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Is Samsung Preparing For A Price War?

April 27, 2016 by  
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Samsung Electronics changing its approach to its memory chip business and focus on market share over profit margins and the industry will suffer, according to one analyst.

Bernstein Research’s senior analyst Mark C. Newman said that the competitive dynamic in the memory chip industry is not as good as we thought due to Samsung’s aggressive and opportunistic behavior. This is analyst speak for Samsung is engaging in a supply and price war with the other big names in the memory chip marking business – SK hynix and Micron.

“Rather than sit back and enjoy elevated profit margins with a 40 percent market share in DRAMs, Samsung is intent on stretching their share to closer to 50 percent,” he said.

Newman said the company is gaining significant market share in the NAND sector.

“Although Samsung cares about profits, their actions have been opportunistic and more aggressive than we predicted at the expense of laggards particularly Micron Technology in DRAMs and SK hynix in NANDs,” he said.

SK hynix is expected to suffer. “In NAND, we see Samsung continuing to stretch their lead in 3D NAND, which will put continued pressure on the rest of the field. SK hynix is one of the two obvious losers.”

Newman said that Samsung’s antics have destroyed the “level of trust” among competitors, perhaps “permanently,” as demand has dropped drastically with PC sales growth down to high single digits in 2015 with this year shaping up to be the same.

“Sales of smartphones, the main savior to memory demand growth have also weakened considerably to single digit growth this year and servers with datacenters are not strong enough to absorb the excess, particularly in DRAM,” Newman said.

He is worried that Samsung could create an oversupply in the industry.

“The oversupply issue is if anything only getting worse, with higher than normal inventories now an even bigger worry. Although we were right about the shrink slowing, thus reducing supply growth, the flip side of this trend is that capital spending and R&D costs are soaring thus putting a dent in memory cost declines,” he said.

China’s potential entry into the market and new technologies will provide further worries “over the longer term.”

“Today’s oversupply situation would become infinitely worse if and when China’s XMC ramps up big amounts of capacity. New memory technologies such as 3D X-point, ReRAM and MRAM stand on the sidelines and threaten to cannibalize part of the mainstream memory market,” he said.

Courtesy-Fud

Symantec Has Some Flaws With SEP

April 1, 2016 by  
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Symantec has warned of three serious vulnerabilities in its Endpoint Protection (SEP) software, and is advising users to update their systems.

The bugs affect all builds of the 12.1 version of the SEP software, with the first two flaws allowing authorised but low privilege users of the software to gain elevated and administrative access to the management console, which can be accessed either locally or through a web-based portal.

The third bug is in the sysplant driver and enables users to bypass the SEP’s security controls and run malware and other malicious code on a targeted client machines.

“Exploitation attempts of this type generally use known methods of trust exploitation requiring enticing a currently authenticated user to access a malicious link or open a malicious document in a context such as a website or in an email,” said the security firm.

There have been no recorded exploits of the flaws, so it would appear that Symantec has squashed the bugs before they became a real-world problem for its customers.

The first two bugs were discovered by security researcher Anatoly Katyushin from rival firm Kaspersky Labs, which is a little embarrassing. Discovery of the third bug was credited to the enSilo Research Team.

Symantec advises SEP users to update their software to the 12.1 RU6 MP4 version. It also recommends that users should take precautions and restrict remote access to the management console in order to prevent hackers from attacking client systems through the web portal.

While hackers can direct sophisticated malware at even the most robustly secured systems, exploiting flaws in software offers an easier route into machines and networks, providing hackers get in before the bugs are discovered and patched.

Recent examples can be seen with the discovery of iOS malware which threatens iPhones through an Apple DRM flaw, and an error on Code.org’s website which saw the emails of its volunteers exposed.

Courtesy-TheInq

The Linux Foundation Goes Zephyr

March 4, 2016 by  
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The Linux Foundation has launched its Zephyr Project as part of a cunning plan to create an open source, small footprint, modular, scalable, connected, real-time OS for IoT devices.

While there have been cut-down Linux implementations before the increase in numbers of smart, connected devices has made something a little more specialized more important.

Zephyr is all about minimizing the power, space, and cost budgets of IoT hardware.
For example a cut down Linux needs 200KB of RAM and 1MB of flash, IoT end points, which will often be controlled by tiny microcontrollers.

Zephyr has a small footpoint “microkernel” and an even tinier “nanokernel.” All this enables it to be CPU architecture independent, run on as little as 10KB while being scalable.

