Shifu is described as “masterful” by IBM X-Force, and is named after the Japanese word for thief, according to the firm. It is also the Chinese word for skilled person, or tutor.

X-Force said in a blog post that the malware has been active since the early summer, and comprises a number of known tools like Dyre, Zeus and Dridex. It has been put together by people who know what they are doing, and sounds like a significant problem for the 20 institutions it is targeting.

“The Shifu trojan may be a new beast, but its inner workings are not entirely unfamiliar. The malware relies on a few tried-and-true trojan mechanisms from other infamous crimeware codes,” said the IBM researchers.

“It appears that Shifu’s internal makeup was composed by savvy developers who are quite familiar with other banking malware, dressing Shifu with selected features from the more nefarious of the bunch.”

The Shifu package offers a range of attack features as well as clean-up tools to cover its tracks. It reads like a Now that’s what I call … recent attacks compilation CD, and has some oldies but baddies.

“Shifu wipes the local System Restore point on infected machines in a similar way to the Conficker worm, which was popular in 2009,” added the firm as one example.

The package can wreak havoc on companies and their users. If we had a bucket of damp sand we would pour it all over Shifu and stamp on it.

“This trojan steals a large variety of information that victims use for authentication purposes. For example, it keylogs passwords, grabs credentials that users key into HTTP form data, steals private certificates and scrapes external authentication tokens used by some banking applications,” said IBM.

“These elements enable Shifu’s operators to use confidential user credentials and take over bank accounts held with a large variety of financial service providers.

“Shifu’s developers could be Russian speakers or native to countries in the former Soviet Union. It is also possible that the actual authors are obfuscating their true origin, throwing researchers off by implicating an allegedly common source of cybercrime.”

Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/computing-category/is-the-shifu-trojan-wreaking-havoc-in-japan.html

Sales are way up for little-known manufacturers that sell directly to big cloud companies like Google and Facebook, while the market for traditional external storage systems is shrinking, according to research company IDC.

Internet giants and service providers typically don’t use specialized storage platforms in their sprawling data centers. Instead, they buy vast amounts of capacity in the form of generic hardware that’s controlled by software. As users flock to cloud-based services, that’s a growing business.

Revenue for original design manufacturers that sell directly to hyperscale data-center operators grew by 25.8 percent to more than US$1 billion in the second quarter, according to the latest global IDC report on enterprise storage systems. Overall industry revenue rose just 2.1 percent from last year’s second quarter, reaching $8.8 billion.

These so-called ODMs are low-profile vendors, many of them based in Taiwan, that do a lot of their business manufacturing hardware that’s sold under better known brand names. Examples include Quanta Computer and Wistron.

General enterprises aren’t buying many systems from these vendors, but the trends at work in hyperscale deployments are growing across the industry. Increasingly, the platform of choice for storage is a standard x86 server dedicated to storing data, according to IDC analyst Eric Sheppard. Sales of server-based storage rose 10 percent in the quarter to reach $2.1 billion.

Traditional external systems like SANs (storage area networks) are still the biggest part of the enterprise storage business, logging $5.7 billion in revenue for the quarter. But sales in this segment were down 3.9 percent.

Overall demand for storage capacity continued to grow strongly, with 37 percent more capacity shipped in the quarter compared with a year earlier.

Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/aroundnet-category/enterprise-storage-needs-driving-cloud-sales-boom.html

The new 8000 series consists of a Starter Kit (20800 AFA) and software updates for the full StoreServ range, and HP can now offer multi-petabyte systems offering 3.2 million IOPS with scale out from two to eight controllers and proven tier-1 resiliency.

“Regardless of your size, budget, growth rate, quality of service requirements or even your storage network environment, HP 3PAR StoreServ storage offers a best-in-class flash solution to power your public, private or hybrid cloud with uncompromising adaptability from a single architecture,” said Manish Goel, senior vice president and general manager of HP Storage.

HP has also announced additions to the existing 20000 range, including a 20800 All-Flash Starter Kit clocking in at $99,000, and the 20450, a 6PB all-flash array with 1.8 million IOPS.

Using these products together can create up to 60PB of aggregate usable capacity. Both ranges offer the same hardware acceleration from the HP 3PAR Gen5 Thin Express ASIC, which offers double the bandwidth of competing platforms and up to 20GBps of read bandwidth.

Both ranges are now also certified for use in SAP HANA Tailored Data Centre Integrations. Priority Optimisation can bring latencies as low as 0.5 milliseconds through a QoS engine that requires almost no interaction from system admins.

This is just part of an aggressive strategy in cheap, scalable enterprise storage. In April the company launched the Openstack based StoreVirtual range.

HP has also announced data protection enhancements to the 3PAR StoreServ powered by StoreOnce Recovery Manager Central, offering complete granular recovery of backups taken incrementally based only on changed data to minimise resources.

Finally, Fibre customers can use the new HP SmartSAN, which uses Express Provisioning Technology to orchestrate SAN fabric zoning, reducing the process of SAN configuration by 80 percent.

The products are designed to be a little more robust than SanDisk’s InfiniFlash, which is designed for no more than a few writes of archiving, and the price tag goes up accordingly starting at $19,000, but it’s still a significant drop in price for all-flash and hybrid flash arrays.

An eight-node enterprise flash family with density equivalent to a mechanical drive array starts at $1.50 per gigabyte, based on its predecessor line. That’s a big drop given the speed advantages that could pay for itself in certain sectors.

