Future Technologies

This is interesting. You can log into your Facebook account using three passwords – one is the main password that you created and the other passwords can be constructed by toggling the case of characters that form your original password. For example, if your Facebook password is  operati@nGeronimo! , you can convert the uppercase characters to lowercase (and vice-versa) and the toggled password string – OPERATI@NgERONIMO!  – will also get you into Facebook. There’s another variation as well. If the first character of your Facebook password is in small case, just change that character to upper case – like  Operati@nGeronimo ! -  and Facebook will gladly let you in. You may try these variations with your own password on the Facebook login screen available at facebook.com/login.php . Multiple Facebook Logins You don’t just have multiple passwords on Facebook, you can log into Facebook using multiple usernames as well. The default username is the em...

Microsoft today  updated  Bing Maps with its largest shipment of Bird’s Eye imagery yet, nearly 270 terabytes of data. The company also expanded the number of Venue Maps to more than 4,700 in 59 countries and added a new “Report a problem” feature. So far, Microsoft has published a total of 1,452,958 sq km, or half a petabyte of data, in Bird’s Eye scenes from around the world. The Bing Maps coverage for this release is shown in yellow (it’s mainly for the US, some Europe, plus a little Canada and Australia): Venue Maps meanwhile let you navigate your way around malls, airports, amusement parks, casinos, shopping districts, convention centers, museums, stadiums, universities, hotels, and so on, using your Windows phone, tablet, and PC. It’s Microsoft’s answer to Google’s  indoor floor plans . Here’s an example: Microsoft also explained that while using Bing Maps within a zoom level of 1,000 feet, purple (stores) and green (restaurants) polygons will ...

It turns out Koobface is washed up – not raging. Last week, McAfee  released a threat report  showing samples of Koobface, the Facebook spreading worm, spiking in the Internet wild all through the first three months of 2013. But on Friday, the anti-virus giant that's now part of Intel did a complete reversal. In a  cryptically-worded blog post  , researcher Craig Schmugar notes that sample counts can be "influenced by repacking of the same underlying code . . . and other forms of server or client polymorphisms." Schmugar confesses that "these factors led to our Koobface statisitcs being off by a large margin." Facebook issued no public statement. But the company's PR agency contacted all the publications that ran with McAfee's initial, alarming, survey results. Cyberattacks are real and pose tangible risk to consumers and businesses. And public awareness is not what it should be. McAfee is not alone when it comes to competitive vendor...

 UPDATE: McAfee on Friday, June 6, said it  made a mistake . Koobface has actually been quiet of the past three months. Koobface, the fast-spreading Internet worm cybergangs use to hijack Facebook accounts on a massive scale, is on the move once again. McAfee this morning released a  threat report showing samples of Koobface spiking in the Internet wild all through the first three months of 2013. "The resurrection of Koobface reminds us that social networks continue to present a substantial opportunity for intercepting personal information," says Vincent Weafer, senior vice president, McAfee Labs. Meanwhile, the bad guys also are turning up the spam spigot, as activity of the equally infamous spam-spreading botnet Cutwail, also known as Pushdo, also surged in the first quarter. After remaining more or less stable in 2012, spam levels reached the highest volume McAfee has seen in the past two years. The rising trends are very probably related. The logon...

Microsoft has orchestrated the bust-up of another top-tier botnet operation. These bad guys – operators of the sprawling Citadel botnet -- make the fictional band of sophisticated thieves from the movie Ocean's 11 look like amateurs. Authorities estimate they've scored more than $500 million from banks in the United States and abroad by accessing online accounts and rerouting funds. The software giant and the FBI, working with law enforcement and tech officials from some 80 countries, knocked out 1,000 of 1,400 of the Citadel botnets. A botnet is a collection of hundreds to thousands of infected PCs that respond to commands routed through a command-and-control server, which is also an infected PC. The bad guys running Citadel commanded as many as 5 million infected PCs, making Citadel one of the biggest botnet operations. Botnets are the engins that drive cybercrime. They fuel spam, denial of service attacks and cyberespionage. And they are used in big operations,...