STE WILLIAMS

Remember the enterprise? Despite what has become a fanatical focus on consumers to beat Apple with Windows 8 tablets and Windows phones, Microsoft does – just about.

Microsoft on Monday revealed three main editions of Windows 8, due later this year: two for tablets and Windows Pro for “business/technical professionals”, which for some reason assumes such professionals won’t want a tablet in the office.

Snuck into the news was the merest of mentions of Windows 8 Enterprise Edition. Now, three days later, Microsoft has explained how Enterprise will differ from Pro – beyond the obvious point of it only being available to the big dogs on a Software Assurance contract.

With Enterprise it’ll be possible to boot from a USB with Windows to Go, so organisations can install and manage the operating system on devices the user brings into the office.

Mobility and security are served in two ways: there will be remote access to the corporate network without the need to launch a separate VPN using DirectAccess, while PCs can cache files, websites and other content without constantly choking the corporate network with repeated downloads.

Enterprise users will also receive the ability to “side-load internal, Windows 8 Metro style apps”. This sounds like the ability to install apps that were not built according to the WinRT rules but which have the tiled interface.

The Software Assurance rules have been, once again, extended. Among the changes are an extension of SA to cover any machine using Windows to Go.

These features come in addition to Windows 8 Pro’s BitLocker encryption, client virtualisation, domain and group policy management and file system encryption.

You can read more here. ®

Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/19/win_8_enterprise_details/

Virus lynchpins are distributing an Android Trojan under the guise of popular photo-sharing app Instagram.

The fake version of the Instagram Android app is being distributed via unapproved sources, rather than official sites such as the Google Play Android marketplace. The rogue app has been published on a Russian website purporting to be an official Instagram site, among others.

Once installed, the app will silently send SMS messages to premium rate services, doubtless earning its creators a tidy commission at the expense of fandroids in the process.

Cybercriminals are seeking to exploit the popularity of the Instagram app – which has millions of users around the world, prompting Facebook to pay an eye-watering $1bn for the firm behind the technology earlier this month.

Security firms including Sophos, which detects the malware as Andr/Boxer-F, have added detection for the malware to their smartphone security suites. The Instagram Android Trojan represents the latest example in a growing number of viral threats to target the Android smartphone platform.

“Android malware is becoming a bigger and bigger problem,” said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos. “Just last week, we saw a bogus edition of the Angry Birds in Space game and it’s quite likely that whoever is behind this latest malware is also using the names and images of other popular smartphone apps as bait.

“Infected Androids are now effectively part of a botnet, under the control of malicious hackers.  Android users need to be extremely careful when downloading applications from sites, especially when they’re not official Android markets.”

Curiously, the malware contains a random number of identical photos of a man. The photo features a cropped image of a casually dressed witness from a Moscow wedding photo, an image that has become something of a phenomenon on Russian internet forums.

More information on the Android Instagram threat can be found in a blog post on Sophos’s Naked Security website here. ®

Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/19/instagram_android_sms_trojan/

Cyberooks are selling malware through underground forums which they claim offers the ability to steal credit card information from a hotel point of sale (POS) applications.

The ruse, detected by transaction security firm Trusteer, shows how criminals are using malware on enterprise machines to collect financial information in addition to targeting consumer PCs with banking Trojans and other nasties.

The hospitality industry attack involves using a remote access Trojan program to infect hotel front desk computers. The malware includes spyware components that steal credit card and other customer information by capturing screenshots from the PoS application. The malware is capable of stealing credit card numbers and expiration dates, but not CVV2 numbers in the sample Trusteer inspected.

The attack code is being offered for $280 in Visa underground forums. The purchase price includes instructions on how to set up the Trojan. The sellers even offer advice on how to use telephone social engineering techniques via VoIP software to trick front desk managers into installing the Trojan.

Trusteer said that at the time of publishing its blog on Wednesday, the malware had not yet been detected by any anti-virus application. More details on the malware – including a screenshot from the underground forum where it was offered for sale – can be found here.

Last week Trusteer warned about a ZeuS-based Trojan that targeted cloud-based payroll service providers. The transactions security firm reckon the hospitality industry malware it found on an underground forum is part of the same trend, involving the diversification of Trojan-based attacks away from traditional targets such as consumers and small business bank customers.

“Criminals are increasingly expanding the focus of their attacks from online banking targets to enterprises,” said Trusteer’s CTO Amit Klein. “One of the reasons for this shift is that enterprise devices can yield high value digital assets when compromised. In addition, the prevalence of bring your own device (BYOD) usage by employees makes it easier to infect unmanaged smartphones, tablets and laptops that are used to access sensitive enterprise systems and applications.” ®

Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/19/hotel_trojan_scam/

The Metropolitan Police is pushing a mug-shot gallery smartphone app so Londoners can help nab petty criminals across the capital.