The products will be rolling out over the next few months starting with the StoreServ 8000 which will be available immediately. More products will be available next month, and RMC-V brings up the rear in October.

Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/computing-category/hp-moves-to-lower-the-price-of-ssds.html

Sourc

For those not in the know, the Formula E Championship is for electric cars, and they are no longer the milk floats that English people get stuck behind in narrow streets.

The new Official Qualcomm Safety Car is the BMW i8 but it will be charged wirelessly with an advanced Qualcomm Halo 7.2kW wireless charging system.

The Qualcomm Halo 7.2kW wireless charging system delivers twice the amount of energy to the BMW i8′s batteries per hour as compared to last year’s 3.6kW system.

This halves the full charge time, enabling the vehicle to fully charge in one hour. Employing Qualcomm Halo DD technology, with magnetic architecture optimization, ensures higher coupling coefficients and drives lower system currents, higher inefficiencies and the ability to support higher power levels.

A Qualcomm spokesman said that an open championship has encouraged teams to develop their own powertrain tech.

This ensures that the racing remains highly competitive, and it supports the goal of Formula E to advance the development of new technologies for electric vehicles and to bring those technologies, vital to sustainable mobility, to the attention of millions of people around the globe, a spokesman said.

Qualcomm’s general manager of wireless charging, Steve Pazol said Qualcomm was excited to continue its support of Formula E in this second season.

Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/computing-category/qualcomm-to-wirelessly-charge-bmws.html

The company has seen drops in key parts of the business and an overall drop in GAAP net revenue of eight percent year on year to $25.3bn, compared with $27.6bn in 2014.

The company failed to meet its projected net earnings per share, which it had put at $0.50-$0.52, with an actual figure of $0.47.

The figures reflect a time of deep uncertainty at the company as it moves ever closer to its demerger into HP and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. The latter began filing registration documents in July to assert its existence as a separate entity, while the boards of both companies were announced two weeks ago.

Dell CEO Michael Dell slammed the move in an exclusive interview with The INQUIRER, saying he would never do the same to his company.

The big boss at HP remained upbeat, despite the drop in dividend against expectations. “HP delivered results in the third quarter that reflect very strong performance in our Enterprise Group and substantial progress in turning around Enterprise Services,” said Meg Whitman, chairman, president and chief executive of HP.

“I am very pleased that we have continued to deliver the results we said we would, while remaining on track to execute one of the largest and most complex separations ever undertaken.”

To which we have to ask: “Which figures were you looking at, lady?”

Breaking down the figures by business unit, Personal Systems revenue was down 13 percent year on year, while notebook sales fell three percent and desktops 20 percent.

Printing was down nine percent, but with a 17.8 percent operating margin. HP has been looking at initiatives to create loyalty among print users such as ink subscriptions.

The Enterprise Group, soon to be spun off, was up two percent year on year, but Business Critical system revenue dropped by 21 percent, cancelled out by networking revenue which climbed 22 percent.

Enterprise Services revenue dropped 11 percent with a six percent margin, while software dropped six percent with a 20.6 percent margin. Software-as-a-service revenue dropped by four percent.

HP Financial Services was down six percent, despite a two percent decrease in net portfolio assets and a two percent decrease in financing volume.

Source- http://www.thegurureview.net/computing-category/is-hps-forthcoming-split-a-good-idea.html

According to a website set up by the company to share information about the incident, Web.com discovered the security breach on Aug. 13 as part of its ongoing security monitoring.

Attackers compromised credit card information for around 93,000 accounts, as well as the names and addresses associated with them. No other customer information like social security numbers was affected, the company said.

According to the company, the verification codes for the exposed credit cards were not leaked. However, there are websites on the Internet that don’t require such codes for purchases.

Web.com has notified affected customers via email and will also follow up with letters sent through the U.S. Postal Service. Those users can sign up for a one-year free credit monitoring service.

The company did not specify how the intruders gained access to its systems, but has hired a “nationally recognized” IT security firm to conduct an investigation.

Web.com provides a variety of online services, including website and Facebook page design, e-commerce and marketing solutions, domain registration and Web hosting. The company claims to have over 3.3 million customers and owns two other well known Web services companies: Register.com and Network Solutions.

Register.com and Network Solutions customers were not impacted by this breach unless they also purchased services directly from Web.com.

Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/aroundnet-category/web-com-latest-victim-of-credit-card-hacking.html

Beancounters at Digitimes Research said that sales totaled US$12 billion in the second quarter of 2015, increasing 1 per cent from the previous quarter,

Server-use DRAM products became the primary product line for SK Hynix for the first time in the second quarter as sales of its PC-use DRAM chips suffered a significant decline compared to a quarter earlier.

Price reductions of PC DRAM chips were greater than market expectations in the second quarter due to an oversupply in the market, affecting sales performance of SK Hynix.

Samsung was less affected by declining PC DRAM prices because mobile DRAM products accounted for 35 per cent of its total DRAM income.

Samsung memory and semiconductor revenues hit a record high in the second quarter.

For the third quarter, the bit growth rates of NAND flash shipments at Samsung will rise 10 per cent and SK Hynix will increase 13 per cent on quarter.

SK Hynix will manage a five to eight per cent growth while Samsung is expected to see shipments of its DRAM chips grow 12-14 per cent.

Digitimes Researcher flipped their iChing coins and came to the conclusion that Korea’s memory products are expected to increase 3 per cent on quarter and 12 per cent on year in the third quarter of 2015.

Source