Top 10 Stories

Looking forward to a nice, relaxing Sysadmin Day? If you run Microsoft's Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) 2012, your day may just have been complicated by the release of two update rollups. The biggie is the Update Rollup 7 for System Center 2012 R2 Virtual Machine Manager, which adds the ability to “provision and customize Windows 10 Client Virtual Machines (VMs).” There's also enhanced features for those who like to manage servers virtualised under VMWare's tESX...

Germany's federal prosecutors are investigating whether a website has committed treason. Netzpolitik.org reported on plans to expand the country's domestic surveillance of online communications earlier in the year. The site says it has received a letter from prosecutors announcing the probe against two of its journalists as well as an unidentified source. The stories were published in February and April. The February article alleged Germany's domestic intelligence agency wanted additional funds to increase its online...

Cisco has closed a hole in its ASR 1000 line of enterprise and service provider-grade routers that could trigger denial of service. Attackers can exploit the hole by crafting a series of packets that cause the routers to reload and cut net services. The Borg says it has not witnessed attacks in the wild. "A vulnerability in the code handling the reassembly of fragmented IP version 4 (IPv4) or IP version 6 (IPv6) packets of...

Bad error message handling has opened up Cisco's IOS-XE versions prior to 3.13S to a remote denial-of-service (DoS) attack. The company's threat advisory hints that the exploit was brought to Cisco's attention by an independent researcher, since it states that "functional exploit code exists; however, the code is not known to be publicly available." IOS XE is a Linux daemon version of the Borg's operating system that abstracts routing functions away from platform-specific interfaces. The...

Planned Parenthood said electronic traffic to its websites was snarled by computer hackers on Wednesday in the second cyber attack mounted against the healthcare organization this week amid a controversy over alleged sales of aborted fetal tissue. Websites operated by Planned Parenthood and its political branch, Planned Parenthood Action, were clogged by a wide-scale "distributed denial-of-service," or DDoS, attack, the organization said. In such attacks, a web server is deliberately flooded with massive amounts of...

Here’s a nightmare scenario: A simple smartphone exploit that doesn’t require the user to do anything other than receive a text message. If such a thing worries you (and, if you’re an IT manager, in a shop that allows BYOD, it should) then there’s bad news for you: Such an exploit exists for, it estimated, roughly 95% of Android smartphoneswhich runs roughly 82% of the world’s estimated 1.91 billion smartphones. Discovered by Joshua J. Drake,...

Gird your loins internet: Attackers now have the ability to disrupt large swathes of the web through a remote denial of service vulnerability found in the most widely used software for DNS servers. The BIND bug (CVE-2015-5477) patched overnight affects all DNS servers running the software, and can be attacked with ease. In fact a researcher has already developed an attack capable of knocking servers offline with a single packet. Internet Systems Consortium Michael McNally,...

US President Barack Obama has signed an executive order setting up the National Strategic Computing Initiative that will adopt a coordinated strategy involving multiple government agencies, academia and the private sector for the development of high-performance computing systems. Adopting a “whole-of-government” approach, involving all departments and agencies with expertise and interests in HPC, one of the objectives of the NSCI will be to speed up the delivery of “a capable exascale computing system that integrates...

A new kind of memory technology is going into production, which is up to 1,000 times faster than the Nand flash storage used in memory cards and computers' solid state drives (SSDs). The innovation is called 3D XPoint, and is the invention of Intel and Micron. The two US companies predict a wide range of benefits, from speeding up scientific research to making more elaborate video games. One expert described it as a "huge step...

Vulnerability Lab founder Benjamin Kunz Mejri says he's found a security bug in Apple's Mac and iOS app stores that could be exploited to inject malicious JavaScript code into victims' web browsers. Mejri reported the "application-side input validation web vulnerability" to Apple in early June, and went public with details of the flaw on Monday this week after conversations with Apple's security team petered out. "After we received no serious reply, we released the data,"...