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Accused Hacker Out On Bail In England
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The accused ‘Topiary’, whose name is Jake Davis, was charged on Sunday and bailed by the courts yesterday. He was charged with five offences: Unauthorised access to a computer system, Encouraging or assisting offences, Conspiracy with others to carry out a Distributed Denial of Service Attack on the website of the Serious and Organised Crime Agency, Conspiracy to commit offences of Section 3 Computer Misuse Act 1990, and Conspiracy with others to commit offences of Section 3 Computer Misuse Act 1990 contrary to Section 1 of the Criminal Law Act 1977.
According to a report at the Guardian, his bail conditions are that Davis must wear an electronic tag, not access the internet, and not leave his house between 10pm and 7am.
Davis, who appeared outside court wearing sunglasses and holding a copy of “Free Radicals: The Secret Anarchy of Science” by Micheal Brooks and who allegedly authored the Rupert Murdoch is dead story that appeared on the hacked web site of the Sun newspaper, has already gained support on the internet in general and especially on Twitter.
EMC’s Data Breach Cost $66 Million
Between April and June 2011, EMC spent $66 million handling the fallout from a March cyber attack against its systems, which resulted in the compromise of information relating to the SecurID two-factor authentication sold by EMC’s security division, RSA.
That clean-up figure was disclosed last week during an EMC earnings call, by David Goulden, the company’s chief financial officer. It doesn’t include post-breach expenses from the first quarter, when EMC began investigating the attack, hardening its systems, and working with customers to prevent their being exploited as a result of the attacks.
In spite of the breach, EMC reported strong second-quarter financial results, earning consolidated revenue of $4.85 billion, which is an increase of 20% compared with the same period one year ago. Meanwhile, second-quarter GAAP net income increased by 28% from the same period last year, to reach $546 million. The company saw large growth in its information infrastructure and virtual infrastructure products and services, including quarterly revenue increases of 19% for its information storage group.
Those results led executives to increase their financial outlook for 2011 and predict consolidated revenue in excess of $19.8 billion, which would be a 16% increase from EMC’s 2010 revenues of $17 billion.
Is Sprint’s Future Questionable?
August 4, 2011 by admin
Filed under Smartphones
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Sprint Nextel Corp’s shares fell sharply on Thursday as heavy subscriber losses in the second quarter called into question the strategy and outlook of the No. 3 U.S. wireless company.
Sprint had spent heavily to promote its service and better compete against larger carriers Verizon Wireless and AT&T Inc. But that strategy backfired as profit margins eroded and customer losses persisted.
The weak results overshadowed Sprint’s announcement of a $9 billion network contract with start-up LightSquared, and sent the stock tumbling to its lowest point since February before recovering a little to close down 16 percent.
Investors questioned whether Sprint would be able to meet its 2011 targets after such a disappointing showing.
“Their cost of doing business went up dramatically,” said Piper Jaffray analyst Christopher Larsen. “People have less confidence they can meet expectations.”
Sprint’s operating profit margin of 16.3 percent was well below the average Wall Street estimate of around 19 percent as the company had changed its product rebate terms in an effort to combat Verizon Wireless’ sale of the Apple Inc iPhone, and an iPhone discount at AT&T.
But the bet did not pay off as Sprint still saw defections of 101,000 net subscribers — also known as post-paid customers — compared with analysts’ expectation for losses of 15,000.
Alibaba Debuts Smartphone Running Its Cloud OS
August 3, 2011 by admin
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Alibaba Group unveiled its first self-developed mobile operating system and smartphone on Thursday in a bid to capture a slice of China’s burgeoning mobile Internet market.
The cloud computing-based operating system, Aliyun, will run the K-Touch Cloud Smartphone, to be launched at the end of July in 10 colors, said Wang Jian, president of Alibaba Cloud Computing, a unit of Alibaba Group.
A tablet PC running the Aliyun OS, which is based on a customized Android system, will also be launched in China by the end of the year, Wang told reporters after a presentation in Beijing.
Handset manufacturer Tianyu will manufacture the K-Touch as well as the tablet, Wang said.
“Mobile users want a more open and convenient mobile OS, one that allows them to truly enjoy all that the Internet has to offer, right in the palm of their hand, and the cloud OS, with its use of cloud-based applications, will provide that,” said.
The Aliyun operating system will feature cloud services such as email, Internet search and support for web-based applications. Users will not be required to download or install applications onto their mobile devices, Wang said.
Alibaba Cloud plans to integrate the operating system with other devices including mobile phones with larger screens and tablet computers in the coming months.
Wang said the company was looking to launch tablet computers running Aliyun by the end of the year.
The company is currently in talks with Qualcomm Inc to develop a lower-end chipset optimized to run Aliyun OS in lower-end mobile phones, Wang said. The K-Touch phones use a high-end chipset from Nvidia Corp for crisp display of intricate games.
