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

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

How to restore a deleted file from your Computer?

System Requirement:-

1.              Windows OS :- WIN 98 WIN 2000 WIN XP WIN VISTA WIN 7 or higher
2.              Software :- File restore professional
3.              Hardware :- 256 MB RAM, external Memory drive(16 Gb or higher)

About The software:-

File Restore Professional 4.2 – File recovery and folder recovery software. Recover deleted files, their folder structures, and more. Recover files and folders that have been deleted or lost from; the recycle bin, corrupt PCs, formatted drives, corrupt iPods, corrupt digital cameras, corrupt removable drives, corrupt virtual drives, etc.

Download link:- 

Authors Download Link

Direct link…..

http://www.pcrecovery.com/file-restore

Steps to restore file:-

•         Install file restore professional on your computer
•          Run file restore professional  as administrator
•          Open the drive or the folder from which the data has to be recovered
•          Run an advance scan of the drive or folder  from which data is to be restored

   This may take 20 to 60 minutes depending on the amount of data to be restored

•          After scanning select all the files which are to be restored
•          Connect your external memory drive and connect it with file restore professional
•          Click on recover option on the left panel of file restore professional           

  This will recover all files that are in good condition to external memory drive

Hints:-

To run file restore professional as administrator right click on the shortcut to file restore professional and click on Run as Administrator

Use external memory drive so that data do not replaced your recovered file

Image preview of the process:-

Author :- Boon T Jose