New software called Facewatch ID displays police-issued images of unnamed suspects and sought-after witnesses for citizens to identify. Punters pop their postcode into the app to get photos of people linked to their area. Information about those pictured can be submitted in confidence directly to the cops using the software.

The app has been responsible for bringing 29 people to trial in the last two months, according to Facewatch, the firm behind the technology.

It’s hoped the app, sponsored by BlackBerry manufacturer RIM, will help reduce low-level crime such as personal and shop theft, credit-card fraud and criminal damage.

Facewatch also provides an online crime reporting tool and a CCTV film and image upload system to the police. A spokesman for Facewatch explained that the firm supplies crime-reporting technology to businesses, crime-reduction partnerships in town centres and other such groups so images of miscreants can be shared among relevant organisations.

Facewatch ID uses the same infrastructure, but there will be additional costs if the app takes off. This expansion may be financed by a mix of sponsorship and advertising revenues; there’s no plan to charge for the application itself.

Only the police will be allowed to upload images, something that ought to add as a safeguard against abuse. Businesses and the general public will not be able to submit pics. The spokesman added that some of these images may have been taken during last year’s riots.

The service officially launched in London on Wednesday with over 2,000 images of people the MPS would like to identify – however appeals in investigations into more serious offences will reside on the Crimestoppers website.

Facewatch ID will shortly include images from the City of London Police and the British Transport Police for London.

Welcome to Neighbourhood Watch 2.0

The technology effectively asks punters “do you know this person?”, bringing a technique featured on the BBC’s long-running Crimewatch programme to a smartphone platform. Less charitably it might be described as a dream app for curtain-twitching types. Britain has the highest density of CCTV systems in the world, so there will be no shortage of raw material.

Met Police Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley, responsible for Specialist Crime and Operations said: “The Metropolitan Police Service is determined to exploit the opportunities presented by CCTV to solve crime. The general public can support us in this – both by providing us with images – and then helping us to identify those who are responsible for committing crime.

“This new Facewatch crime app helps people to do this by giving them the ability to identify those suspected of committing crime in their local communities. I support the role that Facewatch can play in getting images to us faster and more efficiently – enabling us to arrest more criminals – and thereby making people feel safer. I would encourage as many people as possible to use the app to view these images and send in information.”

Simon Gordon, chairman of Facewatch added: “The Facewatch ID app runs off the same secure infrastructure running our free crime reporting system for businesses and is available free to any police force in the UK – further forces are being added in the near future.” ®

Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/19/facewatch/

The EU could soon introduce rules to monitor the deployment of internet censorship technology in autocratic regimes including China and Saudi Arabia.

The European Parliament is proposing a resolution to strengthen the accountability of countries that export gear used to block websites and eavesdrop on mobile communications.

“There is a race between those harnessing new media to the purpose of liberation and those who seek to use it for repression,” said Richard Howitt, a British Labour-party MEP and the investigator appointed to look into the issue.

“I don’t hesitate to say Vodafone must learn from doing Mubarak’s bidding,” he said in a canned statement, referring to the telco sending out pro-government propaganda and suspending its services in Egypt at President Hosni Mubarak’s request weeks before a revolution forced the head of state to resign.

The resolution, which is expected to be passed in Strasbourg on Thursday, will ask the European Commission to come up with rules for improving oversight of EU countries’ exports of tools that can be used for censorship by next year.

The use of surveillance, censoring and spy software came to light after nations bent on restricting access to information and communication channels turned to countries where freedom of speech and other human rights are supposed to be upheld.

Last year Lord David Alton of Liverpool called on the UK government to ban the export of espionage software and equipment, and questioned sales of Blighty-made gear to Iran and Yemen.

Foreign Office minister Lord David Howell of Guildford replied that there was “no evidence of controlled military goods exported from the United Kingdom being used for internal repression in the Middle East and North Africa”.

However, he also said that “surveillance equipment, including telephone intercept equipment, covers a wide variety of equipment and software, and generally is not controlled because of its use for a wide variety of legitimate uses and its easy and widespread availability”.

The resolution before the European Parliament also includes requests for EU member states to cooperate more consistently with the International Criminal Court for full and open investigations into secret renditions and for increased efforts to get everyone to ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child. ®

Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/18/eu_may_monitor_tech_exports/

Sir Tim Berners-Lee has warned the Tory-led Coalition not to push through a bill to legislate plans to massively increase surveillance of the internet.

