ATM Malware Found In Mexico

A malicious software program identified in ATMs in Mexico has been improved and translated into English, which suggests it may be used elsewhere, according to security vendor Symantec.

Two versions of the malware, called Ploutus, have been discovered, both of which are engineered to empty a certain type of ATM, which Symantec has not identified.

In contrast to most malware, Ploutus is installed the old-fashioned way — by inserting a CD boot disk into the innards of an ATM machine running Microsoft Windows. The installation method suggests that cybercriminals are targeting standalone ATMs where access is easier.

The first version of Ploutus displays a graphical user interface after the thief enters a numerical sequence on an ATM’s keypad, although the malware can be controlled by a keyboard, wrote Daniel Regalado, a Symantec malware analyst, on Oct. 11.

Ploutus is programmed for a specific ATM model since it assumes there is a maximum of four cassettes per dispenser in the ATM. It then calculates the amount of money that should be dispensed based on the number of bills. If any of the cassettes have less than the maximum number of 40 bills, it releases whatever is left, repeating that process until the ATM is empty.

Kevin Haley, director of Symantec Security Response, said in an interview earlier this month that the attackers have deep knowledge of the software and hardware of the particular ATM model.

“They clearly know how this machine worked,” he said.

The source code of Ploutus “contains Spanish function names and poor English grammar that suggests the malware may have been coded by Spanish-speaking developers,” Regalado wrote.

In a new blog post, Regalado wrote that the attackers made Ploutus more robust and translated it into English, indicating the same ATM software can be exploited in countries other than Mexico.

The “B” variant of Ploutus has some differences. It only accepts commands through the keypad but will display a window showing the money available in the machine along with a transaction log as it dispenses cash. An attacker cannot enter a specific number of bills, so Ploutus withdraws money from the cassette with the most available bills, Regalado wrote.

Symantec advised those with ATMs to change the BIOS boot order to only boot from the hard disk and not CDs, DVDs or USB sticks. The BIOS should also be password protected so the boot options can’t be changed, Regalado wrote.

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SalesForce Goes Hacking

Salesforce.com really wants to attract lots of developers to its Dreamforce conference next month in San Francisco. As in, really.

Last Friday, the cloud software vendor announced a “hackathon” would be held at the conference, with US$1 million going to the developer or team who creates the top prize-winning mobile application with Salesforce.com technology.

“It’s not going to be easy — $1 million is going to bring out the best of the best,” Salesforce.com said in Friday’s announcement. “So don’t wait until Dreamforce! You’re going to want to get started now. With Force.com, Heroku, ExactTarget Fuel, Mobile Services and more — you’ve got a killer array of platform technology to use.”

Salesforce.com will also be providing some “pretty amazing new technology” for use at the show, the announcement adds.

In order to participate, developers have to either register for a full conference pass or a special $99 hacker pass.

The hackathon reflects Salesforce.com’s long courtship of developers to its development technologies, its AppExchange marketplace and recent efforts to build out more tooling for mobile application development.

Developers taking part in the hackathon will have plenty of competition, with some 20,000 programmers expected to attend Dreamforce overall. A “Hack Central” area will be open around the clock, supporting coders who want to work until the wee hours on their application.

In order to qualify, an application can’t have been previously released. The entries will be judged on four criteria counting 25 percent each: innovation, business value, user experience and use of Salesforce.com’s platform.

The second-place finisher will receive $50,000, with $25,000 going to the third-place winner. Fourth and fifth place will get $10,000 and $5,000, respectively.

Some 120,000 people are expected to register for Dreamforce this year. While some of that total will be watching online rather than in person, Dreamforce is now operating at a scale rivaling Oracle’s OpenWorld event, which happened last month.

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LG Goes Self-Healing

LG is upping the ante in smartphone technology with a new handset that has a curved touchscreen, along with a special “self healing” technology that the company claims can prevent scratches on the phone’s casing.

