The Register

One does dev, the other ops, and they're believed to be former white hats A pair of cybercrooks who may have started out as legit infosec pros have expanded their operations outside Russia and begun attacking banks across the world.…

Hate leads to... a single vendor The Pentagon has pushed back the deadline for its $10bn cloud services contract by three weeks.…

Ungrateful! We've already given staffers mobiles, now they want patches too! Small businesses are dopey about the importance of regular patches and updates for their employees’ smartphones. And larger ones aren’t much better.…

Pour an aquavit, pour a gin, take a deeeep breath ... Juniper and Ericsson are extending a long-standing love-in to cover 5G network tech.…

Twitter account using 19-year-old's online alias also taunted law enforcement A British teenager has pleaded guilty in court to making hoax bomb threats to schools and airports while posing online as part of a hacker crew, a police agency has alleged.…

Email fraud skyrockets and ransomware is back, baby! Cybercrims are ramping up their efforts to target employees through fraudulent email and social media scams, according to a new study by email security firm Proofpoint.…

Toddler-level interruptions and todo lists. Guys, try harder IFA I didn't see a blockchain toothbrush at IFA in Berlin last week, but I'm sure there was one lurking about somewhere. With 30 vast halls to cover, I didn't look too hard for it. But I did see many things almost as tragic that no one could miss – AI being squeezed into almost every conceivable bit of consumer electronics.…

*By which we mean missed bin collections, fly-tipping etc. A local politician has launched his own chatbot, in what El Reg can only imagine is a bid to one-up health secretary Matt Hancock.…

Machine-learning medic beats fleshy docs' diagnoses, according to study AI can predict when you’ll keel over and die clutching at your chest from a heart attack better than doctors can, apparently.…

Search giant complains of misrepresentation, database titan raises an eyebrow An advocacy group funded in part by Oracle posed as a Russian internet troll farm to call attention to what it claims is Google's failure to police online political ad sales.…

Behind scheule, over budget ... stop us if you've heard this one New Zealand's government has decided to stop sending good money after bad by suspending an Oracle implementation that's so far cost the country NZ$100 million (£51m/ $65.4m).…

First light for Australia-Singapore Cable In response to another – yet another – failure on the SeaMeWe-3 submarine cable, Australian telco Vocus has lit up its ASC submarine cable ahead of schedule.…

Pumpers and dumpers, flash crashers and other miscreants under the SEC's spotlight The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has put out a call for proposals on a new system that would be able to identify possible stock scams posted on Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks.…

Free sessions for Reg to readers explore cloud platform’s main components Promo Microsoft has launched a series of free on-demand webinars to help businesses make the best use of the varied resources that are looking to make Azure cloud services the platform of choice for building and deploying the next generation of modern applications.…

Boffins program quadcopters to clock and record humans, cars and bikes Video Cameras on drones have helped make aerial photography more accessible – and with machine-learning software, they may be able to assist budding filmmakers in the future, too.…

When the bottom line gets bashed, priorities change For years, internet engineers have predicted that the cost of an ever-smaller pool of IPv4 addresses would cause people to shift to the internet's new IPv6 protocol. Well, it finally appears to be happening.…

Researchers uncover botnet malware pouncing on security holes More than 7,500 Mikrotik routers have been compromised with malware that logs and transmits network traffic data to an unknown control server.…

Devs can deal with pull requests from Chrome Developers who uses GitHub – 28 million at last count – now have the option to edit code with the click of a button using Gitpod, an integrated development environment (IDE) that can be launched directly from the social code hosting site.…

Lightning storm Shook Texas facility All Night Long Microsoft is blaming bad weather for the massive outage that knocked a number of Azure cloud and Visual Studio Teams services offline Tuesday.…

Big thumbs up to Internet Archive for now Analysis The Wayback Machine's archive of webpages is legitimate evidence that may be used in litigation, a US appeals court has decided.…

Big Blue deal with MayaData brings OpenEBS to platform MayaData has linked arms with IBM to make OpenEBS storage available to IBM Cloud Private users, giving Big Blue an answer for those that want containerised storage.…

$295m will buy you a lot of IT incident management Collaboration specialist Atlassian has snapped up IT incident-monitoring outfit OpsGenie in a deal worth $295m in cash and shares.…

All driller and lots of filler aboard the ISS The boss of Russian space agency Roskosmos has confirmed that last week's air leak aboard the International Space Station (ISS) was the result of engineers getting handy with a drill.…

Subcontinent agrees to bolster web infrastructure India's ISPs have agreed as a bloc to join The Internet Society's MANRS route integrity programme.…

