Your friendly, neighborhood UPS store might have been hacked. UPS just confirmed that 51 stores across 24 states in the United States had malware capable of recording credit card information and sending it to third parties on its in-store cash registers. Read more…
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Hackers May Have Stolen Credit Card Data From 51 UPS Stores In The US
New submitter GammaKitsune writes: “The Player’s Handbook for the fifth edition of Dungeons and Dragons, formerly known as “D&D Next, ” released today to major bookstores and online retailers across the U.S. The Player’s Handbook, which contains core rules for gameplay and character creation, is one of thee core rulebooks that developer Wizards of the Coast plans to release in 2014. The Monster Manual is scheduled to release in late September, and the Dungeon Master’s Guide will release in mid November. Also out today is the first of two adventure modules in which players team up to battle against the dragon goddess Tiamat. Fifth edition has a lot to prove following the highly-controversial fourth edition, the rise of competing roleplaying game Pathfinder, and two years of public playtesting. Initial reviews posted on Amazon appear overwhelmingly positive at the time of writing, but more skeptical gamers may wish to take a look at the free “Basic Rules” posted on the official D&D website. The basic rules contain all the bare essentials needed to create a character or run your own adventure, and will serve both as a free introduction for new players and as a holdover for long time players until the remaining two rulebooks are released. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Fifth Edition Dungeons and Dragons Player’s Handbook Released
No two humans type alike. Some of us jab our fingers precisely into the right spots on a screen, while others are slightly less accurate. Now, a Swedish security startup is using this behavior to add an extra layer of security to our cellphones. Read more…
MojoKid (1002251) writes AMD is launching a new family of products today, but unless you follow the rumor mill closely, it’s probably not something you’d expect. It’s not a new CPU, APU, or GPU. Today, AMD is launching its first line of solid state drives (SSDs), targeted squarely at AMD enthusiasts. AMD is calling the new family of drives, the Radeon R7 Series SSD, similar to its popular mid-range line of graphics cards. The new Radeon R7 Series SSDs feature OCZ and Toshiba technology, but with a proprietary firmware geared towards write performance and high endurance. Open up one of AMD’s new SSDs and you’ll see OCZ’s Indilinx Barefoot 3 M00 controller on board—the same controller used in the OCZ Vector 150, though it is clocked higher in these drives. That controller is paired to A19nm Toshiba MLC (Multi-Level Cell) NAND flash memory and a DDR3-1333MHz DRAM cache. The 120GB and 240GB drives sport 512MB of cache memory, while the 480GB model will be outfitted with 1GB. Interestingly enough, AMD Radeon R7 Series SSDs are some of the all-around, highest-performing SATA SSDs tested to date. IOPS performance is among the best seen in a consumer-class SSD, write throughput and access times are highly-competitive across the board, and the drive offered consistent performance regardless of the data type being transferred. Read performance is also strong, though not quite as stand-out as write performance. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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AMD Launches Radeon R7 Series Solid State Drives With OCZ
Trailrunner7 writes The GameOver Zeus malware had a nice run for itself, making untold millions of dollars for its creators. But it was a run that ended with a multi-continent operation from law enforcement and security researchers to disassemble the infrastructure. Now researchers have identified a new variant of the Cridex malware that has adopted some of the techniques that made GOZ so successful in its day. Researchers at IBM’s X-Force research team have seen a new version of Cridex, which is also known as Bugat and Feodo, using some of the same techniques that GOZ used to such good effect. Specifically, the new strain of malware has adopted GOZ’s penchant for using HTML injections, and the researchers say the technique is nearly identical to the way that GOZ handled it. “There are two possible explanations for this. First, someone from the GOZ group could have moved to the Bugat team. This would not be the first time something like this has happened, which we’ve witnessed in other cases involving Zeus and Citadel; however, it is not very likely in this case since Bugat and GOZ are essentially competitors, while Zeus and Citadel are closely related. The second and more likely explanation is that the Bugat team could have analyzed and perhaps reversed the GOZ malware before copying the HTML injections that made GOZ so highly profitable for its operators, ” Etay Maor, a senior fraud prevention strategist at IBM, wrote in an analysis of the new malware. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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New Cridex Malware Copies Tactics From GameOver Zeus
