Slashdot Mirror

itwbennett writes: "Over the last few days, the group responsible for extortion attempts and death threats against Ashley Madison users has turned to a new set of targets – Patreon users," writes CSO's Steve Ragan. A message sent from the same account used in previous campaigns by the scammers demands a payment of 1 BTC or else the Patreon user will have their personal information exposed. "The [Bitcoin] wallet being used by the group has barely collected anything," says Ragan, "suggesting that after their massive push towards Ashley Madison users, people have stopped falling for their scams."

An anonymous reader writes: A surge in ransomware campaigns is expected to hit the medical sector in 2016, according to a recent report published by forecasters at Forrester Research. The paper 'Predictions 2016: Cybersecuirty Swings To Prevention' suggests that the primary hacking trend of the coming year will be "ransomware for a medical device or wearable," arguing that cybercriminals would only have to make mall modifications to current malware to create a feasible attack. Pacemakers and other vital health devices would become prime targets, with attackers toying with their stability and potentially threatening the victim with their own life should the ransom demands not be met.

Gumbercules!! writes: A small Australian ISP has received a demand that it block access to an overseas website or face legal action in the Federal Court, in a case in which a building company is demanding the ISP block access to an overseas site with a similar name. This case is being seen as a test case, potentially opening the way for companies and aggregated customers to use the new anti-piracy laws to block access to companies or their competition. The ISP in question has obviously been selected because they're very small and have limited financial capacity to fight a legal case.

HughPickens.com writes: The Associated Press reports that the American Medical Association has called for a ban on direct-to-consumer ads for prescription drugs and implantable medical devices, saying they contribute to rising costs and patients' demands for inappropriate treatment. According to data cited in an AMA news release, ad dollars spent by drugmakers have risen to $4.5 billion in the last two years, a 30 percent increase. Physicians cited concerns that a growing proliferation of ads is driving demand for expensive treatments despite the clinical effectiveness of less costly alternatives. "Today's vote in support of an advertising ban reflects concerns among physicians about the negative impact of commercially-driven promotions, and the role that marketing costs play in fueling escalating drug prices," said the AMA's Patrice A. Harris. "Direct-to-consumer advertising also inflates demand for new and more expensive drugs, even when these drugs may not be appropriate."

The AMA also calls for convening a physician task force and launching an advocacy campaign to promote prescription drug affordability by demanding choice and competition in the pharmaceutical industry, and greater transparency in prescription drug prices and costs. Last month, the Kaiser Family Foundation released a report saying that a high cost of prescription drugs remains the public's top health care priority. In the past few years, prices on generic and brand-name prescription drugs have steadily risen and experienced a 4.7 percent spike in 2015, according to the Altarum Institute Center for Sustainable Health Spending.

An anonymous reader writes: Less than three days after the attacks in Paris, UK prime minister David Cameron has suggested that the process of review for the controversial Draft Investigatory Powers Bill should be accelerated. The controversial proposal, which would require British ISPs to retain a subset of a user's internet history for a year and in effect outlaw zero-knowledge encryption in the UK, was intended for parliamentary review and ratification by the end of 2016, but at the weekend ex-terrorist watchdog Lord Carlile was in the vanguard of demands to speed the bill into law by the end of this year, implicitly criticizing ex-NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden for having 'shown terrorists ways to hide their electronic footprints'.

An anonymous reader writes: A new paper proposes an algorithm to help network providers furnish 'surge' pricing for mobile data and other network communications, citing a 50% shortfall between demand and capacity over the next five years as an indicator that consumers may have to be shepherded out of the congested times and areas in order for normal service to continue to be maintained. Just don't tell any of the people in charge of airport wireless networks.

itwbennett writes: A new service launched this week on a standalone Darknet website offering ransomware called CryptoLocker Service to anyone willing to pay a small fee and 10% of the collected ransom. The new venture is being run by a person using the handle Fakben, who was a former user of the Evolution (Evo) marketplace, writes CSO Online's Steve Ragan. Customers pay $50 to get the basic Ransomware payload. Once the victim pays the demanded ransom, the payment address will forward the funds – less a ten percent fee – to the Bitcoin wallet designated by the CryptoLocker Service customer. The ransom fee itself can be determined by the customer, but the recommended fee is $200. 'I prefer to be less expensive, more downloads and more infections,' Fakben said during a brief chat with Ragan.

sandbagger writes: A 6,700-page report that cost $40 million to produce is being blocked from circulation by the US Department of Justice by relabeling it as a Congressional Record, even though it isn't. Why? Congressional records aren't necessarily subject to Freedom of Information Act requests. Techdirt reports: "There had been some hope that ex-Senator Mark Udall might choose to release some of it from the Senate floor before leaving office, but that didn't happen. And, with the changing of the guard, the new head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Richard Burr, demanded that all the federal government agencies that received the report should return it to him so he can destroy it and make sure that no one ever sees what's in the report. As we noted, however, this whole thing seemed to be an effort to state publicly that the document was a Congressional record. That matters because Congressional records are not subject to FOIA requests. Executive branch records are subject to FOIA requests -- and the ACLU has made a FOIA request to the exec branch for a copy of the report."

