63923197
submission
alphadogg writes:
Netflix has released three internal tools it uses to catch hints on the Web that hackers might target its services.
“Many security teams need to stay on the lookout for Internet-based discussions, posts and other bits that may be of impact to the organizations they are protecting,” wrote Andy Hoernecke and Scott Behrens of Netflix’s Cloud Security Team. http://techblog.netflix.com/20... One of the tools, called Scumblr, can be used to create custom searches of Google sites, Twitter and Facebook for users or keywords.
63894959
submission
alphadogg writes:
Smartphones sold in California will soon be required to have a kill switch that lets users remotely lock them and wipe them of data in the event they are lost or stolen. The demand is the result of a new law, http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/pub/... into effect on Monday, that applies to phones manufactured after July 1, 2015, and sold in the state. While its legal reach does not extend beyond the state’s borders, the inefficiency of producing phones solely for California means the kill switch is expected to be adopted by phone makers on handsets sold across the U.S. and around the world.
63754047
submission
alphadogg writes:
The depletion of Internet addresses would seem to spell relief for aged routers that are struggling to deal with the Internet’s growth, but the complicated interplay between those trends might cause even more problems. Last Wednesday, some older routers and switches stumbled when the Internet’s table of routes surpassed 512,000 entries, the maximum they could hold in a special form of memory called TCAM. The event drew widespread attention, though it was actually the third time in this young century that the Internet had broken through such a threshold. Devices that don’t have room for all the routes may reboot themselves or fail to route some traffic, but the affected gear was fairly old. Another danger remains, and it comes from the address depletion itself. With fewer IPv4 addresses at hand, users or service providers may want to split them up into smaller routes.
63706677
submission
alphadogg writes:
The German city of Munich, long one of the open-source community’s poster children for the institutional adoption of Linux, is close to performing a major about-face and returning to Microsoft products. Munich’s deputy mayor, Josef Schmid, told the Süddeutsche Zeitung http://www.sueddeutsche.de/mue... that user complaints had prompted a reconsideration of the city’s end-user software, which has been progressively converted from Microsoft to a custom Linux distribution – “LiMux” – in a process that dates back to 2003.
63608641
submission
alphadogg writes:
Challenges among top tech execs to dump ice water on their heads to raise awareness for dreaded disease ALS have been escalating this week. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Apple SVP Phil Schiller are among those taking the challenge. Meanwhile, Bill Gates, Google CEO Larry Page and Apple CEO Tim Cook have been challenged. Open source outfits such as Cloudera, Black Duck and Red Hat have also joined in the awareness campaign that has swept across social media networks over the past few weeks.
63593055
submission
alphadogg writes:
Cisco Systems will cut as many as 6,000 jobs over the next 12 months, saying it needs to shift resources to growing businesses such as cloud, software and security. The move will be a reorganization rather than a net reduction, the company said. It needs to cut jobs because the product categories where it sees the strongest growth, such as security, require special skills, so it needs to make room for workers in those areas, it said. “If we don’t have the courage to change, if we don’t lead the change, we will be left behind,” Chairman and CEO John Chambers said on a conference call.
63543759
submission
alphadogg writes:
The late actor/comedian Robin Williams increasingly riffed on smartphones and technology in recent years, including Apple Siri and smartphone apps. Here's a look at his recent tech schticks.
62890425
submission
alphadogg writes:
Public certificate authorities (CAs) are warning that as of Nov. 1 they will reject requests for internal SSL server certificates that don’t conform to new internal domain naming and IP address conventions designed to safeguard networks. The concern is that SSL server digital certificates issued by CAs at present for internal corporate e-mail servers, Web servers and databases are not unique and can potentially be used in man-in-the-middle attacks involving the setup of rogue servers inside the targeted network, say representatives for the Certification Authority/Browser Forum (CA/B Forum), the industry group that sets security and operational guidelines for digital certificates. Members include the overwhelming bulk of public CAs around the globe, plus browser makers such as Microsoft and Apple. The problem today is that network managers often give their servers names like “Server1” and allocate internal IP addresses so that SSL certificates issued for them through the public CAs are not necessarily globally unique, notes Trend Micro's Chris Bailey.
62862819
submission
alphadogg writes:
ix years ago the Social Security Administration embarked on an aggressive plan to replace outdated computer systems overwhelmed by a growing flood of disability claims. Nearly $300 million later, the new system is nowhere near ready and agency officials are struggling to salvage a project racked by delays and mismanagement, according to an internal report commissioned by the agency. In 2008, Social Security said the project was about two to three years from completion. Five years later, it was still two to three years from being done, according to the report by McKinsey and Co., a management consulting firm. Today, with the project still in the testing phase, the agency can't say when it will be completed or how much it will cost.
