Tag: reprints

Feds arrest ATM thieves after discovering $800,000 stuffed in a suitcase

Noah Coffey Federal authorities have arrested five more men accused of taking part in a 21st-century bank heist that siphoned a whopping $45 million out of ATMs around the world in a matter of hours. Prosecutors said the men charged on Monday were members of the New York-based cell of a global operation and contributed to the $45 million theft by illegally withdrawing $2.8 million from 140 different ATMs in that city. The arrests came after the defendants sent $800,000 in cash proceeds in a suitcase transported by bus to a syndicate kingpin located in Florida, US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York Loretta E. Lynch said . Photos seized from one defendant’s iPhone showed huge amounts of cash piled on a hotel bed and being stuffed into luggage, she said. The heists took place during two dates in December 2012 and targeted payment cards issued by the National Bank of Ras Al-Khaimah PSC in the United Arab Emirates and the Bank of Muscat in Oman respectively. Prosecutors dubbed the heists “unlimited” operations because they systematically removed the withdrawal limits normally placed on debit card accounts. These restrictions work as a safety mechanism that caps the amount of loss that banks normally face when something goes wrong. The operation removed the limits by hacking into two companies that processed online payments for the two targeted banks, prosecutors alleged in earlier indictments. Prosecutors didn’t identify the payment processors except to say that one was in India and the other was in the United States. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Feds arrest ATM thieves after discovering $800,000 stuffed in a suitcase

Qualcomm’s Toq wants to be your platform-agnostic color smartwatch

Qualcomm Qualcomm became a surprise entrant in the wearable computing race when it announced its Toq smartwatch. Designed as a showcase for some of Qualcomm’s latest technology, the $349.99 Toq will go on sale on December 2nd through its own portal. From a function perspective, Toq follows somewhat worn paths with notifications sent from your phone, music playback controls, and additional data pushed from an on-phone app. Where Toq differs is less in interactions than hardware features. The display Qualcomm chose is its own Mirasol MEMS-based display. In effect, Mirasol is like a mash-up of E Ink and LCD displays, providing a low-power, static color image where appropriate, with video and animation capabilities that exceed those of traditional E Ink displays. Charging your Toq occurs through Qualcomm’s own WiPower LE wireless charging protocol, and the included charger serves as a case as well. Most smartwatches connect primarily through Bluetooth LE; Qualcomm’s Toq also includes access to its open source AllJoyn protocol, which offers a platform-agnostic approach to device-to-device communications. AllJoyn-enabled devices and software can interact with your Toq over WiFi-Direct or Bluetooth. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Qualcomm’s Toq wants to be your platform-agnostic color smartwatch

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

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

Google Books ruled legal in massive win for fair use

Moyan Brenn A long-running copyright lawsuit between the Authors’ Guild and Google over its book-scanning project is over, and Google has won on the grounds that its scanning was “fair use.” In other words, the snippets of books that Google shows for free don’t break copyright, and it doesn’t need the authors’ permission to engage in the scanning and display of short bits of books. On the fair use factor that’s often the most important—whether or not the fair use of a work hurts the market for the original work—US District Judge Denny Chin seemed to find the plaintiffs’ ideas both nonsensical and ignorant of the limits on the Google Books software: Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Google Books ruled legal in massive win for fair use

Meteorite impacts capture time capsules of the ecosystems they destroy

Sites like this can be searched for glass beads that reveal the past. rickmach Meteorite impacts can be very destructive. A meteorite that fell in Mexico around 66 million years ago created a 180 km crater and caused the extinction of non-avian dinosaurs while spewing debris and molten rock into the air. Now, in what is a fascinating tale of serendipity, researchers have found that these events don’t entirely destroy all traces of life at the site of impact. Molten rocks can capture and preserve organic matter as they cool down to form glass beads. When a meteor enters Earth’s atmosphere, the friction causes it to heat up, scorching everything in its path. Most of the time that’s where the story ends, as the meteor burns up in the sky as a “shooting star.” But sometimes it’s big enough to reach all the way to the surface and transfer its remaining energy to the ground. This energy is dissipated as mild earthquakes and sound shockwaves—but mostly as heat. The heat energy can be so great that it melts rocks on the surface and hurls them up in the atmosphere. Anything that comes in contact with this molten rock would presumably get burnt, leaving nothing but rocky material that cools down in the atmosphere, forming glass beads and tektites (gravel-sized natural glass). This is what City University of New York researcher Kieren Howard assumed, but he was able to show that his assumptions were wrong. Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Meteorite impacts capture time capsules of the ecosystems they destroy

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”

Cisco-threatening open switch coming from Facebook, Intel, and Broadcom

Cisco Nexus switches. pchow98 Six months ago, Facebook announced that its Open Compute Project (OCP) would develop a top-of-rack switch that could boot nearly any type of networking software. With the help of Intel, Broadcom, and others, the consortium devoted to open hardware specifications would develop a rival to Cisco’s network hardware. Today, Facebook and friends described the first tangible steps they’ve taken toward reaching that goal. Intel, Broadcom, Mellanox, and Cumulus Networks have contributed specs and software that bring the Open Compute Project closer to a finished switch design. Frank Frankovsky, VP of hardware design and supply chain operations at Facebook and head of the Open Compute Project, announced the latest developments in a blog post and conference call with reporters today. Frankovsky says the project is on track to “help software-defined networking continue to evolve and flourish,” since open source software-defined networking systems could be installed on Open Compute switches. Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Cisco-threatening open switch coming from Facebook, Intel, and Broadcom

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