Sony Pictures Computer Network Hacked (PCMagazine)

• BY STEPHANIE MLOT
• NOVEMBER 25, 2014

A hack of Sony Pictures Entertainment has left many employees without access to the network.

Workers on Monday were met with an ominous skeleton image on their PCs, from a group called #GOP (Guardians of Peace), alongside a message threatening to release "top secret" data if undisclosed demands were not met.

According to PCMag sister site Geek.com, #GOP leaked a large ZIP file with two lists detailing the extent of the doxxing. "Most of what's inside appears to be from the Sony Pictures finance department, including the stuff of IT guy nightmares: Excel sheets and ZIP files that appear to be full of passwords," Geek said. "There's even a text file that helpfully lists the last 10 recently used passwords for something at Sony."

A number of Sony-related Twitter accounts also appear to have been breached.

Sony Pictures did not immediately respond to PCMag's request for comment, buttold Deadline that the company is "investigating an IT matter."

The image appeared publicly first on Reddit, posted by an anonymous user claiming to be an ex-Sony employee, whose friend shared a screenshot of the threat.

"Warning: We've already warned you, and this is just a beginning," the message said. "We continue till our request be met. We've obtained all your internal data including your secrets and top [secrets]."

Citing an unnamed source at Sony Pictures, Variety said the situation may take up to three weeks to resolve. In the meantime, employees have been instructed to turn off their computers and disable Wi-Fi on mobile devices.

Sony is no stranger to attacks, though. In August, the company's PlayStation Network was taken offline thanks to the efforts of hackers known as Lizard Squad. The same group targeted Sony Online Entertainment President John Smedley via Twitter.

Earlier this week, meanwhile, a hacker group claimed to have infiltrated Sony's PlayStation Network and published gamers' email addresses and passwords of gamers, but Sony denied any hack, The Hollywood Reporter said.

In 2011, Sony's network was hit with a massive outage that included the loss of personal information. It lasted almost a month, and attracted the attention of Congress.

Stephanie began as a PCMag reporter in May 2012. She moved to New York City from Frederick, Md., where she worked for four years as a multimedia reporter at the second-largest daily newspaper in Maryland.

DIY Smart Home: LittleBits' New Kit Connects Old Appliances to the Internet (BusinessWeek)

By Belinda Lanks  November 18, 2014

The promise of future technology is that all your dumb household stuff will become smart. The lock on your front door, your smoke alarm, your thermostat will all “speak” to you through your phone, and vice versa. The problem with this domestic Internet of Things (IoT)—apart from the annoyance of receiving messages from your coffeemaker—is that it requires swapping perfectly serviceable gadgets in favor of ones that can connect to the cloud.

Now there’s another option. LittleBits, which makes brightly colored modules that snap together to create electronic circuits, is now selling a $249 DIY kit for those who want to turn their analog abodes into WiFi-enabled smart homes. The set extends the use of the recently launched cloudBit, giving users a menu of projects that include a remote pet feeder, a smart air-conditioner, and a garage door monitor. It essentially allows people to build their own IoT hardware without having to wait for companies like Nest, GE, or Apple to roll out another product.

“The electronics industry pretty much remains a very top-down industry that is very much controlled by large companies, by experts, by engineers,” says LittleBits CEO Ayah Bdeir. “Very few people are able to gain access and innovate in it.” Her three-year-old startup makes it as easy to customize hardware as it is to assemble Ikea furniture.

GRAPHIC: Printing Makeup From Your Inkjet

The Smart Home Kit comes with 14 bits, including the cloudBit as well as five new ones: an MP3 player, a temperature sensor, a number counter (which, for instance, can be attached to the temperature sensor to display Fahrenheit or Celsius values), a threshold (which can turn a sensor into a trigger module), and an infrared transmitter (which can be paired with an AC switch to turn appliances on or off). The company includes an infographic poster cataloging a host of potential projects, from a device that adds toilet paper to your digital grocery list when someone takes the last roll to an alarm that sounds when your fridge is left open too long. Makers can control the devices through the LittleBits-hosted Web app; their own API, orIFTTT (If This Then That), a service that connects to a channel like Twitter or Facebook to trigger an action such as a tweet or Facebook status update.

Courtesy LittleBits

“The idea is that you are able to take control of your home, take control of your devices, and innovate in the middles where people haven’t created products for you,” Bdeir says. “We’re not out to replace Nest, but why shouldn’t you be able to make your own?”

The kit is available for preorder today, and beginning in December, will be sold in select RadioShack locations. In June, RadioShack announced that it would start carrying the LittleBits in a bid to remake itself as a Home Depot for tech geeks.

STORY: How Sonos Built the Perfect Wireless Speaker

Lanks is the design editor of Businessweek.com.

Hagel Said to Be Stepping Down as Defense Chief Under Pressure (NYT)

By HELENE COOPERNOV. 24, 2014

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel's resignation was expected to be announced by President Obama on Monday.CreditChip Somodevilla/Getty Images

WASHINGTON — Defense SecretaryChuck Hagel is stepping down under pressure, the first cabinet-level casualty of the collapse of President Obama’s Democratic majority in the Senate and the struggles of his national security team amid an onslaught of global crises.

