Tag: polls

You Can Now Browse Through 427 Millon Stolen MySpace Passwords

Stan Schroeder, writing for Mashable:An anonymous hacker managed to obtain an enormous number of user credentials in June 2013 from fallen social networking giant MySpace — some 427 million passwords, belonging to approx. 360 million users. In May 2016, a person started selling that database of passwords on the dark web. Now, the entire database is available online for free. Thomas White, security researcher also known by the moniker “Cthulhu, ” put the database up for download as a torrent file on his website, here. “The following contains the alleged data breach from Myspace dating back a few years. As always, I do not provide any guarantees with the file and I leave it down to you to use responsibly and for a productive purpose, ” he wrote. The file is 14.2 GB in size; downloading it might take some time. It is password-protected, but White made the password available on Twitter and his site. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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You Can Now Browse Through 427 Millon Stolen MySpace Passwords

DoNotPay Bot Has Beaten 160,000 Traffic Tickets — and Counting

Khari Johnson, writing for VentureBeat:A bot made to challenge traffic tickets has been used more than 9, 000 times by New Yorkers, according to DoNotPay maker Joshua Browder. The bot was made available to New Yorkers in March. In recent years and decades, residents of The Big Apple have seen a persistent increase in traffic fines. A record $1.9 billion in traffic fines was issued by the City of New York in 2015. Since the first version of the bot was released in London last fall, 160, 000 of 250, 000 tickets have been successfully challenged with DoNotPay, Browder said. “I think the people getting parking tickets are the most vulnerable in society, ” said Browder. “These people aren’t looking to break the law. I think they’re being exploited as a revenue source by the local government.” Browder, who’s 19, hopes to extend DoNotPay to Seattle this fall. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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DoNotPay Bot Has Beaten 160,000 Traffic Tickets — and Counting

A New ‘Quake’ Episode Appears 20 Years Later

An anonymous reader quotes this report from Motherboard: The months leading up to this year’s phenomenal reboot of Doom were stuffed with all kinds of fun developments surrounding the original series, whether it was mods that let you play as Duke Nukem or whole new levels from famed designer John Romero. There’s now a new Quake game in the works, and already it appears to be enjoying a similar renaissance. Yesterday MachineGames, the studio behind Wolfenstein: The New Order, released an entirely new episode for the original Quake in celebration of its 20-year anniversary, and you can play it entirely for free. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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A New ‘Quake’ Episode Appears 20 Years Later

After Death, Hundreds of Genes Spring Back to Life

Two surprising studies reveal new information about what genes do after death. Slashdot reader gurps_npc writes: You think your body stops after death, but up to two days later certain genes may turn on and start doing stuff for another two days before they give up the ghost. We are all zombies for up to four days after death. Gizmodo reports that in fact “hundreds” of genes apparently spring back to life. “[P]revious work on human cadavers demonstrated that some genes remain active after death, but we had no idea as to the extent of this strange phenomenon.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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After Death, Hundreds of Genes Spring Back to Life

NASCAR Team Pays Ransomware Fee To Recover Files Worth $2 Million

An anonymous reader writes: “NASCAR team Circle Sport-Leavine Family Racing (CSLFR) revealed today it faced a ransomware infection this past April when it almost lost access to crucial files worth nearly $2 million, containing car parts lists and custom high-profile simulations that would have taken 1, 500 man-hours to replicate, ” reports Softpedia. “The infection took place on the computer belonging to CSLFR’s crew chief. Winston’s staff detected the infection when encrypted files from Winston’s computer began syncing to their joint Dropbox account.” It was later discovered that he was infected with the TeslaCrypt ransomware. Because the team had no backups of the crucial data, they eventually paid the ransom (around $500). This happened before TeslaCrypt’s authors decided to shut down their operations and release free decryption keys. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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NASCAR Team Pays Ransomware Fee To Recover Files Worth $2 Million

