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Web.com Latest Hacking Victim
Hackers gain unauthorized access to the computers of Internet services provider Web.com Group and stole credit card information of 93,000 customers.
According to a website set up by the company to share information about the incident, Web.com discovered the security breach on Aug. 13 as part of its ongoing security monitoring.
Attackers compromised credit card information for around 93,000 accounts, as well as the names and addresses associated with them. No other customer information like social security
numbers was affected, the company said.
According to the company, the verification codes for the exposed credit cards were not leaked. However, there are websites on the Internet that don’t require such codes for purchases.
Web.com has notified affected customers via email and will also follow up with letters sent through the U.S. Postal Service. Those users can sign up for a one-year free credit monitoring service.
The company did not specify how the intruders gained access to its systems, but has hired a “nationally recognized” IT security firm to conduct an investigation.
Web.com provides a variety of online services, including website and Facebook page design, e-commerce and marketing solutions, domain registration and Web hosting. The company claims to have over 3.3 million customers and owns two other well known Web services companies: Register.com and Network Solutions.
Register.com and Network Solutions customers were not impacted by this breach unless they also purchased services directly from Web.com.
Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/aroundnet-category/web-com-latest-victim-of-credit-card-hacking.html
Microsoft Unveils ‘Send’ Mobile App
Microsoft unveiled a mobile-minded alternative to email that’s focused primarily on short, quick messages.
Named Send, the new tool aims to deliver a simple experience much like that offered by text messaging or instant messaging software but without the need to know a co-worker’s mobile number or username. Instead, Send lets users quickly fire off a message to any co-worker using just their email address; no subject line, salutations or signatures are required.
“On my way,” might be one example, or “Are you in the office today?”
The app connects to Office 365 business and school email accounts to find frequent and recent contacts; users need only tap on one to start a conversation. A “Quick Reply” option allows for speedy responses.
That Office 365 connection, meanwhile, also means conversations are synced with Outlook, letting users continue them from anywhere. Messages sent using Send are treated internally like any other work email and comply with an organization’s email compliance policies, Microsoft said.
Send is now available free for iPhone through the Microsoft Garage in the U.S. and Canada. Versions for Windows Phone and Android are coming soon, as are additional IT controls. Currently the app works with Office 365 business and school email accounts, but Microsoft plans to make it more broadly available in the coming months, it said.
Xerox To Revamp Healthcare IT Business
Xerox Corp said it would overhaul its healthcare IT business and record a related impairment charge of about $145 million in the second quarter.
The company said it would end sales of its integrated eligibility system, a software system which can support operations in call centers and document imaging.
The healthcare business provides administrative and care management solutions to state Medicaid programs and government healthcare programs.
“Going forward, Xerox will focus on managing and completing the current Health Enterprise implementations, and will be highly selective in responding to new Medicaid Management Information System opportunities,” the company said on Friday.
The healthcare business contributes “$2 billion plus” to total revenue, a company spokeswoman said. The company reported total revenue of $19.54 billion for 2014.
“Basically, they are focusing their government healthcare business away from less profitable initiatives that they were pursuing. I see it as a positive,” Cross Research analyst Shannon Cross said.
“From a long-term stand point, it (Medicaid) is a profitable business,” Cross said.
Xerox, which has been shifting its focus to IT services from making printers and copiers, adjusted its earnings estimate for the quarter ended June to reflect the charge.
The company said it now expects earnings from continuing operations of 9-11 cents per share, below its prior guidance of 17-19 cents per share.
Shares of Xerox, which is expected to report second-quarter results on July 24, were up 1.6 percent at $10.79 in afternoon trading.
Is Oracle Sliding?
Oracle said weak sales of its traditional database software licenses were made worse by a strong US dollar lowered the value of foreign revenue.
Shares of Oracle, often seen as a barometer for the technology sector, fell 6 percent to $42.15 in extended trading after the company’s earnings report on Wednesday.
Shares of Microsoft and Salesforce.com, two of Oracle’s closest rivals, were close to unchanged.
Daniel Ives, an analyst at FBR Capital Markets said that this announcement speaks to the headwinds Oracle is seeing in the field as their legacy database business is seeing slowing growth.
It also shows that while Cloud business has seen pockets of strength it is not doing as well as many thought,
Oracle, like other established tech companies, is looking to move its business to the cloud-computing model, essentially providing services remotely via data centres rather than selling installed software.
The 38-year-old company has had some success with the cloud model, but is not moving fast enough to make up for declines in its traditional software sales.
Oracle, along with German rival SAP has been losing market share in customer relationship management software in recent years to Salesforce.com, which only offers cloud-based services.
