Bonets Attack U.S. Banks

Evidence collected from a website that was recently used to flood U.S. banks with junk traffic suggests that the responsible parties behind the ongoing DDoS attack campaign against U.S. financial institutions — thought by some to be the work of Iran — are using botnets for hire.

The compromised website contained a PHP-based backdoor script that was regularly instructed to send numerous HTTP and UDP (User Datagram Protocol) requests to the websites of several U.S. banks, including PNC Bank, HSBC and Fifth Third Bank, Ronen Atias, a security analyst at Web security services provider Incapsula, said Tuesday in a blog post.

Atias described the compromised site as a “small and seemingly harmless general interest UK website” that recently signed up for Incapsula’s services.

An analysis of the site and the server logs revealed that attackers were instructing the rogue script to send junk traffic to U.S. banking sites for limited periods of time varying between seven minutes and one hour. The commands were being renewed as soon as the banking sites showed signs of recovery, Atias said.

During breaks from attacking financial websites the backdoor script was being instructed to attack unrelated commercial and e-commerce sites. “This all led us to believe that we were monitoring the activities of a Botnet for hire,” Atias said.

“The use of a Web Site as a Botnet zombie for hire did not surprise us,” the security analyst wrote. “After all, this is just a part of a growing trend we’re seeing in our DDoS prevention work.”

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Raspberry Pi Gets A Store

Raspberry Pi Foundation has opened a store to enable users to easily download applications that run on the credit-card sized computer.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation said it partnered with Indiecity and Velocix to create a store for applications that run on the Raspberry Pi computer. The Foundation said that the store itself is an application that runs under its Raspbian Linux distribution and at launch has 23 applications available for download.

The Raspberry Pi Store contains games such as Freeciv alongside applications such as Libreoffice and Asterisk. The Raspberry Pi Foundation said its store accepts compiled binaries, Python code, images, audio and video.

The Raspberry Pi Store will allow developers to charge for applications, with the Foundation saying that it hopes to see a mix of hobbyist and commercial software. The Foundation also asked users that download applications to review them in order to improve the results put out by its recommendations system.

While the Raspberry Pi was initially intended to help teach people how to program, the device has gained wider popularity due to the fact that its hardware can run many typical PC desktop applications. The Foundation’s Raspberry Pi Store will make it easier for users to find and install applications on the device, which can only be a good thing for the Raspberry Pi Foundation and Linux adoption.

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Motorola To Close More Locations

Motorola Mobility will shut down most operations in South Korea in 2013 as part of an ongoing restructuring under Google ownership.

The decision is estimated to displace about 500 jobs in South Korea and follows a decision made a month ago to close down most international Motorola websites and to lay off about 4,000 workers.

Motorola Mobility said in a statement that it began telling staff in South Korea on Monday about “plans to close most of our operations in Korea, including our research and development and consumer mobile device marketing organization.”

The statement said the changes “reflect our plans to consolidate our global R&D efforts to foster collaboration, and to focus more attention on markets where we are best positioned to compete effectively.”

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Yahoo Going Up

Yahoo Inc shares climbed to their highest level in a year and a half, as investor confidence seems to be increasing that new Chief Executive Marissa Mayer can orchestrate a comeback that eluded three of her predecessors.

The Internet pioneer has yet to actually provide Wall Street with any hard evidence that its business is turning a corner – and she has warned that it will be a lengthy job – but investor faith in the ex-Google executive is running high.

Hedge funds Tiger Global Management and Greenlight Capital Management recently disclosed large stakes in Yahoo, accumulated during the third quarter.

“Money managers are staring to want to own this name again,” said Colin Gillis, an analyst with BGC Partners.

“For the amount of traffic they have, and the assets they have, they should be able to squeeze some value out of that,” Gillis said, referring to Yahoo. With Mayer at the helm, he said, Yahoo has “finally got somebody who the market believes can do that.”

Gravity Capital Management’s Adam Seessel said that Mayer’s recruitment of various Google Inc employees, including recently hired Yahoo Chief Operating Officer Henrique de Castro, has also helped burnish Yahoo’s image.

“What the market is seeing is not (financial) numbers so much as they’re seeing people voting with their feet, people moving from Google to Yahoo,” said Seessel, whose firm owns Yahoo shares.

“All these people from Google wouldn’t be following her if they didn’t think that she didn’t have some good cards to play,” he said.

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Baidu Heads To The Cloud

China’s largest search engine Baidu said on Monday that they would provide 30GB of free cloud storage to Android devices built with certain Qualcomm chips, in what’s the latest move by the company to build a presence in the country’s mobile services sector.

Baidu’s limited-time offer applies in China to two of Qualcomm’s latest chips, the Snapdragon S4 MSM 8×25 processor, and the Snapdragon S4 MSM 8x25Q processor. Users activating Baidu’s cloud service will receive 15GB of free cloud storage over the device’s lifetime, and an additional 15GB of storage free for one year.

As of Monday phones containing the chips, from Chinese manufacturers including Lenovo and Huawei, will ship with the free Baidu cloud storage enabled as a result of the partnership with Qualcomm.

Baidu is offering the free storage after the company in September declared China’s mobile Internet space as its next major focus, and announced a $1.6 billion investment to build a new cloud computing center.

