New US spy satellite features world-devouring octopus

United Launch Alliance via ODNI President Obama is out to put the public’s mind at ease about new revelations on intelligence-gathering, but the Office for the Director of National Intelligence can’t quite seem to get with the program of calming everyone down. Over the weekend, the ODNI was pumping up the launch of a new surveillance satellite launched by the National Reconnaissance Office. The satellite was launched late Thursday night, and ODNI’s Twitter feed posted photos and video of the launch over the following days. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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New US spy satellite features world-devouring octopus

Report: Spotify will introduce free mobile streaming next week

Spotify will soon allow its ad-supported users to stream music for free on their mobile devices, according to reports from the Wall Street Journal and TechCrunch . The company is reportedly holding an event next week to announce the service tweak, which takes a bit of the incentive away from subscribing. The Journal reports that Spotify has been negotiating for nearly a year to get mobile streaming rights, and it finally has the blessing of Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, and Warner Music Group. The rights holders and Spotify not only had to agree on rates but on how the music could be used. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Report: Spotify will introduce free mobile streaming next week

Kingpin behind large chunk of world’s malware exploits led lavish life

A screenshot showing BlackHole statistics. Group-IB An online crime kingpin arrested in October and charged with creating and distributing the Blackhole exploit kit may have had his hand in as much as 40 percent of the world’s malware infections, according to information released by the security firm that helped track him down. The 27-year-old Russian, identified only as Paunch, allegedly earned about $50,000 per month selling BlackHole subscriptions for as much as $500 per month, according to a report published Friday by security firm Group-IB. He is also alleged to be behind the much more expensive Cool Exploit Kit and a “Crypt” service used to obfuscate malware to go undetected by antivirus programs. With more than 1,000 customers, he was able to lead a lavish lifestyle that included driving a white Porsche Cayenne, Group-IB said. A man Group-IB identifies as “Paunch” standing in front of a Porsche Cayenne. Group-IB Exploit kits are the do-it-yourself tools used to embed crimeware into hacked or malicious websites so they target a host of vulnerabilities found on end-user computers. People who visit the websites are exposed to “drive-by” attacks that are often able to install highly malicious software on the computers with no sign that anything is amiss. Group-IB estimated that Paunch may have supplied the code used in as much as 40 percent of the PC crimeware infections worldwide. Researchers arrived at that guess by gauging sales of BlackHole and Cool, which they said accounted for about 40 percent of world revenue for exploit kits. Even assuming that some crimeware is installed independent of exploit kits, it’s hard to overstate the role these two kits played in seeding the Web with exploit code that installed malware used in bank fraud and other forms of online crime. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Kingpin behind large chunk of world’s malware exploits led lavish life

Charged with theft, man arrested for plugging car into school’s outlet

Nissan A man in an Atlanta suburb was confronted by a police officer for plugging his electric car into an outside outlet at a school. Ten days later, he was arrested at home and charged with theft for taking about 5 cents worth of electricity “without consent.” Kaveh Kamooneh plugged an extension cable from his Nissan Leaf into a 110-volt external outlet at Chamblee Middle School while his son was practicing tennis. A short time later, he noticed someone in his car and went to investigate—and found that the man was a Chamblee police officer. “He informed me he was about to arrest me, or at least charge me, for electrical theft,” Kamooneh told Atlanta’s Channel 11 News . Kamooneh said that the car, when plugged into a 110-volt outlet, draws a kilowatt an hour. “Over an hour, that’s maybe eight or nine cents” worth of electricity, he said, depending on the rates. He was plugged in for less than 20 minutes, so he estimated the amount of power he drew from the school at less than 5 cents. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Charged with theft, man arrested for plugging car into school’s outlet

Google compute cloud load balances 1 million requests per second for $10

We hold Google ransom for… one million Web requests. New Line Cinema Google Compute Engine, the company’s infrastructure-as-a-service cloud that competes against Amazon Web Services, is trying to take reliability and scale to the extreme. Yesterday, the company said it was able to serve “one million load balanced requests per second” with a single IP address receiving the traffic and distributing it across 200 Web servers. Each of the million requests was just “one byte in size not including the http headers,” Google Performance Engineering Manager Anthony F. Voellm wrote in a blog . It’s thus not representative of real-world traffic, but the simulation shows that Compute Engine should be able to let websites absorb big bursts in traffic without shutting down. According to Google, the test showed the load balancer was able to serve the aforementioned one million requests “within five seconds after the setup and without any pre-warming.” The test ran for more than seven minutes. “The 1M number is measuring a complete request and successful response,” Voellm wrote. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Google compute cloud load balances 1 million requests per second for $10

Anti-GMO crop paper to be forcibly retracted

Chiot’s Run Last year, a French researcher made waves by announcing a study that suggested genetically modified corn could lead to an increased incidence of tumors in lab animals. But the way the finding was announced seemed designed to generate publicity while avoiding any scientific evaluation of the results. Since then, the scientific criticisms have rolled in, and they have been scathing. Now, the editor of the journal that published it has decided to pull the paper despite the objections of its primary author. The initial publication focused on corn that had been genetically engineered to carry a gene that allowed it to break down a herbicide. French researchers led by Gilles-Eric Séralini fed the corn, with and without herbicide, to rats. Control populations were given the herbicide alone or unmodified corn. The authors concluded that the genetically-modified corn led to an elevated incidence of tumors and early death. But even a cursory glance at the results suggested there were some severe problems with this conclusion. To begin with, there were similar effects caused by both the genetically engineered crop and by the herbicide it was designed to degrade. None of the treatments showed a dose effect; in some cases, the lowest doses had the most dramatic effect. And, if the treatment populations were combined, in some cases they were healthier than the controls. Tests of whether the results were statistically significant were completely lacking. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Anti-GMO crop paper to be forcibly retracted

