The First PC Had a Birthday

The year was 1981 and IBM introduced its IBM PC model 5150 on August 12th, 30 years ago today.

The first IBM PC wasn’t much by today’s standards. It had an Intel 8088 processor that ran at the blazing speed of 4.77MHz. The base memory configuration was all of 16kB expandable all the way up to 256kB, and it had two 5-1/4in, 160kB capacity floppy disk drives but no hard drive.

A keyboard and 12in monochrome monitor were included, with a colour monitor optional. The 5150 ran IBM BASIC in ROM and came with a PC-DOS boot diskette put out by a previously unknown startup software company based out of Seattle named Microsoft.

IBM priced its initial IBM PC at a whopping $1,565, and that was a relatively steep price in those days, worth about $5,000 today, give or take a few hundred dollars. In the US in 1981 that was about the cost of a decent used car.

Because the IBM PC was meant to be sold to the general public but IBM didn’t have any retail stores, the company sold it through US catalogue retailer Sears & Roebuck stores.

Subsequently IBM released follow-on models through 1986 including the PC/XT, the first with an internal hard drive; the PC/AT with an 80286 chip running at 6MHz then 8MHz; the 6MHz XT/286 with zero wait-state memory that was actually faster than the 8MHz PC/AT and (not very) Portable and Convertible models; as well as the ill-fated XT/370, AT/370, 3270 PC and 3270/AT mainframe terminal emulators, plus the unsuccessful PC Jr.

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Sprint To Debut Cloud Services

Sprint will introduce cloud services to all sizes of businesses in the fourth quarter, a Sprint executive said on Wednesday.

A Sprint spokeswoman said more details would be announced at a later date, but confirmed the executive’s comments in an interview published Wednesday.

Paget Alves, head of Sprint business markets, said in the interview that Sprint’s offerings to businesses will include selling its network infrastructure as a service available on-demand.

Sprint will also offer software, security apps and Internet hosting.

Verizon and AT&T offer similar services, and Alves was said that the carriers are “in a unique position because our business is centered around the cloud.”

Sprint plans to offer services that rely on the company’s own data center, unlike Verizon, which is using capacity from Terremark, which Verizon purchased for $1.4 billion in January.

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VoIP Ideal Platform For Controlling Botnets

Botnets and their masters can communicate with one other by calling into the same VoIP conference call and exchanging data using touch tones, researchers demonstrated at Defcon.

This gives the botmasters — whose top goals include remaining anonymous — the ability to issue orders from random payphones and disposable cellular phones, say researchers Itzik Kotler and Iftach Ian Amit of security and risk-assessment firm Security Art.

Using phones and the public phone networks eliminates one of the prime tools bot fighters have: taking down the domains of botnets’ command and control servers, the researchers say. If the botmaster isn’t using a command and control server, it can’t be taken down.

In fact, the botmaster can communicate with the zombie machines that make up the botnet without using the Internet at all if the zombies are within a corporate network. So even if a victim company’s VoIP network is segregated from the data network, there is still a connection to the outside world.

In addition to its stealth, the VoIP tactic employs technology that readily pierces corporate firewalls and uses only traffic that is difficult for data loss prevention software to peer into. The traffic is streamed audio, so data loss prevention scanners can’t recognize patterns of data they are supposed to filter, the researchers say.

The downsides of VoIP as a command channel are that it severely limits the number of zombie machines that can be contacted at once, and the rate at which stolen data can be sent out of a corporate network is limited by the phone system. But Kotler and Amit say the connections are plenty big to send commands in.

During their demo at the conference, the pair had an Asterisk open source IP PBX stand in as the corporate PBX. A virtual machine representing a zombie computer on a corporate network called via TCP/IP through the PBX and into a corporate conference call. A BlackBerry, representing the botmaster dialed in over the public phone network to the same conference call.

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AMD Not Chasing Smartphone Market

Advanced Micro Devices is not immediately pursuing opportunities within the smartphone markets as it does not align with the company’s strength in technologies like graphics, an executive said on Monday.

Smartphones are constrained on battery, pixels and screen space, and AMD has other areas it can focus on in order to grow, said Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager for AMD’s product group during the Pacific Crest Securities Technology Leadership Forum in Vail, Colorado. The company sees an opportunity to apply its graphics and chip technologies to tablets, where customers are demanding better video and battery life.

“We haven’t announced any plans to go in that handheld space. We’ve got plenty of opportunities… in server, notebook and now tablets, that’s our immediate focus. But if the right circumstances come up and we can see a way to impact the market, we’ll obviously continue to look,” Bergman said.

