fnself-program1 – Page 31 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Millions of dymanic DNS users suffer after Microsoft seizes No-IP domains

Microsoft Millions of legitimate servers that rely on dynamic domain name services from No-IP.com suffered outages on Monday after Microsoft seized 22 domain names it said were being abused in malware-related crimes against Windows users. Microsoft enforced a federal court order making the company the domain IP resolver for the No-IP domains. Microsoft said the objective of the seizure was to identify and reroute traffic associated with two malware families that abused No-IP services. Almost immediately, end-users, some of which were actively involved in Internet security, castigated the move as heavy handed, since there was no evidence No-IP officially sanctioned or actively facilitated the malware campaign, which went by the names Bladabindi (aka NJrat) and Jenxcus (aka NJw0rm). “By becoming the DNS authority for those free dynamic DNS domains, Microsoft is now effectively in a position of complete control and is now able to dictate their configuration,” Claudio Guarnieri, co-founder of Radically Open Security, wrote in an e-mail to Ars Technica. “Microsoft fundamentally swept away No-IP, which has seen parts of its own DNS infrastructure legally taken away.” Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Millions of dymanic DNS users suffer after Microsoft seizes No-IP domains

Steam reaches highest-ever concurrent user count at over 8 million

Aurich Lawson Over the weekend, Steam’s annual summer video game sale posted its final list of bargains, gathering the two-week sale’s most popular discounts for one last hurrah. Steam sales veterans, heeding the usual advice of “wait until the last day,” responded in kind by storming the service during the sale’s final 24 hours. On Steam’s official statistics page, which logs the past 48 hours of activity, the service confirmed just how big that last hurrah was, counting over 8 million simultaneous live users on Sunday . That’s a new peak for the service, which had crossed the 7 million concurrent mark this past December. Valve Software, operators of the Steam store, announced during January’s Steam Dev Days that the service had reached 75 million active users, which comes shy of the 186 million accounts we measured in April . A NeoGAF thread talking about the Steam numbers showed that they compare well to Xbox Live’s 48 million members (both Gold and otherwise) as of May 2013 and PSN’s 110 million members as of July 2013. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Steam reaches highest-ever concurrent user count at over 8 million

Verizon Wireless employee stole 900 phones, made $270,000 profit on eBay

A Verizon Wireless account executive who pleaded guilty to stealing more than 900 cell phones and selling them on eBay for a profit of $272,290 was sentenced this week to 27 months in prison. James Hopkins, 35, committed the fraud throughout most of 2009 while working as a business-to-business account executive at a Verizon Wireless branch office in Trevose, PA, according to a criminal complaint. He was charged with mail fraud and sentenced in US District Court in New Jersey, where Verizon is based. “From February through November 2009, Hopkins placed numerous orders for Verizon Wireless cellular telephones, handheld devices and accessories in the names of existing Verizon Wireless customers without their knowledge,” the US Attorney’s office in New Jersey wrote in an announcement. “After arranging for the merchandise to be shipped to the home of a relative in New Jersey, the defendant manipulated Verizon’s computer database to conceal the fraudulent orders and shipments. Hopkins received $328,517 worth of stolen Verizon Wireless merchandise, which he sold on eBay for a profit of $272,290.” That amounts to a profit of about $300 for each stolen phone. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Verizon Wireless employee stole 900 phones, made $270,000 profit on eBay

Burglar logs in to Facebook in victim’s house, forgets to sign off

Nicholas Wig. Dakota County Sheriff’s Office A 27-year-old Minnesota man appears to have violated at least two tenets of the digital age: Never log in to your Facebook account in a stranger’s house you’re burglarizing, and don’t forget to sign off if you do. Such egregious violations have led to the arrest of a South St. Paul man charged with burglary allegations. Nicholas Steven Wig is accused of stealing cash, credit cards, a watch, a checkbook, and other items. When the victim came home last week, he noticed a screen missing from a window and his house in disarray. He also discovered his home computer was open to a Facebook page of one “Nick Dub,” who turned out to be Wig, police said. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Burglar logs in to Facebook in victim’s house, forgets to sign off

Are those lost IRS e-mails “unbelievable”? Not really

Former IRS official Lois Lerner giving testimony to a Congressional committee in 2013. The IRS says it can’t find her e-mails from before 2011. During a hearing held yesterday by the House Oversight Committee, Committee Chairman Darrel Issa said that it was “unbelievable” that the IRS had lost the e-mails of former IRS official Lois Lerner. While Congressman Issa is not generally ignorant on tech issues, he’s clearly not familiar with just how believable such a screw-up is. The IRS claims that many of Lerner’s e-mails were lost when the hard drive on her desktop computer crashed in 2011. In a Monday night hearing, IRS Commissioner John Koskinen told Issa and the Oversight Committee that there was no way to recover these e-mails. “If you have a magical way for me to do that,” he told Issa, “I’d be happy to hear about it.” The IRS is not the only federal agency to lose e-mails over the past few years. In fact, despite efforts at many agencies to standardize and improve e-mail by moving to services like Google Apps for Government and Microsoft Office 365 Government, many agencies still run their e-mail like it’s 1999. It’s not just a technology issue—it’s an IT policy issue, a staffing issue, and a cultural issue within government, one that the federal government shares with many private corporations. Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Are those lost IRS e-mails “unbelievable”? Not really

