Popular email services like Gmail and Yahoo! are likely to be banned for official use to safeguard critical and sensitive government data. A proposal to this effect is being moved by Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY) for Cabinet approval by month-end, sources said.
Government communication, barring those of Ministry of Defence and External Affairs, will be done using the platform of the National Informatics Centre (NIC), they added.

A list of almost 5 million combinations of Gmail addresses and passwords was posted online on Tuesday. But the passwords seem to be old, and they don't appear to actually belong to Gmail accounts. Instead, it seems that many of the passwords were taken from websites where users used their Gmail addresses to register, according to some of the leak's victims as well as security experts.

For example, someone might have signed up for a website with the username "myaddress@gmail.com" and the password "mypassword." The list exposed this week makes it look like "mypassword" is the password for the Gmail account itself, but the user's actual Gmail password might be totally different.

The list was posted on a Russian Bitcoin forum on Tuesday evening, and local media started reporting on it on Wednesday. We can't confirm the authenticity of all the email addresses on the list, but a Mashable employee, Evan Engel, saw that his old Gmail password, which he hasn't used in years, is part of the leak.

A Google spokesman told Mashable that the company has "no evidence that our systems have been compromised," and security experts seem to agree that the passwords are either old Gmail passwords obtained through phishing, or are passwords that were actually used on other sites.

Matteo Flora, a computer security expert, reviewed the dumped file and found that around 60 email addresses were in his address book. After he alerted those people, 30 of them told him that the password either was never used for their Gmail accounts or was very old, Flora told Mashable.
Chester Wisniewski, a senior security adviser for security firm Sophos, told Mashable that he expects many of these accounts not to be valid. "There is no honor among thieves as they say, and often stunts like this are released as a sad attempt at gaining credibility among other criminals," he said.
Several Reddit users also confirmed that they found their email addresses in the leak, but that the associated password has never been their Gmail password.

To check if your password was one of the leaked, plug your Gmail address into this trusted tool from KnowEm. Alternatively, if you aren't comfortable giving out your email, you can change all your passwords now. Simply type your email address into the IsLeaked tool to see if your account has been exposed.

However, the tool is not without controversy. Life Hacker actually isn’t promoting it anymore after it said it discovered the “tool” was made public just two days before the Gmail leak was reported.


Google said in a blog post late Wednesday that "less than 2% of the username and password combinations might have worked," adding one more reason not to overreact to this dump.
Google also said that it has contacted the owners of the affected accounts "and have required those users to reset their passwords." So if you haven't heard back from Google, you should be fine. (Though periodically changing your password isn't a bad idea, and two-factor is a must.)

Meanwhile, more security experts seem to agree that the leak is probably almost entirely made of old passwords tken from previous leaks and dumps. Whoever put this particular one together, probably "concatenated several dozen dumps" and then published only the Gmail usernames and password combinations he found, said Jeremi Gosney, the co-founder of PasswordsCon, a hacker conference focusing specifically on passwords and other methods of authentication.

Apple is working directly with celebrities and their publicists to investigate the alleged iCloud hack that may have played a large part in a large cache of nude photographs being released online. Part of that investigation involves obtaining Apple account login information of the people affected, Mashable has learned.

It's not known exactly why Apple needs its users' login information, but presumably it gives them a level of access into a user's account records that they otherwise wouldn't be able to obtain, at least not easily. The company does say that password information stored in iCloud is encrypted and can't be read by Apple. Apple's internal investigation may shine some light on how nude photos of dozens of celebrities were gathered and then released over the weekend. While some have pointed to a potential vulnerability in iCloud security (which has reportedly been patched), there are indications, including the age of some of the photos, that the cache was part of a larger, more complicated effort.

At the same time, the FBI is looking into the iCloud hack, although it stopped short of saying it was opening a full investigation. The incident also raises unsettling questions about the general state of security for cloud storage services, which are now a major part of both personal services and business workflow.

Google is building the largest store of information in human history — a knowledge base that autonomously gathers and merges data from across the web to provide unprecedented access to all facts about the world. The search giant is building Knowledge Vault, a type of knowledge base — a system that stores information so that machines as well as people can read it. Google’s existing knowledge base, called Knowledge Graph, relies on crowdsourcing to expand its information.

It started building the Vault by using an algorithm to automatically pull in information from all over the web, using machine learning to turn the raw data into usable pieces of knowledge.

