Zum dritten Mal vergibt das ZKM gemeinsam mit dem Partner Cyberforum den App Art Award für die besten kreativen Entwicklungen im Bereich der mobilen Applikationen. Die Sponsoren und Förderer CAS Software, GFT Technologies, Grenkleasing, Init und Kulturstiftung der Sparkasse Karlsruhe, übergeben in diesem Jahr den «Künstlerischen Innovationspreis», den Sonderpreis «Crowd Art» sowie den Sonderpreis «Augmented Reality Art», die jeweils mit 10.000 € dotiert sind.
Für eine weitere deutsche Traditionsmarke wird es eng. Loewe ist eines der letzten Unternehmen, die Fernseher noch in Deutschland produzieren. Doch Samsung, Panasonic und Co. machen den Franken das Leben immer schwerer - die Lage ist bedrohlich.
Im Überwachungsskandal um US-Geheimdienste hat Yahoo die Veröffentlichung von Gerichtsdokumenten erzwungen. Das für die Überwachung des Auslandsgeheimdienstes zuständige Gericht in Washington ordnete an, dass eine Entscheidung von 2008 öffentlich gemacht werden muss.
Weltweit verursacht Internetkriminalität jährlich einen geschätzten Schaden von 750 Milliarden Euro. Weiterhin gut im Rennen sind dabei unnütze und unerwünschte Mails - die Spams, die mit Produktfälschungen oder lukrativen Geschäften locken.
Diese Personalie elektrisiert bis heute das Silicon Valley: Googles Vorzeigefrau Marissa Mayer ist seit einem Jahr Chefin bei Yahoo. Sie hat das Interneturgestein auf den Kopf gestellt - und doch das dringendste Problem noch nicht gelöst.
Der von den USA gejagte Geheimdienstexperte Edward Snowden hat nach den Worten des Moskauer Anwalts Anatoli Kutscherena in Russland nun offiziell vorläufiges Asyl beantragt. Ein entsprechendes Gesuch habe der 30-Jährige heute unterzeichnet, sagte Kutscherena der Agentur Interfax zufolge in Moskau.
Die deutsche Regierung kennt nach den Worten von Innenminister Hans-Peter Friedrich auch nach seiner Reise nach Washington nicht das Ausmaß des US-Spähprogrammes Prism. Man könne davon ausgehen, dass in Deutschland niemand gewusst habe, was Prism sei und welchen Umfang es habe, sagte der CSU-Politiker am Dienstag in der ARD.
Die Regierung in Südkorea hat erneut Nordkorea für einen Hacker-Angriff auf die Internetseiten von einheimischen Regierungsstellen und Medienunternehmen verantwortlich gemacht. Unter anderem sei mindestens eine IP-Adresse, die für den Angriff Ende Juni benutzt worden sei, schon bei früheren Cyber-Attacken durch nordkoreanische Hacker identifiziert worden, teilte das Wissenschaftsministerium nach vorläufigen Untersuchungsergebnissen am Dienstag mit. Die Aktion sei vermutlich monatelang vorbereitet worden.
Wie das chinesische Unternehmen Baidu am Dienstag mitteilte, übernimmt es den App Store 91 Wireless für umgerechnet 1,9 Milliarden Dollar. Damit will der chinesische Suchmaschinenbetreiber dem US-Rivalen Google mehr Konkurrenz machen.
Spanien hat sich beim Präsidenten von Bolivien, Evo Morales, für Verzögerungen eines Fluges wegen der Suche nach dem früheren US-Geheimdienstmitarbeiter Edward Snowden offiziell entschuldigt. Der Vorgang sei nicht angemessen gewesen und habe Morales in eine schwierige Situation gebracht, sagte der spanische Botschafter in Bolivien, Angel Vazquez.
Microsoft does not give the National Security Agency direct access to its customers’ email or instant messages, contrary to previous news reports, a company executive said. News reports last week suggested that the company’s own encryption in order to conduct surveillance on email accounts through Outlook.com, but company General Counsel Brad Smith said Tuesday that’s not true. “We do not provide any government with direct access to emails or instant messages,” Smith . “Full stop.” The company does not help government agencies circumvent its encryption, he added. “To be clear, we do not provide any government with the ability to break the encryption, nor do we provide the government with the encryption keys,” he wrote. “When we are legally obligated to comply with [government] demands, we pull the specified content from our servers where it sits in an unencrypted state, and then we provide it to the government agency.”
