password – Page 10 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

“Stains of deceitfulness”: Inside the US government’s war on tech support scammers

Aurich Lawson / PCCare247 Sitting in front of her PC, the phone in her hand connected to a tech support company half a world away, Sheryl Novick was about to get scammed. The company she had reached, PCCare247, was based in India but had built a lucrative business advertising over the Internet to Americans, encouraging them to call for tech support. After glimpsing something odd on her computer, Novick did so. “I saw some sort of pop-up and I don’t know if there’s a problem,” she told a PCCare247 tech named Yakeen. He offered to check the “management part” of her computer for possible problems. Read 61 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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“Stains of deceitfulness”: Inside the US government’s war on tech support scammers

Shocker: Cable TV prices went up four times the rate of inflation

The Federal Communications Commission today issued a report on average cable TV prices in the US , and to the surprise of no one, it turns out they went up a lot. “Basic cable service prices increased by 6.5 percent [to $22.63] for the 12 months ending January 1, 2013. Expanded basic cable prices increased by 5.1 percent [to $64.41] for those 12 months, and at a compound average annual rate of 6.1 percent over the 18-year period from 1995-2013,” the FCC said. The basic cable increase was four times the rate of inflation as measured by the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for the 12-month period, and substantially above inflation for the 1995-2013 measurement. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Shocker: Cable TV prices went up four times the rate of inflation

Former Subway sandwich franchisee cops to $40,000 gift-card hack scheme

A former Subway sandwich shop franchisee pled guilty to taking part in a scheme to hack point-of-sale terminals for at least 13 stores and obtaining gift cards worth $40,000. Shahin Abdollahi, who also ran a business that sold and maintained point-of-sale terminals, sold the computerized checkout registers to the Subway shops that were illegally accessed, according to federal prosecutors in Massachusetts. He set up the terminals with software from LogMeIn , which allows people to remotely log in to PCs over the Internet. Abdollahi and other conspirators then used the software to repeatedly access the Subway terminals without authorization, usually early in the morning, when the restaurants were closed. Once logged in, they loaded gift cards with credit totaling $40,000. Co-conspirator Jeffrey Wilkinson, 37, of Rialto, California, would then advertise the cards for sale on eBay and Craigslist and hand deliver them to buyers. On Wednesday, Abdollahi 46, of Lake Elsinore, California, pled guilty in federal court in Massachusetts to one count of conspiracy to commit computer intrusion and wire fraud and one count of wire fraud. He is scheduled to be sentenced on for August 6. Wilkinson, 37, of Rialto, California, pled guilty in February and is scheduled to be sentenced on May 28. It’s not the first time Subway point-of-sale terminals have been illegally accessed by crooks for purposes of skimming the till. In 2012, two men pled guilty to participating in an international conspiracy that hacked into credit-card payment terminals at more than 150 Subway franchises and racked up more than $10 million in losses. Read on Ars Technica | Comments

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Former Subway sandwich franchisee cops to $40,000 gift-card hack scheme

Microsoft sticking to its guns so far, leaving XP unpatched and exploited

Last month’s Patch Tuesday was meant to bring with it the final ever updates for Windows XP. However, Microsoft went ahead and released another patch for the ancient operating system to fix a flaw that was being exploited in the wild. This month’s Patch Tuesday looks like it’s going to play out a little differently. Microsoft released a critical update for Internet Explorer addressing a flaw in every version from 6 to 11. Although the company says that it’s aware of in-the-wild exploitations of the flaw, this time it says it won’t fix Windows XP. Promise . Of course, last month’s end of support should have meant the same thing, and for no particularly good reason, it didn’t. Microsoft cited the “proximity” of the previous flaw to the end of support as its rationale for issuing the update, but this month’s bugs seem barely less proximal. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Microsoft sticking to its guns so far, leaving XP unpatched and exploited

New planet-hunting hardware needs just a minute to image an exoplanet

PNAS Most of the exoplanets we’ve detected have been spotted during transits, when they pass between their host star and Earth. Almost all the others have been inferred based on the fact that they gravitationally tug at their host star as they orbit around it. Very few exoplanets have been imaged directly, but that may be about to change. Earlier this week, scientists revealed the first images taken with a new instrument, the Gemini Planet Hunter, which has been installed on the (you guessed it) Gemini South telescope located in the Chilean Andes. The new hardware is so efficient that a known exoplanet that once took over an hour and considerable post-processing to image was apparent in a one-minute exposure, with no processing needed. The twin Gemini telescopes (Gemini North is in Hawaii to image the northern sky) are already some of the most advanced hardware on the planet, featuring adaptive optics that correct the gaze of an eight-meter mirror. But directly imaging a planet is a distinct challenge due to the relative brightness of the planet relative to the host star. In terms of our own Solar System, Jupiter would appear 10 9 times fainter than the Sun when imaged at a distance. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Bringing Windows 8-style multitasking to iPads isn’t as simple as it seems

