HP to launch 7seven Superpower (Gen9) Servers

“Today’s IT is inefficient, slow, and manually driven,” says Peter Schrady, VP & GM of HP’s Rack and Tower Server Business. “Every minute people send 240 million emails. IT has not been able to keep pace with the growing demand.”

HP will launch a portfolio of seven ProLiant Generation 9 (Gen9) Servers 0m 8th September 2014 designed to help clients accelerate IT service delivery, reduce IT costs and lower energy consumption.

The servers are built to function across converged infrastructures, as well as cloud and software-defined environments. New features for the Gen9 portfolio include converged management across servers, storage and networking that will allow IT to control storage across the entire enterprise via several networks.

Compared to HP’s Gen8 servers, the new lineup offers three times more compute capacity, 66 times faster service delivery, and it can handle four times the IT workload performance.

The first Gen9 servers, which will hit the market on September 8, are racks designed for small and mid-sized businesses (DL160 ad DL180). HP will roll out five additional platforms in the coming months, including two 2P servers (DL360 and DL380), as well as a performance tower (the ML350). HP will also launch a new blade product, (the DL460C) as well as two high-compute products, the Apollo 6000 and Apollo 8000 on Gen9 processors.

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Teenager traumatised over a Facebook like

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The teenager who allegedly “liked” a pro-Israel page on Facebook is traumatized both by the reaction of the police to investigate him for sedition and the condemnation of him by Internet users, said a source close to his family. Both the Form Five science student and his family are also baffled over the police decision to probe into him for sedition, as the 17-year-old did not “like” the “I Love Israel” page, nor did he make any remarks or postings that were seditious in nature, said the family friend.

The source, acting as spokesperson for the family, said the boy was too scared to go to school after learning of the vilification from several teachers and students from his school, with some even wanting to burn him for supporting Israel. “He never liked the page. He never shared it or posted anything about it. “He said his teacher had messaged him on Facebook to ask why he liked the page after she wrote about it on her Facebook”.

“He said he had also explained to her that he did not click ‘like’ on the page.”

He said the teen also repeated his account when he lodged a police report after receiving threats over the alleged Facebook page “like”. In the police report, the teen said he received a message from a classmate at 10pm on August 10 who told him that his Facebook page was showing that he had liked the “I Love Israel” page. He denied clicking “like” on the page and did not know how it happened.

He then discovered that a screenshot of his Facebook page showing the “like” had been posted on the Facebook page of one of his teachers with the comment “Anak muridku suka Israel? Buat malu cikgu saja” (My student likes Israel? What an embarrassment).

He read the angry comments posted by other people on his teacher’s Facebook page and learned that several teachers and students from his school had condemned him. The spokesperson said when the boy went back to school after a few days, he was initially shunned by some of his schoolmates and teachers.

“He was given the cold shoulder by his schoolmates… they didn’t want to talk to him. But he wasn’t bullied. “It is a little better now. Some of his Muslim schoolmates are talking to him again,” he said. The spokesperson also said the family were worried about the sedition probe. “This boy is one of the top students in school… a regular straight-A scorer. He is not the type who goes around looking for trouble.

“He also had no problems before with the teacher, who made the Facebook posting about the ‘like’.”

The spokesperson, who is a social activist and property agent, said the boy comes from a poor family – his father is a lorry driver and his mother a cleaner – and they did not wish to talk to the media.

The teen is their eldest child and he has three younger sisters.

“They are just baffled why their boy is being investigated for sedition. “The whole issue was caused by the teacher who made the posting on her Facebook, which led to him being threatened and criticised.

“The boy lodged a police report because he was frightened and now he is the victim,” he said.

The spokesperson also said the boy, his parents, the school principal, teachers and committee members of the parent and teacher association attended a meeting in their school in Taman Tasek Mutiara in Simpang Ampat, Penang, yesterday to discuss the issue.

During the meeting that went on for about two hours, the teacher responsible for the Facebook posting apologized for what she did, he said.

“So did another teacher, who had called for the boy to be boycotted for allegedly liking the ‘I Love Israel’ page,” he said, adding that they both taught the boy.

He said the family accepted their apologies but were still worried about the threats against their son. “When they asked what would be done if the boy is threatened in future over the incident, the education director said the boy can report it to his headmaster if it happened in school. “The parents were told to go to the police if anything untoward happens outside school grounds,” he said. He said the director told everyone at the meeting that he wanted the issue settled and not dragged on further. The director also told the boy to continue to study hard, he said.

The sedition probe had raised an outcry among Twitter and Facebook users as well as criminal lawyers, who saw it as a waste of resources.

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Secret Service warns on hotel business center computers

Travelers have one more place to watch their backs when they’re on the road: the hotel business center.

The U.S. Secret Service on Monday confirmed it has warned the hotel industry about malware installed on computers in business centers that allow crooks to monitor every keystroke typed on a device, yielding a motherlode of personal data, such as passwords, user names and credit card information.

The report was first made public on Krebs on Security, and a Secret Service spokesman confirmed the warning.