Infor has been sued by a customer who claims an ERP (enterprise resource planning) project that was supposed to take six months instead allegedly dragged on for well over a year without any useful results. Buckley Powder, a Colorado company that offers explosives and other products for mining and construction firms, entered an agreement with Infor in December 2011, according to the suit. Under its terms, Infor was supposed to install its SX.e software at Buckley, which had been using another Infor system called TakeStock. Both applications handle processes related to wholesale distribution. The work was to take no longer than 180 days, but now 18 months has passed with no working system in place, Buckley said in its suit, which was filed last week in U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado. Instead, “the project has been plagued by setbacks and non-performance on behalf of Infor and no reasonable solution has been presented,” the suit states.
The computer hardware and software graphics market will grow in the coming years as applications become visually demanding, and employment opportunities in the field will expand, according to a study released on Tuesday. Sales of graphics-related computer hardware and software will grow at a consistent rate in the coming years, signaling a change in fortune for a market that slowed down due to global economic struggles and declining hardware sales, according to a study released from Jon Peddie Research. A growing demand for mobile devices and renewed interest in games and other visually attractive applications will drive growth in sales of computer graphics products, the study said. Graphics technologies are improving, there is increasing use of movie and photo applications, and more engineering firms are simulating products on computers before real deployments. More companies will hire graphics artists, designers, scientists and programmers in the coming years as more graphics hardware and software are sold, the study said.
In an odd bit of doublespeak, Microsoft has released a version of its Outlook Web App (OWA) as a native application for the Apple iPhone and iPad. , as the two applications are formally known, are now available in Apple App Store. Not everyone can use them, however—users must be Office 365 subscribers, and their administrators must run the latest version of Exchange Online, Microsoft said. If those requirements are met, users can download the free apps. What the apps do, however, is fill a hole that in June. The “free” Office Mobile for iPhone app also requires an Office 365 subscription and includes the ability to open and edit—not create—documents in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Office Mobile iPhone users could only access Outlook via the web app. iPad users can now take advantage of OWA for iPad—Microsoft hasn’t yet released a version of Office Mobile for the iPad.
Nineteen organizations, including a church and gun ownership and marijuana legalization groups, have filed a lawsuit against the U.S. National Security Agency for a surveillance program that targets U.S. residents’ phone records. The groups accuse the NSA, the U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation of violating their members’ First Amendment rights of association by illegally collecting their telephone call records. filed Tuesday, in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, include the First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles, the California Association of Federal Firearms Licensees, Free Press, the Free Software Foundation, Greenpeace, the National Association for the Reform of Marijuana Laws’ California Chapter, Public Knowledge, and TechFreedom. The groups object to the NSA’s bulk collection of telephone records, disclosed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden in early June. The collection of all Verizon phone records, including records of calls made, the location of the phone, the time of the call, and the duration of the call, violates the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment by giving “the government a dramatically detailed picture into our associational ties,” said Cindy Cohn, legal director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, representing the plaintiffs.
to $350 in an effort to spark demand for the tablet. While it’s a move in the right direction, it’s a little late, and it still doesn’t go far enough to make the Surface RT attractive for business use in a market dominated by Apple’s iPad. . Had it done so, the tablet almost certainly would have sold much better, but with long-term repercussions for Microsoft and the tablet market in general. That price is too low to generate profit or be sustainable in any way, and raising the price after the fact is a hard sell for customers. that the price was simply too much for an “untested” tablet. , which must be purchased separately and adds another $100 to $130 to the cost.
Edward Snowden, the leaker of documents that revealed National Security Agency surveillance programs, has submitted a request for temporary asylum in Russia and could be granted a decision within several weeks, according to news reports. Snowden’s request was submitted Tuesday in an effort to evade persecution from the U.S. government that could bring with it torture or death, said Anatoly Kucherena, Snowden’s attorney, according to reports in . Russia’s Federal Migration Service is required by law to consider the application within three months, but a decision in Snowden’s case could be made in as soon as two to three weeks, the Journal said. The request is being made for “temporary asylum,” not permanent political asylum, because the latter takes longer to consider, the AP said. Under Russian law, political asylum is granted by presidential decree and is not granted often, whereas temporary asylum is akin to refugee status and usually lasts for a renewable period of one year, reports said. WikiLeaks, the nonprofit news-spilling organization that has been advising Snowden, could not be immediately reached to confirm the reports. Officials at the Russian Embassy in Washington, D.C., as well as the Consulate General of Russia in San Francisco, also could not be reached.
