dos

When political tensions flared last month between Georgia and its large neighbor to the north, the country was ready to block Internet traffic from Russia, hoping to avoid the denial-of-service attacks that shut down Internet service in Estonia for several days in 2007. Instead, most of the DoS attacks that were directed against Georgia came from an unlikely place: the United States.

"Russia is one of the most capable countries when it comes to launching system intrusion hacking attempts, distributed denial-of-service attacks, and operation of botnets," said Don Jackson, director of Threat Intelligence for SecureWorks. "Yet you'll notice the number of attacks coming from Russia are very low."

SecureWorks on Monday released a list ranking the countries with the most infected computers enlisted for use with botnets. On that list, Russia ranks 7th, far behind the United States, China, Brazil, South Korea, Poland, and Japan. The reason Russia is so low, Jackson said, is that hackers from Russia don't attack from within Russia.

Instead of attacking using Russian IP addresses, Jackson said, the hackers who wanted to attack Georgia used "computers and control servers located in Turkey while the bots (the infected computers) that they controlled were mostly in the United States." … Read more

Once upon a time, Microsoft decimated Apple with a general purpose operating system and a separation of software from hardware. As the story goes, Microsoft's DOS won because it (either through hapless luck or strategic insight, depending on whom you believe) opened up its operating system and courted developers to become the standard for generic hardware.

Decades later, Google is hoping to do largely the same thing in the mobile market with its Android platform, but this time the platform is open source, not proprietary.

I'm not sure it matters. Not yet, anyway. For the near term, Apple's integrated platform will beat Google's open platform, just as it has been growing far beyond Microsoft's mobile growth rate.

In part this is because Google may lack the aesthetic touch that Apple has in spades, just as Microsoft does. Its newest update apparently is much better than earlier incarnations, but Android is still no iPhone killer.… Read more

In one of the odder stories to hit the tech world in a while, Revision3 has investigated the denial-of-service attack that kept it offline over the Memorial Day weekend and has concluded that antipiracy group MediaDefender is the culprit.

With the Beijing Olympics only a few months away, Lenovo is gearing up for a major dress rehearsal to make sure the technology for the … Read more

A new exploit will either lock up your iPhone or iPod Touch or crash your Safari browser on your PC or Mac OS desktop if you simply visit a maliciously coded Web site. Unlike an earlier exploit that required users to click to become infected, the new code published by iPhoneWorld requires no user interaction.

So far, Apple has had no comment.

The code was first reported in January and exhausts the memory in Safari, which in turn will cause your iPhone or iPod Touch to freeze, or your desktop Safari to crash. "Given the nature of this issue,&… Read more

Aide-memoire service ReQall, which I first tested a year ago, is getting a 2.0 update. New features will make this clever application more useful. Now, when you type or speak an item to remember, you can also help ReQall file it away for you by using certain keywords. For example, if you say, "Buy milk," the service will put that to-do on your "shopping list." The service also understands time: You can specify items for "tomorrow" or for specific dates. You can also share items by saying, for example, "Ask Joe to … Read more

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