TV news team falls for Facebook doppelgänger scam

The doppelgänger Facebook profile scraped from WBAL producer Chris Dachille convinced many of his friends that it was actually him—and then spammed them with requests for money and malicious links. WBAL Reporters and producers at a television station in Baltimore recently found out the hard way that they shouldn’t blindly accept Facebook friend requests. Last month, they found that their profiles had been cloned by an attacker who quickly used their network of friends to spread malicious links and ask for money. Attacks on media organizations’ social media accounts have been at an all-time high this past year, including “hacktivist” and state-sponsored attacks on media outlets from the Syrian Electronic Army. But the attack on the staff of WBAL-TV was directed toward staff members’ personal accounts. And this initiative was a more workaday one, less targeted at the station itself than the friends, co-workers, and viewers who were connected to the cloned accounts. Because some of WBAL’s staff members mixed their personal and professional social networking together, the attack gave the scammer access to a huge audience’s Facebook news feeds. After the attack was discovered, it took weeks for Facebook to shut down the fake accounts. Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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TV news team falls for Facebook doppelgänger scam

New Linux worm targets routers, cameras, “Internet of things” devices

Wesley Fryer Researchers have discovered a Linux worm capable of infecting a wide range of home routers, set-top boxes, security cameras, and other consumer devices that are increasingly equipped with an Internet connection. Linux.Darlloz , as the worm has been dubbed, is now classified as a low-level threat, partly because its current version targets only devices that run on CPUs made by Intel, Symantec researcher Kaoru Hayashi wrote in a blog post published Wednesday . But with a minor modification, the malware could begin using variants that incorporate already available executable and linkable format (ELF) files that infect a much wider range of “Internet-of-things” devices, including those that run chips made by ARM and those that use the PPC, MIPS, and MIPSEL architectures. “Upon execution, the worm generates IP addresses randomly, accesses a specific path on the machine with well-known ID and passwords, and sends HTTP POST requests, which exploit the vulnerability,” Hayashi explained. “If the target is unpatched, it downloads the worm from a malicious server and starts searching for its next target. Currently, the worm seems to infect only Intel x86 systems, because the downloaded URL in the exploit code is hard-coded to the ELF binary for Intel architectures.” Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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New Linux worm targets routers, cameras, “Internet of things” devices

Report: Amazon’s next Kindle Paperwhite will pick up a 300 PPI screen

The original Kindle Paperwhite. Cesar Torres Amazon’s Kindle Fire HDX tablets have already broken the 300 PPI barrier, but the sharpest of its E Ink readers sits at a much lower 212 PPI. According to a report from TechCrunch’s Matthew Panzarino, that may be about to change—Amazon is apparently working on a new version of its backlit Kindle Paperwhite with a 300 PPI display of an unspecified size and resolution. Since E Ink screens are meant to mimic the printed page, a sharper screen would bring the e-reader that much closer to the experience of reading an actual book. While the new e-reader is still apparently “several months away,” we know a little more about its other planned features. On the hardware side, Amazon will reportedly be adding an ambient light sensor to adjust the device’s backlight based on the light in the room you’re in, and hardware buttons for page turning will be making a return (the current Paperwhite relies on touch input for page turning). On the software side, the device’s UI will of course be upscaled to take advantage of the high-density screen, and Amazon will be introducing some new fonts and other tweaks to improve the Kindle’s typography. Finally, the new Paperwhite’s design will be tweaked to bring it more in line with that of the newest Fire tablets. Amazon isn’t the first to bring a high-density e-reader to market. Kobo’s Aura HD has a 265 PPI, 6.8-inch screen and has been out since May, though Kobo is a bigger presence in its home country of Canada than it is in the US. (The Aura HD was supposedly a limited-edition product, but it’s still on sale for $170 six months later so it’s clearly not  that limited.) The newest Paperwhite  will however be the first E Ink reader with access to Amazon’s gigantic e-book library and the Kindle brand, two potent weapons in the battle for e-book market supremacy. Read on Ars Technica | Comments        

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Report: Amazon’s next Kindle Paperwhite will pick up a 300 PPI screen

GitHub resets user passwords following rash of account hijack attacks

GitHub is experiencing an increase in user account hijackings that’s being fueled by a rash of automated login attempts from as many as 40,000 unique Internet addresses. The site for software development projects has already reset passwords for compromised accounts and banned frequently used weak passcodes, officials said in an advisory published Tuesday night . Out of an abundance of caution, site officials have also reset some accounts that were protected with stronger passwords. Accounts that were reset despite having stronger passwords showed login attempts from the same IP addresses involved in successful breaches of other GitHub accounts. “While we aggressively rate-limit login attempts and passwords are stored properly, this incident has involved the use of nearly 40K unique IP addresses,” Tuesday night’s advisory stated. “These addresses were used to slowly brute force weak passwords or passwords used on multiple sites. We are working on additional rate-limiting measures to address this. In addition, you will no longer be able to login to GitHub.com with commonly used weak passwords.” Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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GitHub resets user passwords following rash of account hijack attacks