Wisconsin man sentenced for participating in Anonymous DDoS

A man from Wisconsin was sentenced for participating in a DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack by hacker group Anonymous on a Kansas company.

Eric J. Rosol, 38, is said to have admitted that on Feb. 28, 2011, he took part in a denial of service attack for about a minute on a Web page of Koch Industries -- Kochind.com, using software called a Low Orbit Ion Cannon Code, which was loaded on his computer.

LOIC is a popular DDoS tool used by Anonymous and other online attackers to overload websites with requests and disrupt the target server.

Rosol, who pleaded guilty to one misdemeanor count of accessing a protected computer, was sentenced to two years of federal probation and ordered to pay US$183,000 in restitution, the Department of Justice said in a statement.

A plea agreement was earlier entered by Rosol and the government in the U.S. District Court for the District of Kansas. The parties had agreed that the direct losses as a result of the attack on the website were less than $5,000 but Koch Industries had argued that it hired a consulting group to protect its Web sites at a cost of approximately $183,000.

Koch Industries' owners, David and Charles Koch, were targeted by Anonymous for their alleged role in weakening the bargaining power of trade unions. The attack by Anonymous is said to have forced the Koch website offline for 15 minutes.

The company is privately held with headquarters in Wichita, Kansas, and has businesses in a number of areas including oil and manufacturing.

The use of U.S. computer laws to charge individuals for crimes that could lead to long sentences in jail has been criticized by some civil rights activists who argue that the punishment is often disproportionate to the online crime, and higher than sentences for similar crimes in the physical world.

Jeremy Hammond, 28, a member of Anonymous, was sentenced last month to 10 years in prison for hacking into the computers of a geopolitical analysis firm Strategic Forecasting, also called Stratfor, and obtaining subscriber and credit card information and emails, among other data. Hammond and supporters said he was a whistle blower, whose hacks aimed to expose government secrets, data gathering and surveillance.

16.01 | 0 komentar | Read More

Microsoft's Desktop Optimization Pack gets Win 8.1 management capabilities

The Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) suite of IT management tools has been updated with support for Windows 8.1 device and application management and Office 2013 virtualization.

MDOP 2013 R2, released on Monday, lets IT administrators manage BitLocker in Windows 8.1 using version 2.0 SP1 of Microsoft BitLocker Administration and Monitoring (MBAM) and manage Group Policy with version 4.0 SP2 of Advanced Group Policy Management (AGPM). The suite's Diagnostics and Recovery Toolset (DaRT) also can be used now with Windows 8.1, a major update to Windows 8 that became available in mid-October.

The suite also includes Version 5.0 SP2 of the App-V virtualization tool, which has an Office Deployment Tool for Office 2013 virtualization. App-V is designed to let IT departments store applications on a central server and stream them on demand to multiple user devices. Office 2013 is the most recent version of Microsoft's ubiquitous suite of desktop productivity applications.

More support for Windows 8.1 device management is found in version 2.0 of MDOP's User Experience Virtualization (UE-V), which is designed to establish user preferences and settings in a central server so they can be automatically applied to the multiple devices a user employs. With it, applications don't need to be reconfigured manually in each device. UE-V 2.0 now also lets IT administrators control how users apply the settings of Windows Store applications in their various devices. Windows Store apps are those written specifically for Windows 8.

MDOP 2013 R2 is available now for download for Volume Licensing, Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) and TechNet subscribers.

16.01 | 0 komentar | Read More

Supreme Court leaves online sales tax question to Congress

The U.S. Supreme Court will leave it to Congress to settle the contentious question of online sales tax collection that brick-and-mortar retailers contend puts them at a disadvantage to giants such as Amazon.com.

The nation's highest court declined on Monday to hear a petition from Amazon.com and Overstock.com asking for a review of a New York Court of Appeals ruling that upheld the collection of sales tax for online purchases.

In 1992, the Supreme Court ruled sales tax only needs to be collected if a business has a physical presence in a state.

But the New York law, enacted in 2008, considers retailers to have a physical presence even if the businesses accept "affiliate" sales leads from other websites.