Knowledge Vault has pulled in 1.6 billion facts to date. Of these, 271 million are rated as “confident facts”, to which Google’s model ascribes a more than 90 per cent chance of being true, New Scientist reported.

Tom Austin, a technology analyst at Gartner in Boston, said that the world’s biggest technology companies are racing to build similar vaults. Google researcher Kevin Murphy and his colleagues will present a paper on Knowledge Vault at the Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining in New York.

“Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon and IBM are all building them, and they’re tackling these enormous problems that we would never even have thought of trying 10 years ago,” he said.

In the effort of making 'global email' spam free, Google on Tuesday announced that its Gmail service will now begin rejecting emails that contain misleading combinations of accented or non-Latin characters. Notably, Google had last week announced support for email addresses that contained such characters last week. The search giant on Tuesday said that it is rolling-out some changes to ensure that spammers or scammers cannot use accented or non-Latin characters in suspicious combinations in emails, as similarities between character sets can be exploited to send misleading or harmful messages.

Google said that it is filtering emails for such domains using an open standard, the Unicode Consortium's "Highly Restricted" specification, considering it will strike a 'healthy balance between legitimate uses of these new domains and those likely to be abused.'

"To stay one step ahead of spammers, the Unicode community has identified suspicious combinations of letters that could be misleading, and Gmail will now begin rejecting email with such combinations," said Mark Risher, Spam & Abuse Team, Google.

Google last week announced support for non-Latin characters in email addresses, calling it the 'first step toward more global email'. The company is trying to make the adoption of email addresses containing accented or non-Latin characters widespread by providing partial support in its very popular Gmail service. Google said, "The technology is there, but someone has to take the first step. Today we're ready to be that someone." The first step as per Google was allowing Gmail to recognise addresses that contain accented or non-Latin characters, and thus giving Gmail users the ability to send emails to, and receive emails from such email addresses.

Google added that it would soon bring Calendar support for email addresses with accented or non-Latin characters, and also make it possible in the future to create Gmail addresses of the same type.

The new chip dubbed “TrueNorth” works to mimic the “right brain” functions of sensory process responding to sights, smells and knowledge from the surroundings to “learn” to retort in numerous things, Modha said. It accomplishes this task by employing a vast network of “neurons” and “synapses,” just like however the human brain functions by exploitation info gathered from the body’s sensory organs.

The researchers designed TrueNorth with a million programmable neurons and 256 million programmable synapses on a chip with 4,096 cores and 5.4 billion transistors. A key to the performance is that the extraordinarily low energy use on the new chip, that runs on the equivalent energy of a hearing-aid battery. This can enable a chip put in in a car or smartphone to perform supercomputer calculations in real time while not connecting to the cloud or different network.

The Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics or SyNAPSE chip, is capable of 256 million programmable synapses, 1 million programmable neurons and 46 billion synaptic operations per watt, per second. The new chip dubbed "TrueNorth" works to mimic the "right brain" functions of sensory processing "responding to sights, smells and information from the environment to learn to respond in different situations. It accomplishes this task by using a huge network of "neurons" and "synapses," similar to how the human brain functions by using information gathered from the body's sensory organs.


The researchers say TrueNorth in some ways that outperforms today’s supercomputers though an instantaneous comparison isn’t attainable as a result of they operate otherwise. But they wrote that TrueNorth will deliver from 46 billion to 400 billion “synaptic” calculations per second per watt of energy. That compares with the foremost energy-efficient supercomputer that delivers 4.5 billion “floating point” calculations per second and per watt. The chip was made-up exploitation Samsung’s 28-nanometer method technology.

The project funded by the United States Defense Advanced research projects Agency (DARPA) revealed its analysis in a very cover article on the August 8 edition of the journal Science.
“It is an achievement to leverage a method used for commercially out there, low-power mobile devices to deliver a chip that emulates the human brain by process extreme amounts of sensory info with little power,” aforesaid choreographer Han of Samsung electronics, in a very statement.
“This may be a vast beaux arts breakthrough that’s essential because the business moves toward the next-generation cloud and big-data process.”

 
Yahoo said Thursday it will join an effort by rival Google Inc. Google to create a secure email system by next year that could make it nearly impossible for hackers or government officials to read users' messages. Even the email providers themselves won't be able to decrypt messages.

