wired – Page 54 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Hack on JPMorgan website exposes data for 465,000 card holders

JPMorgan Chase has warned 465,000 holders of prepaid cash cards that their personal information may have been obtained by hackers who breached the bank’s network security in July, according to a report published Thursday. JPMorgan issued the cards on behalf of corporations and government agencies, which in turn used them to pay employees and issue tax refunds, unemployment compensation, and other benefits, Reuters reported . In September, bank officials discovered an attack on Web servers used by its www.ucard.chase.com site and reported it to law enforcement authorities. In the months since, bank officials have investigated exactly which accounts were involved and what pieces of information were exposed. Wednesday’s warning came after investigators were unable to rule out the possibility that some card holders’ personal data may have been accessed. The bank usually keeps customers’ personal information encrypted, but during the course of the breach, data belonging to notified customers temporarily appeared in plaintext in log files, Reuters said. The notified card holders account for about two percent of the roughly 25 million UCard users. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Hack on JPMorgan website exposes data for 465,000 card holders

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

Scientist-developed malware covertly jumps air gaps using inaudible sound

Topology of a covert mesh network that connects air-gapped computers to the Internet. Hanspach and Goetz Computer scientists have developed malware that uses inaudible audio signals to communicate, a capability that allows the malware to covertly transmit keystrokes and other sensitive data even when infected machines have no network connection. The proof-of-concept software—or malicious trojans that adopt the same high-frequency communication methods—could prove especially adept in penetrating highly sensitive environments that routinely place an “air gap” between computers and the outside world. Using nothing more than the built-in microphones and speakers of standard computers, the researchers were able to transmit passwords and other small amounts of data from distances of almost 65 feet. The software can transfer data at much greater distances by employing an acoustical mesh network made up of attacker-controlled devices that repeat the audio signals. The researchers, from Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute for Communication, Information Processing, and Ergonomics , recently disclosed their findings in a paper published in the Journal of Communications . It came a few weeks after a security researcher said his computers were infected with a mysterious piece of malware that used high-frequency transmissions to jump air gaps . The new research neither confirms nor disproves Dragos Ruiu’s claims of the so-called badBIOS infections, but it does show that high-frequency networking is easily within the grasp of today’s malware. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Scientist-developed malware covertly jumps air gaps using inaudible sound

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

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

Google launches Play Newsstand: a hybrid magazine store and RSS reader

The long-rumored Google Play Newsstand for Android has finally launched , and it’s not at all what we were expecting. Early reporting and investigation pinned it as a newspaper section of the Play Store, but it’s much more than that. Google is selling newspapers and magazines under a single banner, and there’s a visual-heavy RSS reader, sort of like Flipboard. This means Newsstand is replacing two of Google’s existing apps: Google Play Magazines and Google Currents. Google is pitching it as “all your subscriptions in one place.” Like most things “Google” these days, calling it an “app” isn’t really the whole story. There’s also a new section of the desktop Play Store, and some magazines and newspapers are even viewable in the browser. RSS is strictly confined to the app, though. Just like the old Play Magazines, paid content is available as a subscription or on a per-issue basis, and 30-day trials are available for some premium content. RSS feeds, magazines, and newspaper can be downloaded for offline reading later, and there’s also a bookmark function. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Google launches Play Newsstand: a hybrid magazine store and RSS reader

Alleged Windows support scammer forfeits money earned by “fixing” PCs

Well, maybe this guy wasn’t quite as smart as Heisenberg. AMC A man accused of tricking PC users into thinking they had viruses and then offering to “fix” their perfectly fine computers has agreed to pay back every penny he allegedly received in the scam. Navin Pasari is a defendant in one of six complaints that the Federal Trade Commission filed in September 2012 against people and entities accused of leading Windows tech support scams.”According to the complaint against Pasari and his co-defendants, the defendants placed ads with Google, which appeared when consumers searched for their computer company’s tech support telephone number,” the FTC noted in an announcement today . “After getting consumers on the phone, the defendants’ telemarketers allegedly claimed they were affiliated with legitimate companies, including Dell, Microsoft, McAfee, and Norton, and told consumers they had detected malware that posed an imminent threat to their computers. The scammers then offered to rid the computer of the non-existent malware for fees ranging from $139 to $360.” Pasari did not admit wrongdoing but agreed to a proposed final judgment and order in which he will forfeit $14,369, “which is the amount of money Mr. Pasari received from the other Defendants,” the document states. The money is being held in escrow and will be transferred to the FTC, assuming the order is approved by a US District Court judge. Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Alleged Windows support scammer forfeits money earned by “fixing” PCs

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