Hackers take control of 300,000home router

A world-spanning network of hijacked home routers has been uncovered by security researchers. The network involves more than 300,000 routers in homes and small businesses that have been taken over through loopholes in their core software. Discovered by researchers at Team Cymru, the network is thought to be one of the biggest involving such devices. It is not yet clear what the people behind the attack intend to do with the collection of compromised routers. In a research paper describing its findings, Team Cymru said it had first seen routers from several different manufacturers being compromised in January 2014.

These first victims had been in Eastern Europe, but now most of the machines were in Vietnam with the rest scattered around Europe as well as a couple of other countries, said Team Cymru. Once routers were taken over, internal instructions were changed so they no longer asked servers at their owner's ISP for help looking up the location of websites they regularly visit. This would mean that the attackers could re-direct people to anywhere they wanted, inject their own adverts into web pages people visitor poison the search results they get. Instead, these queries were routed through two IP addresses overseen by a hosting company in south London. That company has yet to respond to a request for comment.

Team Cymru researcher Steve Santorelli said the reason for creating the network of hijacked routers was still "mysterious" as the attackers did not seem to have abused their control for malicious ends. The attack had some similarities with an incident seen in Poland, which involved hijacked home routers being re-directed to malicious websites controlled by hi-tech thieves keen to grab online bank login credentials, said Mr Santorelli. "It's a definite evolution in technology - going after the internet gateway, not the end machine," Mr Santorelli told the BBC in an email. "We see these leaps in concepts every few years in cybercrime." Team Cymru had contacted law enforcement about the attack and informed ISPs with a lot of compromised customers, he said.

source:- BBC News

Kickstarter pledges cross $1bnmark

The Pebble smartwatch was one of the most strongly backed projects on Kickstarter Online crowdfunding website Kickstarter has passed $1bn (£599m) in pledges, nearly five years after its launch. The site said more than half of that amount was pledged in just the last 12 months. Donors from the US led the pledges, offering more than $663m, followed by UK with more than $54m. Kickstarter is one of the leading crowdfunding websites - sites that allow people raise money from donors to fund various projects. The developers of the Pebble smartwatch are among those who secured big pledges. The project debuted on Kickstarter in April 2012 seeking $100,000 (£62,000) to complete development of the device. By the end of its 38-day funding drive it had raised more than $10m and had almost 70,000 backers. The 'mid' factor Crowdfunding platforms are becoming increasingly popular. More than 5.7 million people have backed projects listed on Kickstarter , with nearly 1.7 million of them backing more than one project. Kickstarter also gave quirky details about the trends in pledges. According to the firm's data, Wednesday is the most popular day for people to pledge cash, and the middle of the month is also the most productive when it comes to pledges. The day with most pledges was 13 March last year with 54,187 backers pledging more than $4m to 1,985 projects.

Source:- BBC News

Apple issues fix to reported OS X security hole

Apple has issued a fix to a flaw in its OS X operating system which previously left users vulnerable to security breaches while browsing online.

The flaw could have enabled hackers to impersonate a website and intercept and capture data en route

A software update was released last week to iPhone, iPad and iPod owners to protect users from "an attacker" who may "capture or modify data".

It was later discovered that the problem also existed on Apple laptops and desktop computers running OS X.

On Tuesday, Apple issue a security fix through its software update service.

The problem was first spotted on Apple's mobile devices which run the iOS 7 operating system. It related to the way secure connections are made between Apple's safari browser and websites, including banking sites, Google and Facebook.

These sites have digital security certificates that allow an encrypted connection to be established between a user's computer and the website. This means any data that is sent over the connection should be secure.

Dropped the ball

However, a vulnerability in the code for Apple's iOS and OS X operating systems meant the security certificates were not being checked properly. This meant hackers could impersonate a website and capture the data that was being sent over the connection before letting it continue its journey to the real website.

A security fix has already been issued for users of iPads, iPhones and iPods

The fix was released on Tuesday.Apple released a fix for mobile devices running iOS 7 last week but a spokesperson issued the following statement about OS X: "We are aware of this issue and already have a software fix that will be released very soon."

According to researchers the security flaw had existed for months but no-one had reported it publicly.

Graham Cluley, a security analyst, said it was a failing by the company that it had not been identified earlier.

"It's pretty bad what Apple have done, they've seriously dropped the ball. How much the problem has been exploited is hard to say. Hackers may now be trying to take advantage while users wait for the security fix."

Source: BBC

Facebook quietly ends email address system

Facebook has quietly closed its three-year-old email service that gave users "@facebook.com" email addresses.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced the launch of email in 2010.

Continue reading the main story

From now on, emails sent to an "@facebook.com" address will be forwarded to the personal email address from which the member signed up for the site.

"We're making this change because most people haven't been using their Facebook email address," said a Facebook spokesperson.

