence practice, told Ars. “It’s the major scenario we’ve all been concerned about for so long.” Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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First known hacker-caused power outage signals troubling escalation

Files on nearly 200 floppy disks belonging to Star Trek creator recovered

(credit: churl ) According to a press release from DriveSavers data recovery, information on nearly 200 floppy disks that belonged to Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry has been recovered. The information on the disks belongs to Roddenberry’s estate and has not been disclosed to the general public. DriveSavers notes, however, that Roddenberry used the disks to store his work and “to capture story ideas, write scripts and [take] notes.” VentureBeat reports that the disks, containing 160KB of data each, were likely used and written in the ’80s. The circumstances of the information recovery are particularly interesting, however. Several years after the death of Roddenberry, his estate found the 5.25-inch floppy disks. Although the Star Trek creator originally typed his scripts on typewriters, he later moved his writing to two custom-built computers with custom-made operating systems before purchasing more mainstream computers in advance of his death in 1991. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Files on nearly 200 floppy disks belonging to Star Trek creator recovered

CBS, Paramount sue crowdfunded Star Trek filmmakers for copyright infringement

Prelude to Axanar (Official). On Tuesday, lawyers representing CBS and Paramount Studios sued Axanar Productions, a company formed by a group of fans attempting to make professional-quality Star Trek fan-fiction movies, for copyright infringement. “The Axanar Works are intended to be professional quality productions that, by Defendants’ own admission, unabashedly take Paramount’s and CBS’s intellectual property and aim to ‘look and feel like a true Star Trek movie,’” the complaint reads (PDF). Axanar Productions released a short 20-minute film called Prelude to Axanar in 2014, in which retired Starfleet leaders talk about their experiences in the Four Years War, a war between the Federation and the Klingons that occurred in the Star Trek universe before The Original Series began. The feature-length Axanar is scheduled to premier in 2016 and follows the story of Captain Kirk’s hero, Garth of Izar . Both productions were funded on Kickstarter and Indiegogo, raising more than $1.1 million from fans. Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Yandex worker stole search engine source code, tried selling for just $28K

(credit: Yandex ) An employee of Russia’s Internet giant Yandex, Dmitry Korobov, stole the source code of its search engine and tried to sell it on the black market to fund his own startup, according to a report by the Russian newspaper Kommersant . A Russian court has found Korobov guilty and handed down a suspended sentence of two years in jail. The Kommersant investigation revealed that Korobov downloaded a piece of software codenamed Arcadia from Yandex’s servers, which contained the source code and algorithms of the company’s search engine. Later on, he tried to sell it to an electronics retailer called NIX, where a friend of his allegedly worked. Korobov also trawled the darknet in search of potential buyers. Korobov put a surprisingly low price on the code and algorithms, asking for just $25,000 and 250,000 Russian rubles, or about £27,000 in total. There’s no information on Korobov’s position within the company, but it appears that he wasn’t aware that the data he had in his possession could be worth much more. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Yandex worker stole search engine source code, tried selling for just $28K

“Nemesis” malware hijacks PC’s boot process to gain stealth, persistence

Malware targeting banks, payment card processors, and other financial services has found an effective way to remain largely undetected as it plucks sensitive card data out of computer memory. It hijacks the computer’s boot-up routine in a way that allows highly intrusive code to run even before the Windows operating system loads. The so-called bootkit has been in operation since early this year and is part of “Nemesis,” a suite of malware that includes programs for transferring files, capturing screens logging keystrokes, injecting processes, and carrying out other malicious actions on an infected computer. Its ability to modify the legitimate volume boot record makes it possible for the Nemesis components to load before Windows starts. That makes the malware hard to detect and remove using traditional security approaches. Because the infection lives in such a low-level portion of a hard drive, it can also survive when the operating system is completely reinstalled. “The use of malware that persists outside of the operating system requires a different approach to detection and eradication,” researchers from security firm FireEye’s Mandiant Consulting wrote in a blog post published Monday . “Malware with bootkit functionality can be installed and executed almost completely independent of the Windows operating system. As a result, incident responders will need tools that can access and search raw disks at scale for evidence of bootkits.” Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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“Nemesis” malware hijacks PC’s boot process to gain stealth, persistence