In an interview with the Guardian, the world wide web inventor and “open data” advisor to the government urged the Home Office to drop the proposed law, which Theresa May unveiled in July last year.

As The Register has previously noted, such a plan to help security services in the UK monitor difficult-to-tap technology such as peer-to-peer communications has been in the running for some time.

The previous Labour government was forced to shelve its plans to bring in the so-called Interception Modernisation Programme (IMP) until after the 2010 General Election.

The Home Secretary effectively rebranded IMP to the Communications Capabilities Development Programme (CCDP) last year.

Only now are the likes of Berner-Lee starting to criticise such a plan, which is expected to be unveiled in the Queen’s Speech next month.

CCDP has been described by the Home Office as an essential way of tackling perceived threats from rapidly evolving encryption and other technologies which have increasingly made it difficult even for government agencies to intercept voice and text mobile communications.

May has gone one step further than that by telling The Sun that such an interwebs snoop law would snare paedophiles and terrorists.

Berners-Lee told the Graun that he was concerned that such legislation could prove to be a “destruction of human rights”.

He warned that such data from internet monitoring, if it fell into the wrong hands, could be devastating for an individual’s privacy. Apparently, the plans are keeping him awake at night.

The Greatest Living Briton opined:

The idea that we should routinely record information about people is obviously very dangerous. It means that there will be information around which could be stolen, which can be acquired through corrupt officials or corrupt operators, and [could be] used, for example, to blackmail people in the government or people in the military. We open ourselves out, if we store this information, to it being abused.

Berners-Lee urged the government to consider creating a “very strong independent body” to oversee any such net-snooping law. He added that the bill, in its current form, needed to be “stopped”.

In a separate confab with the Gruan, Berners-Lee reiterated his dislike of internet silos created by Facebook, Apple and so on.

He said: “One of the issues of social networking silos is that they have the data and I don’t … There are no programs that I can run on my computer which allow me to use all the data in each of the social networking systems that I use plus all the data in my calendar plus in my running map site, plus the data in my little fitness gadget and so on to really provide an excellent support to me.” ®

Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/18/tim_berners_lee_criticises_government_net_snoop_plans/

The United States and Chinese military have been locking horns in secret cyber warfare exercises designed to help prevent the outbreak of real war between the two.

The Guardian revealed that two so-called war games were carried out last year through intermediary and Washington think-tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and organised with the help of the Beijing-based China Institute of Contemporary International Relations.

State department and Pentagon officials reportedly took part in the meetings with their Chinese counterparts in Bejing last June.

The first exercise required both sides to explain what steps they would take if attacked with a Stuxnet-like virus, while the second went further by asking them what they would do if it became clear the attack had been launched by the other country.

The US apparently agreed to the exercises in the hope of airing its frustrations at the growing number of cyber attacks aimed at its government, critical infrastructure and other organisations, but unsurprisingly its efforts appear to have hit another Chinese brick wall.

“China has come to the conclusion that the power relationship has changed, and it has changed in a way that favours them. The [People’s Liberation Army] is very hostile. They see the US as a target. They feel they have justification for their actions. They think the US is in decline,” CSIS director Jim Lewis told the paper.

“The Chinese are very astute. They send knowledgeable people. We want to find ways to change their behaviour … [but] they can justify what they are doing. Their attitude is, they have experienced imperialism and they had a century of humiliation.”

Although another exercise is reportedly scheduled for May, there is little sign that efforts – purportedly by the Chinese government, its allies, or those in its employ – to steal military and other strategically valuable information from the US mainly via advanced persistent threat (APT) attacks which are designed to go unnoticed.

The most recent piece of research of note was a paper (PDF) from defence contractor Northrop Grumman which claimed that the PLA’s advanced information warfare capabilities represent a “genuine risk” to the US military in the event of a conflict.

It went on to claim that the commercial IT sector in China and academic institutions have helped boost the military’s RD efforts in this area and warned that Chinese-made tech kit could also present a security risk if used in mission-critical environments.

In the face of such a formidable foe, it is probably of some comfort to the US and its allies that all is not completely tip-top in the PLA.

A new report for global mag Foreign Policy revealed that, according to one senior PLA general, widespread corruption in the Chinese military could cripple its ability to wage war successfully.

China has, of course, denied it is involved in any cyber espionage and indeed frequently portrays itself as the victim of attack.