Because of lower software sales and the strong dollar, Oracle’s net income fell to $2.76 billion, or 62 cents per share, in the fourth quarter ended May 31, from $3.65 billion, or 80 cents per share, a year earlier.
Revenue fell 5.4 percent to $10.71 billion. Revenue rose 3 percent on a constant currency basis. Analysts had expected revenue of $10.92 billion, on average.
Sales from Oracle’s cloud-computing software and platform service, an area keenly watched by investors, rose 29 percent to $416 million.
RedHat And Canonical Discuss Linux 4.0
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Red Hat has been telling everyone its plans to integrate the latest Linux 4.0 kernel into its products.
In a statement, a spokesman told us, “Red Hat’s upstream community projects will begin working with 4.0 almost immediately; in fact, Fedora 22 Alpha was based on the RC1 version of the 4.0 kernel.
“From a productization perspective, we will keep an eye on these integration efforts for possible inclusion into Red Hat’s enterprise portfolio.
“As with all of our enterprise-grade solutions, we provide stable, secure and hardened features, including the Linux kernel, to our customers – once we are certain that the next iterations of the Linux kernel, be it 4.0 or later, has the features and maturity that our customer base requires, we will begin packaging it into our enterprise portfolio with the intention of supporting it for 10 years, as we do with all of our products.”
Meanwhile, Canonical Head Honcho Mark Shuttleworth has confirmed that Linux Kernel 4.0 should be making its debut in Ubuntu products before the end of the year.
In an earlier note to The INQUIRER, Shuttleworth confirmed that the newly released kernel’s integration was “likely to be in this October release.”
The news follows the release of version 4.0 of the Linux kernel in a flurry of what T S Eliot would describe as “not with a bang but a whimper”.
Writing on the Linux Kernel Mailing List on Sunday afternoon, Linux overlord Linus Torvalds explained that the new version was being released according to schedule, rather than because of any dramatic improvements, and because of a lack of any specific reason not to.
“Linux 4.0 was a pretty small release in linux-next and in final size, although obviously ‘small’ is relative. It’s still over 10,000 non-merge commits. But we’ve definitely had bigger releases (and judging by linux-next v4.1 is going to be one of the bigger ones),” he said.
“Feature-wise, 4.0 doesn’t have all that much special. Much has been made of the new kernel patching infrastructure, but realistically that wasn’t the only reason for the version number change. We’ve had much bigger changes in other versions. So this is very much a ‘solid code progress’ release.”
Come to think of it, it is very unlikely that T S Eliot would ever have written about Linux kernels, but that’s not the point.
Torvalds, meanwhile, explained that he is happier with releasing to a schedule rather than because of any specific feature-related reason, although he does note that there have been four billion code commits, and Linux 3.0 was released after the two billion mark, so there’s a nice symmetry there.
In fact, back in 2011 the version numbering of the Linux kernel was a matter of some debate, and Torvalds’ lacklustre announcement seems to be pre-empting more of the same.
In a subsequent post Torvalds jokes, “the strongest argument for some people advocating 4.0 seems to have been a wish to see 4.1.15 – because ‘that was the version of Linux Skynet used for the T-800 Terminator.’”
Are Cyber Criminals Hard To Catch?
Despite 100,000 cyber crimes being committed every year UK authorities only caught 12 hackers.
In fact on average just one person was convicted of an offence under the Computer Misuse Act every month for the past 23 years.
We assume that it was not the same bloke, because he would be the most luckless criminal ever.
Campaigners from the Digital Trust, which supports victims of online abuse, said police do not know how to cope with the problem.
Need more laws
Criminal justice expert Harry Fletcher, who is a director of the Digital Trust, said: “The police still concentrate their resources on traditional offences offline, but most people are more likely to be mugged online than in the street.
“The law needs to change. It should, for example, be an offence to use any technological device to locate, listen to or watch a person without legitimate purpose.
“In addition, restrictions should be placed on the sale of spyware without lawful reasons. It should also be against the law to install a webcam or any other form or surveillance device without the target’s knowledge.”
Of course just creating new laws is not going to mean that more hackers will be caught, it will just mean that there are more crimes which they could be arrested for.
The conviction rate against hackers are not bad, if the coppers do arrest someone. Between 1990 to 2006 only 183 defendants were proceeded against and 134 found guilty under the Computer Misuse Act.
Unfortunately the Trust did not see, to realize that a lot of the hacks against companies and individuals come from overseas, particularly Russian or China. Changing laws in the UK would not change anything.
Oracle Launches OpenStack Platform With Intel
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Oracle and Intel have teamed up for the first demonstration of carrier-grade network function virtualization (NFV), which will allow communication service providers to use a virtualized, software-defined model without degradation of service or reliability.
