Tag: password

Whitehats recover, release keys to CryptoLocker ransomware

It must be one of these… Joseph No Whitehat hackers have struck back at the operators of the pernicious CryptoLocker ransom trojan that has held hundreds of thousands of hard drives hostage. Through a partnership that included researchers from FOX-IT and FireEye, researchers managed to recover the private encryption keys that CryptoLocker uses to lock victims’ personal computer files until they pay a $300 ransom. They also reverse engineered the binary code at the heart of the malicious program. The result: a website that allows victims to recover the key for their individual content. To use the free service, victims must upload one of the files encrypted by CryptoLocker along with the e-mail address where they want the secret key delivered. Both FOX-IT and FireEye are reputable security companies, but readers are nonetheless advised to upload only non-sensitive files that contain no personal information. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Whitehats recover, release keys to CryptoLocker ransomware

Groupon lost over $60 million in first half of 2014, stock tanks 15 percent

Groupon There was a reason that we wondered in early 2013 if Groupon would make it to 2014—the company is hemorrhaging cash, and the situation has just gotten a lot worse. According to the company’s latest earnings report published on Tuesday, the online deals site sustained a net loss of $22.8 million in the second quarter of 2014—approximately triple the level of losses the company had during the same period a year ago. During the first half of 2014, Groupon lost over $60.6 million, or over five times what it lost during the first half of 2013. From 2009 through 2013, Groupon has incurred total net losses of over $820 million . Unsurprisingly, the stock price took a hit today —as of this writing, Groupon has plummeted over 15 percent in after-hours trading, hovering just under $6 per share. By comparison, Groupon closed  at just over $26 per share after its first day as a publicly traded company back in November 2011. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Groupon lost over $60 million in first half of 2014, stock tanks 15 percent

Re/code: Apple’s next iPhone event happens on September 9

This iPhone 5S is likely to be superseded in September. Andrew Cunningham After a summer full of rumors and part leaks, Re/code reports that Apple is planning to hold its next iPhone event on Tuesday, September 9. Re/code co-founder Walt Mossberg has a long history with Apple and his prior publication AllThingsD correctly predicted the dates Apple’s iPhone and iPad events last year, so there’s a good chance this is the real thing. This year Apple is widely expected to release a redesigned “iPhone 6” with a larger screen. Reports have varied, but anonymous sources have told multiple publications that the company is planning a 4.7-inch phone to rival “normal” handsets from competitors, as well as a 5.5-inch version intended to compete with so-called “phablet” phones like Samsung’s Galaxy Note series. Last year’s top-end iPhone 5S and midrange iPhone 5C were both refinements of the iPhone 5 design introduced in 2012 . Apple also uses its iPhone events to announce final release dates for new iOS versions, which have for the past two years have come out on the second Wednesday after the iPhone unveiling. This means a final release of iOS 8 is likely on or near September 17, assuming Apple doesn’t change its plans. iOS 8 will refine the new design introduced in iOS 7 , allow iOS devices to work more closely with Macs running OS X Yosemite, and introduce a number of under-the-hood improvements including Extensions. Third-generation Apple TVs will receive an updated UI, as well. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Re/code: Apple’s next iPhone event happens on September 9

LinkedIn paying shorted employees $6 million in unpaid wages, damages

Professional-networking site LinkedIn is agreeing to pay nearly $3.35 million in unpaid overtime to 359 workers, in addition to $2.5 million in damages under a deal announced Monday with the US Department of Labor. The accord covers current and former employees at LinkedIn offices in California, Illinois, Nebraska, and New York. “This company has shown a great deal of integrity by fully cooperating with investigators and stepping up to the plate without hesitation to help make workers whole,” David Weil, administrator of the Wage and Hour Division, said in a statement. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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LinkedIn paying shorted employees $6 million in unpaid wages, damages

