Tech wrap: Zappos hacked
Online shoe retailer Zappos told customers this weekend that it has been the victim of a cyber attack affecting more than 24 million customer accounts in its database. The popular retailer, which is owned by Amazon.com, said customers’ names, email addresses, billing and shipping addresses, phone numbers and the last four digits of credit card numbers and scrambled passwords were stolen. The company, which is well known for its customer service, said due to the high volume of customer calls it is expecting it will temporarily switch off its phones and direct customers to contact via email.
Hackers disrupted online access to the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, El Al Airlines and three banks in what the government described as a cyber-offensive against Israel. The attacks came just days after an unidentified hacker, proclaiming Palestinian sympathies, posted the details of thousands of Israeli credit card holders and other personal information on the Internet in a mass theft. Israel opened an agency to tackle cyber attacks earlier this month.
A hacker who goes by the name of “Yama Tough” threatened Saturday to release the full source code for Symantec’s flagship Norton Antivirus software on Tuesday. Last week, Yama Tough released fragments of source code from Symantec products along with a cache of emails. The hacker said all the data was taken from Indian government servers.
Use of microblogging in China quadrupled in 2011 compared with the previous year, with nearly half of all Chinese Internet users now taking to the near-instant service to gather news and spread views, a government Internet think tank said. Microblogging, or “Weibo” as it is known in China, allows users to send short messages of 140 characters or less to their followers. The total number of Weibo users rose 296 percent to 249.9 million in 2011, data from the China Internet Network Information Center showed.
The long-term approach of major Japanese investors, combined with an aversion to foreign and hostile takeovers and uncertainty over lawsuits stemming from the $1.7 billion accounting scandal, will likely make any change of ownership at Olympus a gradual process, writes Isabel Reynolds. Olympus is expected to stay listed for the time being and sources with the company’s powerful main bankers, who are also shareholders, say they would be prepared to wait for the firm to recover on its own.
Tech wrap: Samsung savors smartphone supremacy
Samsung Electronics, the world’s top maker of memory chips and smartphones, reported a record quarterly profit, aided by one-off gains and best-ever sales of high-end phones. The South Korean firm posted 5.2 trillion won ($4.5 billion) in quarterly operating profit, beating a consensus forecast of 4.7 trillion won by analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S. Samsung, which surged past Apple as the world’s top smartphone maker in the third quarter, only entered the smartphone market in earnest in 2010, but its handset division is now its biggest earnings generator.
Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC recorded a worse-than-expected yearly profit decline in the fourth quarter, and the first decline in two years. The former investor darling shocked markets in November by slashing its fourth-quarter revenue guidance, sending its shares down 28 percent in two weeks and 15 percent to date. Investor concerns linger over whether HTC still has the innovative streak that catapulted it from an obscure contract maker to a top brand.
Sony will promote its consumer business chief Kazuo Hirai to the role of president as early as April, taking the title away from Howard Stringer, who is expected to remain chairman and CEO, the Nikkei newspaper reported. Such a move would give Hirai, 51, who made his name in Sony’s PlayStation video game division, more influence over the whole company and its wide range of technology and entertainment businesses, likely cementing expectations he would succeed the 69-year-old Stringer eventually.
Two weeks after disclosing that its website had been hacked, private intelligence analysis firm Strategic Forecasting warned subscribers that hackers were now circulating false emails offering the company’s services for free. Strategic Forecasting, also known as Stratfor, urged subscribers not to open attachments to the fraudulent emails, which offered subscribers the company’s premium content for free as compensation while it tried to secure its website. Stratfor CEO George Friedman said he deeply regretted any inconvenience caused by the latest incident and said the company was still working to reestablish its data systems and Web presence.
Israeli officials said they were concerned the country may be under cyber attack after a wave of credit card code thefts in the past week by a hacker who claims to be operating out of Saudi Arabia. Credit card company officials said 14,000 numbers had been posted on line Tuesday and another 11,000 Thursday. However, they said some of the codes had expired and that the active cards were all being cancelled.
