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Password hack of vBulletin.com fuels fears of in-the-wild 0-day attacks

János Pálinkás Forums software maker vBulletin has been breached by hackers who got access to customer password data and other personal information, in a compromise that has heightened speculation there may be a critical vulnerability in the widely used program that threatens websites that use it. “Very recently, our security team discovered sophisticated attacks on our network, involving the illegal access of forum user information, possibly including your password,” vBulletin Technical Support Lead Wayne Luke wrote in a post published Friday evening . “Our investigation currently indicates that the attackers accessed customer IDs and encrypted passwords on our systems. We have taken the precaution of resetting your account password.” The warning came three days after user forums for MacRumors—itself a user of vBulletin—suffered a security breach that exposed cryptographically hashed passwords for more than 860,000 users . When describing the attack, MacRumors Editorial Director Arnold Kim said the compromise in many ways resembled the July hack of the Ubuntu user forums , which also ran on vBulletin. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Password hack of vBulletin.com fuels fears of in-the-wild 0-day attacks

California shuts down 10 “fraudulent” health care websites

This is the real McCoy. Covered California In a move rarely seen by state authorities, California has shut down 10 domain names that the Golden State claims were fraudulent imitations of Covered California, the state’s own version of the Affordable Care Act. On Thursday, the state’s attorney general announced that it had forced 10 domain names to either redirect to the bona fide Covered California website, or to remove their sites entirely. California also sent cease and desist letters to the operators of those sites. As California’s attorney general, Kamala Harris, wrote in a statement : Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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California shuts down 10 “fraudulent” health care websites

In 6 months, US law enforcement asked Google for data on 21,000 users

Google Google and other tech companies have been actively fighting at the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in an attempt to tell the public more about the types of US law enforcement orders that they must comply with. While that case continues, Google announced on Thursday that US government (local, state, federal) requests for data has reached 21,683 users between January through June 2013. By comparison, the company’s previous reporting period (July through December 2012) saw 8,438 user data requests from US authorities—a jump of about 32 percent. Again, the United States remains at the top of this list by a wide margin. India, Germany, France and the United Kingdom round out the next four positions, respectively. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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In 6 months, US law enforcement asked Google for data on 21,000 users

Android 4.4 KitKat, thoroughly reviewed

After three Jelly Bean releases in a row, Google has unleashed a major revision to the world’s most widely used operating system. With the  Nexus 5  comes Android 4.4 “KitKat.” KitKat brings a ton of enhancements: support for hidden system and status bars, printer support, and lower memory usage. It also has a number of user-level improvements, including a new dialer, a Google-infused home screen, and a whole pile of UI refinements. The lower memory usage is particularly important because Google hopes this is the feature that will finally kill Gingerbread and other older versions of Android. Ice Cream Sandwich raised the system requirements for Android quite a bit, and to this day you still see lower-end phones shipping with Gingerbread because of the lower barrier to entry. Unfortunately, the only device that currently runs KitKat is the Nexus 5, which has a whopping 2GB of RAM, so there isn’t much memory testing that we can do right now. We’ll have to wait for actual low-memory hardware running KitKat to evaluate any of the low-memory requirement claims. We  can   take a look at just about everything else, though. We believe KitKat is the biggest Android release since Ice Cream Sandwich. Google has touched nearly every part of the OS in some way, so there’s a lot to cover. Read 47 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Android 4.4 KitKat, thoroughly reviewed

Hack of MacRumors forums exposes password data for 860,000 users

MacRumors MacRumors user forums have been breached by hackers who may have acquired cryptographically protected passwords belonging to all 860,000 users, one of the top editors of the news website said Tuesday evening. “In situations like this, it’s best to assume that your MacRumors Forum username, e-mail address and (hashed) password is now known,” Editorial Director Arnold Kim wrote in a short advisory . He went on to advise users to change their passwords for their MacRumors accounts and any other website accounts that were protected by the same passcode. The MacRumors intrusion involved “a moderator account being logged into by the hacker who then was able to escalate their privileges with the goals of stealing user login credentials,” Kim said. The company is still investigating how the attacker managed to compromise the privileged account. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Hack of MacRumors forums exposes password data for 860,000 users

How one site beat back botnets, spammers and the “4chan party van”

Aryan Blaauw One Sunday late last month, administrators at Orlando, Florida-based TorGuard were in high spirits. They had just successfully rebuffed the latest in a series of increasingly powerful denial-of-service attacks designed to cripple their virtual private networking service. Despite torrents of junk traffic that reached peaks as high as 15Gbps, the admins had neutralized the offensive by locking down the TorGuard servers and then moving them behind the protective services of anti-DoS service CloudFlare. “This seemed to anger the attackers, however, because on Monday things got a bit more personal,” TorGuard administrator Ben Van Pelt told Ars. “Unable to spam, DDoS, hack, or social engineer us, they employed the tactics of the ‘4chan party van.’ Throughout the day our office received multiple unrequested deliveries from local pizza chains, Chinese food, and one large order of sushi. A handful of local electricians and plumbing services were also disappointed to be turned away. To my knowledge no fake calls have been placed to law enforcement yet, however nothing would surprise me at this point.” The two-month-long campaign of harassment and attacks, which Van Pelt suspects was carried out by a competing virtual private networking service, illustrates the lengths some people will go to goad their online adversaries. His experience provides a vivid account of what it’s like to be on the receiving end of a relentless stream of distributed denial-of-service attacks and ultimately what can be done to mitigate them. Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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How one site beat back botnets, spammers and the “4chan party van”