After New York passed the law, Overstock.com halted contracts with affiliate advertisers in New York, opting to contract with advertisers in other states.

On Monday, Overstock.com said the Supreme Court's decision to not hear the case changed little and that it would not begin collecting sales tax in New York. Instead, "it simply means that we will continue not to engage New York Internet advertisers," according to a statement.

"We are not shaken in our belief that the Internet tax law New York passed is unconstitutional under existing Supreme Court precedent, nor in our conviction that this issue requires a national solution," the company said.

The Retail Industry Leaders Association, which has pushed for sales tax to apply to online sellers, said in a statement on Monday that it is now "up to Congress to close the online sales tax loophole." Brick-and-mortar retailers must collect sales tax, but online retailers don't in many states, giving them a pricing edge.

In May, the U.S. Senate passed the Marketplace Fairness Act, which would allow states to collect sales tax from online business with more than $1 million in sales but no physical presence in a state. The House of Representatives has yet to act on the bill.

Senator Dick Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois, called on the House to act, saying in a statement on Monday that the Senate has "overwhelmingly agreed to do away with the patchwork of confusing state laws that currently govern remote sales."

The act would give states the option to collect sales and use taxes from out-of-state-businesses, according to Durbin's statement.

Forty-six states have sales taxes. Technically, consumers are still supposed to remit sales taxes for online purchases to states, but the requirements are largely ignored.

Amazon.com collects sales tax in 16 states, according to its website: Arizona, California, Connecticut, Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia and Wisconsin.

Amazon.com could not immediately be reached for comment.

16.01 | 0 komentar | Read More

Amazon plans to use aerial drones to deliver packages via a new Prime Air service

Amazon.com plans to deliver packages to customers using unmanned aerial vehicles in 30 minutes or less.

"It looks like science fiction, but it's real," Amazon said on its website. Its Prime Air service, powered by drones, will be ready from a technology point of view to enter commercial operations as soon as the necessary regulations are in place, it said. The company's research and development team is already working on the new delivery method.

Amazon's plans, however, will depend on rules for civilian unmanned aircraft from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, which it expects by 2015. "We will be ready at that time," it added.

The FAA indicated last month that the development and implementation of operational and certification requirements for the operation of public unmanned aircraft systems in the national airspace system is planned for not later than Dec. 31, 2015. It recently released a roadmap for the integration of civil unmanned aircraft systems in the national airspace.

Here's a video from Amazon explaining how the Prime Air service would work:

The Amazon drones will be able to deliver five-pound packages, which account for about 86 percent of items delivered by the company, CEO Jeff Bezos said in an interview on the CBS TV news show 60 Minutes.

The electric-powered drones will be able to deliver packages within a 10-mile radius from a company fulfillment center, he said. The drones would follow instructions based on GPS coordinates of the delivery location, Bezos said.

Putting Prime Air into commercial use will take some number of years as the company advances the technology and waits for the necessary FAA rules and regulations, the company said on its website. But "one day, Prime Air vehicles will be as normal as seeing mail trucks on the road today," the company said.

The vehicles will be built with multiple redundancies and designed to commercial aviation standards, Amazon said.

The online retailer was the most visited retail property during the Black Friday holiday shopping in the U.S. last week, followed by eBay and Walmart, according to digital measurement and analytics firm comScore.

Amazon has been adding new programs to speed up delivery of packages to customers. The company announced last month that it has worked out a deal with the U.S. Postal Service to deliver packages on Sundays to its customers.

The company said it would start the service in Los Angeles and New York, with plans to roll out to "a large portion" of the U.S. population by 2014. In 2009, it introduced a same-day delivery service, called Local Express Delivery, for select locations.

16.01 | 0 komentar | Read More

Acer needs to focus on brand building, tablets under new leaders

Acer will have to choose new leaders with expertise in tablets and brand-building to shed its reputation as a low-end seller of notebooks, analysts said.

Last month, the company abruptly canceled plans to name Jim Wong as its new CEO, and instead did away with the position. Company co-founder Stan Shih has taken over as chairman and president, but only temporarily, Acer spokesman Henry Wang said on Friday.

