Are CCTV Cameras Hackable?

When the nosy British bought CCTV cameras, worried citizens were told that they could not be hacked.

Now a US security expert says he has identified ways to remotely attack high-end surveillance cameras used by industrial plants, prisons, banks and the military. Craig Heffner, said he discovered the previously unreported bugs in digital video surveillance equipment from firms including Cisco, D-Link and TRENDnet.

They could use it as a pivot point, an initial foothold, to get into the network and start attacking internal systems. Heffner said that it was a significant threat as somebody could potentially access a camera and view it. Or they could also use it as a pivot point, an initial foothold, to get into the network and start attacking internal systems.

He will show how to exploit these bugs at the Black Hat hacking conference, which starts on July 31 in Las Vegas. Heffner said he has discovered hundreds of thousands of surveillance cameras that can be accessed via the public internet.

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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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Apple Raising Prices In Japan

Apple Inc increased prices of iPads and iPods in Japan on Friday, becoming the highest-profile brand to join a growing list of foreign companies asking Japanese consumers to pay more as a weakening yen squeezes profit.

Some U.S. companies have inoculated themselves at least temporarily against the yen’s fall through financial hedging instruments, while others are charging customers more.

The yen has fallen more than 20 percent against the U.S. dollar since mid-November when then-opposition leader Shinzo Abe, who is now prime minister, prescribed a dose of radical monetary easing to reverse years of sliding consumer prices as part of a deflation-fighting policy, dubbed “Abenomics.”

The Bank of Japan, under a new Abe-backed governor, in April promised to inject $1.4 trillion into the economy in less than two years to achieve 2 percent inflation in roughly two years.

Price rises are rare in Japan, which has suffered 15 years of low-grade deflation. A few other foreign brands have also raised prices on products, providing an early sign of inflation for Abe and an indication that these companies feel consumer demand is strong enough to withstand the increases.

Still, price rises would have to spread much more widely, especially to lower-end discretionary goods, to show that Abe’s aggressive policies are helping reinvigorate the economy.

Apple, one of the most visible foreign companies in Japan, raised the price of iPads by up to 13,000 yen ($130) at its local stores. The 64-gigabyte iPad will now cost 69,800 yen, up from 58,800 yen a day ago, an Apple store employee said. The 128-gigabyte model will cost 79,800 yen compared with 66,800 yen.

Apple also upped prices of its iPod music players by as much as 6,000 yen and its iPad Mini by 8,000 yen.

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Will Arm/Atom CPUs Replace Xeon/Opteron?

Analyst are saying that smartphone chips could one day replace the Xeon and Opteron processors used in most of the world’s top supercomputers. In a paper in a paper titled “Are mobile processors ready for HPC?” researchers at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center wrote that less expensive chips bumping out faster but higher-priced processors in high-performance systems.

In 1993, the list of the world’s fastest supercomputers, known as the Top500, was dominated by systems based on vector processors. They were nudged out by less expensive RISC processors. RISC chips were eventually replaced by cheaper commodity processors like Intel’s Xeon and AMD Opteron and now mobile chips are likely to take over.

The transitions had a common thread, the researchers wrote: Microprocessors killed the vector supercomputers because they were “significantly cheaper and greener,” the report said. At the moment low-power chips based on designs ARM fit the bill, but Intel is likely to catch up so it is not likely to mean the death of x86.

The report compared Samsung’s 1.7GHz dual-core Exynos 5250, Nvidia’s 1.3GHz quad-core Tegra 3 and Intel’s 2.4GHz quad-core Core i7-2760QM – which is a desktop chip, rather than a server chip. The researchers said they found that ARM processors were more power-efficient on single-core performance than the Intel processor, and that ARM chips can scale effectively in HPC environments. On a multi-core basis, the ARM chips were as efficient as Intel x86 chips at the same clock frequency, but Intel was more efficient at the highest performance level, the researchers said.

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Lenovo Soars

PC sales in China and high growth in smartphones sales helped boost Lenovo’s net profit for its fiscal fourth quarter by 90% year-over-year.

