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on (#WZBQ)
FireEye has uncovered a new piece of malware targeting financial institutions that it's calling Nemesis. This strain of malware is made by a group FireEye calls FIN1, and it's a particularly nasty bug. Once it's introduced to a system, Nemesis hooks into Windows' boot process while remaining next to undetectable from inside the OS. The FIN1 attackers can then exfiltrate nearly any piece of data from an infected system.Nemesis accomplishes its nefarious task by replacing Windows' MBR. The malware first installs its own custom file system in the free space between disk partitions before hijacking the machine's MBR and redirecting the boot process through its own code. When the infected machine boots up, it also fires up ...Read more...
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Techreport
| Link | https://techreport.com/ |
| Feed | http://techreport.com/news.rss |
| Updated | 2024-11-24 10:47 |
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on (#WZ84)
The Tech Report is looking for a freelance news writer or two to assist with our daily news coverage.Ideal candidates will be comfortable scouring a variety of sources for newsworthy information and quickly turning that raw material into ...Read more...
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on (#WYX5)
Microsoft's Lumia 950 didn't exactly get a warm reception from reviewers last month, but different price points come with different expectations. To hit a lower price point (where users may be more willing to forgive Win10's perceived shortcomings), the company has unleashed the Lumia 550, its $139 Windows 10 phone....Read more...
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on (#WXZ8)
The MOBA craze doesn't look like it's letting up any time soon. Epic Games will soon join the fray with Paragon, its spin on the genre. Check out the announcement trailer:...Read more...
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on (#WXJV)
In December 2014, Asetek won a trial against Cooler Master over closed-loop coolers that infringe on Asetek's patents. In September of this year, the US District Court for the northern district of California issued a permanent injunction against Cooler Master's infringing products. Now, according to a report from GamersNexus, both AMD and Gigabyte have received cease-and-desist letters from Asetek regarding the liquid coolers they use on their graphics cards. ...Read more...
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on (#WPE8)
Earlier this year, Oculus released the recommended system specs for using the Oculus Rift headset. Those requirements were already quite a bit above what most people are packing in their computers, and now Frontier Developments has revealed what kind of system you'll need to play the drop-dead-gorgeous Elite: Dangerous in VR glory. You better sit down for this one.For starters, CPUs less powerful than Intel's Core i7-3770K or AMD's FX-4350 need not apply. Those specs are pretty reasonable, but the 16GB of RAM needed to run the VR version might be a pain point for more than a ...Read more...
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on (#WP86)
Apple's lawsuit against Samsung may never fully come to an end, but for now, Samsung will pay its rival for the infringement of some of Cupertino's patents. According to a joint case-management statement filed with the US District Court in San Jose, Samsung has agreed to fork over $548 million in damages. The company says it may try to recoup that money if later trials go in its favor, though.According to the documents, Samsung says it will pay the agreed-upon damages once Apple submits an invoice. The two companies will meet in court on December 10 ...Read more...
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on (#WNVK)
Happy Friday, gerbils. We've pored over plenty of ads and websites looking for the best prices on worthwhile gear this week. Here's what's happening. ...Read more...
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on (#WNFR)
Side-scrolling platformers have never been the PC's forte, but Shadow Complex was one of the rare exceptions to the rule. The game was well received by press and gamers alike back in 2009, and it's now been remastered with modern graphics and gameplay tweaks....Read more...
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on (#WN84)
PCGamesHardware.de is reporting (Google translation here) that Intel Skylake CPUs may be damaged due to pressure from some third-party heatsinks. Some users have reported bent CPUs and even bent socket pins. The site says the cause for this problem may be the thinner substrate used in Skylake CPUs.
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on (#WJRE)
Mini-ITX system builders who want to push the boundaries of CPU performance are usually left out in the heat, and not every closed-loop liquid cooler fits easily in a Mini-ITX case. Corsair is looking to fix that with its Hydro Series H5 SF low-profile closed-loop CPU cooler. ...Read more...
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on (#WJ7D)
Microsoft has pledged ten years of support for Windows 10 on the desktop, but the mobile version may not live so long. Those updates may not be distributed quite like Microsoft previously said, either. The company has updated its Support Lifecycle page for the most recent version of its phone OS. The devil is in the details, and those details may not line up with Microsoft's previous statements.Windows 10 Mobile will get "a minimum of 24 months" of security updates. The company says those updates will be incremental, so users will need to install previous updates in ...Read more...
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on (#WHHB)
'Tis the season of giving, and also the season of getting. GOG has started its big winter sale, and there are good deals to be grabbed for recent and vintage titles alike. Let's kick this off.GOG is equally well-known for its expansive collection of older ...Read more...