AMD has faced criticism for not aggressively pursuing the booming smartphone or tablet markets. The company in June rushed to release its first dedicated tablet chip, called the Z-series. The chip is a low-power variant of PC chips based on the Fusion microarchitecture, which includes a graphics processor and CPU on a single chip. Based on the x86 architecture, the chip can help tablets deliver a full PC and graphics experience, the company has said.

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Lightning Took Down Amazon, Microsoft Clouds

A lightning strike in Dublin on Sunday caused a power outage in data centers belonging to Amazon and Microsoft, causing the companies’ cloud services to go offline.

Lightning hit a transformer, sparking an explosion and fire which caused the power outage at 10:41 AM PDT, according to preliminary information, Amazon wrote on its Service Health Dashboard. Under normal circumstances, backup generators would seamlessly kick in, but the explosion also managed to disable some of those generators.

By 1:56 PM PDT, power to the majority of network devices had been restored, allowing Amazon to focus on bringing EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) instances and EBS (Elastic Block Storage) volumes back online. But progress was slower than expected, Amazon said a couple of hours later.

“We know many of you are anxiously waiting for your instances and volumes to become available, and we want to give you more detail on why the recovery of the remaining instances and volumes is taking so long,” the company wrote at 11:04 PM PDT. “Due to the scale of the power disruption, a large number of EBS servers lost power and require manual operations before volumes can be restored … While many volumes will be restored over the next several hours, we anticipate that it will take 24-48 hours until the process is completed.”

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Google Rewrites Web Pages For Speed

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.

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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.

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IBM Debuts Fast Storage System

With an eye toward helping tomorrow’s data intensive organizations, IBM researchers have developed a super-fast storage system capable of scanning in 10 billion files in 43 minutes.

This system easily bested their previous system, demonstrated at Supercomputing 2007, which scanned 1 billion files in three hours.

Key to the increased performance was the use of speedy flash memory to store the metadata that the storage system uses to locate requested information. Traditionally, metadata repositories reside on disk, access to which slows operations.

“If we have that data on very fast storage, then we can do those operations much more quickly,” said Bruce Hillsberg, director of storage systems at IBM Research Almaden, where the cluster was built. “Being able to use solid-state storage for metadata operations really allows us to do some of these management tasks more quickly than we could ever do if it was all on disk.”

IBM foresees that its customers will be grappling with a lot more information in the years to come.

“As customers have to store and process large amounts of data for large periods of time, they will need efficient ways of managing that data,” Hillsberg said.

For the new demonstration, IBM built a cluster of 10 eight-core servers equipped with a total of 6.8 terabytes of solid-state memory. IBM used four 3205 solid-state Storage Systems from Violin Memory. The resulting system was able to read files at a rate of almost 5 GB/s (gigabytes per second).

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“TDL-4″ Botnet Is Practically Indestructible

A new and improved botnet that has infected more than four million computers is “practically indestructible,” software security experts say.

“TDL-4,” the name for both the bot Trojan that infects PCs and the ensuing collection of compromised computers, is “the most sophisticated threat today,” said Kaspersky Labs researcher Sergey Golovanov in a detailed analysis Monday.

“[TDL-4] is practically indestructible,” Golovanov said and others agree.

“I wouldn’t say it’s perfectly indestructible, but it is pretty much indestructible,” said Joe Stewart, director of malware research at Dell SecureWorks and an internationally-known botnet expert, in an interview today. “It does a very good job of maintaining itself.”

Golovanov and Stewart based their assessments on a variety of TDL-4′s traits, all which make it an extremely tough character to detect, delete, suppress or eradicate.

Because TDL-4 installs its rootkit on the Master Boot Record (MBR), it is invisible to both the operating system and more, importantly, security software designed to sniff out malicious code.

Further,what makes the botnet indestructible is the combination of its advanced encryption and the use of a public peer-to-peer (P2P) network for the instructions issued to the malware by command-and-control (C&C) servers.

“The way peer-to-peer is used for TDL-4 will make it extremely hard to take down this botnet,” said Roel Schouwenberg, senior malware researcher at Kaspersky, ”The TDL guys are doing their utmost not to become the next gang to lose their botnet.”

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More Citigroup Accounts Compromised Than Stated

Citigroup was apparently hit harder by a cyber-attack in May than what was originally reported; which is now 360,000 of its customers. Unfortunately, this number is double the number that Citigroup initially stated.

Citigroup is one of the biggest banks in the US and ranks number 3 overall. The breach occurred on May 10^th and was confirmed by Citigroup on June 8th^th. That said, around 360,080 North American Citigroup credit card accounts were impacted by the breach, Citigroup stated; which is around 1 per cent of their North American card customer’s base.

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