According to a recent study released by Hewlett-Packard (HP), examined 10 common smart devices, including thermostats, smart TVs and webcams. Each device had approximately 25 vulnerabilities, the study claimed. Many of the vulnerabilities had to do with a lack of password strength and weak protection software. Eight out of 10 devices failed to require passwords strong enough to be useful, and the same amount put users at risk of having their personal information intercepted via cloud services.

Information technology research firm Garner predicts there will be 26 billion individual Internet of Things objects in the world by the year 2020. In 2009, there were only about nine million of these devices sold.

"The fact is, that today, many categories of connected things in 2020 don't yet exist," Gartner research director Peter Middleton said in a statement. "As product designers dream up ways to exploit the inherent connectivity that will be offered in intelligent products, we expect the variety of devices offered to explode."

"Late last year, we were hearing a lot about Internet of Things, and a bit about IoT security, but had not seen anything that focused on the complete picture of IoT security," a statement from HP read. "So, we decided to start the OWASP [Open Web Application Security Project] Internet of Things Top 10 Project, which aims to educate on the main facets of Internet of Things security that people should be concerned with."

A 3D chip stack that utilises carbon nanotubes could theoretically power supercomputers small enough to fit in a pocket, according to researchers. Philip Wong, an electrical engineering professor at Stanford University, claims that the chip stack would reduce the power needs of supercomputer systems to such an extent that a computer as powerful as IBM's Watson could one day come in a pocket-sized form.

"This design requires new, highly-efficient heat spreaders," Wong said at the recent Semicon West conference. "The thermal aspect is critically important. "The resulting design could provide a thousand-fold power reduction for the IBM system that consumed 175kW power to beat human contestants in the Jeopardy gameshow."

Wong admits that there are significant challenges to be met before such a system could be practically implemented. "The material is not suitable for the high-temperature doping processes used in today's chip fabs," Wong said. "Researchers still need to improve the purity of the material they grow. And, like all transistor materials, it faces challenges when contacts scale to increasingly small sizes."

The advancement of technology has often been summarised by Moore's law, which states that the number of transistors that it is possible to fit onto a chip doubles every two years. This rule has held fast since the dawn of computers, however in the last few years it has begun to collapse. The reason behind this is the limitations of silicon as a semiconductor; it is not possible to reliably scale down chips below 10 nanometres. It is widely believed that carbon nanotubes could hold the key to overcoming this scaling issue and re-establishing Moore's law. One of those betting on carbon nanotubes is IBM. Earlier this month the firm announced a new $3 billion (£1.8 bn) project that aims to build commercial transistors using carbon nanotubes by 2020.

Government's cyber security arm Computer Emergency Response Team-India (CERT-In) reported 62,189 cyber security incidents in the first five months of the current calendar year, Parliament was informed today. Similarly, the government body reported that 9,174 Indian websites were hacked by groups spread across the world, Communication and IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said in a written reply to Lok Sabha.

"During the years 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014 (till May), a total number of 21,699, 27,605, 28,481 and 9,174 Indian websites were hacked by various hacker groups spread across worldwide. In addition, during these years, a total number of 13,301, 22,060, 71,780 and 62,189 security incidents, respectively, were reported to the CERT-In," Prasad added. These incidents include phishing, scanning, spam, malicious code and website intrusions, the Minister said.

"These attacks have been observed to be originating from the cyber space of a number of countries including the US, Europe, Brazil, Turkey, China, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Algeria and the UAE," he added.It has been observed that the attackers compromise computer systems located in different parts of the world and user masquerading techniques and hidden servers to hide the identity of the actual system from which the attacks are being launched, Prasad said.In a separate query in the House, Prasad said with the increase in the proliferation of IT and related services there is a rise in the number of cyber crime and cyber security incidents. The trend in increase in cyber crime incidents is similar to that worldwide.

"As per the cyber crime data maintained by National Cyber Records Bureau, a total of 1,791, 2,876 and 4,356 cyber crime cases were registered under Information Technology Act during the year 2011, 2012 and 1013, respectively, thereby showing an increasing trend," he added.
A total of 422, 601 and 1,337 cases were registered under cyber crime related sections of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) during the year 2011, 2012 and 2013, respectively, he said.

The latest updates to Apple's OS X Mavericks and iOS operating systems, both released on Monday, address a number of bugs and security vulnerabilities. The new version of Mavericks -- officially named OS X Mavericks v10.9.4 -- fixes issues that had prevented some Macs from automatically connecting to known Wi-Fi networks, and also improves the reliability of waking from sleep mode.
A new version of Apple’s mobile operating system, iOS 7.1.2, was released alongside the Mavericks update on June 30. The mobile upgrade addresses issues in the iPhone 4 and later generations, as well as the iPod Touch 5 and later, and the iPad 2 and later. Apple also updated its web browser to Safari 7.0.5.