Microsoft wants you to trade in your MacBook Air for a Surface Pro 3

Ready to kick your MacBook Air to the curb (and wonder how much exactly in in-store credit it’s worth)? Your friendly neighborhood Microsoft Store is ready to help. Peter Bright This weekend, Microsoft Stores launched a trade-in program to encourage sales of the new Surface Pro 3 , but the trade-in promotion named only a single device : the MacBook Air, at a value of “up to $650” toward any Surface Pro 3 purchase. At the lowest specification, that trade-in amount would let buyers walk out of a Microsoft Store with an Intel i3 Surface Pro 3 for as little as $150. Though Microsoft Stores maintain a trade-in program that accepts video games, consoles, Apple iDevices, and PC laptops, this is the first promotion from Microsoft Stores that has actively sought Apple laptops—or, in this case, laptop singular. Seeing as how Microsoft has attempted to position the Surface Pro 3 as the best of both tablet and laptop worlds, the capable, paper-thin MacBook Air is the obvious recipient of Microsoft’s promotional crosshairs. We called the flagship Microsoft Store in Seattle with trade-in value questions, and while the representative said that any Macbook Air could be traded in at stores in the United States and Canada, he insisted that Microsoft won’t break down the exact trade-in value of a given Macbook Air or any other Apple hardware (iPhones, iPads, etc.) without seeing the product in person. The response came even after we tried listing off our MacBook Air’s processor, hard drive, and other specs. This stays in line with Microsoft Store policy through their own website to not disclose trade-in values. Read on Ars Technica | Comments

At least 32,000 servers broadcast admin passwords in the clear, advisory warns

An alarming number of servers containing motherboards manufactured by Supermicro continue to expose administrator passwords despite the release of an update that patches the critical vulnerability, an advisory published Thursday warned. The threat resides in the baseboard management controller (BMC), a motherboard component that allows administrators to monitor the physical status of large fleets of servers, including their temperatures, disk and memory performance, and fan speeds. Unpatched BMCs in Supermicro motherboards contain a binary file that stores remote login passwords in clear text. Vulnerable systems can be detected by performing an Internet scan on port 49152. A recent query on the Shodan search engine indicated there are 31,964 machines still vulnerable, a number that may not include many virtual machines used in shared hosting environments. “This means at the point of this writing, there are 31,964 systems that have their passwords available on the open market,” wrote Zachary Wikholm, a senior security engineer with the Carinet Security Incident Response Team. “It gets a bit scarier when you review some of the password statistics. Out of those passwords, 3,296 are the default combination. Since I’m not comfortable providing too much password information, I will just say that there exists a subset of this data that either contains or just was ‘password.'” Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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At least 32,000 servers broadcast admin passwords in the clear, advisory warns

Tell a lie, remove the gear: How the NSA covers up when cable taps are found

Der Spiegel via Edward Snowden via NSA Sometimes, the spooks do get caught. German magazine Der Spiegel yesterday revealed a new slide (PDF) from the Edward Snowden document cache that offers a tantalizing glimpse of what it looks like when someone stumbles on an intelligence agency cable tap. The NSA’s Special Source Operations (SSO) branch isn’t in the business of computer hacking but of cable tapping; its logo shows an eagle flying above the globe and clutching a string of wires in its talons. These taps, each obscured with a codename, are often made deep within the network of telecom providers and often with the cooperation of key executives. But sometimes non-cleared people start raising questions about just what might be going on, as was the case with AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein, who revealed an NSA “secret room” in San Francisco . On March 14, 2013, an SSO weekly briefing included a note regarding such a discovery. The unit had been informed two days earlier that “the access point for WHARPDRIVE was discovered by commercial consortium personnel. Witting partner personnel have removed the evidence and a plausible cover story was provided. All collection has ceased.” Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Tell a lie, remove the gear: How the NSA covers up when cable taps are found

Hacker infects Synology storage devices, makes off with $620,000 in Dogecoin

One of the affected Synology devices. Synology A hacker generated digital coins worth more than $620,000 by hijacking a popular type of Internet-connected storage device from Synology, security researchers said. The incident, which was documented in a research report published Tuesday by Dell SecureWorks, is only the latest hack to steal other people’s computing resources to perform the computationally intense process of digital currency mining. The cryptographic operations behind the process often draw large amounts of power and produce lots of heat. People looking to acquire a large war chest of digital coins typically must pour large amounts of money and effort into the endeavor. One way malicious actors get by this requirement is by compromising large numbers of devices operated by other people. The devices then perform the work at the expense of the unsuspecting end users and pass on the proceeds to the attacker. According to researchers from SecureWorks Counter Threat Unit, the attackers exploited four separate vulnerabilities contained in the software of Synology network-attached storage boxes. The vulnerabilities were documented in September and fixed in February by Synology . By then, large numbers of people began complaining their Synology devices were running sluggishly and extremely hot . It turns out that at least some of them were running software that mined large sums of the Dogecoin cryptocurrency. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Hacker infects Synology storage devices, makes off with $620,000 in Dogecoin

Report: Seattle paid $17,500 to boost online reputation of city official

tdlucas5000 A newly-published document shows that Seattle’s publicly-owned electrical utility paid thousands of dollars to Brand.com to manage the online reputation of CEO Jorge Carrasco. The document , which was received and published Saturday by the Seattle Times after a public records request, shows that Brand.com charged City Light $5,000 in December 2013. As the contract states: Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Report: Seattle paid $17,500 to boost online reputation of city official