The Oracle-led project uses the Intel Open Network Platform (ONP) to create a robust service over NFV, using intelligent direction of software to create viable software-defined networking that replaces the clunky equipment still prevalent in even the most modern networks.
Barry Hill, Oracle’s global head of NFV, told The INQUIRER: “It gets us over one of those really big hurdles that the industry is desperately trying to overcome: ‘Why the heck have we been using this very tightly coupled hardware and software in the past if you can run the same thing on standard, generic, everyday hardware?’. The answer is, we’re not sure you can.
“What you’ve got to do is be smart about applying the right type and the right sort of capacity, which is different for each function in the chain that makes up a service.
“That’s about being intelligent with what you do, instead of making some broad statement about generic vanilla infrastructures plugged together. That’s just not going to work.”
Oracle’s answer is to use its Communications Network Service Orchestration Solution to control the OpenStack system and shrink and grow networks according to customer needs.
Use cases could be scaling out a carrier network for a rock festival, or transferring network priority to a disaster recovery site.
“Once you understand the extent of what we’ve actually done here, you start to realize just how big an announcement this is,” said Hill.
“On the fly, you’re suddenly able to make these custom network requirements instantly, just using off-the-shelf technology.”
The demonstration configuration optimizes the performance of an Intel Xeon E5-2600 v3 processor designed specifically for networking, and shows for the first time a software-defined solution which is comparable to the hardware-defined systems currently in use.
In other words, it can orchestrate services from the management and orchestration level right down to a single core of a single processor, and then hyperscale it using resource pools to mimic the specialized characteristics of a network appliance, such as a large memory page.
“It’s kind of like the effect that mobile had on fixed line networks back in the mid-nineties where the whole industry was disrupted by who was providing the technology, and what they were providing,” said Hill.
“Suddenly you went from 15-year business plans to five-year business plans. The impact of virtualization will have the same level of seismic change on the industry.”
Today’s announcement is fundamentally a proof-of-concept, but the technology that powers this kind of next-generation network is already evolving its way into networks.
Hill explained that carrier demand had led to the innovation. “The telecoms industry had a massive infrastructure that works at a very slow pace, at least in the past,” he said.
“However, this whole virtualization push has really been about the carriers, not the vendors, getting together and saying: ‘We need a different model’. So it’s actually quite advanced already.”
NFV appears to be the next gold rush area for enterprises, and other consortium are expected to make announcements about their own solutions within days.
The Oracle/Intel system is based around OpenStack, and the company is confident that it will be highly compatible with other systems.
The ‘Oracle Communications Network Service Orchestration Solution with Enhanced Platform Awareness using the Intel Open Network Platform’ – or OCNSOSWEPAUTIONP as we like to think of it – is currently on display at Oracle’s Industry Connect event in Washington DC.
The INQUIRER wonders whether there is any way the marketing department can come up with something a bit more catchy than OCNSOSWEPAUTIONP before it goes on open sale.
Juniper Networks Goes OpenStack
Juniper and Mirantis are getting close, with news that they are to form a cloud OpenStack alliance.
The two companies have signed an engineering partnership that the companies believe will lead to a reliable, scalable software-defined networking solution.
Mirantis OpenStack will now inter-operate with Juniper Contrail Networking, as well as OpenContrail, an open source software-defined networking system.
The two companies have published a reference architecture for deploying and managing Juniper Contrail Networking with Mirantis OpenStack to simplify deployment and reduce the need for third-party involvement.
Based on OpenStack Juno, Mirantis OpenStack 6.0 will be enhanced by a Fuel plugin in the second quarter that will make it even easier to deploy large-scale clouds in house.
However, Mirantis has emphasized that the arrival of Juniper to the fold is not a snub to the recently constructed integration with VMware.
Nick Chase of Mirantis explained, “…with this Juniper integration, Mirantis will support BOTH VMware vCenter Server and VMware NSX AND Juniper Networks Contrail Networking. That means that even if they’ve got VMware in their environment, they can choose to use NSX or Contrail for their networking components.
“Of course, all of that begs the question, when should you use Juniper, and when should you use VMware? Like all great engineering questions, the answer is ‘it depends’. How you choose is going to be heavily influenced by your individual situation, and what you’re trying to achieve.”
