Month: April 2016

Enlarge / The Apple Watch is turning one. How has its first year treated it? (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

About a year ago, Apple announced and released its first Apple Watch. The long-rumored product was Apple’s first all-new product category since the iPad and its first under CEO Tim Cook. To say that expectations were high would be an understatement.

To date, we don’t really know much about how the Apple Watch has sold—Apple folds it into the “Other products” category along with the iPod, the Apple TV, Beats headphones, Airport routers, iPhone and iPad cases and covers, and whatever other little odds and ends the company sells. While revenue for that category has increased year-over-year by a significant margin since the Watch was introduced, the only thing we can really infer from that fact is “someone somewhere must be buying Apple Watches.”

However well it's selling, Apple's strategy with new products is to release them and then iterate continuously, working until all of the biggest complaints about the first-generation model have been addressed (or until people have forgotten about them or moved on to something else). After a full year of wearing the Apple Watch every single day, it's time to revisit the hardware, software, and some things I looked at in our original review to see where the platform is and where I think it ought to go in the next year or two.

The web console for Nuclear, the customer-friendly malware-as-a-service platform. Some Nucleus infrastructure operating on DigitalOcean servers was recently disrupted. (credit: Check Point)

Security researchers at Cisco Talos and Check Point have published reports detailing the inner workings of Nuclear, an "exploit kit" Web service that deployed malware onto victims' computers through malicious websites. While a significant percentage of Nuclear's infrastructure has been recently disrupted, the exploit kit is still operating—and looks to be a major contributor to the current crypto-ransomware epidemic.

Introduced in 2010, Nuclear has been used to target millions of victims worldwide, giving attackers the ability to tailor their attacks to specific locations and computer configurations. Though not as widely used as the well-known Angler exploit kit, it has been responsible for dropping Locky and other crypto-ransomware onto over 140,000 computers in over 200 countries, according to statistics collected by Check Point (PDF). The Locky campaign appeared to be placing the greatest demand on the Nuclear pay-to-exploit service.

Much of Talos' data on Nuclear comes from tracking down the source of its traffic—a cluster of "10 to 15" IP addresses that were responsible for "practically all" of the exploit infrastructure. Those addresses were being hosted by a single cloud hosting provider—DigitalOcean. The hosting company's security team confirmed the findings to Talos and took down the servers—sharing what was on them with security researchers.