You may think an Instagram app that doesn't allow you to take pictures would be kind of pointless...but Instagram Explorer, a Windows 8 app for the Modern user interface, has plenty of potential. Using it is not unlike browsing through the Instagram.com site, but Instagram Explorer brings that experience to Windows 8's alternative view. Instagram Explorer's default view is to display your live feed, much like when you visit Instagram.com. It's a nice change to view some of the gorgeous photos you can find on Instagram on a bigger screen. It's also easier to comment on photos when you're using the spacious real estate of a Windows 8 desktop or laptop, and the comment field is more prominently displayed here than it is on Instagram.com. Instagram Explorer's profile view is superior to the square tiles displaying identically-sized recent photos on your smartphone. Instead, Instagram Explorer—like Instagram.com—displays photos in a variety of sizes and changes some as you're looking. Overall, the effect is far more visually appealing than the mobile view. Instagram Explorer does suggest "famous" users that you might want to make your favorites, but I found this feature unnecessary. It suggested a few folks I'd knew of (Katie Couric), some I'd never heard of (Cody Simpson?) and several I'd like to forget (Kim Kardashian). Clicking any of the suggested names lets you visit that person's profile to check it out, though the app was a bit slow to make the transition at times.
The sheer volume of digital information that businesses produce and collect today offers a greater incentive than ever for hackers to break into private online communications and company files. Recent revelations that the National Security Agency (NSA) successfully used digital snooping to serves as a glowing reminder of life in the digital information age. The dramatic leak is also a somber reminder of the fragile nature of computer security. Even disregarding , small businesses need to ask themselves if their IT infrastructure can withstand potential intrusion attempts from foreign governments or organizations with deep pockets and no qualms about hacking into their networks. One way to significantly increase your security may be to reduce your company’s reliance on third-party cloud providers. Given an inherent lack of oversight over external vendors, businesses have no viable means to accurately assess a particular cloud providers’ security posture or competence. Moreover, cloud services may make an appealing target for sweeping, state-sponsored hacking attempts by foreign governments. And these cloud service providers could conceivably be compelled to reveal information via a secret federal subpoena.
When you’re putting big projects together, megabytes can turn into gigabytes and even terabytes before you know it, especially if you’re studying a visual arts field like filmmaking, animation, or photography. Many newer laptops limit internal storage space in favor of an ultra-portable design, assuming you’ll turn to external resources to store large files. Cloud storage is a great option, but it relies on Internet connectivity, which isn’t always available when you need it, and can be expensive for storing large amounts of data. The solution? An external hard drive. These affordable devices are becoming an increasingly popular way to keep your work safely stored and available anytime you need it. Generally speaking, external hard drives come in two flavors -- desktop and laptop –- and both have their strengths. Desktop-class drives need to be plugged into the wall to run, tend to have a larger capacity than laptop drives, and are usually somewhat cheaper. But they’re not very portable, and when you’re running from dorm room to classroom to deliver your latest animation, packing it up and then plugging it in is not very convenient.
It's not every day that you hear the CEO of an up-and-coming hardware company say that he'd love to give his goods away for zip, zilch, nada, but Oculus VR honcho Brendan Iribe says that if it's possible, he'd love to give the Oculus Rift headset to users for the absolutely nothing. "The lower the price point, the wider the audience," Iribe told . "We have all kinds of fantasy ideas. We’d love it to be free one day, so how do we get it as close to free as possible? Obviously it won’t be that in the beginning. We’re targeting the $300 price point right now but there’s the potential that it could get much less expensive with a few different relationships and strategies." Iribe went on to cite the way console makers like Microsoft and Sony subsidize their hardware and make up the difference in sales of software and services. A similar model could enable Oculus Rift to land in the hands of the masses for nothing, or Oculus could bundle the VR headset with laptops and other types of hardware. "We’re not there yet, but we’re sitting there thinking all the time, how can we make this free?" Iribe pondered.
