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Enlarge (credit: Xylitol)

Two men who built and sold a banking trojan that infected more than 50 million computers around the world and caused almost $1 billion in losses have been sentenced to a combined 24 years in prison.

Aleksandr Andreevich Panin, the chief developer and distributor of SpyEye, received a sentence of nine years and six months in federal prison, according to a statement issued by the US Department of Justice. In underground forums where the trojan was sold, the 27-year-old Russian national went by the hacker aliases “Gribodemon” and “Harderman.” In 2010, prosecutors said, he received the source code to a crimeware platform dubbed ZeuS. From 2009 to 2011, he conspired with others to develop SpyEye, which is believed to have borrowed liberally from ZeuS.

Prosecutors said Panin conspired with Hamza Bendelladj, aka Bx1, an Algerian man who received a 15-year prison term during the same Wednesday sentencing in federal court in Atlanta. Prosecutors said Bendelladj transmitted more than one million spam e-mails containing SpyEye and related malware to computers in the United States. The feat infected hundreds of thousands of computers. Bendelladj also developed SpyEye add ons that automated the theft of funds from victim bank accounts and further spread malware, including SpyEye and Zeus. Authorities said he stole personal information from almost 500,000 people and caused millions of dollars in losses to individuals and financial institutions around the world.

Sarah Laszlo puts an EEG headset on a research participant's head. (credit: Jonathan Cohen/Binghamton University)

While your brain on drugs may be analogous to a fried egg, your brain on Instagram may be like a super-secure form of identification, researchers report in a new study. Fingerprints are so twentieth century. The authors envision future security systems that authenticate or grant access by monitoring a user’s brain while looking at random pictures, such as snapshots of Anne Hathaway or a slice of pizza.

According to the researchers, our brains create unique patterns of neural activity in the first few milliseconds during which we process and react to certain pictures, including images of food, celebrities, and infrequently used words. When the researchers collected and analyzed such patterns from 50 adult participants, ranging in ages from 18 to 43, they were able to create unique brain-based passcodes that identified individuals with 100-percent accuracy and, so far, seem impossible to duplicate.

Study coauthor Sarah Laszlo, a neuroscientist at Binghamton University in New York, told Ars:

James Comey is the director of the FBI. (credit: Brookings Institute)

FBI Director James Comey suggested to a conference in London that his agency paid more than $1.3 million to gray-hat hackers who were able to unlock the iPhone 5C that was used by Syed Farook Rizwan, the dead terrorist who masterminded the attack in San Bernardino, California, in December 2015.

According to Reuters, Comey was asked Thursday how much the FBI paid for the technique that eventually allowed investigators to access the locked phone.

"A lot. More than I will make in the remainder of this job, which is seven years and four months for sure," Comey said. "But it was, in my view, worth it."

(credit: Sony)

Today, Google and Sony announced the Android N Developer Preview is coming to a rather surprising device: the Sony Xperia Z3. Owners of the Z3 can install Sony's "Xperia Companion" app on a Windows or Mac computer and download the developer preview.

Android developer previews are usually relegated to Google's Nexus line, so seeing a finished image for a Sony phone is definitely a surprise. The Xperia Z3 is Sony's flagship from 2014. The company's 2015 flagship, the Xperia Z5, isn't included in the developer preview.

For the Android M Developer Preview, Sony made it possible to compile your own builds of Android M from the Android source code for 17 of its devices. Things seem to be a bit easier for the Z3 this year—this seems to be a finished image.