Collaborating Viruses Showing Up

Two computer viruses are collaborating to defeat clean-up operations. Microsoft researcher Hyun Choi has found that the pair of viruses foil removal by regularly downloading updated versions of their malware partner.

It is the first time that such a defense plan has been noticed before. Choi said that the Vobfus and Beebone viruses, were regularly found together. Vobfus was the first to arrive on a machine, he said, and used different tactics to infect victims. Vobfus could be installed via booby-trapped links on websites, travel via network links to other machines or lurk on USB drives and infect machines they are plugged into.

Once installed, Vobfus downloaded Beebone which enrolled the machine into a botnet. After this the two start to work together to regularly download new versions of each other. If Vobfus was detected and remediated, it could have downloaded an undetected Beebone which can in turn download an undetected variant of Vobfus.

Vobfus become a persistent problem since 2009 when it first appeared.

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Yahoo Still Playing Pac-Man

Yahoo announced on Wednesday that it bought Qwiki for an undisclosed sum, as the firm’s spending spree continues.

Qwiki started out as a video focused search engine in 2011, before making its way into the iTunes Store as an app that turns images and videos into digital story boards.

Yahoo announced its acquisition of Qwiki on Wednesday, although it kept quiet about what it plans to do with the company and how much it spent. However, according to Allthingsd, Yahoo spent approximately $50m to further expand its digital offerings.

What’s more, while it’s unclear what Yahoo’s plans are at present, it’s likely that the firm is looking to challenge Vine and Instagram in the social video market.

Yahoo announced the news, naturally, on Tumblr. It said, “We’re excited to announce that Yahoo acquired Qwiki – a company that uses awesome technology to bring together pictures, music and video to capture the art of storytelling.

“We will continue to support the Qwiki app, and the team will join Yahoo in our New York city office to reimagine Yahoo’s storytelling experience. Stay tuned … there’s much more to come!”

Qwiki also had something to say, posting on its website, “Thank you for being a part of our story – one which is far from over. The Qwiki app will live on as a standalone entity inside Yahoo, where we will grow our thriving community and where our team will continue to work to help you share life’s best experiences.

“We are proud of the work we’ve done, and humbled by unwavering support from the NY tech community. New York is such a big part of who we are, and what we will become.”

Yahoo’s buyout of Qwiki is the latest in a series of acquisitions by the firm. Recently the firm announced that it bought Tumblr for a cool $1.1bn, with Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer promising “not to screw it up”.

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Intel Invests In Tablet Business

Intel has invested in E La Carte, a firm that designs tablets for restaurants.

Intel Capital, the chipmaker’s investment arm, has bought into in all sorts of companies outside of semiconductors in a bid to diversify the firm’s income. Now the chipmaker has invested in E La Carte, a firm that designs tablets for use in restaurants.

E La Carte raised a total of $13.5m in second round funding for its niche tablet business, with Intel Capital leading the investment. The firm said it would use the capital injection to grow the firm and to try to increase the number of restaurants that use its tablets.

Christine Herron, director of Intel Capital said, “E La Carte offers the most innovative and reliable guest tablet solution in the industry. We’re thrilled to further accelerate the company’s growth with not only capital, but also our significant resources and expertise in manufacturing, operations, and media.

“As E La Carte transforms the dining experience, we are creating a new market for both restaurant and guest services.”

E La Carte claims to have sold thousands of tablets to restaurants and cites a month on month growth rate of 35 percent. For Intel it is one way of getting a foothold in the tablet market, even if its Clovertrail+ tablets have yet to take the market by storm.

Rajat Suri, CEO of E La Carte said, “We are excited to work with Intel to grow our footprint to more restaurants across the country. With more than 200,000 casual-dining restaurants in the US, we see an enormous opportunity to make full service and fast casual restaurant experiences more enjoyable for guests, and more profitable for restaurant operators.”

Aside from the cash, Intel Capital will also provide advice in manufacturing, operations and media to E La Carte, presumably with the hope of taking the firm public in the future.

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Citrix Updates Xen Server

Citrix has released its open source Xen Server 6.2 to go up against VMware’s closed source free Vsphere hypervisor.

Citrix for years has maintained a free, open source version of its Xen hypervisor but it has been losing ground to KVM and in particular VMware’s free Vsphere hypervisor. Now the firm has released Xen Server 6.2 and a community website that the firm hopes will help increase support for its open source hypervisor.

According to Citrix, Xen Server 6.2 supports Cloud Stack, Open Stack and Citrix’s own Cloud Platform. The firm touted support for the latest guest operating systems including Microsoft’s Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012.

Sameer Dholakia, group VP and GM of Citrix’s Cloud Platforms Group said, “The cloud era has brought a lot of exciting opportunities for data center infrastructure, but the reality is that one size doesn’t fit all when it comes to virtualization.