Tech wrap: Is Groupon’s IPO window closing?
As the Nasdaq Composite index continued its week-long tailspin, tech investors and analysts are wondering what the stock plunge could mean for the pending IPOs of companies like Groupon and Zynga.
The coming week, which has about a dozen IPOs scheduled to price, will be a good test of the severity of the selloff, according to Nick Einhorn, an analyst at Connecticut-based IPO research house Renaissance Capital. “Less mature, less profitable companies could have a tougher time going public,” Einhorn told Reuters.
If there was to be another recession, writes Investor Place’s Tom Taulli, “the IPO market will freeze up. It will mostly be only standout companies – such as Zynga and Facebook – that will get traction. A company like Groupon, which has substantial losses, may have to delay its offering or cut the valuation.”
Groupon, which more than doubled subscribers this year to 115 million, plans to abandon the use of a controversial financial measure it once touted as a good indicator of performance, two sources with knowledge of the situation said.
Hackers competing at the world’s largest hacking convention in Las Vegas found it ridiculously easy in some cases to trick employees at some of the largest U.S. companies to reveal information that can be used in planning cyber attacks against them.
Will it be more bad news for Cisco Systems? The IT giant reports its quarterly results on Wednesday and investors expect a weak outlook after Juniper Networks and Brocade Communications Systems slashed their forecasts.
Almost half the workers in Verizon Communications’ wireline telecommunications business went on strike on Sunday as negotiations for a new labor contract failed.
The more I read about Groupon’s shady accounting practices, the bleaker their future seems. I mean, their numbers (which are NOT taking in account the percentage Groupon is to pay merchants) don’t add up. How can I trust a business that relies so much on long financial float times?
On the other end of the spectrum is BigTip, whose business model is a great deal sturdier. Plus, they don’t — pardon my French — screw over small merchants the way Groupon does. They have powerful merchant tools that allow business owners to fully customize the deals. When merchants win, consumers win, too. Whether you are a business or just someone who loves to save with coupons, BigTip is the way to go.
from Ask...:
How should we respond to the “enormous” cyber attacks?
Security company McAfee uncovered a series of attacks on the networks of 72 organizations including the U.N., governments and companies around the world and said there was one "state actor" behind them.
Sorry, there are no polls available at the moment.
Tech wrap: Panasonic profits shaken by quake
Japan’s Panasonic Corp forecast on Monday its full-year operating profit would drop 11 percent to 270 billion yen ($3.4 billion) in the year to March 2012, after the earthquake and tsunami in northern Japan hit production and sales. Like many of its rivals, Panasonic delayed its profit forecast due to lack of clarity about the effects of the quake.
Facebook’s U.S. advertising revenue will total roughly $2.2 billion in 2011, displacing Yahoo Inc to collect the biggest slice of online display advertising dollars, according to a new study. Facebook’s U.S. advertising revenue will give it a 17.7 percent share of the market for graphical display ads that appear on websites, according to a report released on Monday by research firm eMarketer.
The Internet body that oversees domain names voted on Monday to end restricting them to suffixes like .com or .gov and will receive applications for new names from January 12 next year with the first approvals likely by the end of 2012. Experts say corporations should be among the first to register, resulting in domain names ending in brands like .toyota, .apple or .coke. Besides the $185,000 to apply, individuals or organizations will have to show a legitimate claim to the names they are buying.
In the latest cyber security news, hackers temporarily knocked offline a Website run by the British police Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA), which targets organized crime in Britain and overseas. Lulz Security, a loosely aligned hacker group which said it brought down the SOCA Website on Monday, has gone after a long list of government and corporate Websites in the past month.
Location-based social network Foursquare has surpassed 10 million users, the two-year-old Web firm announced today on its company blog. TechCrunch reported Foursquare may be raising another funding round, in addition to the $21.4 million it has already raised.
Tech wrap: The Web is about to get some new domains
Brand owners will soon be able to operate their own parts of the Web — such as .apple, .coke or .marlboro — if the biggest shake-up yet in how Internet domains are awarded is approved.