For the quarter ended March 31, Lenovo’s net profit was $127 million, the company said on Thursday. Revenue shattered records and was at $7.8 billion, growing 4% from the same period last year.

In Lenovo’s home market of China, the company had an operating margin of 4.9%, an increase of 8% year-over-year. The company also saw continued profitability in its mobile devices business, which makes up 9% of its overall sales. At the end of the quarter, Lenovo’s smartphone shipments were up 206% year-over-year.

Globally, PC shipments were down 13.9% year-over-year in the quarter, the market’s steepest decline since research firm IDC began tracking the market in 1994. Lenovo itself posted flat year-over-year PC shipment growth in the period.

Smartphone and tablet popularity have hurt PC sales, according to analysts. Computers running Microsoft’s Windows 8 have also failed to drum up consumer interest in the previous two quarters.

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Lenovo, however, has managed to weather the slowdown by taking advantage of the Chinese PC market, where it has an over 30% market share. Close to half of the company’s revenue comes from the country, now the world’s largest PC market.

The company is now close to surpassing leading PC vendor HP for the top spot. The company had a 15.3% share of the market in this year’s first quarter, while HP had a 15.7% share.

But the Chinese PC maker also plans to focus more of its investment on tablets, smartphones and enterprise hardware, the company’s CEO Yang Yuanqing said in a statement. Earlier this year, Lenovo also reorganized its operations to sharpen the company’s branding and compete better in high-end products.

For the current fiscal year, Lenovo aims to ship 50 million smartphones, up from 30 million last year, Yang said Thursday in an earnings call. It aims to ship 10 million tablets, a five-fold increase from the previous fiscal year.

Most of Lenovo’s smartphone sales come from China, but the company has also begun selling handsets in the emerging markets of Russia, India, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam. In addition, Lenovo is preparing to bring its smartphones to the U.S. and European markets, Yang said, without saying when.

Adobe Reader Security Issue Found

McAfee has discovered a vulnerability in Adobe’s Reader program that allows people to track the usage of a PDF file.

“Recently, we detected some unusual PDF samples,” McAfee’s Haifei Li said in a blog post. “After some investigation, we successfully identified that the samples are exploiting an unpatched security issue in every version of Adobe Reader.”

The affected versions of Adobe Reader also include the latest “sandboxed” Reader XI (11.0.2).

McAfee said that the issue is not a “serious problem” because it doesn’t enable code execution, however it does permit the sender to see when and where a PDF file has been opened.

This vulnerability could only be dangerous if hackers exploited it to collect sensitive information such as IP address, internet service provider (ISP), or even the victim’s computing routine to eventually launch an advanced persistent threat (APT).

McAfee said that it is unsure who is exploiting this issue or why, but have found the PDFs to be delivered by an “email tracking service” provider.

The vulnerability works when a specific PDF JavaScript API is called with the first parameter having a UNC-located resource.

“Adobe Reader will access that UNC resource. However, this action is normally blocked and creates a warning dialog,” Li said. “The danger is that if the second parameter is provided with a special value, it changes the API’s behavior. In this situation, if the UNC resource exists, we see the warning dialog.

“However, if the UNC resource does not exist, the warning dialog will not appear even though the TCP traffic has already gone.”

McAfee said that it has reported the issue to Adobe and is waiting for their confirmation and a future patch. Adobe wasn’t immediately available for comment at the time of writing.

“In addition, our analysis suggests that more information could be collected by calling various PDF Javascript APIs. For example, the document’s location on the system could be obtained by calling the Javascript “this.path” value,” Li added.

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Xerox Moving Into IT Services

Printer and copier maker Xerox Corp forecast current-quarter earnings below estimates as it quickens efforts to transform itself into a technology services provider.

Xerox, whose shares were little changed at midday, also offers services such as managing toll systems and healthcare programs to counter sluggish growth in its printers and copiers business, which accounts for about 40 percent of its revenue.

Services is now the larger part of the company’s business and lower margins in IT and business process outsourcing is dragging overall margins.