An anonymous reader writes: A few days ago, privacy-oriented webmail service ProtonMail was hit by a massive DDoS attack, which was accompanied by extortion. It turns out they're not the only ones. FastMail has warned that similar attacks could lead to service disruptions this week. They have refused extortion demands, and have been hit with a couple brief attacks already. This follows attacks over the last week on Runbox, Zoho, and Hushmail. Each service has been working with data centers and network providers to mitigate the attacks as well as possible, but they're still struggling with intermittent service disruptions.

An anonymous reader writes with some of the latest news about the draft Investigatory Powers Bill. Ars reports: "Buried in the 300 pages of the draft Investigatory Powers Bill (aka the Snooper's Charter), published on Wednesday, is something called a 'technical capability notice' (Section 189). Despite its neutral-sounding name, this gives the UK's home secretary almost unlimited power to impose 'an obligation on any relevant operators'—any obligation—subject to the requirement that 'the Secretary of State considers it is reasonable to do so.' There is also the proviso that 'it is (and remains) practicable for those relevant operators to comply with those requirements,' which probably rules out breaking end-to-end encryption, but would still allow the home secretary to demand that companies add backdoors to their software and equipment. That's bad enough, but George Danezis, an associate professor in security and privacy engineering at University College London, points out that the Snooper's Charter is actually much, much worse. The Investigatory Powers Bill would also make it a criminal offense, punishable with up to 12 months in prison and/or a fine, for anyone involved to reveal the existence of those backdoors, in any circumstances (Section 190(8).)"

Professor of journalism at City University Heather Brook writes at the Gaurdian: "When the Home Office and intelligence agencies began promoting the idea that the new investigatory powers bill was a “climbdown”, I grew suspicious. If the powerful are forced to compromise they don’t crow about it or send out press releases – or, in the case of intelligence agencies, make off-the-record briefings outlining how they failed to get what they wanted. That could mean only one thing: they had got what they wanted. So why were they trying to fool the press and the public that they had lost? Simply because they had won. I never thought I’d say it, but George Orwell lacked vision. The spies have gone further than he could have imagined, creating in secret and without democratic authorization the ultimate panopticon. Now they hope the British public will make it legitimate."

harrymcc writes: Night Dive Studios is successfully reviving old video games — not the highest-profile best-sellers of the past, but cult classics such as System Shock 2, The 7th Guest, Strife, and I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. It's a job that involves an enormous amount of detective work to track down rights holders as well as the expected technical challenges. Over at Fast Company, Jared Newman tells the story of how the company stumbled upon its thriving business. "Kick didn’t have money on hand to buy the rights, so he scraped together contract work with independent developers and funneled the proceeds into the project. ... Some efforts fall apart even without the involvement of media conglomerates. In early 2014, Kick tried to revive Dark Seed, a point-and-click adventure game that featured artwork by H.R. Giger. But after Giger’s sudden death, demands from the artist’s estate escalated, and the negotiations derailed. ... But for every one of those failures, there’s a case where a developer or publisher is thrilled to have a creation back on store shelves."

An anonymous reader writes: Our understanding of the brain has come a long way in the past thirty years, but most brain-related medical procedures remain incredibly complicated and dangerous. Neurologist Phil Kennedy has been working on brain-computer interfaces since the 1980s. He was most notably involved in letting a patient with "locked in" syndrome interact with the outside world through a brain-controlled computer cursor. But the FDA has gradually ramped up its safety demands, and in the past decade they've shut down Kennedy's research. So he did what any determined inventor would do: he went to a hospital in Belize and had surgeons there implant electrodes on his own brain so he could continue his research.

"After returning home to Duluth, Georgia, Kennedy began to toil largely alone in his speech lab, recording his neurons as he repeated 29 phonemes (such as e, eh, a, o, u, and consonants like ch and j) out loud, and then silently imagined saying them. ... Kennedy says his early findings are 'extremely encouraging.' He says he determined that different combinations of the 65 neurons he was recording from consistently fired every time he spoke certain sounds aloud, and also fired when he imagined speaking them—a relationship that is potentially key to developing a thought decoder for speech." Eventually, Kennedy had to have the implants removed, but he hopes the data he gathered will help push the FDA toward supporting this research once more.

msm1267 writes: FBI general counsel James Baker reiterated a theme his boss James Comey started months ago, that Silicon Valley needs to find a solution to the "Going Dark" encryption problem. Two crypto and security experts, however, pointed out during a security event in Boston that encryption remains the best defense against the government's surveillance overreach and espionage hacking targeting intellectual property. “If we were able to engineer a mechanism where we’re splitting a key and having a third party escrow it where the government could ask for it, the very next thing that would happen is that China et al will ask for the same solution. And we’re unlikely to give them the same solution,” Eric Wenger, director of cybersecurity and privacy, said. “Complexity kills, and the more complex you make a system, the more difficult it is to secure it. I don’t see how developing a key-bases solution secures things the way you want it to without creating a great deal of complexity and having other governments demand the same thing.”