Today, just 22 generic top-level domains exist — .com, .org and .info are a few examples — plus about 250 country-level domains like .uk or .cn.
The move is seen as a big opportunity for brands to gain more control over their online presence and send visitors more directly to parts of their sites — and a danger for those who fail to take advantage.
Research In Motion’s dismal results and failure to offer a clear strategy to arrest its decline pushed its shares down more than 20 percent, drawing parallels with other technology stars that have fallen from grace.
Earlier in the day Samsung Electronics and other Asian technology stocks also tumbled on fears the sputtering global economy will crimp demand for computers and TVs and hurt earnings at chip and panel makers for the rest of the year.
The tech sector serves as the bellwether for global consumer demand and its outlook has been soured by the debt crisis in Europe and sluggish U.S. job and housing markets.
Yesterday we told you about how the government is attempting to stay one step ahead of cyber attacks like the one that brought down the CIA’s public website.
Tech wrap: Samsung to take smartphone crown
Samsung will become the world’s largest smartphone maker this quarter followed by Apple, overtaking struggling Nokia which has lead the market since 1996, Nomura said. Research firms Gartner and Canalys both said they saw Nokia — which created the smartphone market with its 1996 launch of the Communicator model — losing smartphone volume leadership later this year.
Facebook is preparing to file for an initial public offering as early as October or November that could value the social networking site at more than $100 billion, CNBC reported. Goldman Sachs is leading the chase to manage the offering, which could come in the first quarter of 2012, CNBC said.
The Wall Street Journal’s Shira Ovide sums up what is known about Facebook’s IPO. Perhaps one of the most interesting facts is only a couple dozen U.S. companies, such as Exxon Mobil, GE and J.P. Morgan Chase, have stock-market values above $100 billion.
Google plans to buy online advertising company AdMeld to grab a larger slice of the market for graphical display ads. Google did not disclose the financial terms of the deal, although TechCrunch reported last week that Google paid roughly $400 million, citing anonymous sources.
Governments, multinational corporations and global institutions are losing the battle against computer hackers and must combine their resources if they are to lock out cyber intruders, experts say. The International Monetary Fund has joined Sony and Google on a growing list of hacking victims but it is hard to identify the culprits who consistently manage to keep one technological step ahead of their pursuers. “This is an example of technology developing faster than the frameworks and sometimes the regulations around that,” said Unilever chief executive Paul Polman on the sidelines of a World Economic Forum meeting in Jakarta.
Turkish police detained 32 members of the Anonymous cyberactivism collective on suspicion of planning attacks on a number of websites, Turkish state-run news agency Anatolian reported. The action came in response to a complaint from Turkey’s Directorate of Telecommunications, whose website was taken down on Thursday as part of a protest against what Anonymous says is government censorship of the Internet.
An Apple store employee started a drive to unionize retail workers in a rare move at a company known for its near-fanatical following and cutting-edge mystique. Cory Moll, a part-time employee at an Apple store in San Francisco, is working to form a union to fight for better wages and benefits and to address what he says are unfair practices in the company’s glass-and-steel retail showrooms.
Twitter + Georgian blogger + South Ossetia = Hack Attack
If you were miffed at not being able to tweet your innermost thoughts and random musings to your followers yesterday, or post that smartypants comment on a friend’s Facebook status update, blame politics. Turns out the reason why Twitter was knocked down for hours, while Facebook users had trouble logging in and posting to their profiles on Thursday was a Georgian blogger who uses both services.
According to CNET, which cites Facebook’s chief security officer Max Kelly, the blogger also has accounts in LiveJournal and Google’s Blogger and YouTube platforms, and goes by the name of Cyxymu, which is the name of a town in Georgia. Kelly told CNET:
“It was a simultaneous attack across a number of properties targeting him to keep his voice from being heard.”