Anyone who's purchased a multifunction printer or scanner recently will probably recognize the name FineReader, as the version ships with many such products. Obviously, there are deals being made, but there's no questioning that the program also does a very nice job of OCR. Text extraction is great, though it's not quite as good at recreating complex documents in Word and RTF files as Acrobat or OmniPage. Abbyy FineReader 11 Professional ($170, 15-day free trial) is straightforward and easy to use. The main window shows a list of images in a column to the far left, the image being processed in a pane next to it, and the OCR'd text and elements in a pane on the right side. This side-by-side arrangement, shared with OmniPage Standard 18, makes it super-easy to spot mistakes and compare page elements. Abbyy FineReader 11 is fast, recognizes text in 189 languages, and outputs in a number of different formats including editable PDFs, Microsoft Word, ePub and even open-source PDF competitor DjVu. FineReader created a searchable PDF of my yearbook scans just fine, but like OmniPage, it was over-zealous at rotating images trying to find text until I turned off this feature. With most OCR programs, you're better off using Windows' own Photo Viewer to rotate scans to their correct orientation before OCR'ing.
Workday’s move into cloud-based financial software appears to be gaining steam, with some 50 customers now using the module in tandem with the vendor’s SaaS (software as a service) human resources application. In total, Workday has more than 450 customers now, according to company spokeswoman Christy Sasser. The 50 financials customers are all using the software in conjunction with Workday HCM (human capital management), Sasser said. One of the newest among those 50 is health-care staffing provider Schumacher Group, said company CIO Douglas Menefee. The privately held company is a long-time user of Workday for HCM, but earlier this year completed a move onto Workday’s financial package and will no longer use Oracle’s PeopleSoft product for the latter function, he said. Schumacher Group, which uses cloud-based software extensively, “was looking for a 360-degree view of how human capital and talent management are tied to overall productivity,” Menefee said. The company evaluated a number of products, including Oracle Fusion Applications and Microsoft Dynamics, but ultimately went with Workday.
The World Wide Web Consortium has rejected an attempt by the advertising industry to hijack a specification describing how websites should respond to “do not track” requests sent by Web browsers. Suggestions from the Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA) would have allowed advertisers to continue profiling users who had asked not to be tracked. It would also have allowed them to “retarget” ads to those users by showing ads relevant to one site or transaction on all subsequent sites they visited, according to the co-chairs of the W3C’s Tracking Protection Working Group. A number of popular browsers can already send a special header along with requests for Web pages to indicate whether the user wishes to be tracked. The working group is mainly concerned with standardizing the technical mechanisms for server-side compliance with those do-not-track requests. It will continue its work on the specification in a teleconference Wednesday. Proposals similar to those made by the DAA, an umbrella organization of online advertising organizations whose members conduct a large fraction of online advertising, will also be rejected, working group co-chairs Matthias Schunter and Peter Swire on Monday.
A broadband standard that aims to support bandwidth-intensive applications such as streaming Ultra-HDTV movies without the need to install fiber between the distribution point and people’s homes met its first-stage approval, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) said on Tuesday. The broadband standard is called G.fast and promises up to 1Gbps over existing copper telephone wires. The standard is designed to deliver super-fast downloads over a distance of 250 meters, eliminating the expense of fiber cables to peoples’ homes, the ITU said in . G.fast passed the first-stage approval of the ITU standard that specifies methods to minimize the risk of G.fast equipment interfering with broadcast services such as FM radio, the ITU said. If all goes well, G.fast will be approved in early 2014, it added. The standard is expected to be deployed by service providers that want to offer Fiber to the Home-like services, the ITU said. G.fast is meant to enable flexible upstream and downstream speeds to support bandwidth-intensive applications such as uploading high-resolution video and photo libraries to cloud-based storage, and communicating via HD video, it said.
Toshiba will soon launch the world's fastest SD cards, which will offer write speeds of up to 240MB/s. The Japanese electronics giant said Tuesday that its new Exceria Pro memory card will be aimed at power users such as photographers and have the speed to allow high-resolution photos to be snapped and saved continuously. The cards will have read speeds of up to 260MB/s and will come in 16GB and 32GB sizes. The company aims to have the cards on the market from October. It didn't release prices, but Japanese media reports said the 64GB version will cost around ¥25,000 ($250) domestically, with the smaller-sized card priced at around ¥15,000. Flash storage makers like Toshiba are eager to differentiate themselves from the competition as NAND flash prices fall steadily over time. SD flash cards with 64GB of memory that support slower standards now sell for as little as ¥3,500 online.
