Soulskill - Slashdot User

New Mayhem Malware Targets Linux and UNIX-Like Servers 168

Posted by Soulskill on Friday July 18, 2014 @08:48AM from the keep-calm-and-patch-on dept.

Bismillah writes: Russian security researchers have spotted a new malware named Mayhem that has spread to 1,400 or so Linux and FreeBSD servers around the world, and continues to look for new machines to infect. And, it doesn't need root to operate. "The malware can have different functionality depending on the type of plug-in downloaded to it by the botmaster in control, and stashed away in a hidden file system on the compromised server. Some of the plug-ins provide brute force cracking of password functionality, while others crawl web pages to scrape information. According to the researchers, Mayhem appears to be the continuation of the Fort Disco brute-force password cracking attack campaign that began in May 2013."

Submission + - Verizon's Accidental Mea Culpa (level3.com)

Submitted by Barryke on Friday July 18, 2014 @06:05AM

Barryke writes: Verizon has blamed Netflix for the streaming slowdowns their customers have been seeing. It seems the Verizon ">blog post defending this has backfired in a spectacular way: The chief has clearly admitted that Verizon has capacity to spare, and is deliberately constraining capacity from network providers. The Level3 blog posted in reply to Verizon show a diagram visualising underpowered interconnect problem, and offer a free upgrade for Verizon hardware: the interconnect network cables and ports to plug them in. "(..) these cards are very cheap, a few thousand dollars for each 10 Gbps card which could support 5,000 streams or more. If that’s the case, we’ll buy one for them. Maybe they can’t afford the small piece of cable between our two ports. If that’s the case, we’ll provide it. Heck, we’ll even install it." It seems there isn't much more to say, although i am very curious to the response of the ISP about this straight forward accusation of throttling paying users.

Submission + - CCP explains why virtual reality first person shooters still don't work (redbull.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 18, 2014 @05:16AM

An anonymous reader writes: Icelandic studio CCP is better known for EVE Online, but its first foray into virtual reality with space shooter Valkyrie has caused a stir, and is widely seen as a flagship game for the Oculus Rift headset. In a new interview, Valkyrie executive producer Owen O'Brien explains what advantages the game will have when played with a headset — and gives his view on why a dogfighter is better suited to VR than a first person shooter:

"People have hacked it together, but it doesn't really work," he says. "The basic problem is Simulator Sickness. In Valkyrie or any cockpit game or driving game, what you're doing in the real world, assuming you're sitting down, more or less mimics what your brain is telling you you're doing in the game. So you don't get that disconnect, and it's that disconnect that causes sickness. So, the problem with first-person shooters is that you're running or crouching or jumping in the game but not in the real world, and because it's so realistic it can make some people (not everybody) feel nauseated if they start doing it for extended periods of time."

Submission + - Preparing for Satellite War (businessweek.com)

Submitted by Taco Cowboy on Friday July 18, 2014 @12:15AM

Taco Cowboy writes: In May 2013 the Chinese government conducted what it called a science space mission from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southwest China. The liftoff took place at night and employed a powerful rocket as well as a truck-based launch vehicle

The Pentagon never commented in detail on last year’s launch — and the Chinese have stuck to their story

The U.S. is most vulnerable to a Chinese attack because 43 percent of all satellites in orbit belong to the U.S. military or U.S. companies. According to Lance Gatling, president of Nexial Research, an aerospace consultant in Tokyo, Besides testing missiles that can intercept and destroy satellites, the Chinese have developed jamming techniques to disrupt satellite communications. Furthermore, the Chinese have studied ground-based lasers that could take down a satellite’s solar panels, and satellites equipped with grappling arms that could co-orbit and then disable expensive U.S. hardware

U.S. is exploring ways to mitigate the perceived threat from China, including dispatching a fleet of smaller, mobile satellites that would be harder for adversaries to find and destroy. Enabling satellite transmitters to quickly hop between frequencies could address the Chinese jamming threat, Gatling says.

In June the U.S. Air Force awarded Lockheed Martin (LMT) a $914 million contract to build a ground-based radar system that will track objects as small as a baseball, which could help identify a satellite attack as it’s happening. “Destroying someone’s satellite is an act of war,” says Dave Baiocchi, an engineering professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. “You need to know what’s going on up there.”