Now, for those who don’t follow international politics closely, here’s why the pro-Georgian blogger may have been targeted. August 8 marks the first anniversary of the war that broke out between Russia and Georgia over South Ossetia. Russia sent troops into the separatist region last year, which Georgia claims forced it to launch a counter-offensive. Some other folks say the war started on August 7, 2008. So it was probably no coincidence that the Web attack on Cyxymu, the blogger who blames the attack on Russia, took place on the eve of the war’s anniversary.
Whatever the date, one thing is clear: the more Twitter becomes a communication tool in zones of conflict, the likelier it is to become a target for hackers with political motives. The micro-blogging service obviously needs to step up security so that hack attacks don’t shut it down. After all, regular folks like MC Hammer still need to get to the airport.
Keep an eye on:
- Platinum Equity turns up as the third bidder for The Boston Globe. (The Boston Globe)
- TV dealmaking season wraps up; prices, volume down. (Reuters)
- News Corp’s Fox has asked distributors to withhold DVDs from Redbox. (Bloomberg)
Twitter co-founder Biz Stone’s expected underwear
Even at a difficult moment, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone managed to be witty.
It fell to Stone to write about the hacker who broke in to the company’s computers and stole sensitive business information. His blog on the matter — the official statement from Twitter — was dubbed “Twitter, even more open than we wanted.”
Someone sent a trove of the Twitter documents to the Silicon Valley website TechCrunch. Stone’s blog clarified puzzling statements on TechCrunch that seemed to point toward Google Docs as the problem. Said Stone: “This has nothing to do with any vulnerability in Google Apps which we continue to use.”
That must have come as a welcome relief at Google, which had been trying to explain the robustness of its security even as press agents for obscure security experts sent emails to suggest otherwise, so their clients would get a mention.
Stone said Twitter’s difficulties are an object lesson in the importance of having strong passwords. TechCrunch took some pleasure in asserting that the password for Twitter servers was the word “password.”
So, the public got its first titillating glance at privately held Twitter’s (out of date) cost and revenue numbers, which Stone likened to getting a look at the inside of someone’s underwear drawer, quoting someone else:
“No one’s really going to be surprised about what’s in there.”
Is this ok? TechCrunch publishing stolen (hacked) information on their website. I don’t think it is, they should have warned Twitter about their security flaws, hacking into the system and publishing secret information is a step to far I think.
YouTube can be dangerous place for porn seekers
YouTube is becoming a dangerous place to search for porn.******Anti-virus company PandaLabs reports on its research blog that hackers have riddled the site with links to malicious software. The scheme works like this: Porn seekers searching the YouTube site for terms including Latina, kinky, girl, porn, sex and the names of popular porn stars are directed to another site, called PornTube 2.0. It looks like a legitimate video web site, according to PandaLabs, but is actually riddled with malicious software that can steal credit card data, passwords, install spyware and also attempts to sell users of infected PCs fake anti-virus programs.******Just so you know…
I believe these links are also showing up on other media download sites, and especially blogs where inserting some javascript and links is oh so easy. I know because I found two such pages on Windows Live hosted blogs. I was searching for video content on the “Ida” fossil/prehistoric ancestor find. I discovered a “Gretchen’s Place (space) and another called the same with first female name changed. I listed source and it was loaded with trojans and other malicious software links. It had a video window just like a youtube. I pressed play, it said downloading software for playing HD video, and boom. I caught a trojan undetected by AV program. I’ve seen 3 different clients with same.
Zappos is giving everyone a lesson on managing a data breach that everyone who may ever have to deal with the problem should look to for guidance. There is a lot to be learned. People understand that such things happen and, unless you’ve been egregiously lax in protecting their account information, will give you the benefit of the doubt. How you respond to the crisis will be what determines whether or not the issue is resolved with minimal damage or it deteriorates into a PR disaster.
As I said, Zappos is giving us a real-time lesson on how to do crisis management properly and we should all be taking notes. For a more detailed analysis: http://blog.unibulmerchantservices.com/z appos-is-giving-us-a-lesson-on-managing- a-data-breach