Aleksandr Andreevich Panin, the Russian developer of the SpyEye botnet creation kit, and an associate were on Wednesday sentenced to prison terms by a court in Atlanta, Georgia, for their role in developing and distributing malware that is said to have caused millions of dollars in losses to the financial sector.Panin, who set out to develop SpyEye as a successor to the Zeus malware that affected financial institutions since 2009, was sentenced by the court to nine and half years in prison, while his Algerian associate Hamza Bendelladj got a 15-year term, according to the Department of Justice.After infecting victims' computers, cybercriminals were able to remotely control these compromised computers through command-and-control servers, and steal the victims’ personal and financial information using techniques such as Web injects that introduce malicious code into a victim’s browser, keystroke loggers that record keyboard activity and credit card grabbers. The information sent to the servers was then used to steal money from the financial accounts of the victims.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Rumors of Apple's interest in developing an electric car have persisted for months now. Over the last 12 months, we've heard rumblings that Apple's car development team is almost 1,000 engineers and researchers deep. What's more, it's no secret that Apple has poached a number of employees from high-end luxury automakers such as BMW, Porsche, and of course Tesla.Now whether or not an Apple Car actually sees the light of day is another matter altogether, but it's impossible to ignore that Apple is seriously exploring such a possibility. The latest report about Apple's car plans comes to us courtesy of the German-language Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (F.A.Z) which relays that Apple has a secret auto-oriented research facility in Germany where a team of 15-20 employees with deep experience across all facets of the car design and manufacturing process come up with new and interesting ideas. Specifically, the employees are said to be "progressive thinkers" with backgrounds in engineering, software and hardware design, and sales.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The PC market has been in trouble for ages, but last year took the biscuit. Shipments dropped below 300 million for the first time since 2008, and IDC declared it the worst year in history. That explains a lot about what happened at Intel this week.The chip maker has been reducing its dependency on PCs for some time, preferring to focus on its more successful data center business. But the announcement that it would lay off 12,000 people is a sign that Intel is finally turning a corner.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A second demonstration of mega-venture Magic Leap’s virtual reality technology indicates that head-tracking has been added and possibly hand-tracking.Head-tracking, which wasn’t shown in the only other demonstration that happened over a year ago, lets a person move around a hologram to see it from different sides. Hand-tracking, which is a mouse-like metaphor interface that lets people interact with virtual objects using hand movements, also seems to have been added. The report also hints at the principals behind how Magic Leap’s virtual reality works. Wired reported on Kevin Kelly’s visit to Magic Leap in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, to experience the second public demonstration of the company’s version of virtual reality that it calls mixed reality (MR). A comparison of the Wired story with one written by Rachel Metz over a year ago for the MIT Technology Review measures Magic Leap’s progress.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The business of bug hunting is a potentially lucrative one for both seasoned security researchers and amateurs with an interest in hacking. It’s an area that’s gaining legitimacy thanks to official bug bounty programs and hacking contests, but there’s still a seedy underbelly that unscrupulous bounty hunters can take advantage of if they successfully identify a vulnerability.The average cost of a data breach is $3.8 million, according to research by the Ponemon Institute. It’s not hard to understand why so many companies are now stumping up bounties. It can also be very difficult, time consuming and expensive to root out bugs and flaws internally. Turning to the wider security community for help makes a lot of sense, and where there’s need there’s a market. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A new report from JP Morgan quantifies just how significant the enterprise shift to the cloud has become.The Wall Street giant queried 207 CIOs who have budgets of more than $600 million to find that 16.2% of the workloads under management by the CIOs run in the public cloud and within five years, 41.3% are expected to.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: IDC: The cloud is eating legacy systems +We don’t normally put too much stock in surveys, but this one caught our eye because of who administered and took the survey.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The TP-LINK HS100 smart plug is quite simply a power outlet that you can control from anywhere. Using your smartphone, you can turn devices on & off, set programs to turn them on & off at set times while you're away, or engage a "countdown timer" which powers the switch off after a set amount of time. Installation is simple -- just plug a device into your smart plug and connect to your wifi network. The HS100 is also compatible with Echo, for voice control. Buy multiple plugs and get creative.The TP-LINK HS100 wifi smart plug averages 4 out of 5 stars on Amazon from 250 reviewers (read reviews). With a list price of $49.99, this 40% discount puts the HS100 at just $29.95. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Intel's rise and fall in tablets are starting to resemble the company's misadventures in netbooks less than a decade ago.The company is quickly distancing itself from basic tablets, a market it prized as little as two years ago, to go after detachable devices, hybrids, and high-end tablets that can double as PCs.Intel could also ax some Atom tablet chip lines that brought the company success two years ago. Intel this week laid off 12,000 people as part of a restructuring plan that could also include cuts in some product lines.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The risks and costs of shadow IT have been always been a concern for IT organizations. Yet the business clearly values the capability to procure certain IT services to rapidly meet its changing business needs — so much so that these informal IT capabilities are springing up even more often than IT leaders realize. One 2015 report by Cisco indicated that the number of unauthorized cloud applications being used in the enterprise, for example, was 15 to 10 times higher than CIOs estimated.[ Related: CIOs vastly underestimate extent of shadow IT ]To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
