A Power Plant Hack That Anybody Could Use

The night before the start of this week's Black Hat hacker conference here in Las Vegas, security researcher Dillon Beresford gave a demonstration to a small audience in his room at Caesar's Palace. The topic: how a hacker could take over the Siemens S7 computers that are used to control engines, machines and turbines in tens of thousands of industrial facilities.It was a...

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Spam King Sanford Wallace Indicted for Facebook Spam

Notorious spam king Sanford Wallace is facing federal fraud charges for allegedly breaking into Facebook accounts and sending 27 million spam messages in 2008 and 2009.Sanford WallaceWallace, 43, allegedly used a phishing attack to steal usernames and passwords from victims and then used the stolen credentials to post spam to victims walls, the U.S. Department of Justice...

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Startup Aims to Get the Poor Online With Phone Numbers

U.K. startup Movirtu plans to help 3 million or more people in poor countries use mobile services by giving them personal phone numbers, not phones.Working with a U.N.-affiliated initiative called Business Call to Action (BCtA), Movirtu will offer the numbers, which it calls mobile identities, through commercial carriers in developing countries in Africa and South Asia. People in those countries who typically borrow phones from others will be able to log into the carrier's network and use their own prepaid minutes and bits of data. The service...

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Chinese Hackers Blamed for Database Theft

Hackers have stolen the personal data of 35 million users of the South Korean social network Cyworld and search engine Nate, the company that runs them, SK Communications, has admitted. The country's regulator, the Korea Communications Commission, said in an official statement that SK Telecom had traced the attack to IP addresses in China, and involved the theft of phone...

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Fusion-io to Buy IO Turbine to Reach Virtualized Servers

Flash storage vendor Fusion-io has agreed to buy IO Turbine for up to US$95 million to extend its on-server cache products to virtualized environments.IO Turbine provides software that allows cache storage on servers to be shared across multiple virtual machines. The software will complement Fusion-io's flash products, which use solid-state storage media as a cache for heavily used data in order to minimize the amount of data that has to travel over storage networks. Fusion-io's components have so far been limited to use with data-intensive applications...

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Computers That You Can Wear

It’s an exciting time for the wearable-computing industry. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen declared in a recent interview that wearable computers were the next big thing for Silicon Valley, and the past few months have seen a flurry of new product announcements in the arena.A device that records everything you see for later playback, a bracelet that comfortably and discreetly...

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Healthcare Industry Leads Market in IT Hiring

Flush with federal funds and under the gun of federal regulatory deadlines, the healthcare industry is leading the market in IT jobs creation, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics job placement services.The bureau indicated that IT jobs in healthcare are expected to grow by 20% annually through 2018, "much faster than average." There are currently 176,090 healthcare...

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