management – Page 21 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Russian Hackers Stole Millions From Banks, ATMs

An anonymous reader writes Tens of millions of dollars, credit cards and intellectual property stolen by a new group of cyber criminals. Group-IB and Fox-IT, in a joint research effort, released a report about the Anunak hackers group. This group has been involved in targeted attacks and espionage since 2013. Anunak targets banks and payments systems in Russia and CIS countries. In Europe, USA and Latin America criminals were mainly focusing on retail networks as well as mass media resources. Anunak is unique in the fact that it aims to target banks and e-payment systems. The goal is to get into bank networks and gain access to secured payment systems. As a result, the money is stolen not from the customers, but from the bank itself. If they manage to infect governmental networks, they use the infrastructure for espionage. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Russian Hackers Stole Millions From Banks, ATMs

Samsung Announces Production of 20nm Mobile LPDDR4, Faster Than Desktop DDR4

MojoKid writes Samsung announced today that it has begun volume production of its 8Gb LPDDR4 memory chips, with expected commercial shipments in 2015. The announcement is noteworthy for a number of reasons. First, one of the most important characteristics of a modern mobile device is its battery life, and moving to a new memory standard should significantly reduce the memory subsystem’s power consumption. Second, however, there’s the clock speed. Samsung is claiming that its LPDDR4 will hit 3.2GHz, and while bus widths on mobile parts are significantly smaller than the 64-bit channels that desktops use, the higher clock speed per chip will help close that gap. In fact, multiple vendors have predicted that LPDDR4 clock speeds will actually outpace standard DDR4, with a higher amount of total bandwidth potentially delivered to tablets and smartphones than conventional PCs will see. In addition, the power savings are expected to be substantial. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Samsung Announces Production of 20nm Mobile LPDDR4, Faster Than Desktop DDR4

Manufacturer’s Backdoor Found On Popular Chinese Android Smartphone

Trailrunner7 writes that researchers at Palo Alto Networks have found a backdoor in Android devices sold by Coolpad. “A popular Android smartphone sold primarily in China and Taiwan but also available worldwide, contains a backdoor from the manufacturer that is being used to push pop-up advertisements and install apps without users’ consent. The Coolpad devices, however, are ripe for much more malicious abuse, researchers at Palo Alto Networks said today, especially after the discovery of a vulnerability in the backend management interface that exposed the backdoor’s control system. Ryan Olson, intelligence director at Palo Alto, said the CoolReaper backdoor not only connects to a number of command and control servers, but is also capable of downloading, installing and activating any Android application without the user’s permission. It also sends phony over-the-air updates to devices that instead install applications without notifying the user. The backdoor can also be used to dial phone numbers, send SMS and MMS messages, and upload device and usage information to Coolpad.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Manufacturer’s Backdoor Found On Popular Chinese Android Smartphone

Over 9,000 PCs In Australia Infected By TorrentLocker Ransomware

First time accepted submitter River Tam writes Cybercriminals behind the TorrenLocker malware may have earned as much as $585, 000 over several months from 39, 000 PC infections worldwide, of which over 9, 000 were from Australia. If you’re a Windows user in Australia who’s had their files encrypted by hackers after visiting a bogus Australia Post website, chances are you were infected by TorrentLocker and may have contributed to the tens of thousands of dollars likely to have come from Australia due to this digital shakedown racket. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sony Leaks Reveal Hollywood Is Trying To Break DNS

schwit1 sends this report from The Verge: Most anti-piracy tools take one of two paths: they either target the server that’s sharing the files (pulling videos off YouTube or taking down sites like The Pirate Bay) or they make it harder to find (delisting offshore sites that share infringing content). But leaked documents reveal a frightening line of attack that’s currently being considered by the MPAA: What if you simply erased any record that the site was there in the first place? To do that, the MPAA’s lawyers would target the Domain Name System that directs traffic across the internet. The tactic was first proposed as part of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in 2011, but three years after the law failed in Congress, the MPAA has been looking for legal justification for the practice in existing law and working with ISPs like Comcast to examine how a system might work technically. If a takedown notice could blacklist a site from every available DNS provider, the URL would be effectively erased from the internet. No one’s ever tried to issue a takedown notice like that, but this latest memo suggests the MPAA is looking into it as a potentially powerful new tool in the fight against piracy. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Sony Leaks Reveal Hollywood Is Trying To Break DNS

