IT Minds

Hackers have started adding data-wiping routines to malware that's designed to infect internet-of-things and other embedded devices. Two attacks observed recently displayed this behavior but likely for different purposes. Researchers from Palo Alto Networks found  a new malware program dubbed Amnesia  that infects digital video recorders through a year-old vulnerability. Amnesia is a variation of an older IoT botnet client called Tsunami, but what makes it interesting is that it attempts to detect whether it's running inside a virtualized environment. The malware performs some checks to determine whether the Linux environment it's running in is actually a virtual machine based on VirtualBox, VMware, or QEMU. Such environments are used by security researchers to build analysis sandboxes or honeypots. Virtual machine detection has existed in Windows malware programs for years, but this is the first time when this feature has been observed in malware built for Linux-ba

It’s been a solid year and a half since Microsoft updated its  Surface Pro  line, yet the rumor mill has kept surprisingly quiet on any updates. But today we may be getting our first look at what’s to come, courtesy of longtime Microsoft connoisseur, Paul Thurrott. Unfortunately, there’s not much to it. Surface Pro 5 will not change the Surface Connect power connector, I was just told. Kaby Lake, nothing dramatic Thurrott says the Surface Pro 5 won’t make any dramatic changes. We’ll get Kaby Lake processors, as expected, but Microsoft is keeping its proprietary ‘Surface Connect’ charger (which also serves as a docking port). Some have taken this to mean that the Surface Pro 5 won’t get USB-C, but that seems extremely unlikely to me. Microsoft has held out on the port long enough, and the “no one uses USB-C” argument no longer holds water now that every new phone that isn’t an  iPhone  comes with it.  It’s also totally possible that the device could support charging through

Microsoft and Skype will now help you converse in real time with Japanese speaker — even if you don’t speak Japanese yourself. Skype  announced  this week that it was adding Japanese to its real-time translation software, which it  introduced in 2014 . In its announcement, Skype says: Japan has also become a beloved destination for both tourism and business, and we’re excited for the potential benefit Skype Translator will bring to Japan, the community and our users. In order to use it, click on the globe icon in your chat menu. If you’re using  Windows  10, click the Skype translator button in the Preview app. This isn’t just for Skype, though. Japanese is now available in all Microsoft Translation services. Japanese is the tenth language in the Translator’s repertoire. The others are: English Spanish Brazilian Portuguese French German Italian Mandarin Chinese Arabic Russian According to the same post, Japanese was a tricky language to add. Skype hopes this