62745781
submission
alphadogg writes:
In its quest to help enterprises seek out and neutralize all threats to their Wi-Fi networks, AirMagnet is now looking to the skies. In a free software update to its AirMagnet Enterprise product last week, the Wi-Fi security division of Fluke Networks added code specifically crafted to detect the Parrot AR Drone, a popular unmanned aerial vehicle that costs a few hundred dollars and can be controlled using a smartphone or tablet. Drones themselves don’t pose any special threat to Wi-Fi networks, and AirMagnet isn’t issuing air pistols to its customers to shoot them down. The reason the craft are dangerous is that they can be modified to act as rogue access points and sent into range of a victim’s wireless network, potentially breaking into a network to steal data.
62745071
submission
alphadogg writes:
A presentation on a low-budget method to unmask users of a popular online privacy tool, TOR, will no longer go ahead at the Black Hat security conference early next month. The talk was nixed by the legal counsel with Carnegie Mellon’s Software Engineering Institute after a finding that materials from researcher Alexander Volynkin were not approved for public release, according to a notice on the conference’s website. https://www.blackhat.com/lates... Volynkin, a research scientist with the university’s Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) was due to give a talk entitled “You Don’t Have to be the NSA to Break Tor: Deanonymizing Users on a Budget” at the conference, which take places Aug. 6-7 in Last Vegas.
62702369
submission
alphadogg writes:
Cybercriminals are spreading a new file-encrypting ransomware program that’s more powerful and resilient than Cryptolocker, a threat recently shut down by the U.S. Department of Justice. The new ransomware threat is called CTB-Locker (Curve-Tor-Bitcoin Locker), but Microsoft anti-malware products detect it as Critroni.A. Its creator has been advertising the program to other cybercriminals on Russian-language forums since the middle of June and it seems that he’s been trying to fix most of Cryptolocker’s faults. Critroni uses a file encryption algorithm based on elliptic curve cryptography, which its creator claims is significantly faster than encryption schemes used by other ransomware threats. This also makes decrypting the affected files impossible without paying the ransom, if there are no implementation flaws.
62501171
submission
alphadogg writes:
A group of MIT researchers say they’ve invented a new technology that should all but eliminate queue length in data center networking. The technology will be fully described in a paper presented at the annual conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication. According to MIT, the paper will detail a system – dubbed Fastpass – that uses a centralized arbiter to analyze network traffic holistically and make routing decisions based on that analysis, in contrast to the more decentralized protocols common today. Experimentation done in Facebook data centers shows that a Fastpass arbiter with just eight cores can be used to manage a network transmitting 2.2 terabits of data per second, according to the researchers.
61983855
submission
alphadogg writes:
Georgia Tech researchers are seeking the assistance of website operators to help better understand which sites are being censored and then figure out how to get around such restricted access by examining the data collected. The open source Encore [Enabling Lightweight Measurements of Censorship with Cross-Origin Requests] tool http://encore.noise.gatech.edu... involves website operators installing a single line of code onto their sites, and that in turn will allow the researchers to determine whether visitors to these sites are blocked from visiting other sites around the world known to be censored. The researchers are hoping to enlist a mix of small and big websites, and currently it is running on about 10 of them. End users won’t even know the baseline data measurement is taking place, which of course when you’re talking about censorship and privacy, can be a sticky subject. Facebook learned that recently http://www.networkworld.com/ar... when disclosures erupted regarding its controversial secret study of users’ moods. The Georgia Tech researchers in an FAQ say their tool can indicate to users that their browsers are conducting measurements, and that users can opt out.
61341019
submission
alphadogg writes:
A Chinese electronics vendor accused of selling signal jammers to U.S. consumers could end up leading the market in one dubious measure: the largest fine ever imposed by the Federal Communications Commission. The agency wants to fine CTS Technology US$34,912,500 for allegedly marketing 285 models of jammers over more than two years. CTS boldly—and falsely—claimed that some of its jammers were approved by the FCC, according to the agency’s enforcement action released Thursday. Conveniently, CTS’ product detail pages also include a button to “report suspicious activity.”
The proposed fine, which would be bigger than any the FCC has levied for anti-competitive behavior, not airing children’s shows, or a wardrobe malfunction, comes from adding up the maximum fines for each model of jammer the company allegedly sold in the U.S. The agency also ordered CTS, based in Shenzhen, China, to stop marketing illegal jammers to U.S. consumers and identify the buyer of each jammer it sold in the U.S.