The South Korean electronics vendor unveiled the new phone on Monday, calling it the LG G Flex. Digital renderings of the handset were leaked earlier this month. But in its Monday announcement the company offered further details on the phone, showing that it contains a few new technologies, along with its curved display.

The G Flex is the second phone to feature a curved display, the first coming from Samsung Electronics with its Galaxy Round handset. The top and bottom of the G Flex’s 6-inch screen are curved towards the user, while on the Samsung phone it is the sides that are curved towards the viewer.

This makes LG’s handset closer to the curve of a traditional fixed-line phone handset, a design choice LG said is optimized for the contours of a face. Users can more comfortably hold the phone to their mouth and ear, improving its voice and sound quality, according to LG.

The company also touted the design by stating that the phone offers an easier grip, and holds better in a person’s back pocket. In addition, LG said the curved screen gives an “IMAX-like” experience when viewing videos, allowing for a greater field of view.

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Will Twitter IPO Shares Reach $20?

Twitter has decided to price its IPO shares between $17 and $20 when it lists on the New York Stock Exchange, the company said in its filing.

Based on an assumed initial public offering price of $18.50 — the midpoint of the range — Twitter estimates the net proceeds from the sale of shares of common stock will be roughly $1.25 billion, the company said in documentsfiled with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Some 80.5 million shares of common stock will be registered, according to the filing.

Releasing its IPO price range positions Twitter to begin its “road show,” seeking to raise funds from investors across the country. In documents filed last week, the company said it would list its shares under the ticker symbol TWTR on the New York Stock Exchange, representing a big win for the market over rival Nasdaq.

Twitter has yet to determine a date for the listing, though one report suggested Nov. 15 could be the day.

Twitter’s IPO is likely to be one of the hottest of the year and the most prominent in social media since Facebook went public last year. Twitter’s share price range will be markedly lower than Facebook’s, which priced its IPO at $38 per share.

Twitter filed for its highly anticipated public offering earlier last  month.

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SAP To Stop Offering SME

The maker of expensive esoteric software which no-one is really sure what it does, SAP has decided to pull the plug on its offering for small businesses. Business weekly Wirtschaftswoche said SAP would stop the development of a software dubbed Business By Design, although existing customers will be able to continue to use it.

SAP insists that development capacity for Business By Design was being reduced, but that the product was not being shut down. Business by Design was launched in 2010 and was supposed to generate $1 billion of revenue. The product, which cost roughly 3 billion euros to develop, currently has only 785 customers and is expected to generate no more than 23 million euros in sales this year.

The Wirtschaftswoche report said that ever since the SAP product’s launch, customers had complained about technical issues and the slow speed of the software.

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Is Lenovo Eyeing Blackberry?

Lenovo reportedly has joined the list of possible Blackberry buyers, with the firm reportedly having approached the struggling Canadian phone maker.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Lenovo, despite previously denying that it was mulling a Blackberry buy (paywalled), has been given the thumbs up to cast an eye over the Canadian company’s books before making it a possible offer.

If reports are to be believed, Lenovo has joined a list of possible buyers that includes Intel, Cisco, SAP, Google, Samsung and LG.

Specific details of Lenovo’s possible acquisition are yet to be revealed, but as a newcomer to the smartphone market Lenovo recently admitted that it is selling more smartphones than tablets and PCs in China, despite being one of the only PC makers to continue showing sales growth.

However, Lenovo’s smartphone portfolio is yet to appear the UK, and the firm hasn’t seen much success outside China. However, picking up Blackberry could help Lenovo enter the global smartphone market, and the firm could be looking to take over from Blackberry as a phone maker focused on business professionals.

Lenovo might have a hard time closing a buyout deal for Blackberry, though. Rumours about a takeover have already led to speculation that such a buyout would struggle to get approval from the US and Canada, due to the company’s Chinese ownership and the fact that Blackberry does business with sensitive parts of both governments.

Blackberry didn’t comment on a possible Lenovo buyout, but instead put out its usual vague statement. A company spokesperson said, “The special committee, with the assistance of Blackberry’s independent financial and legal advisors, is conducting a robust and thorough review of strategic alternatives.”