“The key-logger malware captured the keys struck by other hotel guests that used the business center computers, subsequently sending the information via email to the malicious actors’ email accounts,” according to the warning obtained by Krebs on Security. “The suspects were able to obtain large amounts of information including other guests personally identifiable information (PII), log in credentials to bank, retirement and personal web mail accounts, as well as other sensitive data flowing through the business center’s computers.”

The report, jointly issued with Department of Homeland Security’s National Cyber-security and Communications Integration Center, said the advisory comes after the arrest of individuals suspected of attacking computers at several major hotels in the Dallas/Fort Worth area.

“We take that very seriously,” Scott Joslove, head of the Texas Hotel & Lodging Association, said of the advisory. “We have software in many of our business centers that limit how long people can be on the computer, and we try to put [the computers] in public areas where they can be seen,” Joslove said.

His association tries to keep its member hotels up to date on the latest threats, but it’s a problem that’s not unique to hotels. “It’s actually what you face in hotel business centers, computers at shopping malls or in your home,” Joslove said. “You can never stop trying to stay ahead of them.”

Earlier this year, the Secret Service initiated an investigation into a data breach at 14 hotels where malware was installed on the credit and debit card readers at the hotels’ restaurants and gift shops to steal customers’ names, credit card numbers, security codes and card expiration dates.

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USB device viruses could evade all known security

USB devices such as keyboards, thumb-drives and mice can be used to hack into personal computers in a potential new class of attacks that evade all known security protections, a top computer researcher revealed on Thursday.

Karsten Nohl, chief scientist with Berlin’s SR Labs, noted that hackers could load malicious software onto tiny, low-cost computer chips that control functions of USB devices but which have no built-in shields against tampering with their code.

“You cannot tell where the virus came from. It is almost like a magic trick,” said Nohl, whose research firm is known for uncovering major flaws in mobile phone technology.

The finding shows that bugs in software used to run tiny electronics components that are invisible to the average computer user can be extremely dangerous when hackers figure out how to exploit them. Security researchers have increasingly turned their attention to uncovering such flaws.

Nohl said his firm has performed attacks by writing malicious code onto USB control chips used in thumb drives and smartphones. Once the USB device is attached to a computer, the malicious software can log keystrokes, spy on communications and destroy data, he said.

Computers do not detect the infections when tainted devices are inserted because anti-virus programs are only designed to scan for software written onto memory and do not scan the “firmware” that controls the functioning of those devices, he said.

Nohl and Jakob Lell, a security researcher at SR Labs, will describe their attack method at next week’s Black Hat hacking conference in Las Vegas, in a presentation titled: “Bad USB—On Accessories that Turn Evil.”

Thousands of security professionals gather at the annual conference to hear about the latest hacking techniques, including ones that threaten the security of business computers, consumer electronics and critical infrastructure.

Nohl said he would not be surprised if intelligence agencies, like the National Security Agency, have already figured out how to launch attacks using this technique.

Last year, he presented research at Black Hat on breakthrough methods for remotely attacking SIM cards on mobile phones. In December, documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden demonstrated that the U.S. spy agency was using a similar technique for surveillance, which it called “Monkey Calendar.”

An NSA spokeswoman declined to comment.

SR Labs tested the technique by infecting controller chips made by major Taiwanese manufacturer, Phison Electronics, and placing them in USB memory drives and smartphones running Google Android operating system.

Alex Chiu, an attorney with Phison, told Reuters via email that Nohl had contacted the company about his research in May.

“Mr. Nohl did not offer detailed analysis together with work product to prove his finding,” Chiu said. “Phison does not have ground to comment (on) his allegation.”

Chiu said that “from Phison’s reasonable knowledge and belief, it is hardly possible to rewrite Phison’s controller firmware without accessing our confidential information.”

Similar chips are made by Silicon Motion Technology and Alcor Micro. Nohl said his firm did not test devices with chips from those manufacturers.

Google did not respond to requests for comment. Officials with Silicon Motion and Alcor Micro could not immediately be reached.

Nohl believed hackers would have a “high chance” of corrupting other kinds of controller chips besides those made by Phison, because their manufacturers are not required to secure software. He said those chips, once infected, could be used to infect mice, keyboards and other devices that connect via USB.

“The sky is the limit. You can do anything at all,” he said.

In his tests, Nohl said he was able to gain remote access to a computer by having the USB instruct the computer to download a malicious program with instructions that the PC believed were coming from a keyboard. He was also able to change what are known as DNS network settings on a computer, essentially instructing the machine to route Internet traffic through malicious servers.

Once a computer is infected, it could be programmed to infect all USB devices that are subsequently attached to it, which would then corrupt machines that they contact.

“Now all of your USB devices are infected. It becomes self-propagating and extremely persistent,” Nohl said. “You can never remove it.”

Christof Paar, a professor of electrical engineering at Germany’s University of Bochum who reviewed the findings, said he believed the new research would prompt others to take a closer look at USB technology, and potentially lead to the discovery of more bugs. He urged manufacturers to improve protection of their chips to thwart attacks.

“The manufacturer should make it much harder to change the software that runs on a USB stick,” Paar said.

—By Reuters.

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