Gmail users urged to change passwords after apparent attack

Hackers compromised nearly 5M Gmail passwords

Security experts are urging Gmail users to change their passwords amid reports that hackers gained access to the credentials of 5 million users of the free email service. Some password combinations have been spotted on Russian cybercrime forums.

Peter Kruse, head of the eCrime unit at CSIS Security Group in Copenhagen, told Computerworld that most of the nearly 5 million stolen Gmail passwords are about three years old, but many are still legitimate and functioning.

He said that CSIS experts suspect that several hackers worked on an endpoint compromise to exploit vulnerable network protocols.

Google did not respond to a Computerworld request for comment but has told other news outlets that it has found no evidence that their systems have been compromised.

Google’s cloud-based email service is used by individuals as well as enterprises.

Russian media outlet RIA Novosti reported that hackers have stolen and published a database containing the Google account logins and passwords to a Bitcoin Security online forum.

The database reportedly contains 4.93 million Google accounts from English, Russian and Spanish users.

Kruse said the discovery of the hack comes just days after more than 4.6 million Russian-based Mail.ru accounts and 1.25 million Yandex e-mail boxes were reportedly compromised. Yandex is the largest Russian-based search engine.

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Quick look inside IBM’s snazzy new mainframe

What did IBM do to celebrate the mainframe’s 51st birthday? Reinvented the Big Iron basically.

Happy 51st
What did IBM do to celebrate the mainframe’s 51st birthday? Reinvented the Big Iron basically. The z13 models announced this week are the result of a $1 billion, five-year development cycle that resulted in the most powerful, feature-laden mainframe to date. Here we take a quick look at some of the more interesting features of the new system.

Legendary scalability
The z13 promises to build upon the mainframe’s legendary scalability: the big z13 is capable of running up to 8,000 virtual servers -- more than 50 virtual servers per core and z13 is able to process 2.5 billion transactions a day - equivalent of 100 Cyber Mondays every day of the year, IBM says.

Real-time encryption
IBM says the z13 will make practical real-time encryption of all mobile transactions. The z13 speeds real-time encryption of mobile transactions to help protect the transaction data and ensure response times. The system includes 500 new patents including cryptographic encryption technologies that enable more security features for mobile initiated transactions. Support to allow a cryptographic coprocessor to be shared across more than 16 domains, up to the maximum number of logical partitions on the system.

Embedded analytics
The z13 is the first mainframe system with embedded analytics providing real-time insights on all transactions. This capability can help guarantee the ability of the client to run real-time fraud detection on 100% of their business transactions, IBM says.

Cascade of events
On the mobile front, each transaction triggers a cascade of events across computing systems. These events include comparisons to past purchases, data encryption and decryption, bank-to-bank reconciliations, and customer loyalty discounts. This cascade of events causes what IBM calls a “starburst effect” – where a single transaction can trigger as few as four or as many as 100 additional system interactions. IBM says the z13 in such situations can protect and watch over these threat points.

zAware
BM’s zAware program has been improved. The system uses near real-time continuous learning algorithms, providing a diagnostics capability intended to help customers quickly pinpoint problems. IBM zAware uses analytics to intelligently examine z/OS or Linux on z Systems messages to find unusual patterns, inconsistencies, and variations. Large operating system environments can sometimes generate more than 25 million messages per day. This can make manual analysis time-consuming and error-prone when exceptional problems occur. IBM zAware provides a simple graphical user interface and APIs to help customers find message anomalies quickly, IBM says.

Fiber channel connectivity
IBM significantly bolstered the Fiber channel connectivity for storage area networks. IBM said the z13 will support a new release of IBM’s Fiber Connection or FICON. FICON Express16S features a link data rate of 16Gbps and auto-negotiation to 4G or 8Gbps for interaction with existing switches, directors, and storage devices.

Memory
The z13 supports 10TBytes of main memory, up from 3TB on the previous generation. The z13 is based on an eight-core processor made in the same 22 nm process as IBM’s Power 8 processors. A fully configured system sports up to 141 of these cores, all running at 5 GHz. The z13 supports 10 TBytes main memory, up from 3 TB in the previous generation.

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Coming soon: Better geolocation Web data

The W3C and OGC pledge to ease the path for developing location-enriched Web data

From ordering pizza online to pinpointing the exact location of a breaking news story, an overwhelming portion of data on the Web has geographic elements. Yet for Web developers, wrangling the most value from geospatial information remains an arduous task.

Now the standards body for the Web has partnered with the standards body for geographic information systems (GIS) to help make better use of the Web for sharing geospatial data.

Both the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) have launched working groups devoted to the task. They are pledging to closely coordinate their activities and publish joint recommendations.

Adding geographic elements to data online in a meaningful way "can be done now, but it is difficult to link the two worlds together and to use the infrastructure of the Web effectively alongside the infrastructure of geospatial systems," said Phil Archer, who is acting as data activity lead for the W3C working group.

A lack of standards is not the problem. "The problem is that there are too many," he said. With this in mind, the two standards groups are developing a set of recommendations for how to best use existing standards together.

As much as 80 percent of data has some geospatial element to it, IT research firm Gartner has estimated. In the U.S. alone, geospatial services generate approximately $75 billion a year in annual revenue, according to the Boston Consulting Group.

Making use of geospatial data still can be a complex task for the programmer, however. An untold amount of developer time is frittered away trying to understand multiple formats and sussing out the best ways to bridge them together.

For GIS (geographic information system) software, the fundamental units of geospatial surface measurement are the point, line and polygon. Yet, people who want to use geographically enhanced data tend to think about locations in a fuzzier manner.

For instance, say someone wants to find a restaurant in the "Little Italy" section of a city, Archer explained. Because such neighborhoods are informally defined, they don't have a specific grid of coordinates that could help in generating a definitive set of restaurants in that area.

"That sort of information is hard to get if you don't have geospatial information and it is also hard to get if you only have geospatial information," Archer said.

Much of the work the groups will do will be centered around bridging geolocational and non-geolocational data in better ways -- work that the two groups agreed needed to be completed at a joint meeting last March in London.

The groups will build on previous research done in the realm of linked open data, an approach of formatting disparate sources of data so they can be easily interlinked.

The groups will also look at ways to better harness emerging standards, notably the W3C's Semantic Sensor Network ontology and OGC's GeoSPARQL.

The working groups plan to define their requirements within the next few months, and will issue best practices documents as early as by the end of the year.

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