Google Rewrites Web Pages For Speed
August 2, 2011 by admin
Filed under Around The Net
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Google has created a hosted service that analyzes Web pages, rewrites their code to make them perform better and serves them up from Google servers.
To use the Page Speed Service, Web publishers must sign up and point their site’s DNS entry to Google. The service grabs the site’s content, optimizes it for speed and delivers the pages to end users.
Visitors will continue to access a site in the same way as before but could see speed enhancements of 25% to 60%, according to Google.
The service is currently being offered free to a limited number of hand-selected webmasters. Google will announce pricing and other details later. Webmasters can sign up to receive information.
SpyEye Poses Risk To Banking Defenses
Financial institutions are facing more trouble from SpyEye, a piece of malicious software that steals money from customers online bank accounts, according to new research from security vendor Trusteer.
SpyEye is a dastardly piece of malicious software: it can harvest credentials for online accounts and also initiate transactions as a person is logged into their account, literally making it possible to watch their bank balance drop by the second.
In its latest versions, SpyEye has been modified with new code designed to evade advanced systems banks have put in place to try and block fraudulent transactions, said Mickey Boodai, Trusteer’s CEO.
Banks are now analyzing how a person uses their site, looking at parameters such as how many pages a person looks at on the site, the amount of time a person spends on a page and the time it takes a person to execute a transaction. Other indicators include IP address, such as if a person who normally logs in from the Miami area suddenly logs in from St. Petersburg, Russia.
SpyEye works fast, and can automatically and quickly initiate a transaction much faster than an average person manually on the website. That’s a key trigger for banks to block a transaction. So SpyEye’s authors are now trying to mimic — albeit in an automated way — how a real person would navigate a website.
Nokia Had Horrible Quarter
July 27, 2011 by admin
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Nokia has just posted very disturbing quarterly results this morning. The European smartphone giant outlook appears to be getting worse and CEO Stephen Elop has acknowledged that things will not turn around overnight.
Elop is reporting that Nokia’s operating profit is down 44 percent since Q1 and sales of mobile devices are down 23 percent consecutively. While the overall sales of mobile phones and smartphones are down, along with average selling prices.
Elop labelled the results as “clearly disappointing” and went on to say that competitive pressures are continuing. He tried to paint a somewhat more positive outlook for the rest of the year, thanks to Nokia’s clear strategy and several major product launches.
Defense Dept. IT Is ‘Stone Age’
U.S. Marine Corps Gen. James “Hoss” Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, issued a stinging critique of the Defense Department’s IT systems and said he sees much room for improvement.
Cartwright, who was speaking at the FOSE information technology conference in Washington,DC, said the DOD is sending increasing amounts of data, such as video, to soldiers on the battlefield, and it’s beginning to build an architecture “that starts to take us where we need to be.” But Cartwright quickly tempered that.
“Quite frankly, my feeling is — at least being a never-satisfied person — the department is pretty much in the Stone Age as far as IT is concerned,” Cartwright said.
Cartwright cited problems with proprietary systems that aren’t connected to anything else and are unable to quickly adapt to changing needs. “We have huge numbers of data links that move data between proprietary platforms — one point to another point,” he said.
The most striking example of an IT failure came during the second Gulf War, where the Marines and the Army were dispatched in southern Iraq.
Hackers Creating Networking Website
July 25, 2011 by admin
Filed under Around The Net, Internet
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Anonymous, which has taken credit for several high-profile cyber attacks in recent months, plans to launch what it says will be a new social networking site called AnonPlus.
The group’s move was apparently spurred by Google’s decision to shut down Anonymous’ Google+ account for community standard violations, a report by Mashable says.
For the moment, at least, AnonPlus appears to be little more than a single, somewhat poorly formatted page explaining what the site will be about.
“This lil info dump of a site is here simply to dispence (sic) info, soon the actual site will go up and you can begin to interact with it,” a message on the site notes.
“This project is not overnight and will take many of those out there who simply want a better internet,” the message noted. “We will not be stopped by those looking to troll or those willing to stop the spreading of the truth.”
The message doesn’t mention Google shutting down Anonymous’ Google+ account, but it does promise members that with AnonPlus there would be no fear of “censorship”, “blackout” or “holding back.”
T-Mobile Will Offer Unlimited Data Plans
July 24, 2011 by admin
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Wireless telecom firm T-Mobile USA said it will begin offering unlimited data service plans, in a move aimed at snagging customers of bigger rivals Verizon Wireless and AT&T Inc which have discontinued offering such plans.
T-mobile, a unit of Deutsche Telekom AG, said the new plans will become available from July 24. The unlimited plans will be available with a two-year agreement for new and existing customers.
Verizon Wireless, the biggest U.S. mobile provider, said earlier in July it will stop offering unlimited data service plans, meaning higher prices for heavy users of services such as mobile Web surfing.
AT&T had stopped offering unlimited data services last year.