Facebook’s first data center ran into problems of a distinctly ironic nature when a literal cloud formed in the IT room and started to rain on servers.
via Facebook’s first data center DRENCHED by ACTUAL CLOUD • The Register.
Category Archives: Technical
Under the Hood: Banking Malware
After 48 hours (and two all-nighters in a row) I logged onto the (now really REALLY) infected computer, complete with shiny new malware updates. I surfed to Bank of America’s web page, and found what I was looking for– a Man-In-The-Browser attack in action!
via Under the Hood: Banking Malware » LMG Security Blog.
We cover malware network forensics, web proxies and flow analysis during Days 3-4 of the Network Forensics class. We’ll be teaching next at Black Hat USA, July 27-30. Seats are limited, so sign up soon!
Robert McNamara and the Dangers of Big Data at Ford and in the Vietnam War
The use, abuse, and misuse of data by the U.S. military during the Vietnam War is a troubling lesson about the limitations of information as the world hurls toward the big-data era. The underlying data can be of poor quality. It can be biased. It can be misanalyzed or used misleadingly. And even more damning, data can fail to capture what it purports to quantify.
via Robert McNamara and the Dangers of Big Data at Ford and in the Vietnam War | MIT Technology Review.
Haswell is here: we detail Intel’s first 4th-generation Core CPUs
This time around, Intel is actually much more interested in telling us about that lowered power consumption, as is evident in the use of phrases like “biggest [generation-to-generation] battery life increase in Intel history.” By the company’s measurements, a laptop based on Haswell should in some circumstances be able to get as much as a third more battery life than the same laptop based on Ivy Bridge.
via Haswell is here: we detail Intel’s first 4th-generation Core CPUs | Ars Technica.
Haswell is the sort of CPU upgrade we’ve come to expect from Intel: a whole bunch of incremental improvements over last year’s model, all delivered basically on-time and as promised. Again, we’ll need to have test systems in hand to verify all of the lofty claims that the company is making here, but at least on paper Haswell looks like a big push in the right directions. It increases GPU power to fight off Nvidia and AMD, and it decreases overall power consumption to better battle ARM.
Realtime GPU Audio
While these techniques are widely used and understood, they work primarily with a model of the abstract sound produced by an instrument or object, not a model of the instrument or object itself. A more recent approach is physical modeling- based audio synthesis, where the audio waveforms are generated using detailed numerical simulation of physical objects or instruments.
via Realtime GPU Audio – ACM Queue.
There are various approaches to physical modeling sound synthesis. One such approach, studied extensively by Stefan Bilbao,1 uses the finite difference approximation to simulate the vibrations of plates and membranes. The finite difference simulation produces realistic and dynamic sounds (examples can be found at http://unixlab.sfsu.edu/~whsu/FDGPU). Realtime finite difference-based simulations of large models are typically too computationally-intensive to run on CPUs. In our work, we have implemented finite difference simulations in realtime on GPUs.
Twitter, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Yahoo open to hijacking
The above web applications fail to assign new session identities, which allows for a session fixation attack in which the accounts can be hijacked
Cloud Providers Work To Disperse Points Of Failure
In the end, cloud providers — many of which aim for 99.9 percent uptime, or “three nines” — are likely to offer individual companies a more reliable service than those companies attain for themselves, the CSA’s Howie says.
via Cloud Providers Work To Disperse Points Of Failure – Dark Reading.
Note that telecom typically operates under 5 nines uptime. The point of this article may be that end users need to implement their own backup plans to get higher than three 9s reliability.
Internet bad neighborhoods
The idea behind the Internet Bad Neighborhood concept is that the probability of a host in behaving badly increases if its neighboring hosts (i.e., hosts within the same subnetwork) also behave badly. This idea, in turn, can be exploited to improve current Internet security solutions, since it provides an indirect approach to predict new sources of attacks (neighboring hosts of malicious ones).
via Internet bad neighborhoods – UTpublications.
This is a good start in developing some kind of IP blacklist.
Cisco Goes Inside With Silicon Photonics
Optical chip-to-chip connections will definitely be a factor in Cisco’s next-generation ASICs, and the company already has the technology working in the lab, Ward told Light Reading.
via Light Reading – Cisco Goes Inside With Silicon Photonics.
Meet the men who spy on women through their webcams
And if even this handholding isn’t enough, more successful ratters sometimes rent out slaves they have already infected. In other cases, they simply hand them off to others in a “Free Girl Slave Giveaway.”
Calling most of these guys “hackers” does a real disservice to hackers everywhere; only minimal technical skill is now required to deploy a RAT and acquire slaves.
via Meet the men who spy on women through their webcams | Ars Technica.