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Level 3 claims six ISPs dropping packets every day over money disputes

Network operator Level 3, which has asked the FCC to protect it from ” arbitrary access charges ” that ISPs want in exchange for accepting Internet traffic, today claimed that six consumer broadband providers have allowed a state of “permanent congestion” by refusing to upgrade peering connections for the past year. Level 3 and Cogent, another network operator, have been involved in disputes with ISPs over whether they should pay for the right to send them traffic. ISPs have demanded payment in exchange for accepting streaming video and other data that is passed from the network providers to ISPs and eventually to consumers. When the interconnections aren’t upgraded, it can lead to congestion and dropped packets, as we wrote previously regarding a dispute between  Cogent and Verizon . In a blog post today , Level 3 VP Mark Taylor wrote: Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Level 3 claims six ISPs dropping packets every day over money disputes

Infecting DVRs with Bitcoin-mining malware even easier than you suspected

The dialog that appears when users want to manually change the default password on their EPCOM Hikvision S04 DVR. Sans Institute It took just one day for a low-end, Internet-connected digital video recorder to become infected with malware that surreptitiously mined Bitcoins on behalf of the quick-moving attackers. The feat, documented in a blog post published Monday by researchers at the security-training outfit Sans Institute, was all the more impressive because the DVR contained no interface for downloading software from the Internet. The lack of a Wget , ftp, or kermit application posed little challenge for the attackers. To work around the limitation, the miscreants used a series of Unix commands that effectively uploaded and executed a Wget package and then used it to retrieve the Bitcoin miner from an Internet-connected server. Monday’s observations from Sans CTO Johannes Ullrich are part of an ongoing series showing the increasing vulnerability of Internet-connected appliances to malware attacks. In this case, he bought an EPCOM Hikvision S04 DVR off eBay, put it into what he believes was its factory new condition, and connected it to a laboratory “honeypot” where it was susceptible to online attackers. In the first day, it was probed by 13 different IP addresses, six of which were able to log into it using the default username and password combination of “root” and “12345.” Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Infecting DVRs with Bitcoin-mining malware even easier than you suspected

Fitbit designer calls Project Ara the “IKEA chair” of smartphones

Magnets, how do they work? Google’s eventual, modular Project Ara smartphone will answer that question and more once its first “millions of units” ship in 2015’s first half. Project Ara To some extent, Gadi Amit, the tech-design guru who owns New Deal Design and helms the team behind devices like Fitbit, is letting go. His latest project forced him to. It’s called Project Ara , a smartphone concept that began as a Motorola product before Google bought the company. Project Ara strays from Amit’s string of simple, elegant, self-contained products. This phone is not like a fitness band or a more efficient camera; it doesn’t solve a single, immediate goal and then step out of the way. Rather, Project Ara demands experimentation and customization, forcing everyone outside of the Project Ara team to become the phone’s designers. In Amit’s eyes, especially in the modern phone era, that has become the point. The mission, even. Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Fitbit designer calls Project Ara the “IKEA chair” of smartphones

High School senior charged with hacking report-card system

A high school senior in Miami has been arrested on charges claiming he illegally accessed his school’s online report card system and changed grades for him and at least four other students, according to a published report. Jose Bautista, 18, appeared in court Friday, according to WFOR . He reportedly faces charges of intellectual property offense, modifying programs, and an offense against computer users. The student allegedly approached fellow students and asked if they wanted him to change their grades. The principal of Dr. Michael M. Krop Senior High School, the school Bautista attended, said the student gave a written confession detailing the hacking. Bautista’s bond was set at $20,000. He is under house arrest with a GPS monitor. It’s unclear if he will be allowed to graduate or if the other students involved will face any punishment. Read on Ars Technica | Comments

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High School senior charged with hacking report-card system

Maryland police to live-tweet prostitution sting

Elvert Barnes/Flickr Maryland’s Prince George’s Police Department (PGPD), which covers part of the Washington, DC metropolitan area, announced on various social media platforms that it will be live-tweeting a prostitution sting operation “sometime next week.” What could possibly go wrong? Despite a headline that reads as if it were written by The Onion —or perhaps its latest viral media parody spinoff Clickhole —the PGPD explains that its decision to employ this “unprecedented social media tactic” stems from the desire to shame prostitutes and others involved in “the oldest profession” and to let them know that “this type of criminal behavior is not welcome in Prince George’s County.” According to information provided on their Blogger, Twitter, and Facebook accounts, the PGPD will be documenting the planned takedown with frequent updates during the arrests, tweeting photos and arrestee information. The planned takedown in Maryland will target johns, not prostitutes themselves, and will be set up using online ads, according to the department. The PGPD elaborated: Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Maryland police to live-tweet prostitution sting

Cox plans gigabit Internet for residential customers this year

Cox Communications President Pat Esser said the cable company will roll out gigabit broadband to residential customers this year. During an interview with Bloomberg yesterday , Esser said: Delivering gigabit speeds to business service customers has always been a high priority to us, and for years we’ve delivered gigabit broadband to commercial customers across the country. We’re working on our roadmap now around the residential side of the business to bring gigabit speeds to customers this year. I’m talking about plans over time for all of our customers in all of our markets having residential gigabit broadband speeds available to them, and we’re excited about it. Over the next two to three weeks we’ll be announcing which markets we’re starting in. Esser didn’t mention whether this would be a fiber-to-the-home service, but at another point he noted, “We have this very robust network, fiber very deep in the network.” Cox offers fiber-to-the-premises for business customers needing 1Gbps or 10Gbps throughput. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Cox plans gigabit Internet for residential customers this year