With this lens kit from Amir you can take high clarity, professional photos wish fisheye, macro and super wide angle format from virtually any cell phone. These professional HD lenses reduce glass flare & ghosting caused by reflections. A universal clip design makes it easy to attach to most cell phones, iPads and PC's as well. The fisheye lens capture images at 180-degrees, wide angle lens at 140-degrees and the macro lens magnifies 10x with a minimum object distance of 10-15mm. The lens kit receives an average of 4.5 out of 5 stars on Amazon (read reviews). Regular price is listed at $39.99 on Amazon, but with the current 68% discount you can gift this kit to yourself or an aspiring photographer for just $12.88.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google’s Chrome browser has just reached a major milestone, hitting its 50th release.For Google, it’s a moment for positive reflection. To emphasize Chrome’s might, the company points to the browser’s 771 billion page loads per month, 1 billion monthly active mobile users, 9.1 billion auto-filled forms, and 145 million malicious webpages averted. One might also point to Chrome’s ever-growing usage, accounting for 47 percent of all worldwide pageviews, including mobile, according to StatCounter.Indeed, Chrome has become an indispensable tool for many web users, and has served as a leader in the browser world. It introduced the idea of limiting menu clutter around actual webpages, and popularized the syncing of bookmarks, tabs, and browser history across devices. After all these years, it remains PCWorld’s most highly-recommended web browser.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The secret backdoor in Juniper firewalls which automatically decrypted VPN traffic has been compared to “stealing a master key to get into any government building.” The security hole, which existed for at least three years, was publicly announced in December. The whodunit for installing the backdoor is still unknown, but some people believe it was repackaged from a tool originally created by the NSA.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A human’s “real-world movements” are so unique that people can be distinguished by their patterns, a new study conducted by Columbia University and Google finds. And that’s even if the datasets are anonymized.Sleep cycles captured by fitness IoT products, commuting schedules stored by bots, the days of the week that one goes to work and other habits could all one day be used to discern one person from another, the study says.What’s more, the computer scientists say all you need is one dataset to obtain results, for example, a few bank card transactions.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
San Francisco-based online residential real estate company Trulia lives and dies by data. To compete successfully in today's housing market, tt must deliver the most up-to-date real estate information available to its customers. But until recently, doing so was a daily struggle.Acquired by online real estate database company Zillow in 2014 for $3.5 billion, Trulia is one of the largest online residential real estate marketplaces around, with more than 55 million unique site visitors each month.Hadoop at heart
With so much data to store and process, the company adopted Hadoop in 2008 and it has since become the heart of Trulia's data infrastructure. The company has expanded usage of Hadoop to an entire data engineering department consisting of several teams using multiple clusters. This allows Trulia to deliver personalized recommendations to customers based on sophisticated data science models that analyze more than a terabyte of data daily. That data is drawn from new listings, public records and user behavior, all of which is then cross-referenced with search criteria to alert customers quickly when new properties become available.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Apple has agreed to pay US$24.9 million to a patent holding company to resolve a 5-year-old lawsuit accusing Siri of infringing one of its patents.Apple will pay the money to Marathon Patent Group, the parent company of Texas firm Dynamic Advances, which held an exclusive license to a 2007 patent covering natural language user interfaces for enterprise databases. Marathon reported the settlement in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Tuesday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
With their Beacon of Hope IoT app, twin sisters and social entrepreneurs America and Penelope Lopez, are taking up the fight against one of the most revolting crimes on the planet—human trafficking.
In 2013, the United Nations reported that 20.9 million people have been pushed into forced labor and sex trades around the world. Ranked in the top three of fastest-growing crime categories, the same study reported modern slavery has become a booming $32 billion illicit trade.
Recognizing the importance of the issue, the Lopez sisters created the Beacon of Hope project. It is the latest in their string of hackathon successes that includes an anti-bullying app and a police bodycam with facial recognition. This project began at the ground zero of hackathons, the AT&T hackathon at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, which draws hackers like the Kentucky Derby draws gamblers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Salesforce is a juggernaut.In the 10 or so years since it was founded, the company has pretty much single-handedly changed the face of the software industry. Concepts such as SaaS, the cloud and enterprise application marketplaces were, if not invented, at least popularized by Salesforce.In the past decade, Salesforce has gone from being a very interesting and agile CRM vendor to being a provider of pretty much an entire enterprise software stack—from applications at the top end through to development platforms for the creation of applications. Indeed, the fact that health IT vendor Veeva was able to undertake an IPO based on a product built entirely on Salesforce's platform is testimony to what Salesforce has achieved.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Security researchers have found a new memory-scraping malware program that steals payment card data from point-of-sale (PoS) terminals and sends it back to attackers using the Domain Name System (DNS).Dubbed Multigrain, the threat is part of a family of malware programs known as NewPosThings, with which it shares some code. However, this variant was designed to target specific environments.That's because unlike other PoS malware programs that look for card data in the memory of many processes, Multigrain targets a single process called multi.exe that's associated with a popular back-end card authorization and PoS server. If this process is not running on the compromised machine, the infection routine exists and the malware deletes itself.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Earlier this week, I wrote a post discussing how visibility can be used to reverse the security asymmetry challenge. On Tuesday, hot security startup Illumio proved my point by announcing a cyber assessment program that uses granular visibility to identify new attack surfaces.Illumio’s Attack Surface Assessment Program (ASAP) was led by Nathaniel Gleicher, former Director of Cybersecurity Policy for the National Security Council at the White House and now the Head of Cybersecurity Strategy for Illumio. The White House obviously has the strictest of security policies, giving Gleicher the necessary level of paranoia to put together a program like this. Now, any company can benefit from his experience.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Sure, online shopping is generally more convenient than going to the store for your purchases, but prices are pretty much the same three quarters of the time, according to a new MIT study.MIT Sloan Professor Alberto Cavallo cleverly went the crowdsourcing route to gather some of his data by having 370 recruits use a scanning app to check barcodes for prices on a random set of 10 to 50 products in physical stores in 10 countries. That information, along with online price data at multi-channel retailers (so no Amazon or eBay), was fed into the MIT Billion Prices Project database for analysis. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here