The company said it expects second-quarter revenue from its document technology business, which includes printers and copiers, to decline in the mid-single digits. Revenue fell 9 percent to $2.14 billion in the business in the first quarter.

Based in Norwalk, Connecticut, Xerox moved into business services with its purchase of Affiliated Computer Services Inc (ACS) for $5.5 billion in 2009 – the company’s biggest deal in its 106-year history.

Xerox said it plans to quicken the pace of a restructuring plan kicked off in the last quarter of 2012 and included a 2-cent restructuring charge in its second-quarter forecast.

Xerox said it expects flattish revenue for the full year, compared with previous expectations of up to a 2 percent growth, it said on a conference call with analysts.

The company said it was on track to reach its target of adjusted EPS of $1.09 to $1.15 for the full year and to generate operating cash flow of $2.1 billion to $2.4 billion.

“Europe remains weak. US remains stable, but weak. We have not seen a pickup in the US,” Xerox CEO Ursula Burns said on a conference call with analysts.

“We did see a slowdown, a bit of a slowdown, in some developing market economies. But our business model is fairly resilient in the developing markets,” she said.

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EPIC Wants Biometric Data From The FBI

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) has pressed the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for access to its database of US citizens’ biometric data.

EPIC already tried to get access twice last September, and now it is trying again. It said that it has sent repeated freedom of information act requests regarding the database, and that the FBI has failed to respond. Now it has filed a lawsuit for access (PDF).

It warned that the Next Generation Identification system (NGI) is a massive database that “when completed, [will] be the largest biometric database in the world”.

The NGI will use CCTV systems and facial recognition, and it includes DNA profiles, iris scans, palm prints, voice identification profiles, photographs, and other “identifying information”.

The FBI has an information page about the NGI, and there it said that photographs of tattoos are also included and that the system is designed to speed up suspect detection and response times.

“The NGI system will offer state-of-the-art biometric identification services and provide a flexible framework of core capabilities that will serve as a platform for multimodal functionality,” it said.

“The NGI Program Office mission is to reduce terrorist and criminal activities by improving and expanding biometric identification and criminal history information services through research, evaluation, and implementation of advanced technology”.

In its lawsuit EPIC said that the NGI database will be used for non law enforcement purposes and will be made available to “private entities”.

EPIC said that it has asked the FBI to provide information including “contracts with commercial entities and technical specifications”.

It said that so far it has received no information from the FBI in response to its requests.

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Facebook Goes DRAM

Facebook has come up with a data cache which runs on flash memory instead of DRAM. Dubbed McDipper it saves money while still delivering higher performance than disk.

The system is a Facebook-built implementation of the popular memcached key-value store the only difference is that runs on flash memory rather than pricier DRAM. Memcached is the open-source key-value store that caches frequently accessed data in memory so applications can access and serve it faster than if it were stored on hard disks.

Facebook runs thousands of memcached servers to power its various applications. The only downside is that it is expensive. McDipper can handle working sets that had very large footprints but moderate to low request rates. It provides up to 20 times the capacity per server and still supports tens of thousands of operations per second.

According to Gigaom, Facebook has deployed McDipper for a handful of these workloads. This has reduced the total number of deployed servers in some pools by as much as 90 per cent while still delivering more than 90 per cent of get responses with sub-millisecond latencies.

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AT&T Gets GM

AT&T Monday said it will provide LTE wireless services to most General Motors automobiles starting in 2014 in the U.S. and Canada.

A multi-year agreement between AT&T and GM subsidiary OnStar calls for vehicles to continue getting OnStar’s safety and security services while adding information and entertainment services for backseat drivers, AT&T said.

Millions of vehicles will be affected, as AT&T rolls out LTE to reach 300 million people in the U.S. by the end of 2014.

The AT&T-GM announcement is part of an explosion in the number of devices connected to the Internet, many of them wirelessly, in what some have termed the “Internet of Things.”

“The is a big announcement for connected devices,” Glenn Lurie, president of emerging enterprises and partnerships at AT&T, said in an interview at Mobile World Congress here.

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