NASA decides on crowdsourced Tron look for Mars Z-2 spacesuit

NASA The winning Z-2 suit design, “Technology,” standing triumphantly on a 3D-rendered martian rocky outcropping. 14 more images in gallery NASA announced today that it has  finalized the look for its new Mars-bound Z-2 space suit. The design was selected by the public in a vote, and the winning design was one of three showcased by the agency . The new suit is the latest in NASA’s Z-series of suits. These are a far cry from the simple pressure suits worn by the Mercury astronauts in the 1950s—today’s suits aren’t so much suits as person-shaped spaceships. The Z-series suits are being designed to function both in space and also on the ground on other worlds, most notably the moon and Mars. The major design focuses of the Z-series, and the Z-2 in particular, are mobility and ease of use. Since the earliest days of space travel, suited astronauts needed to cope with the tremendous physical burden of working inside what is essentially a rigid pressurized balloon; an air-filled space suit resists bending, and multi-hour spacewalks can be exhausting. Future suits like the Z-series try to help out their occupants with new materials and clever joint designs, not to mention by allowing astronauts to vary their pressurization level. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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NASA decides on crowdsourced Tron look for Mars Z-2 spacesuit

Zero-day Flash bug under active attack in Windows threatens OS X, Linux too

A fragment of the shellcode exploiting a critical vulnerability in Adobe Flash. Kaspersky Lab A day after reports that attackers are exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser , researchers warned of a separate active campaign that was targeting a critical vulnerability in fully patched versions of Adobe’s ubiquitous Flash media player. The attacks were hosted on the Syrian Ministry of Justice website at hxxp://jpic.gov.sy and were detected on seven computers located in Syria, leading to theories that the campaign targeted dissidents complaining about the government of President Bashar al-Assad, according to a blog post published Monday by researchers from antivirus provider Kaspersky Lab. The attacks exploited a previously unknown vulnerability in Flash when people used the Firefox browser to access a booby-trapped page. The attackers appear to be unrelated to those reported on Sunday who exploited a critical security bug in Internet Explorer, a Kaspersky representative told Ars. While the exploit Kaspersky observed attacked only computers running Microsoft Windows, the underlying flaw, which is formally categorized as CVE-2014-1776  and resides in a Flash component known as the Pixel Bender, is present in the Adobe application built for OS X and Linux machines as well. Adobe has updated all three versions to plug the hole. Because security holes frequently become much more widely exploited in the hours or days after they are disclosed, people on all three platforms should update as soon as possible . People using IE 10 and 11 on Windowws 8 will receive the update automatically, as will users of Google’s Chrome browser. It can sometimes take hours for the automatic updates to arrive. Those who are truly cautious should consider manually installing them. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Zero-day Flash bug under active attack in Windows threatens OS X, Linux too

Netflix is paying Verizon for network connection to speed up video

Netflix today confirmed that it reached an interconnection agreement with Verizon, similar to the one it recently struck with Comcast. “We have reached an interconnect arrangement with Verizon that we hope will improve performance for our joint customers over the coming months,” Netflix spokesperson Joris Evers told Ars. “It is a paid interconnect agreement.”Word of the deal first leaked on Twitter when analyst Walter Piecyk wrote , “Verizon CEO [Lowell McAdam] confirms they have signed direct connection deal with Netflix like Comcast’s.” When contacted by Ars, Piecyk said that “McAdam confirmed a deal with Netflix in answer to our question at a group investor meeting [today]. No further details were provided on the financial terms.” Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Netflix is paying Verizon for network connection to speed up video

Bank robbers use KVM switch and 3G router to steal money

The networked KVM switch and 3G router used to rob a Barclays Bank branch remotely. Metropolitan Police, London Nine members of a London-based gang have been convicted  and three others are scheduled for sentencing in June for a series of electronic bank robberies. Using social engineering to install a remote-controlled keyboard-video-mouse (KVM) switch on bank PCs, the gang managed to transfer millions to outside accounts in two separate jobs in April and July of 2013. They were caught attempting to rob a third bank in September. Dean Outram, 32, entered all three banks claiming to be from a tech support contractor and saying he was there to repair computers. At each bank branch robbed, Outram installed a KVM switch and a 3G wireless router . From a “control center” in central London, others then used the KVM switches to gain access to the PCs of bank employees, remotely logging keystrokes and monitoring screen activity to get the information necessary to transfer funds from customers’ accounts to accounts controlled by the group. In the first attempt, the group managed to make 128 fund transfers totaling £1.3 million (about $2 million) in one day from a branch of Barclays Bank. The bank detected the fraud the same day and recovered about £600,000 ($1 million) of the funds before the gang drained the accounts. In its second attempt at another Barclays branch, the group was able to make off with £90,000 (about $150,000). Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Bank robbers use KVM switch and 3G router to steal money