23rd January 2008 Archive

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Apple's record Q1 no match for pessimism over economy

Someone activate the reality distortion field

Apple reported its best quarter ever, as sales of iPods, Macs and iPhones lifted profit by a staggering 57 per cent. But unexpectedly low guidance for the current quarter, combined with flattening iPod sales in the US, sparked analyst concerns that a flagging US economy might dampen Apple's future. For its current quarter, …

IT Channel 23 Jan 00:47
Spotted in the wild: Home router attack serves up counterfeit pages

Drive-by pharming

A security researcher says he has observed criminals using a new form of attack that causes victims to visit spoofed banking pages by secretly making changes to their high-speed home routers. According to Symantec researcher Zulfikar Ramzan, the attack changes a router's settings controlling the domain name system server that …

PC Builder 23 Jan 10:13
Drive-by download menace spreading fast

Marks host malware

Booby-trapped web pages are growing at an alarming rate with unsuspecting firms acting for nurseries for botnet farmers, according to a new study. Security watchers at Sophos are discovering 6,000 new infected webpages every day, the equivalent of one every 14 seconds. Four in five (83 per cent) of these webpages actually …

Software & Security 23 Jan 10:23
AMD rolls out Hybrid Graphics on budget DX10.1 GPUs

Radeon HD 3400 and 3600 series launched

AMD has rolled out its anticipated ATI Radeon HD 3400 and 3600 graphics chip families, pitching the DirectX 10.1 parts right at the budget end of the business. AMD's Radeon HD 3650: one GPU, many SKUs The 3600 series comprises just the 3650, but expect it to be available in a wide range of versions differentiated by memory …

PC Builder 23 Jan 10:37
Cisco draws up certification for design wannabes

Nitty-gritty testing

Cisco has beefed up its reseller certification programme to give customers the opportunity to get involved with the firm's network architecture strategy. The network giant said yesterday that individuals with the right credentials can now sit an exam which focuses on multi-vendor design principles, theory, and analysis. The …

IT Channel 23 Jan 11:43
Google and eBay thwart phishing redirection ruse

Clean up campaign bears fruit

High-profile websites have cleaned up their act after a small team of security researchers documented how they were unwittingly helping phishing fraudsters. Phishing scams often use "open redirector" exploits on major sites to make their attack URL look more legitimate. The trick also makes it more likely that fraudulent …

Software & Security 23 Jan 12:58
IBM bags fleet of global comms resellers

Cuddles Cisco, moons Microsoft

Big Blue has enlisted the likes of Cisco, NEC and Nortel as it reaches out for a larger chunk of the unified communications market. IBM said in a statement yesterday that it has scooped up a number of major original equipment manufacturer (OEM) embedded software and reseller deals, in the expectation it will help plump up …

Enterprise 23 Jan 13:11
AMD's 3870X2 GPU slips out despite last-minute delay

Whoops

AMD's twin-GPU ATI Radeon HD 3870X2 isn't supposed to be announced until next week, but some graphics card suppliers have accidentally unveiled products based upon it. Asus Japan, for example, today announced its EAH3870X2/HTDI/1G, a board with 1GB of GDDR 3 memory clocked at 1.8GHz effective and sitting on a 256-bit bus. The …

PC Builder 23 Jan 14:18
Will Microsoft parachute Windows 7 in early?

Curtains for Vista in 'H2 2009'

Redmond has refused to spike speculation that it is racing to pump out its successor to Vista – Windows 7 – earlier than originally expected. Windows 7 (AKA Blackcomb then Vienna) had initially been rumoured to hit the market in 2010, but expectations are rising that it will make a crash landing in the second half of 2009. …

Software & Security 23 Jan 14:22
Brocade's Backbone wants control of the data center

Big switch has got some nerve

Brocade has released the first product in its new data center platform aimed at extending the company's reach beyond the traditional SAN (storage area network) market. Back in October, Brocade announced it was working on a loosely, and we mean that in the loosest sense of the word, defined new hardware architecture called DFC …

Enterprise 23 Jan 16:27
Domain name gaffe launches Clearswift clients into e-mail panic

Mission critical app in critical condition

A domain name snafu at Clearswift, a company that filters email and web pages for objectionable content, wreaked havoc on some of its business customers when admins awoke to find their organizations were unable to send or receive email. The outage was caused when mimesweeper.biz, the domain where customers' email is routed …

Software & Security 23 Jan 20:09
VMware employs Stage Manager

Turn that SAP upgrade into a virtual headache

VMware this week let loose yet another management product, which pushes the virtualization specialist deeper into the data center. Say 'hello' to the beta of VMware Stage Manager. The Stage Manager code puts a virtual spin on the lengthy, often complicated process of installing, testing and rolling out new applications. …

Enterprise 23 Jan 20:32
IBM hits back against over-timers with pay cut

'These people' get what they deserve

IBM's technical support grunts may have won the battle for overtime pay, but the company has cooked a major catch to its peace agreement. Big Blue is now conceding that about 7,600 IT specialists and tech support workers (about 6 per cent of its US workforce) need to be reclassified as being eligible for overtime wages. But …

IT Channel 23 Jan 21:20
Hacked embassy websites found pushing malware

Visit our glorious malware!

Add embassy websites to the growing list of hacked internet destinations trying to infect visitor PCs with malware. Earlier this week, the site for the Netherlands Embassy in Russia was caught serving a script that tried to dupe people into installing software that made their machines part of a botnet, according to Ofer Elzam, …

Software & Security 23 Jan 21:46
DDR2 chip prices rebound

Keeping spotty head above US$1 water

The DRAM industry has seen DDR2 spot prices spike by 15-20 per cent in the past month, with eTT chips outpacing branded equivalents. DRAMeXchange, the memory biz market watcher, said the rise in sales of non-branded chips (in both 512Mb and 1Gb densities) suggest either an excess of eTT chips flooding the market, or that eTT …

The Register 23 Jan 23:14
Polyglot worm spreads over MSN

Mind your language

A namedropping MSN Trojan is doing the rounds through MSN Messenger. The IRCBOT-RB Trojan poses as messages containing links to pictures on social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook. Typical come-ons involve messages such as "Wanna see my pictures before i send em to facebook?". Clicking on a link takes users to …

Software & Security 23 Jan 23:15