Submission + - New Mayhem malware targets Linux and UNIX-like servers

Submitted by Bismillah on Thursday July 17, 2014 @07:11PM

Bismillah writes: Russian security researchers have spotted a new malware named Mayhem that has spread to 1,400 or so Linux and FreeBSD servers around the world, and continues to look for new machines to infect. And, it doesn't need root to operate.

Submission + - The New Science of Evolutionary Forecasting (simonsfoundation.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 17, 2014 @02:15PM

An anonymous reader writes: Scientists may not be able to predict what life will be like 100 million years from now, but they may be able to make short-term forecasts for the next few months or years. And if they’re making predictions about viruses or other health threats, they might be able to save some lives in the process.

“As we collect a few examples of predictability, it changes the whole goal of evolutionary biology,” Lässig said.

Submission + - Two big dark matter experiments gain U.S. support

Submitted by Graculus on Wednesday July 16, 2014 @01:19PM

Graculus writes: The Department of Energy (DOE) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced on Friday that they will try to fund two major experiments to detect particles of the mysterious dark matter whose gravity binds the galaxies instead of just one. The decision allays fears that the funding agencies could afford only one experiment to continue the search for so-called weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs.

Submission + - 97% of U.S. Banks Allow Clickjacking Fraud. 44% Don't Even Use SSL. 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 16, 2014 @12:45PM

An anonymous reader writes: According to a financial industry software vendor, over 97% of U.S. Banks and Credit Unions Allow Clickjacking Fraud, and 44% Don't Even Use SSL. The report continues to break down the SSL usage and suggests that only 33.1% of institutions actually implement SSL correctly given a portion of the websites that do utilize HTTPS also allow a unsecured HTTP response.

Submission + - Manuel Noriega sues Activision over Call of Duty

Submitted by mrspoonsi on Wednesday July 16, 2014 @11:30AM

mrspoonsi writes: Manuel Noriega, the former dictator of Panama, is suing Call of Duty's video games publisher.

The ex-military ruler is seeking lost profits and damages after a character based on him featured in Activision's 2012 title Black Ops II. The 80-year-old is currently serving a jail sentence in Panama for crimes committed during his time in power, including the murder of critics. One lawyer said this was the latest in a growing trend of such lawsuits. "In the US, individuals have what's called the right to publicity, which gives them control over how their person is depicted in commerce including video games," explained Jas Purewal, an interactive entertainment lawyer. "There's also been a very well-known action by a whole series of college athletes against Electronic Arts, and the American band No Doubt took action against Activision over this issue among other cases. "It all focuses upon the American legal ability for an individual to be only depicted with their permission, which in practice means payment of a fee. "But Noriega isn't a US citizen or even a resident. This means that his legal claim becomes questionable, because it's unclear on what legal basis he can actually bring a case against Activision."

Submission + - SpaceX Booster return partially successful (space.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 16, 2014 @11:13AM

An anonymous reader writes: The commercial spaceflight company SpaceX returned part of its Falcon 9 rocket back to Earth after a successful satellite launch Monday (July 14) in a reusability test that did not go entirely as planned after the booster splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean.

"Rocket booster reentry, landing burn & leg deploy were good, but lost hull integrity right after splashdown (aka kaboom)," SpaceX's billionaire founder and CEO Elon Musk wrote in a Twitter post. "Detailed review of rocket telemetry needed to tell if [it was] due to initial splashdown or subsequent tip over and body slam."

Submission + - ChickTech Brings Hundreds of Young Women to Open Source (opensource.com)

Submitted by ectoman on Wednesday July 16, 2014 @10:31AM

ectoman writes: Opensource.com is running an interview with Jennifer Davidson of ChickTech, a non-profit organization whose mission is to create communities of support for women and girls pursuing (or interested in pursuing) careers in tech. "In the United States, many girls are brought up to believe that 'girls can't do math' and that science and other "geeky" topics are for boys," Davidson said. "We break down that idea." Portland, OR-based ChickTech is quickly expanding throughout the United States—to cities like Corvallis and San Francisco—thanks to the "ChickTech: High School" initiative, which gathers hundreds of young women for two-day workshops featuring open source technologies. "We fill a university engineering department with 100 high school girls—more girls than many engineering departments have ever seen," Davidson said. "The participants can look around the building and see that girls from all backgrounds are just as excited about tech as they are."