Juniper outlined its goals for the tie-up as:
– Reduce cost by enabling service providers and IT administrators to easily embrace SDN and OpenStack technologies in their environments
– Remove the complexity of integrating networking technologies in OpenStack virtual data centres and clouds
– Increase the effectiveness of their operations with fully integrated management for the OpenStack and SDN environments through Fuel and Juniper Networks® Contrail SDN Controller
The company is keen to emphasize that this is not meant to be a middle finger at VMware, but rather a demonstration of the freedom of choice offered by open source software. However, it serves as another demonstration of how even the FOSS market is growing increasingly proprietary and competitive.
Target Settles Security Breach
Target is reportedly close to paying out $10m to settle a class-action case that was filed after it was hacked and stripped of tens of millions of peoples’ details.
Target was smacked by hackers in 2013 in a massive cyber-thwack on its stores and servers that put some 70 million people’s personal information in harm’s way.
The hack has had massive repercussions. People are losing faith in industry and its ability to store their personal data, and the Target incident is a very good example of why people are right to worry.
As well as tarnishing Target’s reputation, the attack also led to a $162m gap in its financial spreadsheets.
The firm apologized to its punters when it revealed the hack, and chairman, CEO and president Gregg Steinhafel said he was sorry that they have had to “endure” such a thing
Now, according to reports, Target is willing to fork out another $10m to put things right, offering the money as a proposed settlement in one of several class-action lawsuits the company is facing. If accepted, the settlement could see affected parties awarded some $10,000 for their troubles.
We have asked Target to either confirm or comment on this, and are waiting for a response. For now we have an official statement at Reuters to turn to. There we see Target spokeswoman Molly Snyder confirming that something is happening but not mentioning the 10 and six zeroes.
“We are pleased to see the process moving forward and look forward to its resolution,” she said.
Not available to comment, not that we asked, will be the firm’s CIO at the time of the hack. Thirty-year Target veteran Beth Jacob left her role in the aftermath of the attack, and a replacement was immediately sought.
“To ensure that Target is well positioned following the data breach we suffered last year, we are undertaking an overhaul of our information security and compliance structure and practices at Target,” said Steinhafel then.
“As a first step in this effort, Target will be conducting an external search for an interim CIO who can help guide Target through this transformation.”
“Transformational change” pro Bob DeRodes took on the role in May last year and immediately began saying the right things.
“I look forward to helping shape information technology and data security at Target in the days and months ahead,” he said.
“It is clear to me that Target is an organization that is committed to doing whatever it takes to do right by their guests.”
We would ask Steinhafel for his verdict on DeRodes so far and the $10m settlement, but would you believe it, he’s not at Target anymore either having left in the summer last year with a reported $61m golden parachute.
IBM Debuts New Mainframe
IBM has started shipping its all-new first z13 mainframe computer.
IBM has high hopes the upgraded model will generate solid sales based not only on usual customer patterns but its design focus aimed at helping them cope with expanding mobile usage, analysis of data, upgrading security and doing more “cloud” remote computing.
Mainframes are still a major part of the Systems and Technology Group at IBM, which overall contributed 10.8 percent of IBM’s total 2014 revenues of $92.8 billion. But the z Systems and their predecessors also generate revenue from software, leasing and maintenance and thus have a greater financial impact on IBM’s overall picture.
The new mainframe’s claim to fame is to use simultaneous multi-threading (SMT) to execute two instruction streams (or threads) on a processor core which delivers more throughput for Linux on z Systems and IBM z Integrated Information Processor (zIIP) eligible workloads.
There is also a single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD), a vector processing model providing instruction level parallelism, to speed workloads such as analytics and mathematical modeling. All this means COBOL 5.2 and PL/I 4.5 exploit SIMD and improved floating point enhancements to deliver improved performance over and above that provided by the faster processor.
Its on chip cryptographic and compression coprocessors receive a performance boost improving both general processors and Integrated Facility for Linux (IFL) cryptographic performance and allowing compression of more data, helping tosave disk space and reducing data transfer time.
There is also a redesigned cache architecture, using eDRAM technology to provide twice as much second level cache and substantially more third and fourth level caches compared to the zEC12. Bigger and faster caches help to avoid untimely swaps and memory waits while maximisng the throughput of concurrent workload Tom McPherson, vice president of z System development, said that the new model was not just about microprocessors, though this model has many eight-core chips in it. Since everything has to be cooled by a combination of water and air, semiconductor scaling is slowing down, so “you have to get the value by optimizing.
The first real numbers on how the z13 is selling won’t be public until comments are made in IBM’s first-quarter report, due out in mid-April, when a little more than three weeks’ worth of billings will flow into it.
The company’s fiscal fortunes have sagged, with mixed reviews from both analysts and the blogosphere. Much of that revolves around IBM’s lag in cloud services. IBM is positioning the mainframe as a prime cloud server, one of the systems that is actually what cloud computing goes to and runs on.