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Can MB Challenge Tesla?
June 22, 2015 by admin
Filed under Around The Net
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On the heels of Tesla announcing a home and commercial battery product line, Mercedes-Benz unveiled its own brand of energy storage products for those with solar systems to store surplus power.
The Mercedes-Benz energy storage plants for private use are available for order now and are expected to ship in September.
The batteries were first developed for cars, but Mercedes-Benz said the energy storage units “meet the very highest safety and quality standards” for home use.
Up to eight battery modules with an energy capacity of 2.5 kWh can be combined into an energy storage plant with a capacity of 20 kWh.
“Households with their own photovoltaic systems can thus buffer surplus solar power virtually free of any losses,” the carmaker said in a statement.
What wasn’t announced by Mercedes-Benz was information about the size of or pricing for the new batteries.
In May, Tesla announced its Powerwall batteries for home use and its Powerpack batteries for commercial use. Today, Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced his company would double the power output of the Powerwall batteries but keep their prices the same.
Tesla’s Powerwall batteries will go from having a two-kilowatt (kW) steady power output and 3.3kW peak output to a 5kW steady output and 7kW peak output, Musk said. The price of the batteries will remain the same: $3,000 for the 7kW/hour (KWh) daily cycle version and $3,500 for the 10kWh backup UPS version. Total installation cost will run around $4,000, according to Musk.
Up to nine Powerwall battery units can be daisy-chained together on a wall to provide up to 90kWh of power.
The average U.S. household uses about 20 kWh to 25 kWh of power every day, according to GTM Research.
Tesla Energy’s new commercial-grade battery is called the Powerpack, and will sell in 100kWh modules for $25,000 each. Musk said the Powerpack can scale infinitely, even powering factories and small cities.
Mercedes-Benz’s batteries, being produced by subsidiary Deutsche Accumotive, are its first industrial-scale lithium-ion units, and they’ve already been tested “on the grid,” the company said.
Will The Drupal Flaw Be Catastrophic?
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The Drupal web content management system has been exposed as having backdoor access that could deliver your site to hackers.
The problem is not particularly new. Drupal warned about it earlier this month, but it still needs tackling as millions of websites may be at risk.
Drupal said that sites running version 7 really ought to have upgraded to 7.32 by now, because not doing so leaves them as open as a torn tea bag.
Initially the alert was about the threat, but the firm has updated its earlier advice and is now warning of in-the-wild attacks.
That earlier advice was about a problem in a database API. “A vulnerability in this API allows an attacker to send specially crafted requests resulting in arbitrary SQL execution,” warned Drupal in a security alert.
“Depending on the content of the requests this can lead to privilege escalation, arbitrary PHP execution, or other attacks. This vulnerability can be exploited by anonymous users.”
More recent information from the firm points users toward the released upgrade, and informs them that attacks started not long after the initial announcement.
“You should proceed under the assumption that every Drupal 7 website was compromised unless updated or patched before Oct 15th, 11pm UTC, that is seven hours after the announcement,” it said, adding that, even when updated, sites will have some cleaning up to do.
“If you have not updated or applied this patch, do so immediately, then continue reading this announcement; updating to version 7.32 or applying the patch fixes the vulnerability but does not fix an already compromised website,” it explains.
“If you find that your site is already patched but you didn’t do it, that can be a symptom that the site was compromised – some attacks have applied the patch as a way to guarantee they are the only attacker in control of the site.”
Gavin Millard, EMEA technical director at Tenable Network Security, advised people to follow Drupal’s advice.
“The so-called ‘Drupageddon’ vulnerability could have easily led to exploitation of any systems running the vulnerable code. With such an easy to exploit flaw, the chance of exfiltration of data or further exploitation are high,” he said.
“For those who have good security controls, reviewing of logs and traffic directed at the sites following the vulnerability being announced and the patch applied is common sense and highly advisable, with appropriate action taken if indicators of compromise are found.
“For those who don’t have such a good level of security or visibility into the logs, the advice from the Drupal team should be heeded. If you don’t know if you were exploited you should assume that you have been.”
UPS Breached
Credit and debit card information belonging to customers made purchases at 51 UPS Store Inc. locations in 24 states this year may have been illegally accessed as the result of an intrusion into the company’s networks.
In a statement on Wednesday, UPS said it was recently notified by law enforcement officials about a “broad-based malware intrusion” of its systems.
A subsequent investigation by an IT security firm showed that attackers had installed previously unknown malware on systems in more than four-dozen stores to gain access to cardholder data. The affected stores represent about 1% of the 4,470 UPS Store locations around the country.
The intrusion may have exposed data on transactions conducted at the stores between Jan. 20 and Aug. 11, 2014. “For most locations, the period of exposure to this malware began after March 26, 2014,” UPS said in a statement.
In addition to payment card information, the hackers also appear to have gained access to customer names, as well as postal and email addresses.
Each of the affected locations is individually owned and runs private networks that are not connected to other stores, UPS added. The company provided alist of affected locations.
The breach is the third significant one to be disclosed in the past week. Last Thursday, grocery store chain Supervalu announced it had suffered a malicious intrusion that exposed account data belonging to customers who had shopped at about 180 of the company’s stores in about a dozen states. The breach also affected customers from several other major grocery store chains for which Supervalu provides IT services.
Spam Is At A Two-Year High
Spam – particularly the kind with malicious attachments – is enjoying a growth spurt, reaching a two-year high overall, which includes the spike last fall just before the SpamIt operation folded its doors, a security firm says.
In fact spam traffic is about double what it was then, according to M86 Security Labs, which analyzes spam levels across selected domains.
“After multiple recent botnet takedowns, cybercriminal groups remain resilient clearly looking to build their botnets and distribute more fake AV in the process,” the company says in its blog. “It seems spammers have returned from a holiday break and are enthusiastically back to work.”
This report coincides with a report yesterday from Internet security company Commtouch, which says a spike in email-attached malware has just ended, but that further waves are expected.
M86 says in its blog that most of the spam is generated by the Cutwail botnet, and malicious spam accounted for 13% of the mix over the past week, which is unusually high, but even that spiked to 24% yesterday.
Get Ready For Email-Malware Spree
A sizeable uptick in malicious email attachments is just subsiding, but if history is any indicator,several smaller spikes are about to follow that use even more deceptive tactics than their predecessors.
The recent surge, fueled in large part by a flood of fake messages from UPS, is similar to one observed at the end of March in that the messages urge recipients to open an attachment that releases the malware on victims’ machines, according to Internet security firm Commtouch.
The earlier wave used a wide range of package-delivery services as senders, including FedEx and DHL, but the latest outbreak employs a wider variety of messages such as, “Dear client, recipient’s address is wrong”, “Dear User, Delivery Confirmation: FAILED”, and “Dear Client, We are not able to delivery [sic] the postal package”, according to the Commtouch blog.
All the messages then instruct the recipient to open the attachment that contains the malware, claiming it is an invoice or a form that needs to be filled out. “This time we see differences in the style of the emails – there is far more variation in the automatically-generated subjects, body and attachment names. Last time all the attachments were “UPS.exe” – this time there are many variations,” says Avi Turiel, director of product marketing at Commtouch in an email.
The attackers will evaluate the success of the attack by finding out how many recipients activated the malware, “Based on the infections vs. malware sent out they will probably try and figure out what they could improve in the next attack,” he says.