“By empowering our users and partners with a committed open source strategy and community for XenServer – which already powers some of the largest clouds in the world – we are moving the needle in innovation to help customers of all sizes, and at all stages of their cloud strategies, to maximize the benefits they gain from vitualization and the cloud.”

Citrix said its Xen Server 6.2 supports its Xen Desktop software, including Intellicache and Dynamic Memory Control. The firm said it has added Desktop Director alerts so that administrators can be notified of low resources to try to prevent virtual machines from becoming unusuable.

Citrix will be hoping that as firms get used to the free version of Xen Server they will shell out for the full versions that cost up to $3,250. However, Citrix’s continued support of its free, open source Xen Serven means that VMware will have to continue offering a free version of Vsphere if it doesn’t want to leave a gap in the market.

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BlackBerry’s Secure Goes To iOS

BlackBerry continues to expand its support for Android and iOS with Secure Work Space, which separates work and personal apps and data, as the device maker tries to hold on to enterprise users by becoming more platform neutral.

Remaining relevant in a world where more than 9 out of 10 smartphones shipped are based on either Google’s Android or Apple’s iOS isn’t easy for BlackBerry. But the company still has fans in enterprise IT departments and hopes to remain an option for users by continuing to embrace the two dominant platforms. The company can already manage devices based on Android and iOS, and support for BlackBerry Messenger is on the way.

BlackBerry announced Secure Work Space in March and has now made good on a promise to ship it before June 30. The software is an add-on to BlackBerry Enterprise Service (BES) 10, and it adds a managed container to protect corporate data and applications running on Android and iOS devices.

Users get integrated email, calendar and contacts, as well as secure browser access to intranets and document editing capabilities. Data is protected both when stored on the device and when transferred to and from enterprise servers, according to BlackBerry.

“The concept is right and very similar to what AT&T offers with Toggle. Creating two different “personas” on mobile devices is becoming a best practice for enterprises. Buying it from BlackBerry is probably most relevant for enterprises that have a major commitment to BlackBerry 10 and BES 10,” said Leif-Olof Wallin, research vice president at Gartner.

On BlackBerry 10 smartphones, BlackBerry has tightly integrated a personal and a work environment with the Balance feature.

BlackBerry is far from the only vendor that has adopted this concept. One competitor is Good Technology, which on Tuesday announced a whole host of new applications compatible with its Dynamics Security Mobility platform, which includes support for both app wrapping and encrypted app containers. The list of newcomers includes Mobility for SAP and remote access app Splashtop.

But for those interested in Secure Work Space, which is based on software from OpenPeak, the BES 10 server software is free to download. Annual client access licenses for Secure Work Space are $99 per year and device. For enterprises that want to get their feet wet, the platform is also available as a 60-day free trial bundle that includes device management for BlackBerry 10, iOS and Android devices, as well as Secure Work Space licenses for 50 users.

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CPU-Z Hits Android

Popular hardware identification tool CPU-Z has hit the Google Play Store. Like the PC version, the apps is completely free and it offers tons of information about your device.

It identified the SoC on board, along with the architecture and clock speed for each core. It also figures out the exact device brand, amount of RAM, storage, battery level, status and temperature. It can tap into the device’s sensor array, which is more of a gimmick than anything useful.

It’s worth noting that it is still in beta, so there might be some kinks to work out. If you’re eager to give it a go, you can find it here. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cpuid.cpu_z.

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Will Icahn Boot Michael Dell?

Carl Icahn reportedly is drawing up a shortlist of potential Dell CEO replacements for Michael Dell should his bid for the company be successful.

Icahn and Southeastern Asset Management have made a bid to rival that of Michael Dell and Silver Lake Partners in the high stakes fight over Dell and its board. Now it is being reported that Icahn has already started drawing up a list of candidates that he and Southeastern Asset Management will propose as replacements for Michael Dell as CEO of Dell.

Icahn has previously warned that should his offer for Dell be accepted by the shareholders he would look to not only oust Michael Dell as CEO but replace the firm’s board of directors. Reuters reports that Icahn is casting his net far and wide, including consideration of former HP CEO and current Oracle co-president Mark Hurd.

According to Reuters’ sources Cisco director Michael Capellas, IBM services head Michael Daniels and Oracle’s Hurd are all in the frame, although none of the individuals would confirm having been approached by Icahn.

Michael Dell’s initial plan to buy back the company he founded has met with strong opposition by existing shareholders, some of whom think they are getting shortchanged. According to Michael Dell, the firm’s reorganisation into an enterprise IT vendor will be easier if the company goes private and doesn’t face investor and market scrutiny.

So far Dell’s board is backing Michael Dell’s and Silver Lake Partners’ buyout offer, suggesting that Icahn’s offer is short of cash. However some of Dell’s investors might like the drastic action that Icahn is promising, along with the fact that his offer allows existing shareholders to maintain a diluted stake in the company.

