Category Archives: Cloud Servers
Cybercriminals Build Massive Banking Fraud System in the Cloud
Cybercriminals have built a cloud-based fraud system that targeted wealthy people and commercial accounts in bilking primarily European banks of possibly billions of dollars, security vendors say.
The international ring targeted accounts with an average of $300,000 to $600,000, and attempted to transfer as much as $130,000 to bogus business accounts, Intel-owned McAfee said Tuesday. While McAfee did not know how much money was actually stolen, the vendor estimates that it ranged from $75 million to $2.5 billion.
The ring targeted banks in Europe and then expanded to Latin America and more recently the United States, where it had just gotten started, Dave Marcus, director of advanced research and threat intelligence at McAfee Labs, said. McAfee, which investigated the ring's operation over the last six months with Guardian Analytics, is working with law enforcement agencies to shut down the fraudsters.
What is unique about the fraud was the amount of automation used, a feat made possible through the use of cloud computing, Marcus said. The combination of remote servers and an intimate knowledge of banking transaction systems made it possible to automate the theft, rather than simply stealing user names and passwords and having someone manually transfer money from a computer.
"The automated nature of these attacks really require that kind of server/cloud functionality," Marcus said. "It can't all take place on the host [computer]. All of the logic and all of the sophistication really does reside on that [cloud] server."
McAfee first discovered the fraudsters operating in Italy, and later followed them to Germany, the Netherlands and other countries in Europe. In March, the ring was found operating in Colombia and one server was later traced to the United States. "It looks like it [the ring] just started making the transition to the U.S.," Marcus said.
The fraud started with an email cleverly disguised to look like it came from the recipient's bank. Clicking on a link in the message downloaded the malware that would later use web-injects to steal the information needed to perform fund transfers. Web-injects are fake pages or form fields launched while a person is on an online banking site.'
McAfee, which dubbed the investigation "Operation High Roller" because of the wealthy victims, found 60 servers processing thousands of attempted thefts. Most of the transfers were for less than $10,000, with the highest reaching $130,000.
The fraudsters used common Zeus and SpyEye malware platforms as the base of the malicious code, which was customized for each targeted bank. Once the malware stole the needed information, transfers were performed via the control servers, which were even able to obtain the information needed to bypass smartcard readers often used in Europe for two-factor authentication. "We have not seen this level of sophistication before," Marcus said.
Besides the use of the cloud, the fraudsters had an impressive knowledge of how banking transaction systems worked. McAfee wasn't able to determine how the criminals gained that level of understanding. "You can't make a fraudulent transaction look like a valid transaction, if you don't know what you're doing," Marcus said. "And these guys know what they're doing."
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Cybercriminals Build Massive Banking Fraud System in the Cloud
RightGrid – Scalable batch processing in the Cloud (Amazon EC2) – Video
25-06-2012 16:55 RightGrid is RightScale's back-end batch processing framework. Cloud computing provides the perfect solution for batch processing because you are no longer limited by a dedicated compute capacity. If there is a large number of jobs in the queue that need to be processed by your back-end worker servers, now you can increase the number of compute resources to reduce the total processing time. Cloud computing lets you "scale-up" the number of resources at a rate and number that suits your needs and then "scale-down" once the number of jobs have been processed.
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RightGrid - Scalable batch processing in the Cloud (Amazon EC2) - Video
ChicagoMicro – Technology, Software
25-06-2012 15:02 ChicagoMicro Offers their Services to Every Sector: Non-Profit, Education, Businesses of all sizes & Cloud Based Services Check them Out at: & Let them Know JunoWallet Sent you! Lately their main focus has been on helping customers who are growing at a fast rate & need aa lot of server space & a lot of data to the cloud, They provide data centers & also adequate licensing for things from Adobe & Microsoft Hottest thing they offer right now is Apple dual Core towers & Gen8 HP servers rack (intelligent servers) If your Growing business is in need of Network Monitoring Services (NMS) make sure you check Chicago Micro a look Their Managed Services Solutions Include: -Network Monitoring Services (NMS) -Internet Service Provider (ISP) Services and Data Circuit Provisioning -Daily Data Back-Up Monitoring -Co-location Facilities -Offsite Data Storage -SPAM Filtering Services
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ChicagoMicro - Technology, Software
Verizon, Vodafone and MTS Select HP ProLiant Servers to Standardize, Reduce Costs
PALO ALTO, CA--(Marketwire -06/26/12)- HP (HPQ) today announced that Verizon, Vodafone and Mobile TeleSystems OJSC (MTS) -- three of the world's market-leading providers of wireless and wireline communications -- have signed new technology agreements for the supply and delivery of industry standard servers.