Lenovo declined to comment on the report.

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Amazon Debuts Cloud-based Transcoding Service

Amazon Web Services has rolled out the option to use its Elastic Transcoder for audio-only conversions.

Amazon Elastic Transcoder was developed to offer an easy and low-cost way to convert media files from their source format into versions that will play on devices like smartphones, tablets and PCs.

The new feature lets anyone use Amazon Elastic Transcoder to convert audio-only content like music or podcasts from one format to another. Users can also strip out the audio tracks from video files and create audio-only streams. An option that, for example, can be used to create podcasts from video originals that are compatible with iOS applications that require an audio-only HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) file set, Amazon said.

The output from Elastic Transcoder is two-channel AAC, MP3 or Vorbis. Metadata like track name, artist, genre and album art is included in the output file and users can also specify replacement or additional album art.

Users of the service pay for the length of their converted content. For audio-only transcoding, prices start at $0.0045 per minute. That compares to the video version, which costs from $0.015 per minute for standard definition content and $0.03 per minute for high-definition clips, according to Amazon’s website.

For users who want to try out the service, the AWS Free Tier offers up to 20 minutes of free audio output per month. The service was announced for video in January and is still tagged as a beta.

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Does Wall Street Like Intel’s Mobile Plan?

In recent months Intel’s new CEO Brian Krzanich and President Renee James made several interesting statements, signalling to Wall Street that the chipmaker gets it – it has to do more in mobile.

With smartphone shipments expected to hit one billion per year as early as next year, Intel’s newfound love of mobile chips is hardly surprising. In recent months Intel told the world that it’s now treating Atom just like Core, which means Atom will no longer look like an unwanted stepchild. On the face of it this is good news for shareholders and investors, but scratch the surface it doesn’t look too encouraging.

As a result, most analysts expect Intel to post lacklustre results on Tuesday, which is hardly surprising given the state of the PC market, which is still the bulk of Intel’s core business. Analysts expect revenue of $13.47 billion, 0.1 percent higher year-on-year, but earnings per share are estimated at $0.53, or 8.6 percent down over last year. But negative EPS forecasts aren’t the biggest problem facing Intel. Most analysts agree that 2014 won’t be much better, but there are some factors that indicate even these bleak forecasts might be too optimistic.

The first Bay Trail products are starting to appear and initial performance reports are encouraging, but they are just that – encouraging rather than groundbreaking. Benchmarks seem to indicate that Bay Trail-T tablets end up marginally slower than Qualcomm 800 and Tegra 4 based devices, which are a bit older, too. With prices ranging from $32 to $37, the first batch of Bay Trail chips also cost a bit more than their ARM competitors, but a direct comparison is not possible as ARM players don’t disclose the unit prices of their chips.

Furthermore Intel still lacks integrated LTE support, which means Bay Trail isn’t going to score big phone design wins. Intel hopes to roll out its first LTE enabled products next year, but there’s still some ambiguity. For example, Intel discrete modems are still built on TSMC silicon and it could be a couple of years before they end up on the die of an Intel SoC built in an Intel fab. While Intel could roll out the first two-chip solution next year, it’s highly unlikely that it will have a proper integrated solution before 2015.

This is a bit of a problem for more reasons than one. Many analysts don’t dig deep enough, some of these technical issues go under the radar – so they stick to Intel’s promise of LTE in 2014. Quark is also being overhyped, although it won’t generate any significant revenue over the next few years. Many analysts also believe x86 support is still a big deal, and to some extent it is, but the relevance of x86 is often exaggerated and it is diminishing as we speak. That is why Intel is talking up hybrids, or 2-in-1s – because legacy x86 support is a lot more important for hybrids than regular tablets. In smartphones, x86 support is as useless as a Facebook share button on a porn site.

However, this is where it gets interesting, because Intel is also promising $99 Bay Trail tablets. Back at IDF, Krzanich said Intel’s new tablet platform would “go below $100 by Q4 2013,” giving the impression that Intel can do dirt cheap tablets as well. We are not sure that it can, not unless it subsidizes them with heaps of cash, and we all know how well that went with Ultrabooks.