Multiple Security Fixes
The update to Apple’s operating system, its third so far in 2014, includes a number of changes. Apple’s support Web site lists fixes to Maverick’s Certificate Trust Policy, Dock, graphics driver, and Thunderbolt drivers, among others.

Most of the fixes target problems with Maverick’s WebKit rendering engine which allow Web sites to crash the browser or execute malicious code, according to a report on The Register. The security bugs also include a potential leak of iBooks logs that could reveal a user’s Apple ID, and a vulnerability in the Dock that allows malicious code execution. It also includes a fix to prevent malicious ZIP archives from executing code and to prevent remote server attacks, plus a way to circumvent the screensaver lock.

Apple’s iOS update also includes patches for a number of security problems, including one that allows the Siri voice command system to reveal a user’s contact list. The upgrade includes patches for the OS kernel, Mail, WebKit, and Safari. According to a report on Expert Reviews, the vulnerability to remote code execution makes the new iOS highly recommended, although warns that the patches could block use of the Pangu iOS 7.1.1 jailbreak.

A full description of the security upgrade can be found on Apple's support Web site. The company recommends the upgrade for all users.

IIT Kanpur has launched its second supercomputer this week. The new supercomputer is the 5th best in India in terms of its performance and is the best 130th in the world’s top 500 supercomputers list, published in November 2013.

Google has released a fix for faulty redirects on its mobile search — which happens when a website displayed in the search results isn’t properly set up to handle requests from smartphones, and leads you to the mobile site homepage instead.

Starting today, first with English search results in the US, Google will have an indication below the result when it detects that smartphone users will be redirected to a homepage instead of the Web page displayed. You can still click ‘Try anyway’ if you want to reach the homepage.

If any of a site’s pages are redirecting smartphone users to the homepage, Google will also now start sending site owners a message on Webmaster Tools in the ‘Smartphone Crawl Errors’ section.

 
Cyber crime costs the global economy about $445 billion every year, with the damage to business from the theft of intellectual property exceeding the $160 billion loss to individuals from hacking, according to research published on Monday.

The report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) said cyber crime was a growth industry that damaged trade, competitiveness and innovation. A conservative estimate would be $375 billion in losses, while the maximum could be as much as $575 billion, said the study, sponsored by security software company McAfee.

"Cyber crime is a tax on innovation and slows the pace of global innovation by reducing the rate of return to innovators and investors," Jim Lewis of CSIS said in a statement.

"For developed countries, cyber crime has serious implications for employment."

The world's biggest economies bore the brunt of the losses, the research found, with the toll on the United States, China, Japan and Germany reaching $200 billion a year in total.
Losses connected to personal information, such as stolen credit card data, was put at up to $150 billion.

About 40 million people in the United States, roughly 15 percent of the population, has had personal information stolen by hackers, it said, while high-profile breaches affected 54 million people in Turkey, 16 million in Germany and more than 20 million in China. McAfee, owned by Intel Corp, said improved international collaboration was beginning to show results in reducing cyber crime, for example in the takedown last week of a crime ring that infected hundreds of thousands of computers known by the name of its master software, Gameover Zeus.

The latest Ericsson (NASDAQ:ERIC) Mobility Report reveals for the first time that the number of active cellular M2M devices will increase 3-4 times by 2019, from 200 million at the end of 2013. While the majority of cellular M2M devices today are still GSM-only, that is expected to shift by 2016 when 3G/4G will represent the majority of active cellular M2M subscriptions.

• New analysis: Machine-to-Machine (M2M) takes off with active cellular M2M devices to grow 3-4 times by 2019
• 65 percent of all phones sold in Q1 2014 were smartphones
• Mobile subscriptions to exceed world population in 2015
• 4G/LTE subscriptions to reach 85 percent in North America and 30 percent in Europe in 2019

Internet Users in 2014: The developing world is playing catch-up

In case you missed it, within five years, the number of internet users in the developing world is going to experience a two-fold rise, to an estimated 1.9 billion in 2014 from 974 million in 2009. This means that the developing nations will make up two-third of the global 3 billion internet population by year-end. Globally in 2014, 44% of households will benefit from an internet connection this year. In developed countries, the percentage flirts with 78 while in emerging nations, households with internet access will amount to 31%. However, as the report also mentioned, 4 billion individuals are not yet connected to the internet and 90% of them live in the developing world.