Should Icahn manage to get his takeover offer accepted by Dell’s shareholders, it will set up a sensational return to the PC industry for Hurd and give Dell renewed momentum to compete with HP.

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IBM Buys SoftLayer

IBM has signed an agreement to purchase SoftLayer Technologies, as it looks to accelerate the build-out of its public cloud infrastructure. The company is also forming a services division to back up the push.

The financial details of the deal were not announced, but SoftLayer is the world’s largest privately held cloud computing infrastructure provider, according to IBM.

IBM already has an offering that includes private, public and hybrid cloud platforms. The acquisition of SoftLayer will give it a more complete in-house offering, as enterprises look to keep some applications in the data center, while others are moved to public clouds.

SoftLayer has about 21,000 customers and an infrastructure that includes 13 data centers in the U.S., Asia and Europe, according to IBM. SoftLayer allows enterprises to buy compute power on either dedicated or shared servers.

Following the close of the acquisition of SoftLayer, which is expected in the third quarter, a new division will combine its services with IBM’s SmartCloud. IBM expects to reach $7 billion annually in cloud revenue by the end of 2015, it said.

Success is far from certain: The public cloud market is becoming increasingly competitive as dedicated cloud providers, telecom operators and IT vendors such as Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard all want a piece. The growing competition should be a good thing for customers if it drives down prices. For example, Microsoft has already committed to matching Amazon Web Services prices for commodity services such as computing, storage and bandwidth.

Not all hardware vendors feel it’s necessary to have their own public cloud. Last month, Dell changed strategy and said it would work with partners including Joyent, instead of having its own cloud.

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McAffee See Sure In Spam

The first three months of 2013 have seen a surge in spam volume, as well as a growing number of samples of the Koobface social networking worm and master boot record (MBR) infecting malware, according to antivirus vendor McAfee.

After remaining relatively stable throughout 2012, spam levels rose during the first quarter of 2013, reaching the highest volume seen in the past two years, McAfee said in a report released Monday.

The amount of spam originating from some countries rose dramatically, McAfee said. Spam from Belarus increased by 540% while spam originating in Kazakhstan grew 150%.

Cutwail, also known as Pushdo, was the most prevalent spam-sending botnet during the first quarter, McAfee said.

The increased Pushdo activity has recently been observed by other security companies as well. Last month, researchers from security firm Damballa found a new variant of the Pushdo malware that’s more resilient to coordinated takedown efforts.

On the malware front, McAfee has also seen a surge in the number of Koobface samples, which reached previously unseen levels during the first quarter of 2013. First discovered in 2008, Koobface is a worm that spreads via social networking sites, especially through Facebook, by hijacking user accounts.

The number of malware samples designed to infect a computer’s master boot record (MBR) also reached a record high during the first three months of 2013, after increasing during the last quarter of 2012 as well, McAfee said.

The MBR is a special section on a hard disk drive that contains information about its partitions and is used during the system startup operation. “Compromising the MBR offers an attacker a wide variety of control, persistence, and deep penetration,” the McAfee researchers said in the report.

The MBR attacks seen during the first quarter involved malware like StealthMBR, also known as Mebroot; Tidserv, also known as Alureon, TDSS and TDL; Cidox and Shamoon, they said.

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Will Qualcomm Be First?

We could not get the right timeframe for the launch of Qualcomm’s successor to the high-end Snapdragon 800, but there is no doubt that Qualcomm, Samsung, Nvidia and other ARM supporters are thinking about 20nm products where some of them will be based on Cortex A57.

Qualcomm has its own Krait core that can be adapted to 20nm and follow up the success of Snapdragon 600 and the soon to come Snapdragon 800. It turns out that it traditionally takes 18 to 24 months for the mobile industry to shift from one process to another and Qualcomm had its first 28nm part in April 2012, with the Snapdragon S4, used in the HTC One S. The first ever 28nm part from Qualcomm was the Snapdragon S4 MSM8260A that is now more than a year old and a relatively obsolete product.

Less than a year after the first 28nm product Qualcomm followed up with the Snapdragon 600 that is shipping in millions of high end devices right now. In a month or two it plans to release Snapdragon 800 based on new Krait 400 core and add a new core and get even better performance.

The next step is the 20nm core that should start shipping before the end of 1H 2014. We would not be surprised to see 20nm Krait demoed at CES 2014 already in January, see more of it at the Mobile World Congress in February and the volume shipment to follow in early Q2 2014. This is the expected schedule and not something we got from Qualcomm.

The only official world we got is that the new generation traditionally comes 18 to 24 months after the first iteration of a current one. This can give you an idea that Tegra 5, codenamed Logan, should show up at a similar time, along with Samsung’s 20nm Exynos.

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