Under the three-year agreements, HP will provide HP ProLiant servers based on the latest Intel processors, enabling Verizon, Vodafone and MTS to offer new services for their more than 490 million subscribers.
Verizon is a global leader in delivering broadband, video and other wireless and wireline communications services to mass market, business, government and wholesale customers. Vodafone is one the world's largest mobile operators and has equity interests in more than 30 countries across five continents, and more than 40 partner markets worldwide. MTS is the leading telecom provider in Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).
Each company needed to find a solution that would allow them to further standardize x86 server data-center technologies at a group level, and to reduce costs and improve their total cost of ownership for servers.
This agreement has been reached through close collaboration between Verizon, Vodafone and MTS, enabling the companies to align on product standards and combine their purchasing volumes into one single vendor.
HP also provides HP Converged Infrastructure solutions for Verizon, Vodafone and MTS that range from thousands of servers and mission-critical systems to storage and cloud innovations. The benefits of these technology offerings include:
About HPHP creates new possibilities for technology to have a meaningful impact on people, businesses, governments and society. The world's largest technology company, HP brings together a portfolio that spans printing, personal computing, software, services and IT infrastructure to solve customer problems. More information about HP is available at http://www.hp.com.
Intel is a trademark of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and other countries.
This news release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions. If such risks or uncertainties materialize or such assumptions prove incorrect, the results of HP and its consolidated subsidiaries could differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements and assumptions. All statements other than statements of historical fact are statements that could be deemed forward-looking statements, including but not limited to statements of the plans, strategies and objectives of management for future operations; any statements concerning expected development, performance, market share or competitive performance relating to products and services; any statements regarding anticipated operational and financial results; any statements of expectation or belief; and any statements of assumptions underlying any of the foregoing. Risks, uncertainties and assumptions include macroeconomic and geopolitical trends and events; the competitive pressures faced by HP's businesses; the development and transition of new products and services (and the enhancement of existing products and services) to meet customer needs and respond to emerging technological trends; the execution and performance of contracts by HP and its customers, suppliers and partners; the protection of HP's intellectual property assets, including intellectual property licensed from third parties; integration and other risks associated with business combination and investment transactions; the hiring and retention of key employees; assumptions related to pension and other post-retirement costs and retirement programs; the execution, timing and results of restructuring plans, including estimates and assumptions related to the cost and the anticipated benefits of implementing those plans; expectations and assumptions relating to the execution and timing of cost reduction programs and restructuring and integration plans; the resolution of pending investigations, claims and disputes; and other risks that are described in HP's Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the fiscal quarter ended April 30, 2012 and HP's other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including HP's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended October 31, 2011. HP assumes no obligation and does not intend to update these forward-looking statements.
2012 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice. The only warranties for HP products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. HP shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein.
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Verizon, Vodafone and MTS Select HP ProLiant Servers to Standardize, Reduce Costs
Google Ventures-Backed Cliqr Brings Old-School Business Apps To The Cloud
Anthony Ha is a writer at TechCrunch, where he covers media, advertising, and startups. Previously, he was a staff technology writer at Adweek, worked as a senior editor at the tech blog VentureBeat, and was also a reporter at the Hollister Free Lance, where he won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for breaking news coverage and writing.... Learn More
In all the talk of cloud computing, Cliqr Technologies CEO Gaurav Manglik says theres one area of enterprise technology thats been sitting out the transition business applications. The cloud has led to an explosion of new apps, but (to pick two random examples) chip design and medical imaging apps are still running on old-fashioned servers.
Naturally, thats a problem that Manglik is trying to solve with Cliqr, which is coming out of stealth mode today. The company has raised a seed round of just under $1 million from Google Ventures and Foundation Capital, and its raising a Series A now.
Cliqr is supposed to take the headache out of moving these business apps onto the cloud. Manglik says that as business apps are doing more and more computation on more and more data, theyre straining against the resources of on-premise servers. On the cloud, those enterprises could scale their computing resources as needed, but there are still obstacles, like the complexity and cost of the migration.