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Is Google Going Wireless?

They already sells phones and tablets, provides a wealth of online services and has been laying high-speed fiber to people’s homes. Now Google is apparently  weighing the possibility of a wireless network service as well.

Google has been in talks with satellite TV provider Dish Network over a possible partnership to build out a wireless service that would rival those from carriers such as AT&T and Sprint, the Wall Street Journal reported late last week.

The talks are at an early stage and could amount to nothing, and Google is just one of many companies Dish is talking to, according to the Journal, which cited anonymous sources. But it raises the prospect that Google might expand its business in a new direction.

Dish has been buying spectrum that could support a wireless service, although it still needs regulatory approval to set one up. In an interview with the Journal Thursday, CEO Charlie Ergen said the partners Dish is talking to include companies that don’t currently have a wireless business.

Google declined to comment on the report, the newspaper said.

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Samsung And Yahoo Ink A Deal

Yahoo announced a deal on Tuesday with Samsung to integrate its Broadcast Interactivity service into the company’s Smart TVs.

The agreement will allow Yahoo to push real-time content alongside TV shows and advertisements on Samsung TVs, such as “subtle, on-screen prompts” that inform viewers of additional content that they can watch.

“With the touch of a remote, connected tablet or phone, Samsung Smart TV viewers can easily surface content or offers related to the TV shows and commercials they are watching,” Samsung said.

TV programmers can use the integration feature to provide Samsung TV customers with “complementary content” such as trivia, additional information about the show being watched and interactive gaming.

Showtime Networks and National Geographic Channel are two of the first TV programming partners that will take advantage of the agreement, Yahoo said.

If TV ads aren’t annoying enough, Yahoo said the partnership also creates new forms of advertising by “extending traditional 30-second commercials into immediate actions”.

In other words, with broadcast interactivity enabled commercials, advertisers can embed “calls-to-action” for downloading apps or digital media, providing coupons, ordering samples, reading reviews or viewing product information. Just in case you really want to know more about that Mr Muscle sink unblocker, or the next JML cleaning gadget that is set to transform your home life forever.

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Amazon Goes To Court

Amazon is suing Daniel Powers, its ex VP in charge of global sales for Amazon Web Services because he joined Google in a cloud role.

Taking the new job, asserts Amazon, violates Powers’ non-compete agreement with Amazon, which let Powers go this summer with a reasonable severance package.

There is a risk that Powers could take important information that he learned about the Amazon web services business to its rival, Google, and that is what the firm is seeking to stop.

According to Geekwire Amazon wants an injunction against Powers to prevent him from “engaging in any activities that directly or indirectly support any aspect of Google’s cloud computing business”.

A court filing claims that Amazon has an agreement with Powers that says he will not join a rival for a “limited time following the termination of his employment”.

Powers, it warns, is a veteran who knows the cloud business from “top to bottom”, adding that he has “acquired and currently possesses extensive knowledge of Amazon’s trade secrets and its highly confidential information”.

The complaint says that he has extensive and detailed information about Amazon Web Services’ prospects, business, potential business partners, pricing strategies and goals.

Amazon has not provided us with further comment.

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RIM’s PlayBook Tablet Pulled

Models of Research in Motion’s PlayBook tablet have been yanked from online stores of some top retailers in the U.S. and Canada, a move one analyst said could mean that the company is gearing up for a successor tablet.

The PlayBook tablet is no longer listed on the online stores of consumer electronics retailers including Wal-Mart, Best Buy, RadioShack and Staples. The products are listed as being out of stock in Office Depot’s online store.

In the BlackBerry maker’s home country of Canada, only the 32GB model is available on the websites of retailers Futureshop and Best Buy Canada, at a discounted rate of C$149.99 ($153). The 16GB and 64GB PlayBook models are out of stock.

However, the tablets remain available on RIM’s own online store.

RIM did not respond to requests for comment.

The first PlayBook shipped in April 19, starting at $500 for a 16GB model, but has sold poorly since. PlayBook sales dropped to about 130,000 in RIM’s most recent fiscal quarter, which ended on Sept. 1.

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Oracle And Nokia Make A Deal

Nokia Oyj has agreed to grant Oracle Corp’s customers access to its mapping products, as the wireless phone company attempts to expand its location services business.

The Finnish company, which bought the world’s largest digital mapping firm, Navteq, in 2008, has been looking for ways to boost the business and recently signed mapping deals with Groupon Inc and Amazon.Com Inc.

In stark contrast with Nokia’s troubled mobile phone operation, sales at the location business grew last quarter, though it still generates only 4 percent of group revenue.

Oracle has developed a link between its own software and the Nokia Location Platform software, Nokia said on Monday. This enables the U.S. company’s business users to access the mapping services through its products.

Financial details of the deal were not disclosed, but Nokia said Oracle users would license Location Platform from Nokia for use in Oracle applications.

“Nokia has been on a mission for the last 18 months to sign mapping and location deals with large internet players. The deal with Oracle extends this,” CCS Insight analyst Martin Garner said.

Last week Apple publicly apologized after customer complaints about errors in its maps, which have been put on its latest phone operating system instead of Google Inc’s mapping service.

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