A report last month from the government’s National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team and Coordination Center claimed that attacks on Chinese bodies from outside of its borders jumped from five million in 2010 to 8.9 million last year. ®

Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/18/china_us_wargames/

Toshiba Information Systems UK breached the Data Protection Act, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has ruled.

The company published the personal details of 20 competition entrants on its website, which were compromised by a security gaffe, the watchdog growled.

“A security fault with the incremental numbering of the competition entrants registration URL created the potential for access to other customers’ personal data for a two-month period,” the regulator said.

The ICO was told about the privacy blunder in September. Names, addresses and dates of birth as well as contact information were exposed on the site after people registered for an online competition. The watchdog found that Toshiba had failed to put in place the correct measures to detect that a web design cock-up had been made by an unnamed third-party coder.

“It is vital that, as ever-increasing amounts of our personal information are collected online, companies have the necessary safeguards in place to keep this information secure,” said ICO head of enforcement Stephen Eckersley.

“We are pleased that Toshiba Information Systems (UK) have committed to ensuring that any changes to applications on their website are thoroughly tested by both the developer and themselves, in order to keep the personal information they are collecting secure.”

He warned: “We would urge other UK organisations with interactive websites to make sure they have suitable checks in place before collecting peoples’ details online.”

Toshiba inked an undertaking [PDF] with the ICO to implement security measures to ensure that the personal data it handles are protected. ®

Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/18/toshiba_slapped_by_ico/

Google is reportedly going to be slapped with a bigger regulatory fine than the meagre one handed down to it from the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) late last week.

According to Mercury News, which cites anonymous sources familiar with the confabs between the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Google, the search giant is expected to be hit with a larger penalty over its bypassing of the default privacy settings of Apple’s Safari browser.

The FTC – which is the Stateside consumer watchdog – could issue that fine within the next 30 days, the newspaper reported.

Its chums over at US communications regulator, the FCC, fined Google $25,000 last week for failing to aid its investigation into the company’s “accidental” Street View fleet’s Wi-Fi payload data slurp-fest.

But, significantly, the same probe failed to find that Google’s actions had been unlawful because the data it collected was not encrypted.

As heavily documented in these pages, Google has been undergoing intense scrutiny of its business practices on both sides of the Atlantic for some time now.

In March, the Wall Street Journal reported that the FTC had widened its investigation of the firm to include its bypass of privacy settings on Apple’s Safari browser.

Today’s Mercury News piece reasserted other reports that the FTC is investigating the Safari snafu in relation to its existing consent decree. If that has been violated, then the commission could swiftly enforce that order by slapping a hefty fine on the Chocolate Factory.

Following Google’s Buzz blunder in 2010, the company agreed last year to undergo biennial privacy audits for the next 20 years. As part of that agreement, Google avoided being fined and did not have to admit that its biz practices had been unlawful.

In fact, such a fine from the FTC could be huge, adding up to as much as $16,000 per violation per day.

The watchdog is currently trying to determine exactly how many people were affected by the Safari breach. That number of iPad, iPhone and Mac users could run into millions, the newspaper said. ®

Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/17/google_ftc_fine_safari_privacy_gaffe/

Podcast

Enterprise tech guru Greg Knieriemen, and master of all that is cloud and storage Ed Saipetch, are back with another episode of enterprise and consumer tech-cast Speaking in Tech. This week, web2.0 and social media analyst Sarah Vela mysteriously goes AWOL … after just three episodes. We find out why as the guys discuss all the latest trends in enterprise tech.

Speaking in Tech’s special guest this week is Brian Katz. Brian works at Sanofi Pharmaceuticals, a global pharmaceutical company, where he is in charge of its mobile engineering group. You can follow him on Twitter here or read his blog, A screw’s loose, here.

The gang also plan their June live-podcast raid at Dell Storage Forum in Boston and HP Discover in Las Vegas.

This week they talk about…

• Google Drive’s launch next week. Various internet reports claim that Google will be launching Google Drive next week with 5GB – more than double the 2GB that come with the popular Dropbox. From the reports, Google Drive will work “in desktop folders” on Mac, Windows, iOS and Android.
• Meanwhile, a leaked VMware Memo outlines View 5.1 – aka Project Octopus – the cloud storage service referred to as “Dropbox for the enterprise”. The leaked doc pegs it as coming out by the end of June…
• Brian on consumerisation: You want me to do what? A mobile strategy challenge
• Are “acceptable use” policies effective?
• Mobile security: The distinction between iOS devices and Android on security and compliance.
• BYOD: It’s not about saving money…
• Brian faces down the 10 Big Questions.

Listen with the Reg player below, or download here.

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Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/17/speaking_in_tech_episode_4/