So Cliqr can handle the migration process to cloud infrastructures like Amazon, HP, and Rackspace, hopefully in less than a day. In fact, customers dont really have to think about their infrastructure at all, Manglik says, and instead they get an application-centric view of the cloud.
Manglik makes it sound like there are already plenty of businesses interested in Cliqrs technology, but I also wondered about the companys long-term prospects. After all, its focused on a specific transition, so will it still be relevant in a few years? Manglik says yes, because there are other advantages to Cliqrs approach. For one thing, applications are now unhooked from infrastructure, you can use the service to move from cloud to cloud. Do pricing changes make you want to move your app from Amazon to Rackspace? With Cliqr, you should be able to switch with a click.
Google Ventures is the financially motivated venture capital arm of Google Inc., founded in 2009. Google Ventures invests in startups in industries including consumer Internet, software, hardware, clean-tech, bio-tech, health care and others. They aim to invest about $100 million a year, with deal sizes ranging from seed to late-stage investments of tens of millions of dollars, depending on the stage of the opportunity and the companys need for capital. Google Ventures currently invests in the U.S. and has offices in...
Foundation Capital is an investment firm run primarily by entrepreneurs. Each partner left a successful career in industry to work in venture capital in order to work with other entrepreneurs to build great new companies. They have backed successful entrepreneurs across various sectors from enterprise software to clean technology to consumer Internet and fabless semiconductors. Typically, Foundation makes an initial investment of $1 to $10 million and follow that by participating in each subsequent round of financing. As...
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Google Ventures-Backed Cliqr Brings Old-School Business Apps To The Cloud
Cloud computing moves slow for North Jersey businesses
With the growing buzz around cloud computing and its benefits of ramping up efficiency while cutting information technology costs some local companies are beginning to weigh its pros and cons, while acknowledging it as the next inevitable IT progression.
According to a 2012 survey by Edge Strategies and Microsoft, a major cloud provider, about 30 percent of small to midsize companies are using some cloud services, which allow part or all of businesses' computing needs like Web-based applications, backup services, data storage or other functions to be hosted online rather than on in-house servers.
"I'm seeing more and more businesses that are interested in learning about cloud computing and more and more that are using it," said Tzvi Mayerfeld, president of CMIT Solutions in Clifton, which offers cloud computing services.
Cloud computing allows consumers to pay one monthly fee that covers only what they use. This can save money by avoiding expensive hardware and maintenance costs when a business grows and needs more computing power, and the technology can update itself without bringing in a tech expert, Mayerfeld said.
Because of this, cloud services work best for start-ups without a lot of capital, running Web-based applications or businesses that need to guarantee remote access to work applications. It can also ensure that data remains accessible in the event a catastrophe destroys an office, because cloud-based applications and services can still operate. Cloud also works well with companies that don't have the proper space for IT equipment, said Jhovanny Rodriguez, vice president of Synetek, a Hackensack-based managed IT services and cloud computing provider.
Cloud also can be advantageous for businesses that face unpredictable demand, such as an e-commerce site that needs to expand its capacity only for holiday spikes, explained Vladimir Zwass, distinguished professor of computer science and management information systems at Fairleigh Dickinson University.
Data Screening, a background-checking company in Clifton with four in-house staffers, does most of its business on the cloud, Vice President Kimberly Slezak said.
The company has been using Synetek for about four years for cloud email spam and backups. For background checks, it uses a cloud-based, online application that allows staff and clients to access information and place requests anywhere. The company also uses SalesForce, an application that logs sales data and manages files through the cloud, Slezak said.
"Now I'm available 24/7," she said. "It's not a matter of me telling a client, 'I can't get this done for you because I'm at home.' I can just log online to do it."
Slezak said converting to cloud has saved them money. Otherwise, major in-house equipment could cost them around $3,000 upfront, and it's more expensive and cumbersome to develop their own sales and background-checking software.
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Cloud computing moves slow for North Jersey businesses
Yottaa Introduces Cloud-Based Firewall and Global DNS Service
SANTA CLARA, CA--(Marketwire -06/26/12)- Velocity Conference -- Yottaa, Inc., the cloud performance and security company, announced today that it has added cloud-based firewall and global DNS to the Yottaa product suite. With this move, Yottaa extends its suite beyond performance optimization, and into reliability and security.