Advertiser That Tracked Around 100M Phone Users Without Consent Pays $950,000

Mobile advertising firm InMobi will be paying a fine of $950, 000 and revamp its services to resolve federal regulators’ claims that it deceptively tracked locations of hundreds of millions of people, including children. Ars Technica reports:The US Federal Trade Commission alleged in a complaint filed Wednesday that Singapore-based InMobi undermined phone users’ ability to make informed decisions about the collection of their location information. While InMobi claimed that its software collected geographical whereabouts only when end users provided opt-in consent, the software in fact used nearby Wi-Fi signals to infer locations when permission wasn’t given, FTC officials alleged. InMobi then archived the location information and used it to push targeted advertisements to individual phone users. Specifically, the FTC alleged, InMobi collected nearby basic service set identification addresses, which act as unique serial numbers for wireless access points. The company, which thousands of Android and iOS app makers use to deliver ads to end users, then fed each BSSID into a “geocorder” database to infer the phone user’s latitude and longitude, even when an end user hadn’t provided permission for location to be tracked through the phone’s dedicated location feature. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Advertiser That Tracked Around 100M Phone Users Without Consent Pays $950,000

Microsoft: Nearly One In Three Azure Virtual Machines Now Are Running Linux

Mary Jo Foley, reporting for ZDNet: Microsoft’s self-professed Linux love is helping the company in the cloud. During his keynote at DockerCon 2016 in Seattle today, Azure Chief Technology Officer Mark Russinovich showed off some of the new and upcoming ways Microsoft is adding more container support to its cloud and server products. He also revealed a couple of new interesting datapoints. In the past year, Russinovich said, Microsoft has gone from one in four of its Azure virtual machines running Linux to nearly one in three. The other two-thirds of Azure customers are running Windows Server in their virtual machines. Russinovich showed off the promised Windows Server support that officials said would be coming at some point to the company’s Azure Container Service (ACS). Microsoft made Azure Container Service generally available in April 2016, but for Linux containers only. Last year, company execs said Microsoft also would bring Windows Server support to ACS. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Microsoft: Nearly One In Three Azure Virtual Machines Now Are Running Linux

New ‘Hardened’ Tor Browser Protects Users From FBI Hacking

An anonymous reader quotes an article from Motherboard: According to a new paper, security researchers are now working closely with the Tor Project to create a “hardened” version of the Tor Browser, implementing new anti-hacking techniques which could dramatically improve the anonymity of users and further frustrate the efforts of law enforcement… “Our solution significantly improves security over standard address space layout randomization (ASLR) techniques currently used by Firefox and other mainstream browsers, ” the researchers write in their paper, whose findings will be presented in July at the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium in Darmstadt, Germany. The researchers say Tor is currently field-testing their solution for an upcoming “hardened” release, making it harder for agencies like the FBI to crack the browser’s security, according to Motherboard. “[W]hile that defensive advantage may not last for too long, it shows that some in the academic research community are still intent on patching the holes that their peers are helping government hackers exploit.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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New ‘Hardened’ Tor Browser Protects Users From FBI Hacking

South Australia Refuses To Stop Using An Expired, MS-DOS-Based Health Software

jaa101 writes: The Australian state of South Australia is being sued for refusing to stop using CHIRON, an MS-DOS-based software from the ’90s that stores patient records. Their license expired in March of 2015, but they claim it would be risky to stop using it. CHIRON’s vendor, Working Systems, says SA Health has been the only user of CHIRON since 2008 when they declined to migrate to the successor product MasterCare ePAS. SA Health has 64 sites across South Australia — all of which are apparently still using the MS-DOS-based health software from the 1990s. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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South Australia Refuses To Stop Using An Expired, MS-DOS-Based Health Software

One Million IP Addresses Used In Brute-Force Attack On A Bank

Cisco says in just one week in February they detected 1, 127, 818 different IP addresses being used to launch 744, 361, 093 login attempts on 220, 758, 340 different email addresses — and that 93% of those attacks were directed at two financial institutions in a massive Account Takeover (ATO) campaign. An anonymous reader writes: Crooks used 993, 547 distinct IPs to check login credentials for 427, 444, 261 accounts. For most of these attacks, the crooks used proxy servers, but also two botnets, one of compromised Arris cable modems, and one of ZyXel routers/modems. Most of these credentials have been acquired from public breaches or underground hacking forums. This happened before the recent huge data breaches such as MySpace, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and VK.com. It’s apparently similar to the stolen-credentials-from-other-sites attack that was launched against GitHub earlier this week. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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One Million IP Addresses Used In Brute-Force Attack On A Bank