password – Page 7 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Goldman Sachs demands Google unsend one of its e-mails

Goldman Sachs has demanded a court order to get Google to unsend an e-mail that the bank sent in error, according to Reuters’ report Wednesday. The e-mail contained “highly confidential” information addressed to the wrong account, a mistake on Goldman Sachs’ part that Google hasn’t yet been tempted to rectify. Goldman Sachs did not specify to Reuters how many clients were affected in the situation, which occurred on June 23. Reportedly, the mistake happened while a Goldman Sachs contractor was testing internal changes made to Goldman Sachs’ system to meet new requirements from the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. The contractor prepared a report with sensitive client information, including details on brokerage accounts, and e-mailed it to a gmail.com address, rather than the gs.com one she intended. Reuters says that it tried to “retrieve the report” and contact the owner of the Gmail account without success. Google told Goldman Sachs on June 26 that it couldn’t reach through Gmail and delete the e-mail without a court order. Goldman Sahcs filed with the New York Supreme Court, requesting “emergency relief” to both avoid a privacy violation and “avoid the risk of unnecessary reputational damage to Goldman Sachs.” Read on Ars Technica | Comments

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Goldman Sachs demands Google unsend one of its e-mails

The Witcher coming to iOS, Android, WP8 as a free-to-play MOBA game

For a video game, the jump from “series” to “franchise” can have its seriously awkward moments. At what point does it make sense for a beloved game character to show up in different genres, like puzzle, sports, or kart-racing games? It’s a question worth posing to the folks at Polish design studio CD Projekt Red, who today publicly unveiled the first major spin-off for the company’s plot- and morals-loaded RPG series The Witcher . Thankfully, The Witcher: Battle Arena seems more logical for the series than, say, Dr. Geralt of Rivia’s Mean Bean Machine , as the game will pit the series’ heroes and villains against each other in three-on-three “MOBA”-styled combat by the end of this year. The game’s unveiling didn’t come with a grand pronouncement of new twists on the genre; rather, CD Projekt Red appeared to justify the game’s existence on the fact that quality MOBA games simply don’t exist on smartphones and tablets. “I dare you to name three MOBA games on mobile devices,” Tadek Zielinski said in a Eurogamer report , adding, “We don’t want to fight with League of Legends or Dota . We are a humble company. It wouldn’t be wise to go against guys who are working on it for such a long time.” Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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The Witcher coming to iOS, Android, WP8 as a free-to-play MOBA game

Steam reaches highest-ever concurrent user count at over 8 million

Aurich Lawson Over the weekend, Steam’s annual summer video game sale posted its final list of bargains, gathering the two-week sale’s most popular discounts for one last hurrah. Steam sales veterans, heeding the usual advice of “wait until the last day,” responded in kind by storming the service during the sale’s final 24 hours. On Steam’s official statistics page, which logs the past 48 hours of activity, the service confirmed just how big that last hurrah was, counting over 8 million simultaneous live users on Sunday . That’s a new peak for the service, which had crossed the 7 million concurrent mark this past December. Valve Software, operators of the Steam store, announced during January’s Steam Dev Days that the service had reached 75 million active users, which comes shy of the 186 million accounts we measured in April . A NeoGAF thread talking about the Steam numbers showed that they compare well to Xbox Live’s 48 million members (both Gold and otherwise) as of May 2013 and PSN’s 110 million members as of July 2013. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Steam reaches highest-ever concurrent user count at over 8 million

Verizon Wireless employee stole 900 phones, made $270,000 profit on eBay

A Verizon Wireless account executive who pleaded guilty to stealing more than 900 cell phones and selling them on eBay for a profit of $272,290 was sentenced this week to 27 months in prison. James Hopkins, 35, committed the fraud throughout most of 2009 while working as a business-to-business account executive at a Verizon Wireless branch office in Trevose, PA, according to a criminal complaint. He was charged with mail fraud and sentenced in US District Court in New Jersey, where Verizon is based. “From February through November 2009, Hopkins placed numerous orders for Verizon Wireless cellular telephones, handheld devices and accessories in the names of existing Verizon Wireless customers without their knowledge,” the US Attorney’s office in New Jersey wrote in an announcement. “After arranging for the merchandise to be shipped to the home of a relative in New Jersey, the defendant manipulated Verizon’s computer database to conceal the fraudulent orders and shipments. Hopkins received $328,517 worth of stolen Verizon Wireless merchandise, which he sold on eBay for a profit of $272,290.” That amounts to a profit of about $300 for each stolen phone. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Verizon Wireless employee stole 900 phones, made $270,000 profit on eBay

Are those lost IRS e-mails “unbelievable”? Not really

Former IRS official Lois Lerner giving testimony to a Congressional committee in 2013. The IRS says it can’t find her e-mails from before 2011. During a hearing held yesterday by the House Oversight Committee, Committee Chairman Darrel Issa said that it was “unbelievable” that the IRS had lost the e-mails of former IRS official Lois Lerner. While Congressman Issa is not generally ignorant on tech issues, he’s clearly not familiar with just how believable such a screw-up is. The IRS claims that many of Lerner’s e-mails were lost when the hard drive on her desktop computer crashed in 2011. In a Monday night hearing, IRS Commissioner John Koskinen told Issa and the Oversight Committee that there was no way to recover these e-mails. “If you have a magical way for me to do that,” he told Issa, “I’d be happy to hear about it.” The IRS is not the only federal agency to lose e-mails over the past few years. In fact, despite efforts at many agencies to standardize and improve e-mail by moving to services like Google Apps for Government and Microsoft Office 365 Government, many agencies still run their e-mail like it’s 1999. It’s not just a technology issue—it’s an IT policy issue, a staffing issue, and a cultural issue within government, one that the federal government shares with many private corporations. Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Are those lost IRS e-mails “unbelievable”? Not really