Yottaa Firewall is a cloud-based service that lets web operations teams throttle or block traffic. This helps prioritize "good" traffic (e.g., customers, site visitors, and important bots such as Googlebot and Bing web crawler), throttle less important traffic (e.g., other crawlers and bots) and completely block malicious traffic (hackers and annoying bots).
Yottaa DNS is a global IP Anycast-based DNS service. The enterprise-grade service, running in more than ten geographically distributed data centers, allows web operations teams to improve performance, security and reliability of their DNS infrastructure. Yottaa DNS balances requests across a customer's entire web and cloud infrastructure -- across multiple servers, multiple data centers, and in the public cloud.
"Our new protection services are a radical re-think of Internet traffic processing," said Coach Wei, CEO, Yottaa. "Yottaa's cloud-based protection services are built from the ground-up to be as elastic, resilient and cost-effective as the cloud itself. And they share and learn from the collective intelligence acquired across the entire Internet, to grow better over time. With these additions to the Yottaa suite, every business can now enjoy enterprise-grade speed, scale and security."
Enterprise-Grade Traffic Control for Any Website
Traditionally, enterprise-grade DNS and firewall protection have been out of reach of most organizations. By incorporating these services in the Yottaa suite, Yottaa makes web performance and security accessible to everyone.
Next-Generation Protection Services for Cloud Apps
Until now, organizations hosting sites and applications in the cloud have had to either settle for the limited security protection options made available by their cloud providers, or attempt to build a custom security solution on their own. Yottaa now offers a third choice -- enterprise-grade protection delivered as a cloud-based service.
Protection Service as Elastic and Adaptive as The Cloud Itself
Traditional firewalls are typically appliance-based, with fixed upfront capital costs, no elasticity and zero intelligence sharing. Yottaa's cloud-based virtualized firewalls have no single point of failure, can scale to handle traffic spikes, and use patented learning technology to continually learn and improve performance over time.
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Yottaa Introduces Cloud-Based Firewall and Global DNS Service
ImperialCraft: Survival, PVP Minecraft server – Video
24-06-2012 16:34 Imperialcraft is a fun and friendly server with a Large and kind staff. The server is full of land to explore and build in. We hope you join us and have fun. Tell them anime sent you for 2 free diamonds! IP: 184.154.171.108
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ImperialCraft: Survival, PVP Minecraft server - Video
Two of many mingebags on servers – Video
25-06-2012 11:43 Wow... I can't believe that an admin really kicked me for demoting a mingebag for spamming in the out of character, plus he's already punished me before it (you can see on my screenshots in the link below) I say both of these people deserve a ban, the admin should lose his powers as well. Admin abusing: Persistan STEAM_0:1:42233763 Player abusing ID: STEAM_0:1:14787686 Background story: The mingebag player was insulting my friend and whining on the /ooc, then another admin threatened the player that he is on his last warning for RDM, however he carried on arguing when the admin left, i decided to help out my friend because the player was convince that my friend was on his last warning, not him. However when i told him the facts he directed his abuse towards me, after around 30mins of arguing i decided i should demote him for abusing the /ooc. He started raging and called the mingebag admin to help him out. The mingebag admin teleported us into a room and started agreeing with whatever the player said i did, so the admin decided to ignite me, jail me, get kicked by a ragdoll, kill me twice before listening to my side of the story, when i told him my side the player constantly interrupted me just to piss me off, however the admin didn't even listen to me and gave the player a ak47, a knife and some other weapons because he accidentally killed him when he ragdoll kicked himself into me (killing me also). Then the admin let the player kill me which is clearly RDM, then the ...
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Two of many mingebags on servers - Video
Episode 3: Building Scalable Applications in the Cloud – Application Server Tier – Video
25-06-2012 11:54 In this six-part series, RightScale Solutions Architect Brian Adler identifies the challenges of building scalable applications in the cloud, shares best practices for building a reference architecture, and shows you how to set up the individual tiers in a multi-tiered architecture. This video series is a must-see for application developers and systems architects who have taken advantage of cloud resources to scale their applications and are encountering new challenges as they approach previously unseen scalability thresholds.
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Episode 3: Building Scalable Applications in the Cloud - Application Server Tier - Video