Jive is rolling out of its software assembly line a new version of its enterprise social networking (ESN) suite with enhanced gamification and sharper analytics, as well as deep integration with Salesforce.com’s Chatter, Microsoft’s Yammer and Evernote. Nathan Rawlins, Jive product marketing vice president, said that with this latest quarterly update the company addressed key trends in ESN, like promoting engagement with the software via techniques like gamification; giving administrators usage analytics capabilities; and simplifying the way Jive is integrates with third-party systems. Improvements in gamification include a reputation center where employees can view their current and completed “missions” and the points and badges they have earned. Managers now can also customize “missions” with more than 130 specific actions they want employees to engage in to accomplish business goals. The gamification capabilities in Jive are powered by Bunchball. Analytics enhancements include the availability of what Jive describes as “ready made, easy to read” reports designed to pinpoint business areas that could be tweaked to advance the attainment of specific goals like hitting sales targets, enhancing onboarding of new employees and sharpening customer service.
Intel's super-duper high speed Thunderbolt interface hasn't exactly taken the PC world by storm, and Monday, Acer stole some of the scant thunder Intel's baby had managed to generate. . "It's less expensive, offers comparable bandwidth, charging for devices such as mobile phones, and has a large installed base of accessories and peripherals." transfer 4K video signals. . You'll need a hub to hook up multiple USB 3.0 devices.
Lenovo is expanding software partnerships as it tries to break into a server market dominated by Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Dell. Its first such partnership expansion, announced Tuesday, is with VMware on virtualization products. Lenovo will bundle ThinkServer products with VMware’s vSphere with Operations Management. The servers with VSOM are targeted at customers of small and medium-sized businesses who want higher performance and server utilization rates, said Sean Gilbert, senior alliances manager at Lenovo. Lenovo has been pursuing the server market for a few years now with single- and dual-socket rack and tower offerings. However, Lenovo offers only basic hardware while competitors and market leaders like HP, Dell and IBM sell servers that combine homegrown hardware, networking, storage and software products.
The U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has ordered the government to declassify its secret order and parties’ briefs in a case which Yahoo expects will demonstrate that it resisted government directives. that the government should do a “declassification review” of the court’s memorandum of opinion in 2008 and legal briefs submitted by the parties, as it anticipates publishing its opinion in a redacted form. The government will have to report to the court by July 29 on the likely dates for the completion of the declassification of the documents, with priority given to the court opinion, Judge Reggie B. Walton wrote in the order. to the court last week that disclosure of the information would show that it objected at every stage of the proceedings, but the objections were overruled and a stay denied. Like other electronic communications providers, Yahoo finds itself under public pressure to provide more information about its response to U.S. government demands for user data. The disclosure of the court’s opinion and other documents would also give the public a view into “how the parties and the Court vetted the Government’s arguments supporting the use of directives,” Yahoo said in the filing.
Since taking the reins as Yahoo’s CEO a year ago this week, Marissa Mayer has set out to revamp the struggling Internet company with a series of rapid fire acquisitions that could make even her former colleagues at Google envious. In a strategy she has described as “a series of sprints,” Mayer has bought more than a dozen companies this year alone, mostly in pursuit of her goal of taking the lead in mobile, and to bring back the cool to a brand that was once the envy of Silicon Valley but somehow came to symbolize the very opposite of innovation. She’s had some success, especially on the financial side. Yahoo’s stock has risen roughly 70 percent since Mayer started there on July 17 last year, and analysts expect a 12 percent jump in profit when Yahoo reports its quarterly earnings Tuesday. But it’s a long haul to make a tarnished brand shiny and new again, and despite and Yahoo Mail, analysts say Mayer still has a way to go before she can claim to have brought Yahoo back from the brink.
Several underground marketplaces are offering full information packages for sale that contain verified health insurance credentials, bank account numbers, Social Security numbers and other personal information, along with counterfeit physical documents corresponding to the data. The information packages are known as “fullz” among cybercriminals and cost around $500 each if they include U.S. health insurance credentials, according to security researchers from Dell’s SecureWorks subsidiary who identified several marketplaces where dossiers of this type are being sold. “Fullz” usually contain full names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses with corresponding passwords, dates of birth, Social Security numbers (SSNs), Employer ID Numbers (EINs), and financial data such as bank account information, including account and routing numbers, online banking credentials with varying degrees of completeness, or credit card information, including magnetic stripe data and associated PINs. These information packages can also be accompanied by counterfeit physical documents including credit cards, drivers’ license, insurance cards and more, in which case they are called “kitz,” the Dell SecureWorks researchers said Monday in a .