Microsoft wants you to trade in your MacBook Air for a Surface Pro 3

Ready to kick your MacBook Air to the curb (and wonder how much exactly in in-store credit it’s worth)? Your friendly neighborhood Microsoft Store is ready to help. Peter Bright This weekend, Microsoft Stores launched a trade-in program to encourage sales of the new Surface Pro 3 , but the trade-in promotion named only a single device : the MacBook Air, at a value of “up to $650” toward any Surface Pro 3 purchase. At the lowest specification, that trade-in amount would let buyers walk out of a Microsoft Store with an Intel i3 Surface Pro 3 for as little as $150. Though Microsoft Stores maintain a trade-in program that accepts video games, consoles, Apple iDevices, and PC laptops, this is the first promotion from Microsoft Stores that has actively sought Apple laptops—or, in this case, laptop singular. Seeing as how Microsoft has attempted to position the Surface Pro 3 as the best of both tablet and laptop worlds, the capable, paper-thin MacBook Air is the obvious recipient of Microsoft’s promotional crosshairs. We called the flagship Microsoft Store in Seattle with trade-in value questions, and while the representative said that any Macbook Air could be traded in at stores in the United States and Canada, he insisted that Microsoft won’t break down the exact trade-in value of a given Macbook Air or any other Apple hardware (iPhones, iPads, etc.) without seeing the product in person. The response came even after we tried listing off our MacBook Air’s processor, hard drive, and other specs. This stays in line with Microsoft Store policy through their own website to not disclose trade-in values. Read on Ars Technica | Comments

At least 32,000 servers broadcast admin passwords in the clear, advisory warns

An alarming number of servers containing motherboards manufactured by Supermicro continue to expose administrator passwords despite the release of an update that patches the critical vulnerability, an advisory published Thursday warned. The threat resides in the baseboard management controller (BMC), a motherboard component that allows administrators to monitor the physical status of large fleets of servers, including their temperatures, disk and memory performance, and fan speeds. Unpatched BMCs in Supermicro motherboards contain a binary file that stores remote login passwords in clear text. Vulnerable systems can be detected by performing an Internet scan on port 49152. A recent query on the Shodan search engine indicated there are 31,964 machines still vulnerable, a number that may not include many virtual machines used in shared hosting environments. “This means at the point of this writing, there are 31,964 systems that have their passwords available on the open market,” wrote Zachary Wikholm, a senior security engineer with the Carinet Security Incident Response Team. “It gets a bit scarier when you review some of the password statistics. Out of those passwords, 3,296 are the default combination. Since I’m not comfortable providing too much password information, I will just say that there exists a subset of this data that either contains or just was ‘password.'” Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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At least 32,000 servers broadcast admin passwords in the clear, advisory warns

Hacker infects Synology storage devices, makes off with $620,000 in Dogecoin

One of the affected Synology devices. Synology A hacker generated digital coins worth more than $620,000 by hijacking a popular type of Internet-connected storage device from Synology, security researchers said. The incident, which was documented in a research report published Tuesday by Dell SecureWorks, is only the latest hack to steal other people’s computing resources to perform the computationally intense process of digital currency mining. The cryptographic operations behind the process often draw large amounts of power and produce lots of heat. People looking to acquire a large war chest of digital coins typically must pour large amounts of money and effort into the endeavor. One way malicious actors get by this requirement is by compromising large numbers of devices operated by other people. The devices then perform the work at the expense of the unsuspecting end users and pass on the proceeds to the attacker. According to researchers from SecureWorks Counter Threat Unit, the attackers exploited four separate vulnerabilities contained in the software of Synology network-attached storage boxes. The vulnerabilities were documented in September and fixed in February by Synology . By then, large numbers of people began complaining their Synology devices were running sluggishly and extremely hot . It turns out that at least some of them were running software that mined large sums of the Dogecoin cryptocurrency. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Hacker infects Synology storage devices, makes off with $620,000 in Dogecoin

Undergrad breaks Android crypto ransomware

Early in June, Ars reported the discovery of Android/Simplocker , which appeared to be the first cryptographic ransomware Trojan targeted at Android devices. Simplocker encrypts photos, documents, and videos in devices’ local storage and then instructs the device owner to send money if they ever want to see that content again. One researcher—Simon Bell, an undergraduate student at the University of Sussex—managed to dissect the code for Simplocker. He found that while the code actually called back to a command and control server over the Tor anonymizing network to pass information about the infected device, all of the encryption work was done by the malware itself. Today, Bell released an antidote to Simplocker —a Java program that can decrypt the files attacked by the malware. “The antidote was incredibly easy to create because the ransomware came with both the decryption method and the decryption password,” Bell wrote. “Therefore producing an antidote was more of a copy-and-paste job than anything.” Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Undergrad breaks Android crypto ransomware

Report: Seattle paid $17,500 to boost online reputation of city official

tdlucas5000 A newly-published document shows that Seattle’s publicly-owned electrical utility paid thousands of dollars to Brand.com to manage the online reputation of CEO Jorge Carrasco. The document , which was received and published Saturday by the Seattle Times after a public records request, shows that Brand.com charged City Light $5,000 in December 2013. As the contract states: Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Report: Seattle paid $17,500 to boost online reputation of city official