New update from Apple gets Mavericks and Gmail to play nice

Mail in OS X 10.9. Apple Apple has just issued a patch specifically for Gmail users running Mail.app in OS X 10.9 . The 32.46MB Mail Update for Mavericks  is said to bring “improvements to general stability and compatibility with Gmail,” specifically a bug that causes unread message counts to be inaccurate, and another bug that “prevents deleting, moving, and archiving messages for users with custom Gmail settings.” The support page for the fix recommends backing up your data via Time Machine or some other mechanism before installing. You can get the update either through Software Update or by grabbing it  manually . The rumor mill says that Apple is also testing some other new features and fixes for Mavericks, most notably in an OS X 10.9.1 update designed to fix minor-but-pressing problems and a larger 10.9.2 update later on. Neither of these has appeared in Apple’s standard developer portal as of this writing, but given that Apple has followed this pattern for every single version of OS X to date, it’s not exactly a stretch of the imagination. Apple also released version 1.0.1 of iBooks for OS X today, which includes some non-specific “bug fixes and improvements to performance and stability.” Read on Ars Technica | Comments        

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New update from Apple gets Mavericks and Gmail to play nice

Bigger than Google Fiber: LA plans citywide gigabit for homes and businesses

Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles. Diliff Los Angeles is about to unleash one of the most ambitious city-led broadband projects to date, with the goal of bringing fiber to all of its 3.5 million residents and all businesses. Next month, the city plans to issue an RFP (request for proposals) “that would require fiber to be run to every residence, every business, and every government entity within the city limits of Los Angeles,” Los Angeles Information Technology Agency GM Steve Reneker told Ars today. The City Council this morning unanimously voted to move forward with drafting the RFP and will vote again in a few weeks to determine whether it’s ready for release, he said. LA expects the fiber buildout to cost $3 billion to $5 billion, but the cost would be borne by the vendor. “The city is going into it and writing the agreement, basically saying, ‘we have no additional funding for this effort.’ We’re requiring the vendors that respond to pay for the city resources needed to expedite any permitting and inspection associated with laying their fiber,” Reneker said. “If they’re not willing to do that, our City Council may consider a general fund transfer to reimburse those departments, but we’re going in with the assumption that the vendor is going to absorb those up-front costs to make sure they can do their buildout in a timely fashion.” Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Bigger than Google Fiber: LA plans citywide gigabit for homes and businesses

Acer CEO resigns on the back of $446 million quarterly loss

Soon-to-not-be CEO J.T. Wang. Acer Acer has issued a statement this morning reporting that Acer CEO J.T. Wang has resigned following news of the company’s significant $446 million loss during the third quarter of 2013. Wang will continue in his role as Acer’s chairman for another seven months, but he will be handing over the CEO reins to Acer President Jim Wong at the start of 2014. Acer’s financial beatdown was announced last Tuesday along with the rest of its Q3 results. It’s the second quarter in a row of losses for the PC OEM; Q2 in August ended with a $11.4 million loss where many analysts had expected at least some profit. According to GigaOm , an additional (Chinese) statement issued by Acer blames “the gross margin impact of gearing up for the Windows 8.1 sell-in and the related management of inventory.” As Microsoft Editor Peter Bright showed yesterday , though, Windows 8.1 hasn’t necessarily exploded out of the gate, and tying significant amounts of money up around the operating system’s launch doesn’t appear to have served Acer very well. Most OEMs see sales dips in Q2 and Q3 before the holiday-saddled Q4 pushes sales back up, but Acer’s numbers paint a particularly dismal picture: the company saw a 35 percent drop in sales from the same quarter last year. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Acer CEO resigns on the back of $446 million quarterly loss

New Kepler analysis finds many Earth-like planets; total 3,500 exoplanets

Sun-like stars are bright enough that their habitable zones are pushed close to the edge of where Kepler is able to detect planets. NASA Although NASA’s Kepler probe has entered a semi-retirement , discoveries from the data it collected continue. Scientists are currently gathered to discuss these results, and they held a press conference today to announce the latest haul. As of today, the Kepler team is adding 833 new exoplanet candidates to its existing haul, bringing the total up to over 3,500. So far, 90 percent of the candidates that have been checked have turned out to be real. The number of planets in the habitable zone has gone up to over 100. In conjunction with the press conference, PNAS is releasing a paper that performs an independent analysis of Sun-like stars. This finds that over 20 percent of these host a planet less than two times the size of Earth’s radius. Within Kepler’s field of view, 10 of them receive an amount of light similar to that reaching Earth. A status update Kepler spots planets by watching them transit in front of their host star. This creates a characteristically square-shaped dip in the amount of light reaching Earth. This method of detection, however, isn’t considered definitive. The sightings are considered candidates and need to be confirmed by another method. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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New Kepler analysis finds many Earth-like planets; total 3,500 exoplanets