As for phones, Intel is still dead in the water and this won’t change anytime soon. Apple is quite happy designing its own custom chips and having them built by the lowest bidder. Samsung is going for off-the-shelf IP and manufacturing its Exynos 5 chips in 28nm, and it will hit 20nm soon. Qualcomm dominates the market and Intel can’t erode its lead over the next couple of product cycles. Even if Intel comes up with competitive smartphone chips in a year or two, who will they be for? Apple won’t buy them, neither will Samsung. This would leave Intel in an awkward position of fighting over scraps with heavy hitters like Qualcomm and a range of smaller ARM players like Nvidia and MediaTek.

This is hardly a viable long-term mobile strategy. Intel is basically doing the only thing it can – and doing the only thing that can be done and calling it a strategy doesn’t really make for much of a strategy.

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Google Goes Quantum

When is a blink not a natural blink? For Google the question has such ramifications that it has devoted a supercomputer to solving the puzzle.

Slashgear reports that the internet giant is using its $10 million quantum computer to find out how products like Google Glass can differentiate between a natural blink and a deliberate blink used to trigger functionality.

The supercomputer based at Google’s Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab is a joint venture with NASA and is being used to refine the algorithms used for new forms of control such as blinking. The supercomputer uses D-Wave chips kept at as near to absolute zero as possible, which makes it somewhat impractical for everyday wear but amazingly fast at solving brainteasers.

A Redditor reported earlier this year that Google Glass is capable of taking pictures by responding to blinking, however the feature is disabled in the software code as the technology had not advanced enough to differentiate between natural impulse and intentional request.

It is easy to see the potential of blink control. Imagine being able to capture your life as you live it, exactly the way you see it, without anyone ever having to stop and ask people to say “cheese”.

Google Glass is due for commercial release next year but for the many beta testers and developers who already have one this research could lead to an even richer seam of touchless functionality.

If nothing else you can almost guarantee that Q will have one ready for Daniel Craig’s next James Bond outing.

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Is Skype Involved In Spying?

Luxembourg’s data protection authority is investigating Microsoft-owned Skype for its alleged cooperation with the U.S. NSA’s Prism spying program, according to the agency.

Luxembourg’s data protection authority, CNPD, is investigating Skype’s links to NSA spying programs after receiving several complaints, said Tom Kayser, a spokesman for the authority. “I can’t really talk about the details of the investigation because it is still ongoing,” he said.

Skype, which has its European headquarters in Luxembourg, allegedly cooperates with the NSA through a program exploring the legal and technical issues involved in making customer calls available to intelligence and law enforcement agencies. The Guardian newspaper first reported the investigation.

The CNPD has powers to ensure that multinational companies based in Luxembourg respect national law, and often receives complaints from the data protection authorities of other European Union member states.

Privacy campaign group Europe-v-Facebook filed one of the complaints in June. That filing was part of a barrage of complaints filed in various countries against European subsidiaries of tech companies that are allegedly involved in the NSA’s spying program, including Facebook, Apple, Microsoft and Yahoo.

Under Luxembourg data protection law service providers and operators are required to ensure the confidentiality of communications and related traffic data.

“No person other than the user concerned may listen to, tap or store communications or the traffic data relating thereto, or engage in any other kinds of interception or surveillance thereof, without the consent of the user concerned,” reads the law’s unofficial English translation.

Violators can face up to a year in prison and/or a fine up to a!125,000 ($170,000). The court dealing with the matter can also order companies like Skype to stop any processing that conflicts with the law on pain of a periodic monetary penalty determined by the court.

“We regularly engage in a dialogue with data protection authorities around the world and are always happy to answer their questions,” a Microsoft spokeswoman said in an email. “It has been previously widely reported that the Luxembourg DPA was one of the DPA’s that received complaints from the ‘Europe v Facebook’ group so we’re happy to answer any questions they may have.”

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