snydeq (1272828) writes “Two of Microsoft’s kernel-mode driver updates — which often cause problems — are triggering a BSOD error message on some Windows systems, InfoWorld reports. ‘Details at this point are sparse, but it looks like three different patches from this week’s Black Tuesday crop are causing Blue Screens with a Stop 0x50 error on some systems. If you’re hitting a BSOD, you can help diagnose the problem (and perhaps prod Microsoft to find a solution) by adding your voice to the Microsoft Answers Forum thread on the subject.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Microsoft Black Tuesday Patches Bring Blue Screens of Death
itwbennett writes Japan is one of the last countries in the world where telegrams are still widely used. A combination of traditional manners, market liberalization and innovation has kept alive this age-old form of messaging. Companies affiliated with the country’s three mobile carriers, NTT DoCoMo, KDDI and SoftBank, offer telegrams, which are sent via modern server networks instead of the dedicated electrical wires of the past (Morse telegraphy hasn’t been used since 1962), and then printed out with modern printers instead of tape glued on paper. But customers are still charged according to the length of the message, which is delivered within three hours. A basic NTT telegram up to 25 characters long can be sent for ¥440 ($4.30) when ordered online. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Telegram Not Dead STOP Alive, Evolving In Japan STOP
badger.foo (447981) writes Peter Hansteen reports that a new distributed and slow-moving password guessing effort is underway, much like the earlier reports, but this time with a twist: The users they are trying to access do not exist. Instead, they’re taken from the bsdly.net spamtrap address list, where all listed email addresses are guaranteed to be invalid in their listed domains. There is a tiny chance that this is an elaborate prank or joke, but it’s more likely that via excessive automation, the password gropers have finally Peak Stupid. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Password Gropers Hit Peak Stupid, Take the Spamtrap Bait
MojoKid (1002251) writes “Security researcher Gene Bransfield, with the help of his wife’s grandmother’s cat, decided to see how many neighborhood WiFi access points he could map and potentially compromise. With a collar loaded with a Spark chip, a Wi-Fi module, a GPS module, and a battery, Coco the cat helped Gene identify Wi-Fi networks around the neighborhood and then reported back. The goal here is obvious: Discover all of the unsecured, or at least poorly-secured, wireless access points around the neighborhood. During his journey, Coco identified dozens of Wi-Fi networks, with four of them using easily-broken WEP security, and another four that had no security at all. Gene has dubbed his collar the “WarKitteh”, and it cost him less than $100 to make. He admits that such a collar isn’t a security threat, but more of a goofy hack. Of course, it could be used for shadier purposes.” (Here’s Wired’s article on the connected cat-collar.) Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Connected Collar Lets Your Cat Do the War-Driving
theodp (442580) writes “Google earned kudos from Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel this week for teaming up with Staples to fund the projects of 367 of the city’s 22, 519 public school teachers on “begfunding” site DonorsChoose.org. “Everything that you asked for…every project that the teachers put on to help their students learn, exceed and excel here in the city of Chicago, you now have fully funded, ” Mayor Emanuel said. “Chicago’s hardworking public school teachers are doing all that they can-and more-to support their students, but they need more help, ” said Rob Biederman, head of Chicago Public Affairs at Google. “We jumped at the chance to join with DonorsChoose.org and Staples to make Chicago’s local classroom wishes come true.” So what kind of dreams did Google make possible? Ironically, a look at Google Chicago’s Giving Page shows that the biggest project funded by Google was to outfit a classroom with 32 Microsoft Surface RT tablets for $12, 531, or about 6.5% of the $190, 091 Google award. Other big ticket projects funded by Google included $5, 931 for a personal home biodiesel kit and $5, 552 for a marimba (in the middle of the spectrum was $748 for “Mindfulness Education”). In addition to similar “flash-funding” projects in Atlanta (paper towels!) and the Bay Area, Google and DonorsChoose have also teamed up this year to reward teachers with $400, 000 for recruiting girls to learn to code (part of Google’s $50 million Made With Code initiative) and an unknown amount for AP STEM teachers who passed Google muster (part of Google’s $5 million AP STEM Access grant).” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Chicago Mayor Praises Google For Buying Kids Microsoft Surfaces