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Submission + - Zeus Still Alive and Well With New Variant Floki Bot

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: Malware gangs, like sad wedding bands bands, love to play the hits. And one of the hits they keep running back over and over is the Zeus banking Trojan, which has been in use for many years in a number of different forms. Researchers have unearthed a new piece of malware called Floki Bot that is based on the venerable Zeus source code and is being used to infect point-of-sale systems, among other targets.

Flashpoint conducted the analysis of Floki Bot with Cisco’s Talos research team, and the two organizations said that the author behind the bot maintains a presence on a number of different underground forums, some of which are in Russian or other non-native languages for him. Kremez said that attackers sometimes will participate in foreign language forums as a way to expand their knowledge.

Along with its PoS infection capability, Floki Bot also has a feature that allows it to use the Tor network to communicate.

Submission + - Inside The NYPD's Attempt To Build Community Trust Through Twitter (backchannel.com)

Submitted by mirandakatz
mirandakatz writes: When the NYPD rolled out its Twitter presence a couple years back, it didn't go so smoothly: the @NYPDNews account tweeted a request: “Do you have a photo with a member of the NYPD? Tweet us & tag it #myNYPD,” and by midnight the same day, more than 70,000 people had responded decrying police brutality. At Backchannel, Susan Crawford looks at the department's attempt to use Twitter to rebuild community trust, noting that while the NYPD has a long ways to go, any opening up of communication is an improvement on the traditionally tight-lipped culture.

Submission + - 5-Year-Old Critical Linux Vulnerability Patched (threatpost.com)

Submitted by msm1267
msm1267 writes: A critical, local code-execution vulnerability in the Linux kernel was patched more than a week ago, continuing a run a serious security issues in the operating system, most of which have been hiding in the code for years.

Details on the vulnerability were published Tuesday by researcher Philip Pettersson, who said the vulnerable code was introduced in August 2011. A patch was pushed to the mainline Linux kernel Dec. 2, four days after it was privately disclosed. Pettersson has developed a proof-of-concept exploit specifically for Ubuntu distributions, but told Threatpost his attack could be ported to other distros with some changes.

The vulnerability is a race condition that was discovered in the af_packet implementation in the Linux kernel, and Pettersson said that a local attacker could exploit the bug to gain kernel code execution from unprivileged processes. He said the bug cannot be exploited remotely.

Submission + - Trade Secrets Stolen From ThyssenKrupp In Major Hack

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: German steel manufacturer ThyssenKrupp has been hacked in a major cyberattack, coordinated by unnamed malicious actors based in south-east Asia. The large-scale attack was targeted at the German firm to steal its technical trade secrets. Martin Hölze, CIO at ThyssenKrupp said that the company had been the target of a ‘very professional hacker attack since February.’ The breach was executed through hidden backdoors in the IT systems which were used to gain access to the steel giant’s valuable intellectual property. ThyssenKrupp said that the attack was uncovered in April by its own in-house computer emergency response team (CERT), which has since cleaned and re-secured the infected systems. State and federal cyber security and data protection agencies were informed of the hack. A criminal complaint was also lodged with police in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia.

Submission + - Apache Zeppelin open-source analytics startup reveals new name, fresh funding (networkworld.com)

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: The team behind the Apache Zeppelin open-source notebook for big data analytics visualization has renamed itself ZEPL and announced $4.1M in Series A funding. ZEPL, which swears a certain professional football organization had nothing to do with it ditching its former name (NFLabs), is one of numerous companies smelling blood in the water around Tableau, the $3.5 billion business intelligence and analytics software vendor that has stumbled financially in recent quarters and seen its stock price plummet accordingly.

Submission + - AI Could Help Solve Unemployment: By Helping Colleges Predict What To Offer (edsurge.com)

Submitted by jyosim
jyosim writes: If Amazon can forecast what consumers will buy and prestock items in their warehouses to meet the expected demand, why can’t colleges do the same thing when planning their curricula, using predictive analytics to make sure new degree or certificates programs are started just in time for expanding job opportunities?

That's the premise of a new center, announced today, involving data scientists from U of Chicago, Argonne National Labs, and the San Diego Supercomputing Center.

Other players are already trying to translate the job market into a giant data set to spot trends. LinkedIn sits on one of the biggest troves of data, with hundreds of millions of job profiles, and ambitions to create what it calls the “economic graph” of the economy. But not everyone is on LinkedIn, which attracts mainly those in white-collar jobs. And companies such as Burning Glass Technologies have scanned hundreds of thousands of job listings and attempt to provide real-time intelligence on what employers say they’re looking for. Those still don’t paint the full picture, though.

The hope is that tools could also be developed using the data to help students see what they should study to best position

themselves to get jobs once they graduate.

And the data could be a boon to scholars who are analyzing labor markets. “There is a question, is this country still a land of opportunity?” one U Chicago sociologist says. “That’s what economists have been asking lately and trying to understand how opportunities are created, especially for disadvantaged students and communities.”

Submission + - "Domaincop" malicious abuse notifications (sans.edu)

Submitted by UnderAttack
UnderAttack writes: An outfit by the name of "domaincops.net" apparently harassed domain owners with malware loaded spam. The spam claimed to include an abuse notification, and the domain name "domaincops.net" made them more plausible. Properly DKIM signed, these notes may have even slipped through many spam filters, and the site was (while it was still up) protect by Cloudflare.