A Domain Registrar Is Starting a Fiber ISP To Compete With Comcast

Jason Koebler writes: Tucows Inc., an internet company that’s been around since the early 90s — it’s generally known for being in the shareware business and for registering and selling premium domain names — announced that it’s becoming an internet service provider. Tucows will offer fiber internet to customers in Charlottesville, Virginia — which is served by Comcast and CenturyLink — in early 2015 and eventually wants to expand to other markets all over the country. “Everyone who has built a well-run gigabit network has had demand exceeding their expectations, ” Elliot Noss, Tucows’ CEO said. “We think there’s space in the market for businesses like us and smaller.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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A Domain Registrar Is Starting a Fiber ISP To Compete With Comcast

Telepresence Store Staffed Remotely Using Robots

Molly McHugh writes: What better way to sell telepresence technologies than having the store employees themselves appear via robot? At the Beam store in Palo Alto, Calif., no human salespeople physically appear, only robots. Users appear on the 17-inch display and control the robot via keyboard, mouse, or Xbox controller. Beam can roll as fast as two miles per hour. People behind the screen control the Beam through their computers, and two wide-angle cameras attached to the top of the bot lets them see everything happening around the store. It’s a bit eerie, watching floating heads tool around and talk to people in this video, and the customers’ react to the Beam with confusion and wonder. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Waze Causing Anger Among LA Residents

KindMind writes According to AP, Waze has caused trouble for LA residents by redirecting traffic from Interstate 405 to neighborhood side streets paralleling the interstate. From the article: “When the people whose houses hug the narrow warren of streets paralleling the busiest urban freeway in America began to see bumper-to-bumper traffic crawling by their homes a year or so ago, they were baffled. When word spread that the explosively popular new smartphone app Waze was sending many of those cars through their neighborhood in a quest to shave five minutes off a daily rush-hour commute, they were angry and ready to fight back. They would outsmart the app, some said, by using it to report phony car crashes and traffic jams on their streets that would keep the shortcut-seekers away. Months later, the cars are still there, and the people are still mad.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Seagate Bulks Up With New 8 Terabyte ‘Archive’ Hard Drive

MojoKid writes Seagate’s just-announced a new ‘Archive’ HDD series, one that offers densities of 5TB, 6TB, and 8TB. That’s right, 8 Terabytes of storage on a single drive and for only $260 at that. Back in 2007, Seagate was one of the first to release a hard drive based on perpendicular magnetic recording, a technology that was required to help us break past the roadblock of achieving more than 250GB per platter. Since then, PMR has evolved to allow the release of drives as large as 10TB, but to go beyond that, something new was needed. That “something new” is shingled magnetic recording. As its name suggests, SMR aligns drive tracks in a singled pattern, much like shingles on a roof. With this design, Seagate is able to cram much more storage into the same physical area. It should be noted that Seagate isn’t the first out the door with an 8TB model, however, as HGST released one earlier this year. In lieu of a design like SMR, HGST decided to go the helium route, allowing it to pack more platters into a drive. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Possible Dark Matter Signal Spotted

TaleSlinger sends this news from Space.com: Astronomers may finally have detected a signal of dark matter, the mysterious and elusive stuff thought to make up most of the material universe. While poring over data collected by the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton spacecraft, a team of researchers spotted an odd spike in X-ray emissions coming from two different celestial objects — the Andromeda galaxy and the Perseus galaxy cluster. “The signal’s distribution within the galaxy corresponds exactly to what we were expecting with dark matter — that is, concentrated and intense in the center of objects and weaker and diffuse on the edges, ” [assuming that dark matter consists of sterile neutrinos] study co-author Oleg Ruchayskiy, of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, said in a statement. “With the goal of verifying our findings, we then looked at data from our own galaxy, the Milky Way, and made the same observations, ” added lead author Alexey Boyarsky, of EPFL and Leiden University in the Netherlands. The decay of sterile neutrinos is thought to produce X-rays, so the research team suspects these may be the dark matter particles responsible for the mysterious signal coming from Andromeda and the Perseus cluster.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Possible Dark Matter Signal Spotted