Tag: fnself-program1

“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

Follow this link:
“Nemesis” malware hijacks PC’s boot process to gain stealth, persistence

Spike TV orders 10-episode series for Red Mars written by Babylon 5 creator

According to sources speaking to Variety , Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars has been green-lighted for a 10-episode TV adaptation on Spike TV. Each episode will be an hour long, and J. Michael Straczynski, creator and writer of Babylon 5 and co-creator of Sense8 will serve as Red Mars ’ writer, co-executive producer, and showrunner. Vince Gerardis, co-executive producer of Game of Thrones , will also serve as executive producer on Red Mars with Straczynski. Robinson will reportedly be an on-the-set consultant. The Red Mars project has been on Spike TV’s plate for some time , but the network only just decided to move full-speed ahead with it, according to Variety . The show will go into production this summer and premiere in January 2017. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Continued here:
Spike TV orders 10-episode series for Red Mars written by Babylon 5 creator

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

See the article here:
New diabetes cases finally on the decline

Apple’s A9X has a 12-core GPU and is made by TSMC

Enlarge / A die shot of the A9X. The ratio of GPU to CPU is becoming pretty insane. (credit: Chipworks via AnandTech ) Apple makes interesting chips for its mobile devices, but it doesn’t talk about them much aside from extremely high-level relative performance comparisons. That means it’s up to experts like the ones at Chipworks to open them up and figure it out, and they’ve partnered up with AnandTech to dig into the A9X in the iPad Pro. The most significant news is about the GPU, which is a 12-core Imagination Technologies PowerVR Series 7XT design. The company doesn’t generally offer a 12-core design, as shown in the chart below, but the architecture is designed to be easily scalable and it wouldn’t be the first time Apple had gotten something from a supplier that other companies couldn’t get. The standard A9 in the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus uses a 6-core version of the same GPU. Apple feeds that GPU with a 128-bit memory bus, something that it’s also included in other iPads to boost memory bandwidth and GPU performance. The Series 7XT lineup. The iPad Pro’s GPU falls somewhere in between the stock 8-cluster and 16-cluster designs. (credit: Imagination Technologies) Imagination’s chart for the Series 7XT GPU puts a hypothetical 12-core design in the same general performance neighborhood as an Nvidia GeForce GT 730M, a low-end discrete GPU that’s a bit slower than the stuff Apple is shipping in its high-end MacBook Pros. Our own graphics benchmarks place it a bit higher than that, but as some of you have pointed out , iOS may have a small advantage in some of these tests because of differences between the mobile OpenGL ES API in iOS and the standard OpenGL API used in OS X. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Read More:
Apple’s A9X has a 12-core GPU and is made by TSMC

The National Security Letter spy tool has been uncloaked, and it’s bad

It took 11 years to finally unveil what the FBI demands in a National Security Letter. How it evolved over the years is shown above. (credit: ACLU ) The National Security Letter (NSL) is a potent surveillance tool that allows the government to acquire a wide swath of private information—all without a warrant. Federal investigators issue tens of thousands of them each year to banks, ISPs, car dealers, insurance companies, doctors, and you name it. The letters don’t need a judge’s signature and come with a gag to the recipient, forbidding the disclosure of the NSL to the public or the target. Nicholas Merrill (credit: Wikipedia ) For the first time, as part of a First Amendment lawsuit, a federal judge ordered the release of what the FBI was seeking from a small ISP as part of an NSL. Among other things, the FBI was demanding a target’s complete Web browsing history, IP addresses of everyone a person has corresponded with, and records of all online purchases, according to a court document unveiled Monday. All that’s required is an agent’s signature denoting that the information is relevant to an investigation. “The FBI has interpreted its NSL authority to encompass the websites we read, the Web searches we conduct, the people we contact, and the places we go. This kind of data reveals the most intimate details of our lives, including our political activities, religious affiliations, private relationships, and even our private thoughts and beliefs,” said Nicholas Merrill, who was president of Calyx Internet Access in New York when he received the NSL targeting one of his customers in 2004. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Continued here:
The National Security Letter spy tool has been uncloaked, and it’s bad

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

See the article here:
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

Follow this link:
Iranian military spear-phish of State Department employees detected first by Facebook

Tesla Model X production starts in earnest, pricing revealed

(credit: Tesla) Several months ago we found out pricing for the fully loaded “Signature” edition Tesla Model X electric SUV. Now, we’ve got a better idea of what the cheapest Model X will set you back: $80,000 before any options and tax rebates or incentives. That’s for the 70D, which has all-wheel drive (a motor for each axle) and a 70kWh battery (pricing for the 90D and P90D haven’t been announced). That’s $5000 more than the equivalent Model S sedan , which hits 60mph a little quicker and has a slightly longer range than the SUV but not the same funky rear doors. The distinctive Falcon wing doors are Tesla’s approach to making an SUV with all the utility of a minivan; that was how Elon Musk described the design brief back in September. By opening up and out, they’re supposed to give better access to the rear seats while taking up less space than a traditional door. There are three different interior layouts. The base 70D is a five seater, but there’s also a six seat version (three rows of two) for an extra $3000 and seven seats are yours for $4500. Tesla released the pricing information for the 70D Model X at the same time it told customers with preorders that they can begin configuring their vehicles. Screenshots of the online configurator provided by Tesla to Ars state that Model X deliveries will begin in early 2016, starting with range-topping P90D orders. “Lesser” 90D Model Xs follow by mid-year, with 70D deliveries before 2017. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

View article:
Tesla Model X production starts in earnest, pricing revealed

FDA approves first GM food animal—Atlantic salmon

(credit: Artizone/Flickr ) After two decades of deliberation, the Food and Drug Administration has approved the first ever genetically engineered food animal, a fast-growing Atlantic Salmon called AquAdvantage salmon. According the agency, which announced the approval Thursday , the modified salmon are safe to eat, equally nutritious as other salmon, and should pose no threat to the environment. First created in 1989 and submitted to the agency for approval in 1995, the Atlantic salmon are modified to carry a growth hormone gene from Chinook salmon. That gene is further engineered to be under the control of a tiny bit of DNA, called a promoter, from the eel-like ocean pout fish. In general, DNA promoters are non-coding sequences that help control the expression level of a gene—how much protein product is synthesized from the gene. With the engineered promoter boosting hormone production, the modified salmon grow to market-size in about half the time of conventional Atlantic salmon. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

View original post here:
FDA approves first GM food animal—Atlantic salmon

Chicago issued $2.4 million in bogus traffic tickets from speed cameras

The Chicago Tribune reported Wednesday as part of an exhaustive investigation that as many as 110,000 “questionable” speeding tickets totalling $2.4 million have been issued in the past two years in Chicago as part of a speed-camera program designed to keep kids safe near parks and schools. …City Hall has systematically ticketed drivers near schools without the legally required evidence of a schoolchild in sight. A Tribune random-sample analysis puts the number of those questionable tickets at about 110,000. And while it was pitched by the mayor as a way to protect youngsters walking near parks and schools, the most prolific cameras in the 2-year-old “Children’s Safety Zone” initiative can be found along major roadways, where crash data show child pedestrians are least likely to be struck by speeders. The lengthy  report is worth a read. Among other things, the report found that Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s speed camera program issued 22,000 tickets for speeding near parks and another 11,000 tickets near parks that were closed for the night. What’s more, another 28,000 citations “were issued at cameras plagued by problems with warning signs that did not meet the minimum legal requirements.” And at least 62,000 tickets were given during the summer “when school activity is so limited that drivers are left to guess whether school is in session or not.” Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Read the original:
Chicago issued $2.4 million in bogus traffic tickets from speed cameras