It can still support a broad range of wireless and wired technologies and of course is entirely open saucy released under the Apache v2.0 License.

It works on Bluetooth, Bluetooth Low Energy, and IEEE 802.15.4 (6LoWPAN) at the moment and supports x86, ARM, and ARC architectures.

Courtesy-Fud

Android Is Coming To The Desktop

January 28, 2016 by  
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Jide Technology has released an Alpha build of its much praised Remix OS version of Android, available free of charge.

The Android fork, which adds conventional desktop features such as a taskbar, start menu and support for multiple windows, has been a huge hit, overshadowing the implementation of Android revealed in Google’s recent high-end tablet the Pixel C.

The initial build, as ever, is designed to fish for bugs and aid developers. A beta will follow in the coming weeks. The Alpha doesn’t contain Google Mobile Services apps such as the Play store and Gmail, but the finished version will. In the meantime, users can sideload the gApps package or go to the Amazon Web Store.

There may also be problems with some video codecs, but we’re told this is a licensing issue which will be resolved in the final version too. In the meantime, the first release is perfectly useable.

Compatibility with most Android apps is instant, but the user community can ‘upvote’ their favourites on the Remix OS site to flag what’s working best in each category.

The company has already released a small desktop machine of its own, called the Remix Mini, the world’s first fully functioning Android PC, priced at just $70 after a successful Kickstarter campaign. It has also developed a 2-in-1 ultrabook, the Remix Ultra, and has licensed Remix OS to several Far East tablet manufacturers.

In this new move, the company has teamed up with Android-x86, a group that has been working on an executable version of Android for computers since 2009, to launch a Remix OS installer which will allow existing hardware to become Remix OS powered, or as a partition on a dual-boot machine.

A third option is to store the OS on a USB stick, meaning that you can make any computer your own. This technique has already been popular through the Keepod programme which offers Android on a stick to countries without access to high-speed computers.

The advantages of Remix OS to the developing world are significant. Bench tests have shown that Remix OS works significantly faster than Windows, which will potentially breathe new life into older machines and make modern machines run at previously impossible speeds.

Remix OS was designed by three ex-Google engineers and includes access to the full Google Apps suite and the Google Play store.

David Ko, co-founder of Jide Technology, said: “Today’s public release of Remix OS, based on Android-x86, is something that we’ve been working towards since we founded Jide Technology in 2014.

“All of us are driven by the goal of making computing a more accessible experience, and this free, public release allows us to do this. We believe Remix OS is the natural evolution of Android and we’re proud to be at the forefront of this change.”

The public Alpha will be available to download from Jide and android-x86 from 12 January, and a beta update is expected swiftly afterwards. The INQUIRER has been using a Remix Mini for over a month now, and a full review of the operating system is coming soon.

Courtesy-TheInq

Will Cortana Impact Windows 10 Battery Life?

July 15, 2015 by  
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It is just over a month until Microsoft introduces Windows 10, and as you should know by now, Cortana is one of the key elements of the new OS.

Cortana always listens in order to hear its name and be a smart digital assistant. This is Microsoft answer to Siri and Google Now that is making its way to Windows 10.

Unfortunately, this will affect your notebook battery life. We have spoken with a few industry sources and we can definitely confirm that Windows 10 with enabled Cortana will have an impact on the battery life. We are testing this as we speak to check how big the impact is.

We don’t know how significant the battery life decrease will be, but the good thing is that you will be able to switch Cortana off in case you don’t need it. We heard that many new Toshiba notebooks will come with a dedicated Cortana button, as this is the easiest way to save battery life. Cortana on Toshiba won’t listen until you press the button.

It would be smart if Microsoft would come up with Cortana enable / disable keyboard shortcut. Win + Q will enable Cortana news while Win + S will bring you directly to the Cortana search engine.

Windows 10 seems to be a logical upgrade for anyone who has Windows 8.1 on their notebooks and misses the options from Windows 7, and some familiar UI elements. We use Windows 8.1 on some devices, while most of our computers still have Windows 7 and nothing more. Microsoft DirectX 12 will force us to Windows 10 but from what awe can tell from Preview release, the upgrade to Windows 10 from with 7 seems like quite seamless and logical step.

Just make sure to be aware that your notebook battery life might suffer because of Cortana. Have in mind that this “talk to your PC and expect a smart answer” option can be disabled.

Source

Verizon Fixes Serious Securty Flaw In FiOS

January 29, 2015 by  
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Verizon corrected a serious vulnerability in its My FiOS mobile application that granted unfettered access to email accounts, according to a developer who found the problem.