Shih is slated to step down as chairman in June when his term ends, and will hold the post of president until a suitable candidate is found, Wang said. "The CEO duties will be taken over by either the corporate president or chairman," he said. "We have no timetable on choosing a president, but we are looking."

The world's fourth largest PC vendor, Acer has been struggling in recent years to lift its earnings. About 80 percent of its revenue comes from desktops and notebooks, but demand for PCs is falling as sales for smartphones and tablets continue to surge.

To revive its business, Acer may need to choose leaders from outside the company who understands mobile products, said Arthur Liao, an analyst with Fubon Securities Investment Services.

"The company has suffered in the past two years, because its executives have had a PC-focused mindset," he said. "They spent a lot of resources on ultrabooks, netbooks, but the PC market is shrinking."

Acer should instead focus on the tablet market, Liao said, an area of its business that's growing, but accounts for only about 8 percent of its revenue. Based in Taiwan, Acer could target neighboring mainland China, where low-cost Android tablets are in demand.

For next year, tablet shipments will be close to surpassing the PC market in size, and reach 285 million units, according to research firm Canalys.

Other analysts believe Acer's new leaders will need to build the company's brand as a high-end maker of products.

"We've done many studies and people still perceive Acer's brand as low-end PC vendor," said Helen Chiang, an analyst with IDC. "Even when Acer comes out with high-end products, it's still been hard for the company to change its brand image."

Moving to the high-end will help Acer improve its profit margins, a direction rivals Dell and HP took years earlier with their focus on enterprise products. "It will probably take two or three years for Acer to turn this around," Chiang added. "Acer has been late in moving outside PC products, and so is much more reliant on selling PCs when compared to its rivals."

16.01 | 0 komentar | Read More

Bitcointalk.org warns passwords in danger after DNS attack

A popular Bitcoin discussion forum warned on Monday some user passwords may have been intercepted after the site's DNS (Domain Name System) registrar was breached.

An attacker found a flaw in Bitcointalk.org's domain name registrar, a company based in Japan called Anonymous Speech, wrote an administrator for the forum who goes by the nickname "Theymos." Anonymous Speech could not immediately be reached for comment.

Tampering with a DNS server is a powerful attack. A hacker can direct traffic destined for one website to one that he or she controls, even if a person types in the correct domain name in the URL address bar of a browser.

The attacker could then execute a man-in-the-middle attack on Bitcointalk.org, intercepting encrypted forum submissions, passwords sent during login sessions, authentication cookies, private messages and more, Theymos wrote.

The attack occurred between 06:00 UTC on Sunday and 20:00 UTC Monday. People who logged into the site during this period should change their passwords, Theymos wrote.

Since many people tend to re-use passwords, hackers usually try to see if the captured login credentials are valid on other services.

People who had the "Remember me" login feature enabled should not be at risk, Theymos wrote. Security codes used to let people login without entering their passwords again have now been invalidated.

A Bitcointalk.org user noticed the change and "immediately transferred Bitcointalk.org to a different registrar," Theymos wrote. But DNS changes can take up to a day to be updated on servers around the world.

In the meantime, Theymos wrote that users want to make sure they're communicating with the right server. Users can add this IP address to their hosts file: "109.201.133.195 bitcointalk.org" and remove it later when the updated settings have been distributed through the DNS.

Bitcointalk.org's TLS certificate—which allows users to cryptographically verify they're talking to the correct server—has a SHA1 fingerprint of "29:0E:CC:82:2B:3C:CE:0A:73:94:35:A0:26:15:EC:D3:EB:1F:46:6B," Theymos wrote.

Additionally, Bitcointalk.org was targeted by a DDoS (distributed denial-of-service attack), Theymos wrote. "These two events are probably related, though I'm not yet sure why an attacker would do both of these things at once."

Bitcointalk.org was defaced in early October and taken offline after hackers apparently found a flaw in the Simple Machines forum software the site uses.