Submission + - US House Passes Pemanent Ban On Internet Taxes

Submitted by jfruh on Wednesday July 16, 2014 @09:19AM

jfruh writes: In 1998, the US Congress passed a law that temporarily banned all taxes imposed by federal, state, and local governments on Internet access and Internet-only services, a ban that has been faithfully renewed every year since. Now the US House has passed a permanent version of the ban, which also applies to several states that had passed Internet taxes before 1998 and were grandfathered in under the temporary law. The Senate must pass the bill as well by November 1 or the temporary ban will lapse.

Submission + - The Placebo Effect occurs with Computer Applications too

Submitted by vrml on Tuesday July 15, 2014 @08:43AM

vrml writes: In medicine, it is well-known that sugar pills sometimes produce the same effects as real drugs (Placebo Effect). But could that happen with computers too? Can it be that the things a computer application claims to do are “all in our mind” and the app is actually a sham? The first scientific study of the Placebo Effect in computing, just published by the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies , gives an affirmative answer. The experiment considered affective computing, that is those fancy applications that claim to know user’s emotions by detecting physiological parameters with sensors. Researchers took two well-known affective computing systems and used them to control in real-time the state of an avatar that looked more and more nervous as users’ stress level increased, and more and more relaxed as it decreased. But they also considered a third system in which, unbeknown to users, the sensors were disconnected from the computer and the avatar state was controlled by a random stream of physiological data instead of the real user’s data. Results show that participants believed that the sham application was able to display their stress level. Even worse, only one of the two (costly) affective computing systems produced better results than the placebo. This suggests that evaluations of such novel computer applications should include also a placebo condition, as it is routinely done in medicine but not yet in computer science.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Future-Proof Jobs?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 15, 2014 @08:17AM

An anonymous reader writes: My niece, who is graduating from high school, has asked me for some career advice. Since I work in data processing, my first thought was to recommend a degree course in computer science or computer engineering. However, after reading books by Jeremy Rifkin (The Third Industrial Revolution) and Ray Kurzweil (How to Create a Mind), I now wonder whether a career in information technology is actually better than, say, becoming a lawyer or a construction worker. While the two authors differ in their political persuasions (Rifkin is a Green leftist and Kurzweil is a Libertarian transhumanist), both foresee an increasingly automated future where most of humanity would become either jobless or underemployed by the middle of the century. While robots take over the production of consumer hardware, Big Data algorithms like the ones used by Google and IBM appear to be displacing even white collar tech workers. How long before the only ones left on the payroll are the few "rockstar" programmers and administrators needed to maintain the system? Besides politics and drug dealing, what jobs are really future-proof? Wouldn't it be better if my niece took a course in the Arts, since creativity is looking to be one of humanity's final frontiers against the inevitable Rise of the Machines?

Submission + - Microsoft reveals cheap PCs to compete with Chromebook (crn.com.au)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 14, 2014 @11:32PM

An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft has given away details of three new low-priced laptops that will compete head on with Google Chromebooks. Kevin Turner, Microsoft's chief operating officer, let the cat out of the bag during his keynote address on the first day of World Partner Conference (WPC). The first device revealed is an HP device he called "the Stream", which will be released in time for Christmas, priced at $199. While Turner did hold up the HP device on stage, he didn't give away any more specs. He did, however, show specs for two more devices, both priced at $249. One has a 2.1Ghz Intel Celeron processor, 4GB RAM and 500GB storage. Microsoft has been working with OEM partners to reduce the cost price of devices by cutting licence costs. In February, it was reported that Microsoft had reduced prices of Windows 8.1 for manufacturers of low-cost computers and tablets by 70 percent to compete with cheaper products like Google's Chromebooks, according to Bloomberg.

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