Randy Westergren, a senior software developer with XDA Developers, looked at the Android version of My FiOS, which is used for account management, email and scheduling video recordings.

“Since Verizon has a good amount of my information, I thought it would be a good candidate for research,” Westergren wrote on his personal blog. “I was right, and the results were astonishing.”

The flaw, contained in the application’s API, could have allowed an attacker to read individual messages from a person’s Verizon inbox and even send emails from an account, he wrote.

Westergren looked at the traffic sent back and forth between My FiOS and Verizon’s servers. He found My FiOS would return the content of someone else’s email inbox by simply substituting a different user ID in a request.

He contacted Verizony, which later acknowledged the problem. Verizon issued a fix last Friday, Westergren wrote.

“Verizon’s security group seemed to immediately realize the impact of this vulnerability and took it very seriously,” Westergren wrote. “They were very responsive during this process and even arranged for a free year of FiOS Internet service as a token of their gratitude.”

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Symantec Uncovers Advanced Spying Malware

December 5, 2014 by  
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An advanced malicious software application has been discovered that since 2008 was used to spy on private companies, governments, research institutes and individuals in 10 countries, anti virus software maker Symantec Corp said in a report on Sunday.

The Mountain View, California-based maker of Norton anti virus products said its research showed that a “nation state” was likely the developer of the malware called Regin, or Backdoor. Regin, but Symantec did not identify any countries or victims.

Symantec said Regin’s design “makes it highly suited for persistent, long-term surveillance operations against targets,” and was withdrawn in 2011 but resurfaced from 2013 onward.

The malware uses several “stealth” features “and even when its presence is detected, it is very difficult to ascertain what it is doing,” according to Symantec. It said “many components of Regin remain undiscovered and additional functionality and versions may exist.”

Almost half of all infections occurred at addresses of Internet service providers, the report said. It said the targets were customers of the companies rather than the companies themselves. About 28 percent of targets were in telecoms while other victims were in the energy, airline, hospitality and research sectors, Symantec said.

Symantec described the malware as having five stages, each “hidden and encrypted, with the exception of the first stage.” It said “each individual stage provides little information on the complete package. Only by acquiring all five stages is it possible to analyze and understand the threat.”

Regin also uses what is called a modular approach that allows it to load custom features tailored to targets, the same method applied in other malware, such as Flamer and Weevil (The Mask), the anti virus company said. Some of its features were also similar to Duqu malware, uncovered in September 2011 and related to a computer worm called Stuxnet, discovered the previous year.

Symantec said Russia and Saudi Arabia accounted for about half of the confirmed infections of the Regin malware and the other countries were Mexico, Ireland, India, Iran,Afghanistan, Belgium, Austria and Pakistan.

Source

Adobe Eases Privacy Concerns

November 14, 2014 by  
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Tests on the latest version of Adobe System’s e-reader software reveals the company is now collecting less data following a privacy-related row last month, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Digital Editions version 4.0.1 appears to only collect data on e-books that have DRM (Digital Rights Management), wrote Cooper Quintin, a staff technologist with the EFF. DRM places restrictions on how content can be used with the intent of thwarting piracy.

Adobe was criticized in early October after it was discovered Digital Editions collected metadata about e-books on a device, even if the e-books did not have DRM. Those logs were also sent to Adobe in plain text.

Since that data was not encrypted, critics including the EFF contended it posed major privacy risks for users. For example, plain text content could be intercepted by an interloper from a user who is on the same public Wi-Fi network.

Adobe said on Oct. 23 it fixed the issues in 4.0.1, saying it would not collect data on e-books without DRM and encrypt data that is transmitted back to the company.

Quintin wrote the EFF’s latest test showed the “only time we saw data going back to an Adobe server was when an e-book with DRM was opened for the first time. This data is most likely being sent back for DRM verification purposes, and it is being sent over HTTPS.”

If an e-book has DRM, Adobe may record how long a person reads it or the percentage of the content that is read, which is used for “metered” pricing models.

Other technical metrics are also collected, such as the IP address of the device downloading a book, a unique ID assigned to the specific applications being used at the time and a unique ID for the device, according to Adobe.

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Is Epic Turla Exploiting Windows XP?

August 22, 2014 by  
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Kaspersky Lab has discovered an espionage network that successfully attacked government institutions, intelligence agencies and European companies.

The firm has dubbed the spy operation Epic Turla, and said that it is in no doubt about its capabilities.