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on (#WHHC)
If a thread on Nvidia's forums is any indication, owners of notebooks with GeForce GTX 860M graphics cards have been experiencing system crashes and unresponsive games for the last few weeks. Nvidia has acknowledged the problems with its drivers for GTX 860M-equipped notebooks and issued an updated driver.The updated driver, version 359.12, will only install on notebooks with a GTX 860M. The release notes only mention a resolution ...Read more...
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on (#WER5)
AMD has announced the FirePro W4300, a low-profile workstation graphics card aimed at small-form-factor professional PCs. Outside of the low-profile form factor, this card has a lot in common with the W5100. Both cards have GPUs with 768 stream processors good for 1.4 teraflops, backed with 4GB of GDDR5 memory that can provide 96 GB/s of bandwidth. ...Read more...
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on (#WEJH)
Phanteks' Power Splitter accessory already lets modders power two systems from one PSU, but the company is making it even easier for the average builder to put two PCs in one case. The Enthoo Mini XL Dual System kit includes a slightly modified Enthoo Mini XL case, the Power Splitter, and parts that allow builders to put a Mini-ITX mobo alongside a microATX board in the case's main chamber. ...Read more...
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on (#WEAY)
Looks like Dell is on a roll, and not the good kind. After the company's recent Superfishy root CA problem, security researchers are now finding holes in Dell's Foundation Services support software. According to the company, this software "provides a core set of foundational services facilitating customer serviceability, messaging, and support functions."Last week, the LizardHQ security research team disclosed a vulnerability in Foundation Services version 2.3.3800.0A00, which allowed a remote attacker to determine a device's Service Tag . That tag could ...Read more...
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on (#WDPG)
Lenovo is taking its Yoga classes very seriously. The company has just released a new convertible workstation targeted at graphic and CAD designers. Take a look at the company's latest asana, the Thinkpad P40. ...Read more...
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on (#WDER)
Ten freakin' terrabytes—that's what HGST is packing in a single hard drive now. The Western Digital subsidiary has announced that it's started shipping the Ultrastar He10, a helium-filled hard drive that uses perpendicular magnetic recording to pack that 10TB of storage into a single 3.5" chassis. ...Read more...
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on (#WAX7)
Flash has been a part of browsing the web on desktop systems for a long time, but its popularity has declined in recent years with the advent of standards-based rich content technologies that don't need plug-ins, like HTML5. Adobe has announced it's overhauling its Flash CC authoring software to embrace this reality, and the product has a new name—Adobe Animate CC. Adobe CC evangelist Michael Chaize walks through some of the new features in this video....Read more...
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on (#WAG9)
GeForce owners preparing to play Just Cause 3 and Rainbow Six Siege will find a hot, fresh Game Ready driver in GeForce Experience today. Nvidia's 359.06 WHQL drivers offer optimizations for both games, and this update also contains an SLI profile for Rainbow Six Siege.Nvidia has published graphics settings guides for Just Cause 3 and Rainbow Six Siege that dive into each game's eye candy settings and their effects on performance. The company has also created dozens of side-by-side comparison images that show ...Read more...
on (#WA96)
Just Cause 3 has just been released, and the game is showing up in headlines for all the wrong reasons. Reports of severe performance issues across all platforms (PC, PS4, Xbox One) are steadily coming in, and the game also seems to suffer from an inordinate number of bugs and glitches.The game's ills seem to come in all sorts of flavors. Players have reported unexplained performance dips, disappearing oceans and other geometry glitches, long ...Read more...
on (#WA7H)
Just Cause 3 has just been released, and the game is showing up in headlines for all the wrong reasons. Reports of severe performance issues across all platforms (PC, PS4, Xbox One) are steadily coming in, and the game also seems to suffer from an inordinate number of bugs and glitches.The game's ills seem to come in all sorts of flavors. Players have reported unexplained performance dips, disappearing oceans and other geometry glitches, long ...Read more...
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on (#W9ZC)
Most gaming mice today offer on-the-fly DPI adjustments, but those settings are usually represented with nothing more than a series of LEDs, and remembering what those lights mean in the middle of a heated game might not be easy. Cooler Master gets around that problem by putting an OLED display front and center on its Sentinel III gaming mouse, a neat-looking rodent designed for palm grippers. That OLED display shows the mouse's exact DPI setting to avoid confusion. ...Read more...
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on (#W9RW)
Just as it promised, AMD has posted a driver update that fixes issues with low fan speeds on some Radeon graphics cards. Radeon Software Crimson Edition 15.11.1 also includes updates for recent big game releases.The release notes for Catalyst Crimson 15.11.1 detail fixes for three issues related to AMD OverDrive that were apparently causing the issues with fan speeds that some users experienced. The OverDrive fan settings should no longer default to "on" after rebooting. After exiting a 3D application, ...Read more...