Global Mobile Broadband in 2014: Penetration will reach 32%

World Mobile-Cellular Subscriptions in 2014: Figures will hit 7 billion

Digital existence in Bharat is predicted to ambiguous in situation every two years and change nine-fold between 2013 and 2020, from 326 exabytes to 2.8 zettabytes, says a new explore conducted by IDC and tech monster EMC. Globally, Digital Accumulation is set to hit 44 cardinal gigabytes by 2020, ascent from 4.4 trillion gigabytes in 2013.

Currently, 60% of accumulation in the digital existence is attributed to flowering markets such as Frg, Japan, and the Joint States, but by 2020, the percentage gift sky, and aborning markets including Bharat, Brazil,China, Mexico and State gift accounting for the majority of aggregation, says  the account.

"Prc already accounts for 14 per coin of the digital creation. Tho' US' percentage has declined as the otherwise aborning markets love grown, it is solace 26 per cent. India's distribute is also maturation from 3 per coin in 2010 to 6 per cent in 2020," EMC India and SAARC Presidency Rajesh Janey is quoted as saying.

"India's Digital Accumulation is growing sudden driven by incorporative digitization crossways enterprise and governance; and a stabilise ascending in writing of the cultural and moveable phenomenon by
everyone. It's orotund of untapped possibleness and erstwhile unlocked it promises to inform us in distance  that can turn lives, label remedies to incurable diseases, redefine industries, hear new
markets, cater work local community challenges much as hunger and impoverishment - the possibilities are sempiternal."

If the Amerindian Digital Universe were represented by the store in a cumulus of tablets, in 2013 it would score extended 3% of the way to the Lunation. By 2020, it would move 42% of the way from the Object to the laze, adds the IDC and EMC news.

The cerebrate also saved that that writer than 50% of the Digital Content in Bharat needs protection. "This is evidential especially if we seem in the environment of India superior 4th in cost of most phishing attacks globally in 2013. 4.4 trillion gigabytes of accumulation created in 2013, lower than half the collection that requisite protection conventional indorsement, things most at probability are Corporate financial information,  Personally placeable collection (PII), Examination records and Individual calculate collection. Organisations supported in Bharat (80%) are much possible to jazz practised assemblage decline and/or  systems downtime within the historic twelvemonth, than those gross crosswise Assemblage Peaceful and Nihon (71%)," says the reflection also sheds reddened on growth of Internet of Things (IoT), which is predicted to advance up to 10 proportionality of enumerate data generated in India by 2020. Currently, assemblage from these contiguous twist bed some 4 proportionality distribute in the unit assemblage in India.

Heartbleed is a catastrophic bug that affects thousands of sites and services across the internet, but what is it, and what do you need to do about it to protect yourself from cybercriminals? According to security researchers, around half a million sites worldwide are rendered insecure by the bug. "Catastrophic is the right word," commented Bruce Schneier, an independent security expert. "On the scale of 1 to 10, this is an 11."

Heartbleed has grabbed the attention of the world’s media, but there has been a lot of misinformation bandied around. Here’s a quick rundown of the important bits you should know about.
Heartbleed is the nickname given to a bug in a piece of security software used by almost every secure website on the internet.

It is a flaw in a software package called OpenSSL, which is used by banks, shops, email providers and a plethora of other services across the web to secure a connection between the user and the service. Web servers that use SSL securely send an encryption key to the visitor, which is then used to protect all other information coming to and from the server.
Most people will recognise this secure connection as the little padlock symbol in the top left-hand corner of the web browser.

What is Heartbleed  &  How does it work?
Heartbleed affects the encryption technology designed to protect online accounts for email, instant messaging and e-commerce. It was discovered by a team of researchers from the Finnish security firm Codenomicon, along with a Google researcher who was working separately. Heartbleed creates an opening in SSL/TLS, an encryption technology marked by the small, closed padlock and "https:" on Web browsers to show that traffic is secure. The flaw makes it possible to snoop on Internet traffic even if the padlock is closed. Interlopers can also grab the keys for deciphering encrypted data without the website owners knowing the theft occurred. The problem affects only the variant of SSL/TLS known as OpenSSL, but that happens to be one of the most common on the Internet.