Score: 0)Posted by: Posted by sysop on Sunday, August 28 @ 12:33:22 CDT
Softpedia News writes "Security researchers warn that a recently discovered botnet designed to mine Bitcoins has been updated with components that facilitate distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.
The so-called Miner Botnet uses a peer-to-peer infrastructure and can also serve as a malware distribution platform.
However, considering that by default it includes three different Bitcoin mining tools, namely Ufasoft, RCP and Phoenix, its primary purpose is rather clear. Security researchers from Kaspersky Lab told The H Security that recently they've observed two DDoS components being distributed through the botnet."
News : 3 reasons the feds are avoiding cloud computing
Score: 0)Posted by: Posted by sysop on Sunday, August 28 @ 12:29:21 CDT
Info World writes "A New York Times article does a great job defining the issues around cloud adoption within the U.S. government -- or, I should say, the glaring lack thereof. As the Times reports, "Such high praise for new Internet technologies may be common in Silicon Valley, but it is rare in the federal government."
Convenient excuses for skirting cloud computing are easy to find these days; for example, attacks on internal government systems from abroad this spring and summer are easy to recall. In July, the Pentagon said it suffered its largest breach when hackers obtained 24,000 confidential files.
I suspect that issues such as the recent attacks are going to be more the rule than the exception, so there will always be an excuse not to move to cloud. (I reject the notion that cloud-based systems are fundamentally less secure, by the way.) It's really how you use security best practices and technology, not so much where the server resides. I'm not suggesting that state secrets go up on Amazon Web Services right now, but almost all of the other information managed by the government is fine for the cloud."
News : Lottery wins come easy, if you can spot the loopholes
Score: 0)Posted by: Posted by sysop on Sunday, August 28 @ 12:24:55 CDT
New Scientist writes "SOME lottery players don't wish for luck, they make their own. Yet the recent spate of US "lotto-hacker" revelations do not involve high-tech gadgets like those used by the casino-robbing team in the film Ocean's Eleven but a knack for spotting patterns and exploiting loopholes.
Take consultant statistician Mohan Srivastava of Toronto, Canada. In January, Wired magazine explained how, back in 2003, Srivastava learned to predict which Ontario Lottery scratch cards were winners. Each card contains a visible section showing numbers between 1 and 39, and a "scratchable" section, where hidden numbers might match the visible ones.
Srivastava suspected these winning cards weren't randomly assigned but the result of a piece of software called a pseudo-random number generator. Indeed, he found that cards containing a row of three numbers that each appear only once on the card's visible section were almost always winners."
News : Drupal 8 will be packed with HTML5 goodness
Score: 0)Posted by: Posted by sysop on Sunday, August 28 @ 12:17:59 CDT
The Register (UK) writes "One of the primary building blocks of yesterday's web is limbering up to become a mover and shaker in mobile � but it might just spend longer in training than you'd like.
Dries Buytaert, the Linus Torvalds of open-source content management systems (CMS), has told The Reg that websites built on Drupal 8 will default to being created in HTML5.
Drupal 8 is the next planned version of the CMS Buytaert pioneered at university, now a project that he leads and which he claims today runs 2 per cent of sites on the internet. That's up from 1 per cent when I last spoke to him in April last year in San Francisco, California. Users of Drupal today include the US White House, MTV, Sony, Warner Music, the BBC and The Economist, while the core Drupal CMS Buytaert pioneered serves as a platform for 10,000 plug-in modules from individuals and companies that add functionality to sites."
