Xpertfeed

  Hackers exploited a Trend Micro OfficeScan zero-day to plant malicious files on Mitsubishi Electric servers. Chinese hackers have used a zero-day in the  Trend Micro OfficeScan antivirus  during their attacks on Mitsubishi Electric, Tech News has learned from sources close to the investigation. Trend Micro has now patched the vulnerability, but the company did not comment if the zero-day was used in other attacks beyond Mitsubishi Electric. MITSUBISHI ELECTRIC HACK News of the Mitsubishi Electric hack became public on Monday, this week.  In a press release  published on its website, the Japanese electronics vendor and defense contractor said it was hacked last year. The company said it detected an intrusion on its network on June 28, 2019. Following a months-long investigation, Mitsubishi said it discovered that hackers gained access to its internal network from where they stole roughly 200 MB of files. While initially the company didn't reveal the content of ...

  A number of leading Chinese tech companies have started utilising green energy but the scale remains limited compared to foreign peers, according to a recently released paper. Chinese tech companies are expected to continue growing exponentially in the era of 5G, cloud computing, and internet of things, but their investment in green energy has lagged behind comparative to foreign competitors, according to a  paper  released by Greenpeace and North China Electric Power University. Although China's electricity consumption from the data centre industry is forecast to expand by 66% between 2019 and 2023, coal remains the primary source for electricity, said the paper.  Data centres in China consume nearly 2% of the entire electricity consumption in the country, as nearly 300,000 data centres in China ran non-stop as of the end of 2017, an  earlier news report  suggested. Many Chinese companies have also moved their data centre facilities to the Guizhou provin...

  Technology professionals shouldn't be distracted by the big TVs and robots at CES; the real innovation happens behind the curtain with the enterprise tech powering all those 'smart' consumer gadgets. Each January, over 150,000 people from all over the world converge on Las Vegas for the year's biggest show in tech...CES. And today's CES is as much a showcase for the latest business technology as it is for new consumer electronics. Enterprise technologies like AI, data analytics, IoT, and 5G underpin all the gadgets, smart devices, and autonomous vehicles that are on display during the show. So as always, will have CES covered from all the angles that matter for businesses and professionals. At CES 2020, there are three big trends that tech pros and CIOs should pay attention to: 1. 5G 5G has been a hot topic for the last two years and has rolled out in limited areas. 2020 will be the year we begin to see 5G come to consumer devices at scale and become a force for d...

  As we become ever-more reliant on GPS, the prospect of it going down seems increasingly worrying. Almost half a century ago, the US Department of Defense started working on an experimental project to launch a series of satellites into space to make it possible to pinpoint any location on Earth. Fast-forward 47 years, and the Global Positioning System (GPS) is everywhere and in everything from the activity-tracking applications in our smartphones to the navigation systems found in airplanes. Ahead of receiving the £1 million Queen Elizabeth Award for Engineering last week, the chief architect of GPS, Bradford Parkinson, told that making the tool accessible to all was part of his plan from the earliest stages of the project. And it became part of the US government’s plan, too:  in 1983, the Reagan administration declared that it would effectively guarantee and provide GPS for both military and civilian purposes . “President Reagan established that reliable knowledge of your po...

  RuNet disconnection tests were successful, according to the Russian government. The Russian government announced on Monday that it concluded a series of tests during which it successfully disconnected the country from the worldwide internet. The tests were carried out over multiple days, starting last week, and involved Russian government agencies, local internet service providers, and local Russian internet companies. The goal was to test if the country's national internet infrastructure -- known inside Russia as RuNet -- could function without access to the global DNS system and the external internet. Internet traffic was re-routed internally, effectively making Russia's RuNet the world's largest intranet. The government did not reveal any technical details about the tests and what exactly they consisted of. It only said that the government tested several disconnection scenarios, including a scenario that simulated a hostile cyber-attack from a foreign country. The expe...

A Google spokesperson has confirmed that the rollout of Chrome 79.0.3945.93 for Android has begun. Earlier this week, Google paused the rollout of Chrome 79 for Android users after a bug was reported by developers. This bug led to the deletion of user data and resetting of some mobile apps. However, a fix has now been found, and it has been added to the rollout of Chrome 79.0.3945.93 for Android. The update rollout has commenced once again, and Android users must keep a lookout for this update, especially users who were affected by the bug. A Google spokesperson confirmed that the rollout of Chrome 79.0.3945.93 for Android has begun, and it brings a fix for the app data deleting bug. The update was paused earlier this week after the Chromium bug tracker labelled the data deletion issue as ‘catastrophe'. Essentially, users of specific apps found that all the data inside the apps were lost after updating to Chrome 79. It seemed like the apps simply did a reset without any interv...

  Google is using its latest machine-learning techniques to improve news suggestions for mobile users. Google Search mobile users in the US looking for a specific news topic will now see a carousel of relevant stories at the top of the results page, plus new related coverage. That related coverage to top stories can be seen in additional cards beneath each main card in the carousel. This feature should make it easier for users to make informed decisions about which articles to click through to,  according to Google .   "Within each story, the new structure will make more room for high-quality content – beyond just the most recent coverage – as well as more diverse sources, to bring more context and perspective to the day's news," it says in a blogpost. Google recently revealed how its new BERT machine-learning generated models are improving how Search understands what humans are looking for when they type a query.     BERT is short for Bidirection...

  Emails, usernames, and strong-hashed passwords sold for $2,000. A hacker has breached online music streaming service Mixcloud earlier this month, and is now selling the site's user data online, on a dark web marketplace. The hack came to light on Friday, when the hacker contacted several journalists to share news of the breach and to provide data samples. Accordig to a sample of the stolen data, the hacker is selling Mixcloud user information that includes details such as usernames, email addresses, hashed password strings, users' country of origin, registration dates, last login dates, and IP addresses. The breach appears to have taken place on or before November 13, which is the registration date for the last user profile included in the data dump. Tech news sites TechCrunch and Motherboard also verified the data authenticity through other means, as well. Mixcloud confirmed the breach in a blog post on Saturday. The company said that most users had signed up through F...

  Data security and automation are the top IT projects for 2020, while artificial intelligence projects are not in the top 10 for IT professionals, according to Netwrix. The online survey asked 1045 IT professionals worldwide to name their top five IT projects for the next year; they could pick from a predefined list or specify their own descriptions. The survey found no dramatic difference in IT priorities among organizations based on size or vertical. Top IT projects for 2020 74% of organizations named data security as their top IT priority for 2020 54% of respondents plan to focus on automating manual tasks 43% of organizations ranked data privacy among their top five priorities; 52% of them are subject to privacy regulations 33% of organizations intend to focus on digital transformation, integrating their existing solutions and performing  cloud migrations . These goals were mostly cited by larger organizations with more than 5,000 employees 20% of organizations plan to fo...

  Hackers began hijacking accounts hours after Disney+ launched earlier this week. Hackers didn't waste any time and have started hijacking Disney+ user accounts hours after the service launched. Many of these accounts are now being offered for free on hacking forums, or available for sale for prices varying from $3 to $11, a investigation has discovered. A STREAM OF USER COMPLAINTS The Disney+ video streaming service launched this week, on November 12. The service, although being available only in the US, Canada, and the Netherlands, has already amassed more than 10 million customers in its first 24 hours. The Disney+ launch was marred by technical issues. Many users reported being unable to stream their favorite movies and shows. But hidden in the flood of complaints about technical issues was a smaller stream of users reporting losing access to their accounts. Many users reported that hackers were accessing their accounts, logging them out of all devices, and then changing ...