It’s such a simple idea: Marry relatively affordable DDR memory cache with a hard drive in order to speed write performance. It’s been done for years on controller cards, but credit Buffalo Technology for taking advantage of cheap memory prices and leveraging the concept with an external drive. The company’s DriveStation DDR—a 3.5-inch, USB 3.0 drive—easily surpasses the write performance of any external hard drive we’ve tested. Indeed, it rivals the speed of external USB 3.0 solid-state drives, and at a far lower cost per gigabyte. External hard drives are relatively simple devices. The DriveStation DDR is an approximately 8-by-5-by-1.75-inch black box sporting a tick of red on the top front. Inside are a USB 3.0 type B port, a Kensington lock port, an AC jack, power and activity lights, and a cooling vent on the back. There’s no actual fan, as Buffalo feels that passive convection cooling is sufficient. And that seemed to be the case during our subjective and official tests. With both volatile memory and a hard drive on board, however, it’s no surprise that AC power is required to operate the drive. The 1GB of DDR3 cache onboard helped the DriveStation DDR’s write performance tremendously. It wrote our 10GB mix of files and folders at 140.8 megabytes per second (MBps)—that’s at least 40 MBps faster than the next fastest external USB hard drive we’ve tested. Nice. But where the DriveStation DDR really showed its mettle was in writing our large 10GB file at a scintillating 201.8 MBps, nearly twice what the average USB 3.0 hard drive can manage.
If you live in a world where you can afford to drop $9556 on an enormous, water-cooled gaming PC with four (four!) discrete graphics cards, I envy you. But if you’re thinking of taking the plunge with Primordial Computers’ latest gaming machine, the Medusa, I’d encourage you to look before you leap. As befits its name, the Medusa is a monstrous computer, with clear tubing snaking through its interior carrying neon-green-tinted coolant. The CPU and each of the system’s four (four!) GPUs have corrosion-resistant nickel-plated water blocks bolted to them. Apart from the absence of a custom paint job, the Medusa is the epitome of excess, with strips of LED lights festooned around the interior of its gargantuan Corsair Obsidian Series 900D Super Tower case. But before I dive any deeper into this review, allow me to explain why the Medusa lacks polish: Nvidia’s GeForce GTX Titans are heavy in their own right. Add 10 pounds of nickel-plated cooling blocks distributed among the four, link them together for quad-SLI operation, and you end up with a behemoth. If one card sags, it pulls the other three along with it. And that’s just what happened as the Medusa sat in the PCWorld Labs: The video cards began to droop to such an alarming degree that we wedged a piece of Styrofoam beneath them to keep them from falling out of their PCIe slots. Considering that the Medusa is a custom-built rig, Primordial should have come up with an attractive brace to support the cards and take the strain off of those slots. And that wasn’t the only thing to go south (pun intended) during my evaluation. An LED strip glued inside the case fell off right before we packed the machine to send it back to Primordial.
Most of the attention on Windows 8.1 Preview emphasizes the many . Windows 8.1 will include Internet Explorer (IE) 11, whose flashiest new feature will be support for multiple windows. The browser’s security enhancements should help keep the new experience exciting, but not scary. The Enhanced Protected Mode (EPM) that was added in IE 10 will now be turned on by default in the old-style desktop application, instead of just the IE app in the newer Windows UI. When turned on, EPM enables a sandbox-like feature called AppContainer, which restricts IE tabs from accessing sensitive data and system files. Additionally, EPM uses 64-bit tabs, offering more protection against attacks than 32-bit tabs provide. IE 11 will also let antivirus programs have deeper access to the browser. This will allow binary extensions—like the often exploited ActiveX controls—to be scanned by an antimalware program before they’re executed. This could also reduce the chances of malware infection or attack via rogue extensions and toolbars.
Trend Micro says it detected a targeted attack that sent malware-laden emails to representatives of 16 European countries and some Asian governments. The bogus emails purported to come from China’s defense ministry and contained a malicious attachment that exploited a now-patched vulnerability in Microsoft Office versions 2003 to 2010, Microsoft patched the vulnerability in Office, CVE-2012-0158, more than a year ago although attackers are still frequently targeting it, including in the campaigns, Leopando wrote. If the email attachment is opened on an unpatched computer, a “backdoor” program is then installed that steals login credentials for websites and email credentials from Internet Explorer and Microsoft Outlook, Leopando wrote.