Posted on January 6th, 2012 by ElectroGeek
A computer worm that has traditionally targeted the financial industry has set its sights on social networking, recently stealing over 45,000 Facebook login credentials, according to security firm Seculert.
In a statement, Facebook said the majority of the login credentials were outdated, but it was still notifying the affected users.
The worm, known as Ramnit, dates back to April 2010, and is described as a multi-component malware family that infects Windows executable and HTML files, stealing sensitive info like stored FTP credentials and browser cookies, Seculert said in a blog post.
A July 2011 report (PDF) from Symantec said Ramnit was responsible for 17.3 percent of all new malicious software infections.
Ramnit started going after financial institutions in August 2011, possibly merging with ZeusS “to create a ‘Hybrid creature’ which was empowered by both the scale of the Ramnit infection and the ZeuS financial data-sniffing capabilities,” Seculert said.
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Posted on January 5th, 2012 by ElectroGeek
Electronics retailer Best Buy is headed for the exits. I can’t say when exactly, but my guess is that it’s only a matter of time, maybe a few more years.
Consider a few key metrics. Despite the disappearance of competitors including Circuit City, the company is losing market share. Its last earnings announcement disappointed investors. In 2011, the company’s stock has lost 40% of its value. Forward P/E is a mere 6.23 (industry average is 10.20). Its market cap down to less than $9 billion. Its average analyst rating, according to The Street.com, is a B-.
Those are just some of the numbers, and they don’t look good. They bear out a prediction in March from the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column, which forecast “the worst is yet to come” for Best Buy investors. With the flop of 3D televisions and the expansion of Apple’s own retail locations, there was no killer product on the horizon that would lift it from the doldrums. Though the company accounts for almost a third of all U.S. consumer electronics purchases, analysts noted, the company remains a ripe target for more nimble competitors.
But the numbers only scratch the surface. To discover the real reasons behind the company’s decline, just take this simple test. Walk into one of the company’s retail locations or shop online. And try, really try, not to lose your temper.
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Posted on January 3rd, 2012 by ElectroGeek
Japan reportedly has paid Fujitsu $2.3 million to build a self-replicating assassin squad — a computer virus it can set loose in the network to track down and eliminate other viruses.
Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun reported that the Defense Ministry’s Technical Research and Development Institute began developing the anti-viral virus in 2008. The government agency in charge of weapons development paid the heavy industries firm $2.3 million (178.5 million Yen) to create a virus that can analyze cyberattacks and even identify their source.
It sounds like an answer to Stuxnet or Duqu — cyberweapons so potent that one security official called them “the hydrogen bomb of cyberwarfare.” And the cyberwar is clearly heating up, said Dave Aitel, president and CEO of security firm Immunity Inc.
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Posted on January 2nd, 2012 by ElectroGeek
Repent, sinners! SATAN EXISTS! And his evil eye is looking at you from space! I mean, if there is an Eye of God* in space, there has to be an Eye of Satan in a permanent staring contest, right?
At least, it looks like a really evil eye to me. It’s a photo of the central region of NGC 4151, a spiral galaxy 43 millions light years away from Earth. It’s one of the nearest galaxies with a growing supermassive black hole.
This photo is a composite made from X-ray images (blue) from the Chandra X-ray Observatory combined with optical data (yellow) from the 1-meter Kapteyn Telescope on La Palma and radio observations (red) by the National Science Foundation’s Very Large Array.
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Posted on January 1st, 2012 by ElectroGeek
Happy New Year 2012 from ElectroGeek.com
Happy New Year to all! Wishing you and your family and loved ones a Happy, Healthy and Prosperous 2012. Make 2012 a great year!
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Posted on December 31st, 2011 by ElectroGeek
Activations of new iOS and Android devices soared on Christmas Day, jumping by 142% over the same day last year, a Web metrics company said.
Meanwhile, Google’s head of mobile claimed that 3.7 million new Android smartphones and tablets had been activated last weekend.
According to Flurry, which provides metrics services to app developers, total activations of new iOS and Android devices reached 6.8 million on Sunday, Christmas Day. That was 142% above the previous one-day record of 2.8 million activations on Dec. 25, 2010, and a 353% increase over the average of 1.5 million activations daily between Dec. 1 and Dec. 20, 2011.
Not surprisingly, Flurry attributed the massive jump in iOS — iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch — and Android phone and tablet activations to holiday gift giving.
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Posted on December 30th, 2011 by ElectroGeek
Netbook sales have been declining, with major vendors deciding to leave the netbook market entirely. That hasn’t stopped Intel from launching a new family of processors designed for small and cheap laptops.
The new chips are the Atom N2600 and N2800, based on the Intel’s third-generation Atom architecture, codenamed Cedarview. The Cedar Trail-M platform pairs one of these processors with company’s pre-existing NM10 chipset. As with the previous generation Pineview processor, each dual core, four thread chip integrates a GPU. For Cedarwood, the processor is based on a PowerVR design. Cedarview’s GPU offers twice the performance of Pineview’s. Cedarview adds to this a dedicated media engine for hardware-accelerated decoding of motion video, including support for 1080p H.264.
Cedarview is built on Intel’s 32 nm process, compared to the 45 nm process used in Pineview. This allows for reduced power consumption in spite of the faster GPU—5 W for the 1.6 GHz N2600, 8 W for the 1.86 GHz N2800, compared to 10 W for the 1.66 GHz Pineview N570. The new processors also include more aggressive power-saving features than their predecessors. Intel is targeting system runtimes of up to 10 hours, with standby times measured in weeks. The company also claims that systems using the slower N2600 part will draw so little power that they can be passively cooled—no need for fans.
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Posted on December 29th, 2011 by ElectroGeek
Windows-based tablets haven’t been treated kindly by the test of time. Those released in the Windows XP era relied on wonky, stylus-based data entry, and even modern, touch-based tablets running Windows 7 are poor performers.
Indeed, Microsoft has a troubled tablet history that the public isn’t soon to forget. This November, Forrester released a study that showed consumer interest in a Windows-based tablet dropped significantly this year. At the start of 2011, 46 percent of potential tablet owners wanted a Windows device. By Q3, that number slipped to 25 percent.
Forrester’s report stated, “Windows 8 hasn’t entered the consciousness of tablet buyers yet.”
That’s a shame because Gadget Lab has seen a Windows 8 tablet in action, and the experience opened our eyes to just how useful — and, yes, even fun — a Windows 8 tablet might be. Sure, Microsoft was demoing a mere reference design, but what we saw was so intriguing, we’re legitimately excited to see final, shipping products.
Windows 8 is being developed from the ground up to elegantly run on both traditional computers (desktops and notebooks) as well as touch-based tablets. The OS can run on either ARM or x86 processors, though apps written specifically for the x86 desktop environment won’t be able to run on ARM-based mobile devices.
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Posted on December 28th, 2011 by ElectroGeek
NASA captured this solar eruption on March 19, 2011.
Sporadic radio blackouts are expected to occur in the wake of a massive eruption of solar plasma, technically known as a coronal mass ejection.
Scientists predicted that fast-moving charged particles could spawn minor or moderate geomagnetic storms at high altitudes, creating colorful aurora bursts among the so-called Northern Lights.
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