Bio-high-tech treatment for Ebola may have saved two US citizens

The Ebola virus consists of small but lethal filament of RNA containing only seven genes. CDC Today, CNN is reporting that the two US citizens who were flown back to the states after contracting Ebola virus were given an extremely experimental treatment, one that’s still undergoing animal testing. While the treatment involves antibodies, it’s not a vaccine and can work effectively even after an infection has started. The process that produced it is a testament to the impressive capabilities developed in the field of biotechnology. The Ebola virus, known for its horrific symptoms and high fatality rate, currently has no established treatment. Which means that health care workers who are fighting the disease, and thus at high risk for becoming infected themselves, can do little more than put themselves in isolation and try to compensate for the damage the virus causes. That was apparently the case for two Americans who contracted the virus while working in Liberia. In this case, however, both were apparently given an experimental treatment developed in part by a company called Mapp Biopharmaceutical. Complicating matters, Mapp licenses its developments to a company called LeafBio for production and distribution. But LeafBio has also licensed an Ebola treatment from a second company, called Defyrus, and plans on combining the two. It’s unclear whether the Americans received the original or combined therapy. In either case, both therapies were based on the same developmental process outlined below. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Bio-high-tech treatment for Ebola may have saved two US citizens

What we judge when we judge freemium, and the money we’ve spent on Hearthstone

BagoGames Few people know what to make of the Kim Kardashian: Hollywood mobile game. By reputation it’s boring, vapid, materialistic, and shallow—according to many serious gamers—and is deplorable not least because players can spend money to get ahead. The wails only grew louder when reports indicated that the game earned $1.6 million in its first five days and is on track to make $200 million in annual revenue , according to one analyst. While many gamers and gaming journalists struggled to figure out why anyone would spend money on a game made by and featuring a reality TV star, we aren’t totally in the dark. For one, casting shade on the subject matter is a value judgment of a certain set of interests and lifestyle. And on a meta level,  how people use their leisure time . Let he who has lived every moment deliberately immersed in deep consideration of the universe cast the first Angry Bird. Materialism in games probably does not cause materialism in the streets . For another, Kim K is actually pretty self-aware of its own materialism and glorification of social climbing and has a sense of irony about the world it gives players to try and thrive in. To wit, one of the things you can spend in-game money on is new body parts. Read 25 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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What we judge when we judge freemium, and the money we’ve spent on Hearthstone

Chip-based credit cards are a decade old; why doesn’t the US rely on them yet?

Ciaran McGuiggan Earlier this week, mobile payments company Square announced that it had developed a credit card reader that will verify purchases from an embedded chip on the card. Currently, US consumers primarily rely on swipe-and-sign credit cards, which give card details to a merchant through the magnetic stripe on the back. But because the swipe-and-sign system became overburdened with instances of fraud, MasterCard, Visa, and other financial groups decided in 2012 that they would transition their systems to a chip-based setup called EMV (eponymous for EuroPay, MasterCard, and Visa, the three primary developers of the standard) by October 2015. Square is hoping to capitalize on this transition by being one of the first companies out of the gate in the US to offer small and medium-sized business owners a smaller, less-expensive alternative to buying a whole new set of credit card terminals. The EMV standard works using a chip that’s embedded in a credit card, which effectively acts as a mini-computer. Instead of swiping quickly and having your card give its details to a merchant’s point of sale (POS) system, an EMV card creates a unique code for each transaction and (ideally) requires the consumer to enter a PIN associated with the card instead of relying on a signature. Because of this, EMV is often called chip-and-PIN. Making a purchase with an EMV card also requires the card to be present in the card reader throughout the transaction. Read 15 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Chip-based credit cards are a decade old; why doesn’t the US rely on them yet?

