news.buyenne.com

(credit: Garrett Ewald)

Technicians from the global payment network SWIFT left Bangladesh's Central Bank vulnerable to an attack that saw attackers steal $81 million, according to Bangladeshi police and bank officials speaking to Reuters.

In February, unknown hackers broke into the Bangladesh Bank and almost got away with just shy of $1 billion. In the event, their fraudulent transactions were cancelled after they managed to transfer $81 million when a typo raised concerns about one of the transactions. That money is still unrecovered. In April, we learned that preliminary investigations had revealed the use of cheap networking and a lack of firewalls, both contributing to the attack.

The new report sheds further light on the incident. The SWIFT organization is owned by 3,000 financial companies and operates a network for sending financial transactions between financial institutions. Technicians from the organization worked at the central bank last year when they were connecting the Bangladesh's real-time gross settlement (RTGS) system to the SWIFT network. Mohammad Shah Alam, leading the probe for the Bangladesh police, told Reuters that the technicians doing this work left "a lot of loopholes" that were not subsequently addressed.

(credit: Marco Paköeningrat Follow)

A US Senate committee on Tuesday demanded that Facebook Chairman Mark Zuckerberg respond to a Monday report in Gizmodo that the social networking site's workers "routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network's influential 'trending' news section."

South Dakota Republican Sen. John Thune, chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, labeled the allegations in the anonymously sourced Gizmodo piece "serious."

"Facebook must answer these serious allegations and hold those responsible to account if there has been political bias in the dissemination of trending news,” Thune said in a statement. "Any attempt by a neutral and inclusive social media platform to censor or manipulate political discussion is an abuse of trust and inconsistent with the values of an open Internet."

You can check out any time you want, and so can card-data stealing criminals. (credit: Novotel Century Hong Kong Hotel)

Hotel chains focus on hospitality, but their security practices have made them entirely too hospitable a target for data theft. Hotels have been brutalized over the past year by a wave of point-of-sale system breaches that have exposed hundreds of thousands of guests' credit card accounts. And those attacks, as a recent episode described by Panda Security's Luis Corrons demonstrates, have become increasingly targeted—in some cases using "spear-phishing" e-mails and malware crafted specifically for the target to gain access to hotels' networks.

In one incident that was uncovered recently, the target "was a small luxury hotel chain," Corrons told Ars. "We discovered the attack, and it was really customized for the specific hotel. This was 100 percent tailored to the specific target."

The attackers used a Word document from the hotel itself—one frequently used by the hotel to allow customers to authorize credit card charges in advance of a stay. The document was actually enclosed as part of a self-extracting file, which also installed two other files on the target machine—one of them an installer for backdoor malware named "adobeUpd.dll" to disguise it and the other a Windows .cmd batch script that both opens the Word document and launches the backdoor.

(credit: Alan Cleaver)

A suburban San Francisco man was sentenced to 12 years in prison Monday following his conviction of robbing a Craigslist patron at gunpoint.

The 38-year-old defendant, Tuan Ngoc Luong, was nabbed last year during a sting operation when he tried to rob an undercover Alameda County sheriff's deputy, according to court documents (PDF). His sentence was lengthy because, in part, he was found guilty of being a convicted felon in possession of a Glock semi-automatic pistol.

The investigation began last year after a man saw a Craigslist advertisement about a car—a 1996 Acura Integra—and contacted the seller, who turned out to be the defendant. The two met at a local Bay Area subway station. During a late-evening test drive, the victim got out of the car to inspect it and wanted to buy it for $1,100. The defendant, who went by the name Michael, "pointed a black semi-automatic handgun at the victim and demanded money," according to a police affidavit.

Over the course of the spring, I had the chance to talk about science journalism at a number of universities. (Thanks to the folks at Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Illinois in Chicago for inviting me.) It took about 45 minutes for me to discuss the issues involved and provide a number of examples of things gone badly wrong.

On Sunday, John Oliver managed to cover the same ground and more, and he did it with a lot more flair and humor—all in under 20 minutes. If you have the time, it's well worth a watch.

On Monday, all these science journalism problems were driven home yet again. The University of Gothenburg issued a press release suggesting that hunger influences our decision-making processes. This finding shouldn't be a huge surprise; anything that distracts us seems to influence our ability to make decisions. But the release itself is a perfect example of many of the problems Oliver pointed out.

(credit: Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock)

SAN FRANCISCO—Google lawyer Robert Van Nest delivered a spirited defense to Oracle's accusations to a jury on Tuesday, telling them that Android was no shortcut—it was built with sweat and hard work.

"Google engineers spent several years and hundreds of millions of dollars to create Android using Google know-how," he said. "They created a brand new platform for innovation in smartphones and tablets that was beyond anything any of us had ever seen before."

Van Nest's strategy centered on a few key points. First, the Java language was open and free to use—a gift from creator Sun Microsystems to the world, he said. Sun wanted developers to take up Java and teach it in universities and schools.

Enlarge / Your new spaceship chariot. (credit: Electronic Arts / Bioware)

In a blog post today on MassEffect.com, Bioware General Manager Aaryn Flynn announced the next game in the Mass Effect series has a new release date: early 2017. First teased at E3 in 2014 with a short video and then given a more formal reveal and an official name at last year’s E3, Mass Effect: Andromeda was tentatively targeted at a late 2016 release.

Last month, Electronic Arts CFO Blake Jorgensen appeared to indicate in a financial presentation that Andromeda would arrive during EA’s fourth fiscal quarter, which aligns with the first calendar quarter of 2017. Today’s announcement by Bioware dovetails nicely with that rumor.

We’ve reached out to Bioware with some requests for additional information and a couple of questions, and we’ll update this story if they’re able to reply.