Submission + - Conexant and Amazon bring Alexa to Raspberry Pi with âAudioSmart 2-mic Deve (betanews.com)

Submitted by BrianFagioli
BrianFagioli writes: Much of Amazonâ(TM)s success with Echo and Alexa is thanks to third-party developers and hardware. Today, Conexant and Amazon announce the AudioSmart 2-mic Development Kit. This add-on for the Raspberry Pi should enable easier development of devices using Amazonâ(TM)s Alexa voice technology. This could ultimately lead to further growth and adoption of the Alexa voice assistant.

Submission + - Microsoft Demos Windows 10 On Snapdragon Processors With Full Function x86 Apps (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Microsoft just made a major announcement with regards to Windows on ARM processors that power so many of the world's mobile devices. The company has enable the ability to support the complete Windows 10 ecosystem with x86 emulation on Qualcomm Snapdragon processors. Unlike Windows RT, this is a full version of Windows 10 that is compiled to run on Qualcomm Snapdragon hardware. That means that customers aren't limited to only running Universal Windows apps (as was the case with Windows RT). Users get all of the features and capabilities that you would expect with Windows 10 and will also be able to run Win32 apps (only 32-bit x86 support will offered initially). In the video demo, you can see Microsoft demonstrating Windows 10 running on a Snapdragon 820 processor paired with 4GB of RAM. The device has the ability to join a domain (something that wasn't possible with Windows RT), run Adobe Photoshop CC, Office and even play Windows games.

Submission + - Norwegian Consumer Council Declares Internet-connected Toys a Privacy Risk. (forbrukerradet.no)

Submitted by product_bucket
product_bucket writes: The Norwegian Consumer Council has assessed some internet-connected toys and
decided that they present a privacy risk. The companies behind the toys apparently fail to adequately explain the safeguard mechanisms in place for the data they collect, and conveniently retain the right to modify their terms and conditions at any future date. Also mentioned by the
BBC is a formal complaint on behalf of U.S Consumer Groups [PDF] relating to poor Bluetooth linking implementation.

Submission + - Windows 10 Is Coming To Qualcomm's Snapdragon Mobile Chips (anandtech.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Today at Microsoft’s WinHEC event in Shenzhen, China, the company announced that it’s working with Qualcomm to bring the full Windows 10 experience to future devices powered by Snapdragon processors. These new Snapdragon-powered devices should support all things Microsoft, including Microsoft Office, Windows Hello, Windows Pen, and the Edge browser, alongside third-party Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps and, most interestingly, x86 (32-bit) Win32 apps. They should even be able to play Crysis 2. This announcement fits nicely with Microsoft’s “Windows Everywhere” doctrine and should come as no surprise. It’s not even the first time we’ve seen Windows running on ARM processors. Microsoft’s failed Windows RT operating system was a modified version of Windows 8 that targeted the ARMv7-A 32-bit architecture. It grew from Microsoft’s MinWin effort to make Windows more modular by reorganizing the operating system and cleaning up API dependencies. The major change with today's announcement over Windows RT and UWP is that x86 apps will be able to run on Qualcomm's ARM-based SoCs, along with support for all of the peripherals that are already supported with Windows 10. This alone is a huge change from Windows RT, which would only work with a small subset of peripherals. Microsoft is also focusing on having these devices always connected through cellular, which is something that is not available for many PCs at the moment. Support will be available for eSIM to avoid having to find room in a cramped design to accommodate a physical SIM, and Microsoft is going so far as to call these "cellular PCs" meaning they are expecting broad support for this class of computer, rather than the handful available now with cellular connectivity. The ability to run x86 Win32 apps on ARM will come through emulation, and to demonstrate the performance Microsoft has released a video of an ARM PC running Photoshop.

Submission + - John Deere's Electric Tractor Paves the Way For Zero Emissions Farming (newatlas.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: John Deere has released a video of an all-electric concept tractor in the lead-up to the SIMA Agribusiness show in France, pointing the way toward a zero-local-emissions tractor product in the future. In some ways, tractors seem like an ideal candidate for electrification. Electric motors are great for generating the kinds of huge torque figures tractors require, and tractors are generally fairly short range vehicles that live in the same shed every night, making for convenient recharging. They're also very low-maintenance in comparison with diesel gear. That's the thinking behind John Deere's SESAM (Sustainable Energy Supply for Agricultural Machinery) tractor, a gutted out JD 6R with a huge battery bank up front and dual electric motors developing up to 130 kilowatts (174 horsepower) of continuous power. The dual motors can be set to three modes; all drive can go to the wheels, or the power take-off shaft, or drive can be split between them. The battery at this stage will only last for about four hours of work, so it's not ready for the big leagues yet. But it's starting to get close, and it's good to see a major player in agriculture starting to take zero-emissions farming seriously.

Submission + - Cesarean births *possibly* affecting human evolution 1

Submitted by CanadianRealist
CanadianRealist writes: Larger babies delivered by cesarean section may be affecting human evolution. Researchers estimate cases where the baby cannot fit down the birth canal have increased from 30 in 1,000 in the 1960s to 36 in 1,000 births today. (Science Alert and ( BBC "this is happening headline" version.)

More detailed studies would be required to actually confirm the link between C-sections and evolution, as all we have now is a hypothesis based on the birth data.

Agreed, more studies required part. Cesareans may simply be becoming more common with “too large” defined as cesarean seems like a better idea. It's reasonable to pose the question based simply on an understanding of evolution. Like it's reasonable to conjecture that length of human pregnancy is a compromise between further development in utero, and chance of mother and baby surviving the delivery.

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