Apple’s multi-terabit, $100M CDN is live—with paid connection to Comcast

dariorug Apple’s long-rumored content delivery network (CDN) has gone live in the US and Europe, delivering traffic directly to Comcast and other Internet service providers thanks to paid interconnection deals, Frost & Sullivan analyst Dan Rayburn reported today . The CDN can deliver multiple terabits of data per second and will help Apple more efficiently distribute new releases of iOS and OS X. Apple is still using Akamai and Level 3 CDN services for iTunes and app downloads, “but over time, much of that traffic will be brought over to Apple’s CDN,” Rayburn wrote. “It’s too early to know how much traffic will come over and when, but Apple’s already started using their own CDN much faster than I expected. The pace of their build out and amount of money they are spending on infrastructure is incredible. Based on my calculations, Apple has already put in place multiple terabits per second of capacity and by the end of this year, will have invested well more than $100M in their CDN build out.” Apple has been working on its CDN for about a year. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Apple’s multi-terabit, $100M CDN is live—with paid connection to Comcast

This thumbdrive hacks computers. “BadUSB” exploit makes devices turn “evil”

Saurabh R. Patil When creators of the state-sponsored Stuxnet worm used a USB stick to infect air-gapped computers inside Iran’s heavily fortified Natanz nuclear facility , trust in the ubiquitous storage medium suffered a devastating blow. Now, white-hat hackers have devised a feat even more seminal—an exploit that transforms keyboards, Web cams, and other types of USB-connected devices into highly programmable attack platforms that can’t be detected by today’s defenses. Dubbed BadUSB, the hack reprograms embedded firmware to give USB devices new, covert capabilities. In a demonstration scheduled at next week’s Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, a USB drive, for instance, will take on the ability to act as a keyboard that surreptitiously types malicious commands into attached computers. A different drive will similarly be reprogrammed to act as a network card that causes connected computers to connect to malicious sites impersonating Google, Facebook or other trusted destinations. The presenters will demonstrate similar hacks that work against Android phones when attached to targeted computers. They say their technique will work on Web cams, keyboards, and most other types of USB-enabled devices. “Please don’t do anything evil” “If you put anything into your USB [slot], it extends a lot of trust,” Karsten Nohl, chief scientist at Security Research Labs in Berlin, told Ars. “Whatever it is, there could always be some code running in that device that runs maliciously. Every time anybody connects a USB device to your computer, you fully trust them with your computer. It’s the equivalent of [saying] ‘here’s my computer; I’m going to walk away for 10 minutes. Please don’t do anything evil.” Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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This thumbdrive hacks computers. “BadUSB” exploit makes devices turn “evil”

Modbook’s next project is the convertible MacBook Apple won’t make

The Modbook Pro X would be an expensive entry in a crowded niche. Modbook Inc. Before the iPad, people who wanted an Apple tablet could buy something called the ” Modbook ” from a company named Axiotron. For $2,279, the company would take a regular white plastic MacBook, take it apart, and reassemble it inside a purpose-built tablet case with a Wacom digitizer and stylus installed. After some financial trouble and the launch of an actual Apple tablet , Axiotron became Modbook Inc. , and the company launched the Modbook Pro , which did for the 13-inch MacBook Pro what the Modbook did for the standard Macbook. Today the company is ready to announce the third iteration of the Modbook, kind of. The Modbook Pro X takes the 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro (including the refreshed models introduced yesterday ), makes some modifications to its specs, and puts it into a tablet case. Like past Modbooks, the Modbook Pro X is designed to appeal to artists and other creative professionals who would like to draw directly on their tablet screens without having to use a separate drawing tablet. The catch? This project currently exists  only as a Kickstarter project , with no guarantee the product will see the light of day if it doesn’t hit its $150,000 funding goal. The Modbook as a tablet. Modbook Inc. The Modbook Pro X will preserve all of the original ports and the CPU, GPU, and screen specs of the 2013 Retina MacBook Pro, crammed into a black tablet of indeterminate thickness and weight. The screen will be covered by a digitizer that supports 2,048 different pressure levels, and the Modbook will come with software installed to take advantage of the digitizer hardware. Optional “keybars,” small rows of keys mounted to the back of the tablet, will provide keyboard hotkey shortcuts that users can press without interrupting whatever they’re sketching onscreen. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Modbook’s next project is the convertible MacBook Apple won’t make