“I just need to write about this Murloc rush deck. For work.” Aurich Lawson Apple is planning to add a split-screen multitasking mode to its iPads in iOS 8, according to “sources with knowledge of the enhancement in development” speaking to 9to5Mac . The feature will supposedly allow two applications to run side-by-side while the tablet is in landscape mode, not unlike the similar Snap feature in Windows 8.1 or the multi-window mode supported on many of Samsung’s phones and tablets . iPad applications have always used the tablet’s entire screen, which keeps things simple but can feel restrictive for heavy multitaskers. Though 9to5Mac’s sources have been accurate in the past, as with all rumors, this report should be taken with a continuous stream of salt until you actually see Apple get up on stage and announce it. If it’s true, this new display mode implies big changes to the way that iPad apps are designed and the way that they interact with each other, and we wanted to take a look at the hurdles in iOS and the iPad hardware that would have to be dealt with to make this feature a reality. We’ll also be making some informed guesses about how Apple might jump over them. Resolution independence Read 17 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Bringing Windows 8-style multitasking to iPads isn’t as simple as it seems

Encrypted or not, Skype communications prove “vital” to NSA surveillance

Last year, Ars documented how Skype encryption posed little challenge to Microsoft abuse filters that scanned instant messages for potentially abusive Web links. Within hours of newly created, never-before-visited URLs being transmitted over the service, the scanners were able to pluck them out of a cryptographically protected stream and test if they were malicious. Now comes word that the National Security Agency is also able to work around Skype crypto—so much so that analysts have deemed the Microsoft-owned service “vital” to a key surveillance regimen known as PRISM . “PRISM has a new collection capability: Skype stored communications,” a previously confidential NSA memo from 2013 declared. “Skype stored communications will contain unique data which is not collected via normal real-time surveillance collection.” The data includes buddy lists, credit card information, call records, user account data, and “other material” that is of value to the NSA’s special source operations. The memo, which was leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and released Tuesday by Glenn Greenwald to coincide with the publication of his book No Place to Hide , said the FBI’s Electronic Communications Surveillance Unit had approved “over 30 selectors to be sent to Skype for collection.” Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Encrypted or not, Skype communications prove “vital” to NSA surveillance

Teen arrested for 30 “swatting” attacks against schools, security reporter

Police in the Canadian city of Ottawa said they arrested a 16-year-old male charged with carrying out so-called “swatting” attacks that targeted 30 North American targets. One of the targets included KrebsOnSecurity reporter Brian Krebs , who was previously on the receiving end of a vicious swatting attack that resulted in a team of police pointing guns at him as he opened the front door of his Virginia home. Krebs said the recent attacks were preceded by taunts from someone controlling the Twitter handle @ProbablyOnion . The last tweet made from that account, made on Thursday, stated: “Still awaiting for the horsies to bash down my door.” The individual didn’t have long to wait. That same day, the 16-year-old was arrested, according to press releases here and here issued by the Ottawa Police Service and the FBI, respectively. Swatting refers to the act of knowingly giving authorities false information about bomb threats, the taking of hostages, or similar threats in progress with the goal of tricking heavily armed police to raid the location of an innocent person or group. According to authorities, the unnamed 16-year-old allegedly carried out swatting attacks on 30 targets, including schools in North America that responded with lockdowns or evacuations. The minor was charged with 60 criminal offenses, including public mischief, mischief to property, uttering death threats, and conveying false info with intent to alarm. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Teen arrested for 30 “swatting” attacks against schools, security reporter

YouTube shuts down public RSS feeds of user subscriptions

If you’re a news junky, you probably use an RSS reader like Feed.ly to keep up with stuff on the Web. One of the nicest ways to consume YouTube subscriptions was to use an RSS feed of new videos, allowing them to show up just like news articles do. You might not have noticed yet, but Google quietly shut down this feature a few days ago. The RSS feed, which used to be http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/base/users/[username]/newsubscriptionvideos, now throws out a “403 Forbidden” error. Previously, the URL would provide a publicly accessible feed of new subscriptions from any YouTube account, provided users didn’t choose to turn off public subscription retrieval. The feed was part of the YouTube Data API v2, which was deprecated in March of this year. The replacement—predictably named YouTube Data API v3—doesn’t offer a comparable data stream. Bug reports filed for this regression as early as January 2013 have gone unanswered, save for a single response in January 2014 (yes, a year later) saying, “Patch is in the works, however we can’t comment on the expected date.” Now it’s five months later, the feature is gone, and there’s no solution in sight. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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YouTube shuts down public RSS feeds of user subscriptions

Microsoft boosts cloud security, network performance, compute power, and more

At TechEd in Houston today, Microsoft announced a wide range of updates to its Azure cloud platform. As has become customary for Azure updates, the new features announced today include a mix of previews of brand-new capabilities, and general availability releases of features previously only in preview. In the general availability bucket are a set of new networking options for connectivity to Azure. Currently, Azure users connect to Azure through a mix of public Internet addresses and private VPNs, with all traffic going over the Internet. The new ExpressRoute capability provides a third option: direct private connections to Azure, either through exchange providers, or by connecting Azure to existing corporate WANs. ExpressRoute will be offered with a 99.9 percent SLA and four bandwidth tiers: 200Mbps, 500Mbps, 1Gbps, and 10Gbps. Though now generally available, the connectivity is currently limited to connections via two US sites—Silicon Valley and Washington, DC—and London. Microsoft intends to make it available in 13 further locations by the end of the year. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Microsoft boosts cloud security, network performance, compute power, and more