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Hacker’s Account of How He Took Down Hacking Team’s Servers

An anonymous reader writes: FinFisher, the hacker that broke into Italian firm Hacking Team, has published a step-by-step account of how he carried out the attacks, what tools he used, and what he learned from scouting HackingTeam’s network. Published on PasteBin, the attack’s timeline reveals he entered their network through a zero-day exploit in an (unnamed) embedded device, accessed a MongoDB database that had no password, discovered backups in the database, found a BES admin password in the backups, and eventually got admin access to the Windows Domain Server. From here, it was easy to reach into their email server and steal all the company’s emails, and later access Git repos and steal the source code of their surveillance software. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Hacker’s Account of How He Took Down Hacking Team’s Servers

New Full Duplex Radio Chip Transmits and Receives Wireless Signals At Once

Wave723 writes: A new chip by Columbia University researchers uses a circulator made of silicon transistors to reroute signals and avoid interference from a transmitter and receiver that share the same antenna. This technology instantly doubles data capacity and could eventually be built into smartphones and tablets. The chip enables them to work around the principle of Lorentz Reciprocity, in which electromagnetic waves are thought to always travel along the same path both forward and backward. Traditionally, electronic devices required two antennas — a transmitter and receiver — that took turns or operated on different frequencies in order to exchange signals. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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New Full Duplex Radio Chip Transmits and Receives Wireless Signals At Once

Mitel Buys Polycom For $1.96B In Enterprise Communications Consolidation Play

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Mitel announced that it would acquire Polycom in a cash-and-stock deal with a total value of $1.96 billion, creating a company with combined sales of $2.5 billion and 7, 700 employees. Polycom’s acquisition by Mitel comes at a key time in the world of enterprise communications and collaboration. On one hand, it is a time of massive change and evolution. For years a lot of the services that companies used were based on legacy networking, but in the last decade there has been a big shift to IP-based networks for many of these services. However, at the same time the whole space has been massively disrupted by startups that are upsetting by tapping into the next phase of digital services — the internet. Companies like Microsoft by way of services like Skype and Yammer, and smaller startups like Slack, are overturning the whole idea of how people who are not in the same office floor can communicate and collaborate for work. These solutions are way cheaper than a lot of the legacy offerings; they tap into the cloud-based services that are now ubiquitous to share and work on files; and they are also built in very user-friendly ways, based around tech that ordinary consumers are using. Both companies compete against the likes of Cisco and Avaya. Mitel is perhaps best known for its IP telephony solutions, including PBX systems, while Polycom is a leader in conferencing services. They also cover SIP technology, and customers span 82% of Fortune 500 companies. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Mitel Buys Polycom For $1.96B In Enterprise Communications Consolidation Play

Scientists Build Smallest, Single Atom, Working Heat Engine

William Herkewitz, writing for Popular Mechanics: Physicists have just built the smallest working engine ever created. It’s a heat-powered motor barely larger than the single atom it runs on. Designed and build by a team of experimental physicists led by Johannes at the University of Mainz in Germany, the single atom engine is about as efficient as your car at transforming the changing temperature into mechanical energy. While scientists have previously created several micro-engines consisting of a mere 10, 000 particles, Johannes’s new engine blows these out of the water by paring down the machine to a singular atom housed in a nano-sized cone of electromagnetic radiation. The project is outlined today in the journal Science. “The engine has the same working principles as the well-known [combustion] car engine, ” Johannes says. It follows the same four strokes; expanding then cooling, contracting then heating.There’s some confusion here. The article says it’s a “four-stroke” engine. But as we know, a four-stroke engine consists of an intake stroke, a compression stroke, a power stroke, and an exhaust stroke — things that the engine in the article doesn’t seem to have. The article doesn’t mention how a single atom is able to mimic all the effects of a combustion engine. Update: 04/15 18:24 GMT by M :The article appears to have been updated for clarification. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Scientists Build Smallest, Single Atom, Working Heat Engine

Canadian Police Have Had BlackBerry’s Global Decryption Key Since 2010

Justin Ling and Jordan Pearson, reporting for Vice News: A high-level surveillance probe of Montreal’s criminal underworld shows that Canada’s federal policing agency has had a global encryption key for BlackBerry devices since 2010. The revelations are contained in a stack of court documents that were made public after members of a Montreal crime syndicate pleaded guilty to their role in a 2011 gangland murder. The documents shed light on the extent to which the smartphone manufacturer, as well as telecommunications giant Rogers, cooperated with investigators. According to technical reports by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police that were filed in court, law enforcement intercepted and decrypted roughly one million PIN-to-PIN BlackBerry messages in connection with the probe. The report doesn’t disclose exactly where the key — effectively a piece of code that could break the encryption on virtually any BlackBerry message sent from one device to another — came from. But, as one police officer put it, it was a key that could unlock millions of doors. Government lawyers spent almost two years fighting in a Montreal courtroom to keep this information out of the public record. Motherboard has published another article in which it details how Canadian police intercept and read encrypted BlackBerry messages. “BlackBerry to Canadian court: Please don’t reveal the fact that we backdoored our encryption, ” privacy and security activist Christopher Soghoian wittily summarizes the report. “Canadian gov: If you use Blackberry consumer encryption, you’re a “dead chicken”. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Canadian Police Have Had BlackBerry’s Global Decryption Key Since 2010

