Technology

A few folks have reported a new ransomware technique that preys upon corporate inability to keep passwords safe. The notes & which are usually aimed at instilling fear & are simple: the hacker says &I know that your password is X. Give me a bitcoin and I won&t blackmail you.&

Programmer Can Duruk reported getting the email today.

The email reads:

I&m aware that X is your password.

You don&t know me and you&re thinking why you received this e mail, right

Well, I actually placed a malware on the porn website and guess what, you visited this web site to have fun (you know what I mean). While you were watching the video, your web browser acted as a RDP (Remote Desktop) and a keylogger which provided me access to your display screen and webcam. Right after that, my software gathered all your contacts from your Messenger, Facebook account, and email account.

What exactly did I do

I made a split-screen video. First part recorded the video you were viewing (you&ve got a fine taste haha), and next part recorded your webcam (Yep! Ityou doing nasty things!).

What should you do

Well, I believe, $1400 is a fair price for our little secret. You&ll make the payment via Bitcoin to the below address (if you don&t know this, search &how to buy bitcoin& in Google) .

BTC Address: 1Dvd7Wb72JBTbAcfTrxSJCZZuf4tsT8V72 (It is cAsE sensitive, so copy and paste it)

Important:

You have 24 hours in order to make the payment. (I have an unique pixel within this email message, and right now I know that you have read this email). If I don&t get the payment, I will send your video to all of your contacts including relatives, coworkers, and so forth. Nonetheless, if I do get paid, I will erase the video immidiately. If you want evidence, reply with &Yes!& and I will send your video recording to your 5 friends. This is a non-negotiable offer, so don&t waste my time and yours by replying to this email.

To be clear there is very little possibility that anyone has video of you cranking it unless, of course, you video yourself cranking it. Further, this is almost always a scam. That said, the fact that the hackers are able to supply your real passwords & most probably gleaned from the multiple corporate break-ins that have happened over the past few years & is a clever change to the traditional cyber-blackmail methodology.

Luckily, the hackers don&t have current passwords.

&However, all three recipients said the password was close to ten years old, and that none of the passwords cited in the sextortion email they received had been used anytime on their current computers,& wrote researcher Brian Krebs. In short, the password files the hackers have are very old and outdated.

To keep yourself safe, however, cover your webcam when not in use and change your passwords regularly. While difficult, there is nothing else that can keep you safer than you already are if you use two-factor authentication and secure logins.

In the wake of Broadcom failing to complete its takeover of Qualcomm, Intel is buying another chip company as it works on adjusting its own its business to fit the next generation of computing. Today, the company is announcing that it is acquiring eASIC, a fabless semiconductor company that makes customisable eASIC chips for use in wireless and cloud environments.

Financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed, as the price paid will not be material to Intel. eASIC has 120 employees, was founded in 1999 and has counted Khosla, Kleiner Perkins and Seagate among its investors, raising $149 million in total. It had been recapitalised in 2012 and so, in its last round, in November 2017, it was valued at around $110 million post-money, according to PitchBook, to give you a basic idea of a possible pricing ballpark.

eASICtechnology and team will become a part of IntelProgrammable Solutions Group (PSG), which Intel created after it acquired Altera in 2015 for $16.7 billion. Altera is a producer of FPGA chips, and the idea will be to complement those with eASICtechnology, said Dan McNamara,corporate vice president and GM of the PSG division:

&We&re seeing the largest adoption of FPGA ever because of explosion of data and cloud services, and we think this will give us a lot of differentiation versus the likes of Xilinx,& which is one of Intelbiggest competitors in FPGA. &We&ll be able to offer an end-to-end lifecycle that fits todaychanging workloads and infrastructure. No one on the marketplace will have this.& FPGA designs allow companies to quickly modify chip architectures, but they also require a lot of power. eASIC chips are more efficient, and they can be configured quickly from the outset (but cannot be modified).

The idea will be to offer eASIC as a transition to customers of Intel(and its competitors) who are already using FPGA and looking for a migration to the next thing. Applications that might need eASIC power could range frombaseband and radio heads in 4G and 5G networks as well as applications based in the cloud that require heavy data computations, for example AI and video services, or financial risk analysis.

Intel and eASIC have actually been working together since 2015, when the latter company started to provide its flavor of ASIC designs to Intel for its Xeon chips. McNamara confirmed that Intel never invested in eASIC but it had considered the idea &multiple& times, including recently, instead of acquiring.

However, ultimately, owning the company outright made more sense for both sides, he said.

&Strategic partnerships are good but a combination much better,& he said, &because it brings the investment capability to the next node. When you are privately held and venture-backed you can be challenged by the investment needed for the next phase of innovation.& He also noted the &key talent& and IP — including multiple patents — that Intel will be getting in the deal.

eASIC itself has felt the pinch of being a smaller chip company: it tried to file to go public in 2015to raise $75 million but cancelled its IPO at a time when the public markets were freezing up for listings of startups. Its move to Intel is part of whatbeen a long-term consolidation in the chip industry, which gets more value out of economies of scale and selling end-to-end services to larger customers.

&The eASIC team has developed and deployed a truly innovative structured ASIC product. The marriage of the eASIC technology with IP and capabilities ofIntelwill allow the ubiquitous deployment of this proven structured ASIC product into a wide breadth of exciting end applications and markets. This is the perfect time to usher in this new chapter for eASIC,& said Ronnie Vasishta, president and CEO of eASIC, in a statement.

While many in the technology and communications industries believe that areas like the Internet of Things and 5G — and the infrastructure, hardware and related services powering them — will be huge businesses, today they remain relatively small. In Intelmost recent quarterly earnings reported in April, PSG had revenues of$498 million — up 17 percent on a year ago but still the smallest division within the companydata-centric business units. As a point of comparison, IntelPC-centric Client Computing Division made $8.2 billion. But CCG only grew three percent over a year ago, and that stagnation and slowdown in Intelbusiness is one reason why it needs to buy companies like eASIC and focus on future technologies.

eASICcustomers include a number of vendors that work in the communications industry, including Huawei, NEC, Violin Memory, Seagate, Microsoft, Flir Systems and Arm. After it added a longtime Apple vet to its board several years ago, it was speculated that Apple might also have a tie to the company, although that has never been confirmed.

The deal comes at a key time for Intel, which in addition to its over-reliance on revenues from its legacy business, has been facing delays on the production of 10nm chips, and then unexpectedly lost its CEO Brian Krzanich in June when he resigned over inappropriate behavior. But Robert Swan is in the role now on an interim basis, and McNamara says the company is going full-steam ahead on its previous strategy.

&The executive team is fully focused on the execution of our strategy and this is a good example of it,& he said.