“Over the last 10 months, Kaspersky Lab researchers have analyzed a massive cyber-espionage operation which we call ‘Epic Turla’,” it said.

“The attackers behind Epic Turla have infected several hundred computers in more than 45 countries, including government institutions, embassies, military, education, research and pharmaceutical companies.”

Kaspersky said that Epic Turla used two zero-day exploits that affected Adobe and Microsoft software, along with some backdoor and social engineering tricks.

In particular, Kaspersky said a vulnerability in Windows XP and Windows 2003 – CVE-2013-5065 – termed a “privilege escalation vulnerability” is being used. “The CVE-2013-5065 exploit allows the backdoor to achieve administrator privileges on the system and run unrestricted. This exploit only works on unpatched Microsoft Windows XP systems.”

The use of this Windows XP flaw underlines the risk that the unsupported Windows XP OS poses. Kaspersky went on to explain that, once inside, attackers install their own rootkits and other malware tools and begin their surveillance.

“Once the attackers obtain the necessary credentials without the victim noticing, they deploy the rootkit and other extreme persistence mechanisms,” it said. “The attacks are still ongoing as of July 2014, actively targeting users in Europe and the Middle East.”

The attacks are just the latest in a long line of incidents that businesses need to be aware of as cyber attacks continue at an alarming rate.

In June the security firm Crowdstrike alerted the industry to Putter Panda, a cute-sounding but nasty piece of malware. That firm pointed an accusatory finger at China and charged it with espionage on the US and Europe.

Crowdstrike CEO George Kurtz said at the time, “China’s decade-long economic espionage campaign is massive and unrelenting. Through widespread espionage campaigns, Chinese threat actors are targeting companies and governments in every part of the globe.” Chinese authorities disputed this.

The report comes in the same week Hold Security reported uncovering a huge trove of 1.2 billion web passwords and login details that have been gathered by Russian cyber criminals.

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Is Malware Wreaking Havoc On XP?

July 14, 2014 by  
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One of the top three malware programs affecting businesses in the second quarter is a worm that takes advantage of the large number of companies still using Windows XP, Trend Micro has warned.

The worm, dubbed DOWNAD, also known as Conficker, can infect an entire network via a malicious URL, spam email, or removable drive. Windows XP is particularly susceptible to this threat because it is known to exploit the MS08-067 Server service vulnerability in order to execute arbitrary code.

DOWNAD also has its own domain generation algorithm (DGA) that allows it to create randomly-generated URLs. It then connects to these created URLs to download files to the system. Trend Micro said that around 175 IP addresses are found to be related to the DOWNAD worm and that these IP addresses use various ports and are randomly generated via the DGA capability of DOWNAD.

“During our monitoring of the spam landscape, we observed that in Q2, more than 40 percent of malware related spam mails are delivered by machines infected by DOWNAD worm,” said Trend Micro anti-spam research engineer Maria Manly in a blog post.

“A number of machines are still infected by this threat and leveraged to send the spammed messages to further increase the number of infected systems. And with Microsoft ending the support for Windows XP this year, we can expect that systems with this OS can be infected by threats like DOWNAD.”

The security company warned that spam campaigns delivering FAREIT, MYTOB, and LOVGATE payloads in email attachments are attributed to DOWNAD infected machines. FAREIT is a malware family of information stealers that download variants of the Zeus Trojan, while MYTOB is an old family of worms known for sending a copy of itself in spam attachments.

The other top sources of spam with malware are the CUTWAIL botnet, together with Gameover ZeuS (GoZ). Manly said CUTWAIL was actually previously used to download GoZ malware but now a malware called UPATRE employs GoZ malware or variants of ZBOT which have peer-to-peer functionality.

“In the last few weeks we have reported various spam runs that abused Dropbox links to host malware like UPATRE,” Manly said. “We also spotted a spammed message in the guise of voice mail that contains a Cryptolocker variant. The latest we have seen is a spam campaign with links that leveraged CUBBY, a file storage service, this time carrying a banking malware detected as TSPY_BANKER.WSTA.”

According to Manly, cybercriminals and threat actors are probably abusing file storage platforms to mask their malicious activities and go undetected in the system and network.

“As spam with malware attachment continues to proliferate, so is spam with links carrying malicious files. The continuous abuse of file hosting services to spread malware appears to have become a favoured infection vector of cyber criminals most likely because this makes it more effective given that the URLs are legitimate thereby increasing the chance of bypassing anti-spam filters,” she added.

Source

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