Man Deletes His Entire Company With One Line of Bad Code

Reader JustAnotherOldGuy writes: Marco Marsala appears to have deleted his entire company with one mistaken piece of code. By accidentally telling his computer to delete everything in his servers, the hosting provider has seemingly removed all trace of his company and the websites that he looks after for his customers. Marsala wrote on a Centos help forum, “I run a small hosting provider with more or less 1535 customers and I use Ansible to automate some operations to be run on all servers. Last night I accidentally ran, on all servers, a Bash script with a rm -rf foo/bar with those variables undefined due to a bug in the code above this line. All servers got deleted and the offsite backups too because the remote storage was mounted just before by the same script (that is a backup maintenance script).” The terse “rm -rf” is so famously destructive that it has become a joke within some computing circles, but not to this guy. Can this example finally serve as a textbook example of why you need to make offsite backups that are physically removed from the systems you’re archiving?”Rm -rf” would mark the block as empty, and unless the programmer hasn’t written anything new, he should be able to recover nearly all of the data. Something about the story feels weird. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Man Deletes His Entire Company With One Line of Bad Code

AMC Theaters is considering letting people text during movies

Just as AMC Theaters was starting to win customers back by replacing every old seat in its auditoriums with recliners , the company wants to destroy that good will among moviegoers. That’s because CEO Adam Aron thinks letting people use their phones during a movie would be a good idea. “When you tell a 22-year-old to turn off their phone, don’t ruin the movie, they hear ‘please cut off your left arm above the elbow, ‘” Aron tells Variety . “You can’t tell a 22-year-old to turn off their cellphone. That’s not how they live their life.” Yes, he actually said that. This could be seen as an extension of recreating a home-like experience at a theater, vis a vis said recliner seats. But the difference here is that if you’re using your phone while watching a flick at home, you’re only affecting yourself and maybe your significant other — not the 100 or more people who paid to get into the theater. Movie theaters and places of worship are a few of the remaining places where using a cellphone is verboten, and by pandering to this demographic’s horrible habit AMC is stripping away common courtesy and setting a gross precedent in the name of profits. Aron says that certain sections where texting would be allowed is one possibility for this, while the more likely situation would be having specific auditoriums set up to be “more texting friendly.” If the chain is willing to kick out someone wearing Google Glass for fear of piracy, though, how is it going to differentiate someone texting from a person recording what’s on the screen with their phone? Contrast this with The Alamo Drafthouse which will happily eject you from a showing if you’re talking or texting, or won’t even let you into the auditorium if you’re late. As you can imagine, Twitter is lighting up with people decrying this , and for good reason: It’s an absolutely stupid move that could drive away already loyal customers in an effort to chase those it isn’t reaching anyway. “22-year-olds like to shoplift! What can we do??” — if the AMC CEO ran Macy’s — Scott Weinberg (@scottEweinberg) April 13, 2016 And that’s one way to keep me out of AMC theaters. Really hope they reconsider. https://t.co/DNthAggJIs — Chris Pugh (@ChrisLikesDinos) April 13, 2016 No @CEOAdam , I don’t want to go to a theater where people can text. We already have that, it’s a living room. #amctheaters — Rachel Stuhler (@RachelStuhler) April 13, 2016 Source: Variety

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AMC Theaters is considering letting people text during movies

Jigsaw Ransomware Deletes Your Files If You Don’t Pay Or When You Reboot Your PC

An anonymous reader writes: Researchers found a new ransomware yesterday called Jigsaw which will first lock your files and ask for a 0.4 Bitcoin ($150 USD) payment. If users don’t pay, every hour the ransomware deletes your files. If the user restarts their PC, the ransomware also deletes 1, 000 more files. The good news is there’s a free Decrypter available to unlock the ransomware. The Decrypter was built by Michael Gillespie, who announced yesterday on Softpedia the ID Ransomware service, which tells infected victims what kind of ransomware infection they have by allowing them to upload an encrypted file and the ransom note. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Jigsaw Ransomware Deletes Your Files If You Don’t Pay Or When You Reboot Your PC

FBI Offers $25K Reward For Andy Warhol Campbell’s Soup Painting Heist

coondoggie quotes a report from Networkworld: The FBI today said it was offering a reward of up to $25, 000 for information leading to the recovery of seven Andy Warhol paintings stolen from the Springfield Art Museum in Springfield, Missouri. The collection, which has been owned by the Springfield Art Museum since 1985, is set number 31 of the Campbell’s Soup I collection and is valued at approximately $500, 000. Each painting in the screen print collection measures 37 inches high by 24.5 inches wide and framed in white frames, the FBI stated. The FBI says that seven of 10 Andy Warhol paintings Campbell’s Soup I collection, made in 1968, were taken. Since its inception, the FBI’s Art Crime Team has recovered more than 2, 650 items valued at over $150 million. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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FBI Offers $25K Reward For Andy Warhol Campbell’s Soup Painting Heist

HTC 10 With 5.2-inch QHD Display, Snapdragon 820 SoC, 12MP Camera Launched at $699

Dan Seifert, writing for The Verge: HTC is today formally announcing the 10, its flagship smartphone for 2016. The HTC 10 follows last year’s M9 and blends the design of the M series with the A9 that came last fall. HTC says it spent 12 months designing this phone and integrated feedback from its customers throughout the development process. The 10 has everything you might expect from a flagship Android phone in 2016. There’s a 5.2-inch, quad HD Super LCD 5 display that HTC says displays 30 percent more color than last year’s phone. The screen is covered in Gorilla Glass with curved edges that blend into the phone’s metal frame. You’ll be able to find out if that’s enough for HTC to compete when the phone ships next month for $699. One interesting feature, which separates HTC 10 from many other Android flagship smartphones, is support for AirPlay. The feature enables the smartphone to stream media content to an Apple TV. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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HTC 10 With 5.2-inch QHD Display, Snapdragon 820 SoC, 12MP Camera Launched at $699