Gauss: Stuxnet Like Worm Spotted Stealing Banking Information

A new cyber weapon which is believed to be linked with Stuxnet,Duqu,Flame in its operation (i.e to  target Iranian nuclear facility) has been discovered which was aimed at stealing financial information from customers of a series of Lebanese banks.

Like Flame, Gauss is also discovered by ITU (International Telecommunications Union) as part of its mission to maintain world cyber-peace.
Kaspersky said

“Gauss is a nation state sponsored banking Trojan which carries a warhead of unknown designation”. Besides stealing various kinds of data from infected Windows machines, it also includes an unknown, encrypted payload which is activated on certain specific system configurations.

It shares some functionalities with Flame, such as the USB infection subroutines.

Kaspersky made some analsys on this Trojan and released a technical paper  which contains several details about the worm.

New Google Search to affect Copyright offenders

Google today announced that it will update its search Algorothm to ignore or lower the search results of web domains with high number of copyright removal notices.

Starting next week, we will begin taking into account a new signal in our rankings: the number of valid copyright removal notices we receive for any given site.

Since last year the company has been gathering data(complaints) from Copyright owners.  Couple of months back Google published this data in its Google Transparency Report .

At this moment the Top 10 affected domains are ..

Metro UI: Call It Windows 8 UI?

There has been news going around that due to a naming dispute with a European partner (Metro Group) that Windows New Layout For Windows 8 can no longer be referred to as a Metro UI but "Windows 8,", according to some sources. It's said that references to "Metro design" will be replaced with "Windows 8 Design", thought not yet confirmed by Microsoft Executives publicly.So the Metro interface on Windows Phone is now known as the "Windows 8 interface" on Windows Phone.

Credit: ZDNET

New Mac Virus Detected

A new Mac OS X exploit was discovered Friday morning by Kaspersky Labs which propogates through a zipfile attachment. The attachment tricks the Mac user into installing a variant of the MaControl backdoor via point-and-grunt. Embedded in the virus is an encrypted IP address belonging to a server in China which is believed to be a C+C server.

Microsoft debut into tablet business with Microsoft Surface:Specs [Video]

Microsoft, the company which ruled the PC business by providing Operating systems(Windows) and ubiquitous application software is now entering into the tablet space with its own hardware, Where there is a huge competition with world-class makers.

The company made the debut by unveiling Surface tablet computer. Microsoft Surface tablets will come in two versions. There will be Windows RT model with an ARM-based processor for light weight and long battery life, and an Intel powered model with which can run all Windows 8 apps, as well as software designed for earlier version of Windows.

Stuxnet Origin Confirmed: Developed by US and Israel Governments to take off Iran's nuclear development

[NYT]: US officials confirm Stuxnet was a joint operation of US-Israeli governments to sabotage the computer systems at Iran’s nuclear facilities according to current and former US officials.
This Operation was code named Olympic Games.

 NYT reports:
From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants in the program.


Mr. Obama decided to accelerate the attacks — begun in the Bush administration and code-named Olympic Games — even after an element of the program accidentally became public in the summer of 2010 because of a programming error that allowed it to escape Iran’s Natanz plant and sent it around the world on the Internet. Computer security experts who began studying the worm, which had been developed by the United States and Israel, gave it a name: Stuxnet.

At a tense meeting in the White House Situation Room within days of the worm’s “escape,” Mr. Obama, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and the director of the Central Intelligence Agency at the time, Leon E. Panetta, considered whether America’s most ambitious attempt to slow the progress of Iran’s nuclear efforts had been fatally compromised.

“Should we shut this thing down?” Mr. Obama asked, according to members of the president’s national security team who were in the room.

Told it was unclear how much the Iranians knew about the code, and offered evidence that it was still causing havoc, Mr. Obama decided that the cyberattacks should proceed. In the following weeks, the Natanz plant was hit by a newer version of the computer worm, and then another after that. The last of that series of attacks, a few weeks after Stuxnet was detected around the world, temporarily took out nearly 1,000 of the 5,000 centrifuges Iran had spinning at the time to purify uranium.

Read More

Google Glass Trackpad spotted in a demo by Sergey Brin [Video]

On promoting the company's sci-fi-inspired eyewear 'Project Glass', Sergey Brin( who has been working seriously on the project from an year ) appeared on The Gavin Newsom’s Current TV talk show Wednesday, May 23 along with his wife, Anne Wojcicki.

On the show, Brin demoed how the Google Glass interface is navigated.

Sergey also told Newsom that Google X is now his primary focus at Google. His team has been working on the glasses for two to three years, and Brin as been involved for the past year. Brin also explains why Google is working on the technology: “The idea is that you want to be free to experience the world without futzing with a phone.”

Apple's Tim Cook on Steve Jobs at D10 [Video]

Timothy D. Cook, Apple's chief executive making his debut performance at the D: All Things Digital conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif. spoke about the companies former CEO Steven .P Jobs