Android malware woes look a lot like Windows'
McAfee says that Android malware is taking a worrisome turn, with cybercriminals mimicking popular strategies used against Windows. The latest attacks tap IRC bots, where the malware gets further operating instructions from an Internet chatroom.
Called Android/Multi.dr, the attack masks itself as the game Madden NFL 12. Multi.dr is comprised of three separate components, including a root exploit, an IRC bot, and SMS Trojan.
Fire all the lawyers
Could it be true? Are the courts finally tired of the never-ending patent disputes in Silicon Valley? If the statements made by two judges over the past week are an indication, yes.
This frustration was on display Monday in a Seattle court room as Federal Judge James Robart accused both Microsoft and Motorola of "hubris" and "arrogance" in their ongoing patent dispute, and using the courts to gain the upper hand in licensing negotiations, according to GeekWire's Todd Bishop, who was on hand for the proceedings.
Intel, McAfee protect the enterprise cloud
Intel and McAfee aim to address growing cloud concerns through a comprehensive and holistic approach to security. The two companies hope to make data in the cloud as secure as, if not more than, data in the traditional deployment, combining their collective hardware expertise and software know-how to address these concerns.
A recent study commissioned by Intel showed that 56 percent of IT managers are concerned with the inability of public cloud service providers to adequately measure security, and 61 percent worry over the lack of visibility in the private cloud. This leads to delays in adoption in the enterprise by IT managers who could otherwise deliver cost and productivity efficiencies from the cloud, the data suggests.
Half of enterprises waste money on social CRM initiatives
Is your business getting good value from customer relationship initiatives, or are you even able to quantity it? Gartner says unlikely. Only half of all Fortune 1000 companies are expected to see a positive return on investments in social CRM through the end of the year. The findings call into question the effectiveness of using the social web to further business objectives, or whether companies even have the capability to measure success.
Of those failing to achieve positive ROI, only one-fifth can actually measure these failings. That means an overwhelming majority of enterprises are losing revenue through failed social initiatives and don't even know it, the analyst firm argues.
One in 10 US Facebook users don't protect privacy
About 13 million Facebook users in the United States either do not use or do not know about the social network's privacy controls, sharing private information they would not have otherwise. This amounts to one out of every 10 users in the country.
Consumer Reports' study of what we are posting on Facebook should give pause to chronic oversharers. For example, 4.8 million posted publicly where they were going for a day, possibly tipping off a burglar to an empty house; 4.7 million liked a page on a specific health condition or treatment for a disease, which may pique the interest of a prying health insurer.
Why are Amazon Kindles vanishing from Target?
Target confirmed on Wednesday earlier reports that it is discontinuing sales of Amazon products, most notably the Kindle, starting in Spring 2012. First reported by The Verge overnight Wednesday, the move is a hit to Kindle's retail store strategy overall and effectively ends a long-term partnership between the two companies.
Amazon powered Target's website up until last year, and Target was the first to carry the Kindle at retail back in June 2010. The Kindle Fire was Target's best selling tablet on Black Friday last year, but that didn't stop the retailer from kicking Amazon to the curb.
Crocodoc uses HTML 5 to solve the riddle of online document viewing
If you ever viewed a document on Dropbox, LinkedIn, or Yammer, you have already used Crocodoc. The San Francisco-based company offers an HTML5-compliant document viewer that allows for the embedding and viewing of documents as they were intended, and is making the service available for licensing starting Tuesday.
Google Docs and similar competitors have offered online document viewing for some time. Google Docs' transcoding isn't perfect and documents often lose a portion of their original formatting. While this may not be an issue for the average consumer, enterprise usage typically requires a more accurate reproduction.
Flashback Trojan generates $10,000 per day for attackers
The attackers behind the Flashback Trojan for OS X may be making as much as $10,000 per day through a click fraud scheme involving Google AdWords, Symantec says. The Trojan intercepts all queries made specifically to Google's search engine and will redirect the user to a page of the attacker's choosing. Every time this occurs, the attackers make about 0.8 cents per click.
"Flashback uses a specially crafted user agent in these requests, which is actually the clients universally unique identifier (UUID) encoded in base64", explains Symantec. "This is already sent in the 'ua' query string parameter, so it is likely that this is an effort to thwart 'unknown' parties from investigating the URL with unrecognized user-agents". In other words, the attackers are going to great lengths to cover their tracks.
