Criminals ride Obama’s coattails
Pesident Barack Obama is the first US president with a Facebook page, and a YouTube channel. In addition, the president has 1 million “MySpace” friends, 3.7 million Facebook supporters and his campaign database boasts the e-mail addresses of 13 million supporters. So is it any surprise that criminals have taken advantage of Obama’s online popularity?
Walling Data discovered a new computer threat this week that exhibits interesting symptoms, including a pop up of the president’s face in the bottom right hand corner of infected computers. Ironically, the worm was discovered on the network of a K-12 school in the president’s home state of Illinois.
“From what we can tell so far, the good news is that this worm is nothing more than a major nuisance. This threat spreads via external devices, such as flash drives, attacking where a network is typically most vulnerable – from the inside” said Luke Walling, president of Walling Data. “We first discovered the worm in the course of some support work we were providing to the school. It seems this threat was developed in an off the shelf development environment often used for the production of simple games, the version we have seems to have last been modified in December 2008.”
The “Obama worm” replicates via USB storage devices and network shares. The worm’s behavior indicates that it is more of a nuisance than a threat to sensitive data as there are changes to exe/bat/vbs shell extensions (i.e. breaking exe files) and it replicates to a large number of folders on the local computer. On Mondays only, Obama’s face will pop up on the infected computer’s screen.
What a buy!
AT&T has acquired the domain name YP.com for an eye popping $3.85 million. Little is known as to the traffic volume to the site but the website rating service Alexa ranked YP.com at roughly 70,000, implying that it was in the top 70,000 sites on the planet with roughly 1,000 to 3,000 visits per day.
“That kind of daily volume does not substantiate a nearly $4 million cash purchase price, especially with the current state of the US economy,” remarked Matt Panella of Domain News.
What the communication provider’s strategy in the site purchase might be is unclear, but two letter domains rarely come on the market and AT&T already owns YellowPages.com. Time will show if the address was worth the price.
Pirated software launches attack
Mac security company Intego has found a new Mac trojan hiding inside pirated copies of Apple’s iWork. The trojan executes during iWork installation, creating a service run at startup that provides covert, administrator-level system access. Nemertes Research is tracking increasing interest in the Macintosh and other non-Windows desktops as enterprise computing platforms, especially in conjunction with virtual desktop initiatives. A rising enterprise profile will attract more such attacks.
Nemertes suggests that if you are adopting Macs, don’t ignore security even though Mac vulnerability to viruses is minimal: viruses are not the only threat. Train your company’s end users on secure computer usage, watch for illegal software and audit for known compromises or install tools that protect against them.
Bad economy, new terminology
What happens when you can’t launch a tech company due to poor economic conditions? You put the start-up into “hibernation.” It’s an idea that’s catching on as more entrepreneurs realize that companies and consumers don’t have the money right now to try out new technologies and services.
Instead of launching their company and then watching it wither, tech entrepreneurs are making sure they have informative websites and then dumping any real world expenses such as office space. The goal is to ride out the crisis, keeping the idea alive in a scaled back fashion until the global economy stabilizes and the product or service will have a chance for success.
Dividend suspended
Companies are doing everything possible to ensure they make it through the downturn. Cutting staff and scaling back production are popular moves. Shareholders are to be hit too — and not only by falling stock prices.
Imation Corp. has suspended its quarterly cash dividend. The cash dividend suspension will preserve approximately $3 million of capital per quarter. The company’s cash balance was $96.6 million with no debt outstanding as of Dec. 31, 2008.
Commenting on the suspension, Imation President and CEO Frank Russomanno said, “The economic impact we experienced in the fourth quarter was more severe than we had anticipated and we are approaching 2009 cautiously given the uncertainty about the breadth and depth of the economic downturn. Preserving cash will further strengthen the Company’s balance sheet as we continue to invest in our transformation to a brand and product management company. We believe suspending the dividend is in the long term interest of the Company and our shareholders, and we are confident it is the prudent step to take at this time.”
Catalog of design patterns for SOA
Prentice Hall has published SOA Design Patterns, a catalog of 85 design patterns for service-oriented architecture and service-orientation that documents the most proven and successful design techniques for succeeding with modern-day SOA. Thomas Erl, the world’s top-selling SOA author, spearheaded the community effort behind the creation of SOA Design Patterns. In development for over three years, the catalog has been subjected to comprehensive reviews by hundreds of industry professionals.
In conjunction with the release of the book, the new SOAPatterns.org (www.soapatterns.org) community site has been launched, providing an open forum for the ongoing development and expansion of the pattern catalog. Members of the SOA and patterns communities are welcome to contribute, review and use the content on this site and can submit their own candidate patterns. Of the 20 candidate patterns currently published at SOAPatterns.org, some notable additions are the five REST-inspired patterns recently contributed by authors including Raj Balasubramanian, co-author of the upcoming book “SOA with REST.”
In order to make the patterns broadly accessible to IT professionals, a series of articles will be published on a weekly basis on www.informit.com, with each article providing an original, summarized description of one pattern. The series will continue for 85 weeks, into 2010. Additional related resource sites include: www.whatissoa.com, www.soamag.com and www.soaprinciples.com. SOA Design Patterns is available to Safari Books Online subscribers at http://safari.informit.com. IT professionals unfamiliar with Safari Books Online can register for a 10-day free trial by visiting the site.
Filipinos text
The Philippine telecommunications services market generated $5.6bn in 2008 and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 4.8 percent (5.8percent in local currency terms) during the 2008-2013 period, according to a the latest Country Intelligence Report from Pyramid Research.
“2009 will be a difficult year for the Philippine market when measured in US dollar terms, given the combined effects of the peso’s expected devaluation against the US dollar and continued pressure on voice tariffs,” notes Leslie Arathoon, Vice President of Research at Pyramid Research and author of the report. “Pyramid expects the proliferation of 3G and wireless broadband technologies such as WiMAX to boost revenue again in 2010, with the fastest growth coming from VoIP services (32.8 percent service revenue CAGR between 2008-2013), fixed broadband services (16.2 percent CAGR) and mobile data (9.6 percent CAGR).”
Arathoon added, “Philippine mobile subscriber uptake is relatively modest for Southeast Asian standards, as penetration stood at 75 percent in late 2008, putting it ahead of neighboring markets such as Indonesia and Vietnam yet behind Thailand and Malaysia. Despite its rather unimpressive penetration level, the Philippines is known to be home to the world’s most prolific users of SMS service. In 2008, SMS usage reached nearly 400 messages per month, compared with average minutes of use of less than 30 minutes per month.”