The change will happen in early March.

The service was launched in November 2010 and billed as a way to streamline users' communication by providing a single inbox that could receive Facebook messages, SMS texts, and conventional emails.

It came under fire in 2012 when Facebook replaced users' published email addresses with their "@facebook.com" email on their profile.

The company later reversed course.

The move comes just a few days after Facebook's surprise purchase of messaging app WhatsApp for $19bn (£11.4bn).

Source: BBC NEWS

Google developing phone that views in 3D

IDG News Service - Google has been working for the last year on 3D smartphones that aim to give the devices greater awareness of space and motion in natural environments.

The goal of Project Tango is to give mobile devices "a human-scale understanding of space and motion," wrote Johnny Lee, project lead at Google's Advanced Technology and Projects group, in a Google+.

The awareness of space and motion is fundamental to the way people interact with others and their environment, Lee and his team wrote. "Yet, our mobile devices assume that physical world ends at the boundaries of the screen."

The possibilities for the technology are myriad, according to Google. Users can walk around their homes with the 3-D smartphones to get the dimensions before going out to buy furniture, or use the phone to find the exact shelf where a product is located in a store, it said on the Project Tango page. The visually-impaired could also use the new Project Tango technology to navigate unassisted in unfamiliar indoor places.

The prototype of the smartphone is a 5-inch phone running Android, which combines robotics and computer vision technology to track the 3-D motion of the phone, while creating a 3-D model of the surrounding environment.

The prototypes, algorithms, and APIs (application programming interfaces) are still in development, and the experimental devices are "intended only for the adventurous and are not a final shipping product," Google said.

The company is counting on professional developers to use the platform for a variety of applications, and said it has 200 development kits that it plans to distribute by March 14 to developers.

It has allocated some of the devices for projects in the areas of indoor navigation and mapping, single and multiplayer games that use physical space, and new algorithms for processing sensor data. "We have also set aside units for applications we haven't thought of yet," Google said, while asking developers to be creative, specific and bold.

Google has worked with universities, research labs, and industrial partners across nine countries to develop the platform, including the University of Minnesota, George Washington University, German tech firm Bosch and the Open Source Robotics Foundation.

Movidius in San Mateo, California, said its Myriad 1 vision processor platform will power Project Tango. The vision processor platform is described as an ultra-low power, high-performance programmable architecture of computational chips, software and development tools that enables devices to "intelligently understand and contextualize their surroundings."

Author:- John Ribeiro (covers outsourcing and general technology breaking news from India for The IDG News Service.)

 Follow John on Twitter at @Johnribeiro. John's e-mail address is john_ribeiro@idg.com

youtube.com speaks like this:- Say hello to Project Tango! 

Published By:- Boon T Jose

Surface Pro Sales Reach 400,000 in Only a Month

Since its launch, the Surface tablet from Microsoft has reached 400,000 sales, which isn't a bad start for a tablet that is definitely on the pricey side with an $899 price tag. What's even more impressive is that this tablet only launched a month ago. According to IDC Analyst Bob O'Donnell, "That's a respectable number and it leads me to believe that Surface Pro will end up outselling Surface RT."

O'Donnell is, of course, referring to the RT version of the Surface tablet, which is slightly less expensive at $499, though isn't compatible with older Windows software. "It's something that we've predicated all along because of the compatibility that Surface Pro offers," O'Donnell added. Overall, Microsoft has sold nearly 1.5 million Surface devices, including both Pro and RT versions, and was announced only three months ago.

Even though the RT version sold out initially, Microsoft was surprisingly able to keep up with demand quickly. Unfortunately, that hasn't been the case with the Pro. The high-end, 128 GB Pro version of Surface has been continuously sold out since it was released on February 9. This model of the Surface tablet has only recently become readily available in the last week or so.

Regardless, the numbers being put up by the Pro are nothing compared to that of Apple's iPad. Apple sold more than 20 million iPads in the quarter ending in December, though Apple has been in this market substantially longer than Microsoft has and has also had time to fine tune its device. However, like Surface RT, the 9.7" Retina iPad starts at $499 while the iPad Mini is even cheaper at $329.

The trick with the Surface is that it puts a conventional, mainstream laptop into a 2 lb, 0.5" thick tablet. The Pro version comes with a 10.6" 1,920 x 1,080 full HD resolution display, Intel Ivy Bridge processor, 4 GB of memory and a full-fledged solid-state drive, which is exponentially faster than the flash drives found in Apple and Android tablets.

Nonetheless, the numbers posted by Microsoft are impressive, especially considering the lackluster reviews that Windows 8 has been receiving. Windows 8 is the operating system that the Surface uses, though the OS has clearly been designed for use on touchscreen devices. It will be interesting to see what kind of numbers this tablet will post in the coming months.

Source: CNET - Microsoft Surface Pro sales hit 400K in a hurry