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on (#W7VK)
We've heard some pretty impressive performance claims about the A9X SoC in Apple's iPad Pro ever since the mega-slate made its public debut, and now we know a little more about the hardware that makes it all happen (even if it isn't quite surpassing x86 PCs just yet). Reverse-engineering firm Chipworks has teamed up with Anandtech to examine the guts of the A9X, and they've drawn some interesting conclusions looking at the floor plan of the 147-mmdie.Apple's SoCs are well-known for using two strong custom CPU cores, and the A9X doesn't depart from tradition in that regard. What is surprising is the large amount of chip area given over to graphics processing on the A9X. Anandtech believes that Apple has crammed 12 PowerVR Series7 ...Read more...
on (#W7CH)
It's Cyber Monday, and if your wallet isn't a smoking ash pile yet from the past week or so of deals, we have some more discounts for you to consider.That's it for today's deals. If any stragglers pop up this week, we'll be sure to share. If we missed ...Read more...
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on (#W77P)
We've been seeing and hearing about the potential of Microsoft's HoloLens for the better part of a year. Now Autodesk is showing off what it can do with mixed-reality hardware with its Fusion 360 design and collaboration software. If this YouTube video is any indication, HoloLens could be a useful tool for designers who want to show off their work without actually making prototypes....Read more...
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on (#W6K9)
AMD's Radeon Software Crimson Edition packs new features, fixes, and a revamped UI. According to some users, though, the new software may also contain a nasty bug. Some gamers using the new driver software are reporting that their cards' fan speed is set too low, causing the GPU to overheat.AMD is investigating these reports and promises a driver ...Read more...
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on (#W6BA)
Razer and Lenovo have announced that they're working together to produce Razer-customized versions of Lenovo's gaming-oriented desktops. The companies have already produced a prototype that was unveiled over the weekend at Dreamhack Winter 2015. ...Read more...
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on (#VYPH)
Observant gerbils will recall that we've been thinking for some time about using a thermal camera to try and glean some additional insights about the hardware we review. FLIR's One cameras have offered an accessible way into thermal imagers for some time, and we've gotten our hands on one of the second-generation One cameras today. This $250 add-on plugs into the Lightning port on iOS devices, turning them into thermal imagers with FLIR's companion iOS app. An Android version is also available. ...Read more...
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on (#VYDN)
Happy Black Friday, gerbils. We've combed through the avalanche of deals out there today to see what new gold has surfaced since retailers first took the wraps off their sales earlier this week. Here's what we found.Many of the deals in our Monday deals post are still active, too. If we missed ...Read more...
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on (#VY8Q)
The investors from Abu Dhabi who funded GlobalFoundries' expansion may be ready to tap out. A Bloomberg report citing "people familiar with the matter" says the Abu Dhabi sovereign fund, Mubadala Development Company, is exploring a possible sale of GloFo and has been in talks with potential suitors. GloFo competes with firms like TSMC and Samsung in the silicon foundry business, making chips for a range of customers—still including AMD, along with a ...Read more...
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on (#VY68)
Asus is holding a celebration, and it doesn't involve eating turkey. The company first started making graphics cards 20 years ago, and it's released the 20th Anniversary Gold Edition GTX 980 Ti to commemorate that fact. ...Read more...
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on (#VXZD)
While we Americans are still sleeping off our Thanksgiving celebrations, MSI has unveiled some Skylake-compatible updates to its Eco series of motherboards: the H170M Eco, B150M Eco, and H110M Eco. MSI says this trio of Micro-ATX mobos sips power without giving up the performance or features of their non-Eco brethren. All three boards pack Intel Gigabit Ethernet and MSI's Audio Boost features. ...Read more...
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on (#VR4D)
The Radeon R9 Fury X shipped without HDMI 2.0 support, so AMD's top-end card couldn't drive many 4K TVs and monitors at 60Hz with an HDMI cable. Fortunately, that shortcoming can be corrected with an active adapter that converts a DisplayPort 1.2 port to HDMI 2.0. Club 3D has announced a pair of these handy adapters, one for mini DisplayPorts and one for standard-sized versions. ...Read more...
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on (#VQE1)
Here's one for the extreme system builders out there. Putting two systems inside one PC case would normally require two power supplies, but Phanteks' Power Splitter accessory neatly solves that problem. ...Read more...
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on (#VQ8J)
Avalanche Studios has revealed the system specs required to play its upcoming, explosion-packed Just Cause 3. If you were concerned that your PC wouldn't handle the game's bangs and kabooms, fear not—the requirements seem quite reasonable to us....Read more...
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on (#VQ4W)
The GeForce GTX 950 may be a MOBA hero, but we found it also performs well in more graphically-intense games at 1080p with some of the settings dialed back. Biostar is getting in on the budget card action with the GeForce Gaming GTX 950. ...Read more...