Security software market shows steady growth as threats explode
Faced with an ever-increasing number of threats, IT administrators continue to increase spending on security software, a new survey suggests. A recent report from Gartner shows revenue in the sector increased 7.5 percent in 2011 over the year previous. The gains come even as IT spending overall has stagnated due to uncertain economic conditions worldwide.
Altogether, revenues totaled some $17.7 billion last year, with market leading Symantec making up a fifth of that total. Gartner says the company's success in the sector is due to a continuing expansion outside of the antivirus software market and into other sectors, including storage and encryption. Coming in a distant second and third were competitors McAfee and Trend Micro, both making up about seven percent of the market.
LG enables real-time content sharing via new cloud service
LG will enter the cloud on Tuesday, debuting a new service aimed at sharing content across multiple devices. LG Cloud consists of apps for the Android and PCs, as well as LG's own line of smart televisions.
LG Cloud is part of a broader effort by the company to focus on both services and hardware. The offering will become part of a new LG division called the Smart Business Center, which is tasked with developing content and other services for its smart devices.
Do you know any idiots who play Angry birds and drive?
So um, yeah, I have a confession to make. Even though I've written dozens of stories about the dangers of cell phone use while driving or hell, even criticized Google's Project Glass on international television because it is a distraction, writing this post makes me face the music and my hypocritical ways.
British insurance company Ingenie released the results of a survey of 1,000 young drivers age 17-25 on Friday. It shows that smartphone apps are becoming an increasing distraction, and one of the biggest culprits is OMGPOP's Draw Something.
'Kids are growing up Apple'
If you don't own an Apple product, look again. One out of three American households does, and it could be yours. "Kids are growing up Apple. That brand equity goes very far", Ben Arnold, NPD's director of industry analysis, tells BetaNews. Arnold's comments confirm a story I penned last year on the strength of Apple brand's in the youth market. "We definitely saw that [in our research]".
Arnold concedes that while younger consumers drive much of Apple's newfound retail success, their loyalties are fickle. "In five or 10 years someone else could come along". But he pointed to his and other research showing that Apple's brand gets high marks with the youth market, and that brand loyalty will likely extend to any new products that Apple may decide to sell.
Walmart lets online shoppers pay with cash
Cash as a form of payment is rare these days as plastic takes over, and online it is all but nonexistent. Not anymore, though -- Walmart now allows online customers to pay for their orders with the good ol' Greenback.
Here's how it works: customers place their orders on the website, and select "Cash" as the payment option. They then have 48 hours to take a printed-out copy of the order form and pay at any local Walmart store. Walmart's demographics seem to support such an offering, so it is obvious why the retailer would offer cash as a form of payment.
VMware source code leak: 'IT equivalent of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill'
VMware has confirmed that a portion the the source code for its ESX hypervisor was compromised, although the code dates back as early as 2003. That said, a fairly significant portion of the company's customers are still using the platform as VMware works to push them towards its newer hypervisor called ESXi.
A hypervisor in the simplest terms is a virtual machine management platform on which several virtual machines can run concurrently. The hypervisor controls the sharing of virtualized hardware resources. ESXi has a far smaller attack surface, which limits the available avenues of attack on a installation.
Apple's WWDC starts June 11, Mountain Lion and iOS 6 expected
Apple's annual Worldwide Developer Conference will take place June 11-15 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, but forget about going. That's because tickets sold out in only two hours, the fastest in the conference's history. In 2010, this took 10 days to occur, and in 2011 eight hours.
Like last year, 2012's event is expected to focus on software. Mountain Lion should be released during the event, which brings more iOS-like features to the desktop. Conversely, iOS 6 is also expected to debut at WWDC, although we seem to know a lot less there.
Ed's Bio
Ed Oswald is a freelance journalist from the Reading, PA area. Although he has written across a variety of subjects, Ed’s passion and focus has been on technology and gadgets. His work regularly appears on tech news sites BetaNews, PCWorld, and Technologizer, and has been syndicated to eWeek, Time’s Techland blog, VentureBeat and the New York Times.
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