16.00 | 0 komentar | Read More

FBI warns: 'tis the season for online shopping scams

The FBI this week issued a series of reminders to online shoppers to beware of scams and to use their common sense.

"Scammers use many techniques to defraud consumers, from phishing e-mails offering too good to be true deals on brand-name merchandise to offering quick cash to victims who will re-ship packages to additional destinations. Previously reported scams are still being executed today," the FBI states.

Here's a rundown of the FBI's advice, some more obvious than others.

• Keep a watchful eye on your personal credit information at this time of year for any possible fraudulent activity.
• Be careful when receiving online correspondence from banks. Never click on a link embedded in an email from your bank. Rather, open a new webpage and manually enter the URL to avoid getting snagged in a phishing trap.
• Stick mainly to reputable online sites. Those unfamiliar to you might be traps designed to swipe your personally identifiable information.
• Don't assume even top search results will take you to a reputable site. Take a close look at the URL of any site you plan to visit to see if anything looks funky, such as extra characters. Make sure the payment page of any website you use starts with https, not just http.
• Don't respond to unsolicited email (i.e., spam)
• Be wary of emails claiming to http://www.techhive.com/article/2047101/instagram-for-pc-application-is-a-marketing-scam.html?tk=rel_news">contain photos in attached files... which could contain viruses.
• Avoid filling out forms contained in email messages that as for personal info.
• Be on the alert if you are requested to act quickly or if there is an emergency that requires your attention, as these could be scams.
• Check out US-CERT's posting on Holiday Season Phishing Scams and Malware Campaigns.
• Finally, if it looks too good, it probably is.

Subscribe to the Security Watch Newsletter

Thank you for sharing this page.

Sorry! There was an error emailing this page

16.01 | 0 komentar | Read More

Internet of Things means gadgets chatter more than us

Several opportunities are predicted to emerge in the coming months as more data is generated by machines or things other than human beings.

Frost & Sullivan Asia Pacific says that 2014 will see more IT buyers and sellers focused on the Internet of Things (IoT).

Such activity will also increase in the coming years due to a combination of low-cost sensors, cloud computing, advanced data analytics, and mobility, according to Andrew Milroy, vice president, ICT Practice, Frost & Sullivan Asia Pacific.

Demand for big data analytics tools will increase in the coming days as these will improve efficiency and effectiveness of large installations. Powerful analytics tools will transform the way people do business and generate revenues for organizations.

IoT will also drive new cloud computing opportunities as applications driving the functionality of sensors and other mobile devices will be hosted and developed in the cloud.

IoT will lead to the development of mobile applications in the cloud for deployment on any device or sensor.

The professional services market centered around development and management of apps will become more significant next year.

"While apps may enable and enhance that interaction, high speed networks will need to be deployed to enable this heavy use of increasingly sophisticated apps," Milroy added. "From an IoT perspective, these networks will be necessary to efficiently transmit growing volumes of data between sensors and devices."

Frost & Sullivan Asia Pacific finds the biggest revenue opportunity for an IoT ecosystem is within the transportation and logistics sectors. Other areas impacted by IoT are smart cities, connected cars, connected health, and manufacturing.

Businesses that want to tap the wave of IoT will have to address issues related to reliable connectivity, enterprise grade cloud computing, and performance.

16.01 | 0 komentar | Read More

3D printers find a home in Hollywood, cranking out props

3D printing is not only entering the consumer space these days, but it also is finding application in the filmmaking industry.

Michael Turner, the art director behind 20th Century Fox's The Wolverine starring Hugh Jackman, spoke about the growing role of 3D printing during the local launch of the Blu-Ray edition of the film.

3D printing was used to create certain props in The Wolverine, such as the armor for the Silver Samurai character, he said.

"3D printing was great for that character because of the small pieces that made up the armor, and we even created swords with the printers," Turner said. "It's very fast with the modelling on the computer, so you get a real thing pretty quickly once it is designed."

Currently working on a different film, Turner said that the design team is considering getting a 3D printer into the art department in order to build the sets as models with the printer.

"With the 3D printer, we have the opportunity to create buildings quickly instead of making them out of cardboard," he said.