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on (#VN19)
Asus' Zenbook UX305 is one of our favorite thin-and-light notebooks out there. Its $699 price tag gets you an aluminum body, a 1080p IPS screen, and a 256GB SSD. Asus now has a version of the UX305 with a Skylake CPU on board called the UX305C. For that same $699 price, the UX305C adds a Core m3-6Y30 chip in place of the Broadwell processor. The 6Y30 offers two cores and four threads running at 900MHz base and 2.2GHz turbo speeds, all in a 4.5W thermal envelope. ...Read more...
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on (#VMSA)
Shuttle pretty much wrote the book on small form factor PCs back in the day, and it's introducing some new bite-size machines today. Say hello to the Shuttle XPC Nano Ultra-slim. ...Read more...
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on (#VKR5)
All good things must come to an end. AMD has officially ended driver development efforts for older, non-GCN-based Radeon cards. All cards in the Radeon HD 5000 and 6000 series are now considered legacy products. Radeon HD 7600 and lower cards, along with HD 8400 and lower cards, are also entering sunset status today.The company says those products have reached their "peak performance optimization" as of today. AMD is now focusing its software development efforts on products built with the Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture. The company isn't ...Read more...
on (#VKDX)
Yesterday, some concerned Dell PC owners brought a Superfish-y issue to light. It turns out that Dell had installed self-signed root certificates on some of its PCs, and it also included the private key used to generate the certificate. With those tools in hand, an attacker could have generated a valid certificate for any secure website on the Internet, allowing them to carry out a man-in-the-middle attack on affected PCs. Now, Dell has officially acknowledged this vulnerability, and it's provided instructions for removing the rogue certificates.According to Dell, the "eDellRoot" and other self-signed root certificates on its PCs were installed as part of the Dell Foundation Services support application. The company says the certificates were meant ...Read more...
on (#VK95)
Downloading popular Android apps from non-official sources is a bad idea, but even legit apps can do potentially unwanted things in the background without drawing attention. Researchers from MIT dug through some of the most popular apps on Google Play and found that most of them access the network covertly.The research team pored over the top 500 popular applications on Google Play, though some—mostly chat apps, since they require readily available and somewhat unpredictable ...Read more...
on (#VHA4)
Remember the Superfish debacle, when Lenovo shipped computers with a preinstalled rogue root certification authority (CA)? Dell seems to think that was a good idea, as it's shipping laptops and desktop PCs with a similar self-signed "eDellRoot" root CA. An attacker can use this root CA to issue valid-looking certificates for any website. In turn, those certificates will be accepted by any affected Dell machines as legit, leaving the user none the wiser.For the unitiated, secure connections to websites (among other things) rely on a chain of trusted certificates to guarantee the safety of data in transit. Operating systems and web browsers come preinstalled with a set ...Read more...
on (#VH93)
Welcome to the first of what could be several deals posts this week. Black Friday has stretched its tempting bargains all into the surrounding days, as retailers clamor for our attention. Newegg is kicking off its shower of discounts and bargains this afternoon, and a number of appealing deals have already surfaced there. Here are the best of the lot so far.Those are the best deals we could find in today's early volley. If we missed any ...Read more...
on (#VGQJ)
Back in August, Mozilla announced plans to adopt a Chrome-like extension framework for Firefox called WebExtensions. In turn, the company plans to deprecate its existing XUL and XPCOM plug-in APIs. These changes are part of a larger project to make Firefox a more modern browser. According to a couple of entries in Mozilla's Bugzilla tracker, some less popular features of Firefox are going to be retired as part of this project, too.The first feature to hit the trashbin is support for "heavyweight" themes that rely on older add-on technologies. According to the Bugzilla entry for this change, themes that replace chrome packages (not to be confused with the Chrome browser) ...Read more...
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on (#VGH9)
Acer's XB270HU display is one of the more popular Nvidia G-Sync monitors on the market. Sadly, Radeon owners can't take advantage of the XB270HU's variable-refresh-rate magic, since G-Sync is a GeForce-only club for now. Acer isn't leaving red-team fans out, though. Its XF270HU gaming monitor is largely identical to the XB270HU, but this monitor supports FreeSync instead. ...Read more...
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on (#VG3Z)
Asus has unwrapped the latest models in its N series of notebooks. The newcomers pack GeForce GTX graphics cards and can be fitted with 4K IPS screens. Two sizes of N-series notebooks are available: the 15.6" N552 and the bigger 17.3" N772. ...Read more...
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on (#VFV7)
Way back in June 2014, Intel announced its intent to develop a Xeon with x86 cores and an integrated FPGA to accelerate certain processing tasks. That FPGA-accelerated future may arrive early next year, according to a report from PC World.Diane Bryant, senior VP of Intel's datacenter group, announced the impending release of these FPGA-equipped Xeons during an on-stage interview at Structure Conference in San Francisco last week. PC World ...Read more...