The U.S. and China have reached their first ever cybercrime and cyberespionage agreement, but the deal is quite general and how it will translate into actions is still unclear.
Leaders of both countries announced the deal in Washington on Friday after two days of top-level talks, but both dodged questions on specific hacking incidents or the indictment last year by the U.S. of five Chinese military hackers for cybercrimes.
"We have agreed that neither the U.S. or the Chinese government will conduct or knowingly support cyber-enabled theft of intellectual property, including trade secrets or other confidential business information for commercial advantage," President Obama said at a White House news conference.
Pigs haven't taken flight; aliens haven’t invaded; hell hasn’t frozen over. But... Microsoft has created an OS powered by Linux. No, this is not The Onion; it’s true.
Microsoft has built an operating system called Azure Cloud Switch (ACS). As Kamala Subramaniam, Principal Architect, Azure Networking explains on the company blog, "It is a cross-platform modular operating system for data center networking built on Linux."
This is not a typical consumer-grade operating system; it's meant to serve a very specific purpose.
There are many open source software defined, or virtualized networking switches available, but Microsoft didn't find what they were looking for and ended up creating its own.
Subramanian wrote:
Security researchers have discovered a new malware program that infects automated teller machines (ATMs) and allows attackers to extract cash on command.
The program is dubbed GreenDispenser and was detected in Mexico. However, it's only a matter of time until similar attacks are adopted by cybercriminals in other countries, researchers from security firm Proofpoint said in a blog post.
GreenDispenser is not the first malware program to target ATMs. In October 2013, security researchers from Symantec warned about a backdoor called Ploutus that could infect ATMs when a new boot disk is inserted into their CD-ROM drives.
North America has finally run out of new addresses based on IPv4, the numbering system that got the Internet where it is today but which is running out of space for the coming era of networking.
The American Registry for Internet Numbers, the nonprofit group that distributes Internet addresses for the region, said Thursday it has assigned the last addresses in its free pool. The announcement came after years of warnings from ARIN and others that IPv4 addresses were running out and that enterprises and carriers should adopt the next protocol, IPv6.