As for future developments for 3D printing technology, Turner said he is interested in what is currently being done with organic printing.

"I hope we'll have something big enough one day where we can print a whole set," he said.

The Wolverine's SFX assistant supervisor, Lloyd Finnemore, said his team used 3D printers and CAD because their time frame for manufacturing is typically very short.

"We're trying to do a lot of that work in-house, so we can basically do it on demand and decide which part of the work flow is more important right now instead of outsourcing something out to a shop somewhere," he said.

Finnemore admits that the film industry is an early adopter of technologies such as 3D printing.

"Anything that makes our job quicker and easier, so we can bring more things into a physical realm, and do it economically, we're all in favor of it," he said.

Currently Finnemore has been using in-house 3D printers with plastics and wax, and he is looking forward to the prospect of using steel one day.

"We've built our own 3D printers if we needed something bigger and faster, since it's the only way to get things done," he said.

16.01 | 0 komentar | Read More

Review: Apricorn's Aegis 3.0 portable drive offers an SSD option for better performance

Apricorn's Aegis Portable 3.0 is a handsome 2.5-inch, silver and black, USB 3.0 external drive with an integrated cable—and it ships in both hard-drive and SSD flavors. If that isn't a siren's call to see just how much of a performance boost you get from a solid-state drive in an external USB 3.0 enclosure, I don't know what is. Apricorn thoughtfully shipped us both versions so we could answer that call.

There's no outward difference between the SSD version (outfitted with a 256GB SanDisk SD6SB1M256G1022I) and the hard-drive model (which comes with a 1TB, 2.5-inch Toshiba MQ01ABD100), aside from the fact that the SSD version weighs an ounce or two less.

ROBERT CARDINThe Aegis Portable 3.0 comes in an attractive enclosure with an attached USB 3.0 cable.

The Lab ran both models through PCWorld's 10GB-file stress tests, copying data to and from a 16GB RAM drive, and the differences were as vivid as Apricorn's advertising claims—at least when writing data to the drives. The 256GB SSD version wrote our single 10GB file at 334 megabytes per second, which is almost three times faster than the hard-drive version's 115.5 MBps.

With a 10GB mix of small files and folders, the difference in write speed was even more pronounced: 102.7 MBps to 22.6 MBps. But 22.6 MBps is poky, even for a hard drive. We saw similarly subpar write performance from Apricorn's Aeigis Bio, so it might be the bridge controller. By way of comparison, Seagate's Wireless Plus 1TB wrote the same test file at 93 MBps, and other external USB 3.0 hard drives we've tested typically measure anywhere from 50 MBps to 80 MBps.

On the read tests, on the other hand, the drives finished in a near dead heat. Both the SSD version and the hard-drive version of the Aegis Portable 3.0 read the single 10GB file at 263 MBps. In the 10GB files-and-folder test, the hard-drive version actually edged out the SSD version 214 MBps to 212 MBps.

The superior write performance of the SSD versions of the Apricorn Aegis Portable 3.0 carries a hefty premium: The 256GB model costs $399 and the 512GB unit sells for $599, compared to just $79 for the 500GB, $109 for the 1TB, and $189 for 1.5TB versions. Clearly there's some pre-purchase contemplation to be done.

That said, the SSD version weighs significantly less than the hard-drive versions, making it a boon for those who like to travel light. And with no moving parts, the SSD version is not subject to damage from drops, bumps, and other physical impacts; you can be as ham-handed as they come and still not have to worry about hurting the drive.

The SSD-based Aegis Portable 3.0 is a nice product for those who regularly back up or copy files onto an external drive, and need to do so in a hurry. In other usage scenarios, you might be better off buying an external hard drive and saving your cash for other purchases.

Note: I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that you can grab an unpopulated 2.5-inch USB 3.0 enclosure and populate it with a bare 256GB SSD for considerably less than $400. It might not come with an integrated cable or a carrying case, and you'd have separate warranties for the enclosure and the SSD, but you would save a lot of cash.

16.01 | 0 komentar | Read More