New diabetes cases finally on the decline

(credit: Steven Depolo/Flickr ) After more than a quarter of a century of rising diabetes rates, the number of new cases seems to be on a downward trend. From 1980 to 2009, the annual number of new diabetes cases more than tripled in the US, going from 493,000 to 1.7 million diagnoses a year in people aged 18 to 79. But since 2009, case numbers appear to have slumped, though the decline had not registered as statistically significant. Now, using newly released data from 2014 , the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that case numbers are definitely on their first sustained decline. In 2014, the number of diagnosed cases was down to 1.4 million. “It seems pretty clear that incidence rates have now actually started to drop,” said Edward Gregg, one of the CDC’s top diabetes researchers told the New York Times . “Initially it was a little surprising because I had become so used to seeing increases everywhere we looked.” Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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New diabetes cases finally on the decline

Hey Reader’s Digest: Your site has been attacking visitors for days

Enlarge (credit: Malwarebytes ) An active hacking campaign is forcing Reader’s Digest and many other websites to host malicious code that can surreptitiously infect visitors with malware and linger for days or weeks before being cleaned up. Reader’s Digest has been infected since last week with code originating with Angler, an off-the-shelf hack-by-numbers exploit kit that saves professional criminals the hassle of developing their own attack scripts, researchers from antivirus provider Malwarebytes told Ars. People who visit the site with outdated versions of Adobe Flash, Internet Explorer, and other browsing software are silently infected with malware that gains control over their computers. Malwarebytes researchers said they sent Reader’s Digest operators e-mails and social media alerts last week warning the site was infected but never got a response. The researchers estimate that thousands of other sites have been similarly attacked in recent weeks and that the number continues to grow. “This campaign is still ongoing and we see dozens of new websites every day being leveraged to distribute malware via the Angler exploit kit,” Malwarebytes Senior Security Researcher Jérôme Segura wrote in an e-mail. “This attack may have been going on for some time but we noticed a dramatic increase in infections via WordPress sites in the past couple of weeks.” Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Hey Reader’s Digest: Your site has been attacking visitors for days

Iranian military spear-phish of State Department employees detected first by Facebook

The Facebook and email accounts of US State Department officials focused on Iran were hacked, and possibly used to gather data about US-Iranian dual citizens in Iran. More details have emerged about the hacking the computers of US State Department and other government employees, first revealed earlier this month in a Wall Street Journal report . The intrusions by hackers purported to be associated with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard may be tied to the arrest of an Iranian-American businessman in Tehran in October and other arrests of dual citizens in Iran. The attackers used compromised social media accounts of junior State Department staff as part of a “phishing” operation that compromised the computers of employees working in the State Department’s Office of Iranian Affairs and Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs and computers of some journalists. The first warning of the attacks came from Facebook, which alerted some of the affected users that their accounts had been compromised by a state-sponsored attack, the New York Times reports . The Iranian Revolutionary Guard hackers used the access to identify the victims’ contacts and build “spear-phishing” attacks that gave them access to targeted individuals’ e-mail accounts. The attack “was very carefully designed and showed the degree to which they understood which of our staff was working on Iran issues now that the nuclear deal is done,” an unnamed senior US official told the Times . This most recent attack, which came after a brief period of little or no Iranian activity against US targets over the summer according to data from Check Point and iSight Partners, was a change from tactics previously associated with Iranian hackers. Earlier attacks attributed to Iran were focused on taking financial services companies’ websites offline and destroying data—such as in the attack attack on casino company Las Vegas Sands Corp. last year after its majority owner called for a nuclear attack on Iran. These attacks may not have been carried out by the Iranian government but by Iranian or pro-Iranian “hacktivists.” The State Department attack, however, was more subtle and aimed at cyber-espionage rather than simple vengeance—bearing hallmarks of tactics attributed to Chinese state-sponsored hackers. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Iranian military spear-phish of State Department employees detected first by Facebook