Mark Wilson writes: Every home and business in the UK will have access to "fast broadband" by 2020. This is the latest pledge from Prime Minister David Cameron, who said access to the internet "should be a right." At the moment, 83% of homes and businesses in Britain have access to broadband connections 24Mbps and faster. By 2017, this is expected to rise to 95%. The latest plan is directed at the "last 5 percent" — such as people in remote areas — and will oblige broadband providers to supply at least 10Mbps broadband to anyone who demands it.

An anonymous reader writes: The new pro-privacy, pro-encryption webmail service ProtonMail has been under a sustained DDoS attack since November 3. They received a ransom demand a few days ago, along with a brief demonstration of how effective the DDoS attack was. They were advised to pay the ransom, and they complied. Unfortunately, the attackers launched the DDoS anyway. Here's a quote from their press release:

"Through MELANI (a division of the Swiss federal government), we exchanged information with other companies who have also been attacked and made a few discoveries. First, the attack against ProtonMail can be divided into two stages. The first stage is the volumetric attack which was targeting just our IP addresses. The second stage is the more complex attack which targeted weak points in the infrastructure of our ISPs. This second phase has not been observed in any other recent attacks on Swiss companies and was technically much more sophisticated. This means that ProtonMail is likely under attack by two separate groups, with the second attackers exhibiting capabilities more commonly possessed by state-sponsored actors. It also shows that the second attackers were not afraid of causing massive collateral damage in order to get at us."

1sockchuck writes: Data center developers are buying up land in northern Virginia, preparing for explosive growth of cloud computing infrastructure. Digital Realty just bought land in Ashburn, Virginia to support 2 million square feet of data center space, while DuPont Fabros, RagingWire and Sabey have also locked up land parcels for future growth. Why is Ashburn so hot? Cloud builders crave proximity to an Internet exchange operated by Equinix, which itself just bought land for another 1 million square feet of colocation space. That's one of the reasons why Amazon Web Services operates more than 20 data centers in northern Virginia. "Data center demand is stronger today than it's ever been," said Bill Stein, the CEO of Digital Realty.

StewBeans writes: The Wall Street Journal recently published a special report on the staggering growth of the hybrid cloud, citing research from multiple sources, including survey results from Gartner indicating that 75% of large enterprises planned to take advantage of the hybrid cloud by end of this year. The article said that, "CIOs are demanding a way to combine the best of the cloud with their own localized data centers. Few companies or organizations are willing or able to move all of their IT to the public cloud." GE is apparently one of those few companies, because the CTO of Cloud for GE recently wrote that they are moving the vast bulk of their 9,000 applications into the public cloud. In the article, he explains how they came to this counterintuitive decision, their strategy for moving so many apps to the cloud, and why he's more optimistic about the public cloud versus hybrid or private.

Hallie Siegel writes: Having spent many a back breaking hour in deep woods Ontario picking wild blueberries in summer time, I can only imagine the challenge of farming and harvesting these awesome little flavour nuggets. Blueberries are in record demand (probably my son alone accounts for a significant percentage of that!) so it's no surprise, really, that a coalition of farmers has banded together to offer a prize for automated blueberry picking solutions. We've seen competitions and challenges spur innovation in other areas of robotics — think robocar — why not blueberry picking? Can't wait to see the results of this one.

1sockchuck writes: After years of focus on hyperscale server farms, there's new demand for data centers to serve edge content and the service provider market in smaller cities. How do you match the size of the data center to the demand profile of smaller markets? Pre-fabricated data center designs are playing a key role, deploying server space in smaller, digestible chunks. This avoids the overbuilding that led to the data center glut during the dot-com boom, but also allows customers to expand gradually. But the "data center in a box" has evolved since the Sun Blackbox, and now includes a focus on factory-built power rooms and lean construction of data halls, as well as the evolving designs for containerized solutions.

An anonymous reader writes: Stephen Nichols, CEO of a platform that helps non-coders create simple video games, thinks that so-called coding academies are essentially snake oil. "In 20+ years of professional coding, I've never seen someone go from novice to full-fledged programmer in a matter of weeks, yet that seems to be what coding academies are promising, alongside instant employment, a salary big enough to afford a Tesla and the ability to change lives." His point is reminiscent of Peter Norvig's in "Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years."

Nichols also thinks coding tools will become powerful enough in the next decade that the demand for actual, dedicated coders will diminish (perhaps not surprising, given his business). But he's probably right that the people likely to go to a coding academy are likely to be the ones using those tools, when they arrive. "Put succinctly, coding is writing text files in foreign languages containing instructions suitable for an absolute idiot to follow. ... For a little while, spending tens of thousands of dollars on a coding academy might feel like a good way to surmount the intimidation. ... More likely, it is just a new pathway into debt."