Ah, the old bcc blunder, classic Data breaches at organisations that 'fess up to the UK's data protection watchdog are about seven times more likely to be caused by human error than hackers.…

US customers wake up to sleepy cloud service Updated Microsoft has warned that a "subset of customers in South Central US" may experience Azure problems today after cooling issues sent the servers scurrying for the shutdown button.…

£50m connectivity tech trial announcement marred by Panopticon-style horror The West Midlands is to become the first UK urban 5G testbed area at a cost of up to £50m – with one use for the new tech being China-style AI-powered CCTV cameras with automated facial recognition, according to the government.…

Party poppers in Mountain View, party poopers in Redmond Birthday cake makers, rejoice! There's a trio of tech industry milestones to celebrate or maybe commiserate.…

Frankfurt, Berlin regions to launch end of 2019, T-Systems 'trustee' deal to be retired Microsoft's Frankfurt and Berlin data centres will start shipping bits from the fourth quarter of 2019.…

Let's make it really easy for you… Slotting serverless into your infrastructure could save you money in the long term, by allowing you to move to a pay for what you actually use pricing model.…

But if you got yours in Europe, no worries Apple has 'fessed up to a production issue that affects iPhone 8s – but not those sold in Europe.…

But outgoing exec's own balance expected to see £1.7m boost Paul Pester has been booted out of TSB's top office after months of criticism over his handling of the IT chaos that hit the bank this year – but is still expected to take away about £1.7m.…

Security controls aren't there to just look pretty, you know Internet-connected 3D printers are at risk of being tampered with or even sabotaged because users fail to apply security controls, a researcher has warned.…

Take the fight to the cybercriminals Reg Webcast It’s a big bad world out there. Ransomware attacks are taking over as first among IT security worries, cryptojackers are hacking hardware to mine bitcoin holders’ assets and phishing websites are becoming more ingenious than ever.…

The Android comeback must wait a little longer IFA The world's largest annual electronics trade show, IFA in Berlin, was supposed to be where wearables and in particular smartwatches returned from the dead.…

Lock it down, lock it down now, researcher says An internet-wide scan on 230 million domains found 390,000 exposed source code directories.…

New teams in the USA and India to handle customer cases Veritas is planning to disband its UK-based specialist NetBackup Appliance support teams in favour of setting up new ones in the US and India.…

Number-two phone maker's sub-£400 bracket is getting a little messy Hands On "Who are Honor people?" a Huawei executive asked a few years ago, before answering his own question: "They try and wear a flower in their own hair. They are young people."…

Say farewell to Highlights ... if you even noticed it was there This time, Microsoft says, it really will be different: Redmond has promised to stop ruining Skype.…

Upgraded automation platform lightens the load As a developer, you would want to spend less time on drudgery and more on your apps. Microsoft’s answer to this is the recently introduced App Center, a continuous integration, delivery and feedback service for iOS, macOS, and Android developers.…

'Our largest win to date!' squeaks excited IT consultancy IT consultancy Wipro has signed a monster tech servies contract with Illinois-based Alight Solutions that should see the Indian outfit trouser as much as $1.6bn over the next decade.…

Brit broadband pusher admits hiccups in new billing engine Plusnet has admitted that some customer accounts showed other people's names and addresses during a planned upgrade to its billing systems.…

Competition is great, especially when the new contract's run by the old contractors BT has won a five-year contract to supply comms and IT services to various chunks of the NHS.…

ERP giant: You're just mad because you've 'fallen behind' SAP is pushing to have a lawsuit from competitor Teradata thrown out for good, arguing the claims are "factually groundless".…

US-only financing deal lasted all of a year Consumers looking to spread the cost of their Surface fix will have to look elsewhere for their fondleslab financing now Microsoft has brought the axe down on the programme.…

Latest exec hired to make the direct sales conflict go away Dell EMC has poached a channel veteran to lead its UK partner biz, sources have told The Register.…

Verification programme aims to weed out the miscreants Google has placed restrictions on tech support ads after admitting it's increasingly hard to tell promos for legit services from deceptions.…

Good news is that it was just a proof of concept... we hope Cisco has coughed to its Data Centre Network Manager (DCNM) software having a rather unpleasant vulnerability – but there's a patch for it.…

One day, one day... El Reg has once again curated a selection of storage news tidbits for all you thought leaders out there. Surely there's some sort of machine learning algorithm that can find the stuff and write it by now, hm?…

'Crashy McCrashface' sadly not an option this time around An impending Windows 10 release, Azure playing nicely with Google, and a blast through BASIC in the browser. It's the Microsoft round-up.…