The president, who is expected to announce Mr. Hagel’s resignation in a Rose Garden appearance on Monday, made the decision to ask his defense secretary — the sole Republican on his national security team — to step down last Friday after a series of meetings over the past two weeks, senior administration officials said.

The officials described Mr. Obama’s decision to remove Mr. Hagel, 68, as a recognition that the threat from the Islamic State would require a different kind of skills than those that Mr. Hagel was brought on to employ. A Republican with military experience who was skeptical about the Iraq war, Mr. Hagel came in to manage the Afghanistan combat withdrawal and the shrinking Pentagon budget in the era of budget sequestration.

But now “the next couple of years will demand a different kind of focus,” one administration official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. He insisted that Mr. Hagel was not fired, saying that he initiated discussions about his future two weeks ago with the president, and that the two men mutually agreed that it was time for him to leave.

But Mr. Hagel’s aides had maintained in recent weeks that he expected to serve the full four years as defense secretary. His removal appears to be an effort by the White House to show that it is sensitive to critics who have pointed to stumbles in the government’s early response to several national security issues, including the Ebola crisis and the threat posed by the Islamic State.

Even before the announcement of Mr. Hagel’s removal, Obama officials were speculating on his possible replacement. At the top of the list are Michèle Flournoy, the former under secretary of defense; Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island and a former officer with the Army’s 82nd Airborne; and Ashton B. Carter, a former deputy secretary of defense.

A respected former senator who struck a friendship with Mr. Obama when they were both critics of the Iraq war from positions on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Mr. Hagel has nonetheless had trouble penetrating the tight team of former campaign aides and advisers who form Mr. Obama’s closely knit set of loyalists. Senior administration officials have characterized him as quiet during cabinet meetings; Mr. Hagel’s defenders said that he waited until he was alone with the president before sharing his views, the better to avoid leaks.

Whatever the case, Mr. Hagel struggled to fit in with Mr. Obama’s close circle and was viewed as never gaining traction in the administration after a bruising confirmation fight among his old Senate colleagues, during which he was criticized for seeming tentative in his responses to sharp questions.

He never really shed that pall after arriving at the Pentagon, and in the past months he has largely ceded the stage to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, who officials said initially won the confidence of Mr. Obama with his recommendation of military action against the Islamic State.

In Mr. Hagel’s less than two years on the job, his detractors said he struggled to inspire confidence at the Pentagon in the manner of his predecessors, especially Robert M. Gates. But several of Mr. Obama’s top advisers over the past few months have also acknowledged privately that the president did not want another high-profile defense secretary in the manner of Mr. Gates, who went on to write a memoir of his years with Mr. Obama in which he sharply criticized the president. Mr. Hagel, they said, in many ways was exactly the kind of defense secretary whom the president, after battling the military during his first term, wanted.

Mr. Hagel, for his part, spent his time on the job largely carrying out Mr. Obama’s stated wishes on matters like bringing back American troops from Afghanistan and trimming the Pentagon budget, with little pushback. He did manage to inspire loyalty among enlisted soldiers and often seemed at his most confident when talking to troops or sharing wartime experiences as a Vietnam veteran.

But Mr. Hagel has often had problems articulating his thoughts — or administration policy — in an effective manner, and has sometimes left reporters struggling to describe what he has said in news conferences. In his side-by-side appearances with both General Dempsey and Secretary of State John Kerry, Mr. Hagel, a decorated Vietnam veteran and the first former enlisted combat soldier to be defense secretary, has often been upstaged.

He raised the ire of the White House in August as the administration was ramping up its strategy to fight the Islamic State, directly contradicting the president, who months before had likened the Sunni militant group to a junior varsity basketball squad. Mr. Hagel, facing reporters in his now-familiar role next to General Dempsey, called the Islamic State an “imminent threat to every interest we have,” adding, “This is beyond anything that we’ve seen.” White House officials later said they viewed those comments as unhelpful, although the administration still appears to be struggling to define just how large is the threat posed by the Islamic State.

How to Move Files From One Cloud Storage Service to Another

You may want to switch to another cloud storage service — perhaps moving to Microsoft’s OneDrive to get that now-infinite cloud storage. Yes, you could just download and re-upload all your files, but you can also do this a faster way.

Your home Internet connection’s upload speed is usually the bottleneck here. Use a service that will move your files between services for you and you won’t have to worry about your upload speed or even leaving your computer on.

The Obvious, Slow Way

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First of all, keep it simply. If you don’t have that many gigabytes of data stored in a cloud storage service, you don’t have to use any of the services below. All you have to do is download your files to your computer — if they’re all synced to your computer, that will work. If not, you’ll need to change your service’s sync settings to sync all files to your computer.

Note that, if you use Google Docs, you’ll need to export those Google Docs file to Office documents or another format before you can move them to another service.

Next, install the desktop client for the service you want to move your files to, and just move or copy the files from your current cloud storage folder to the new one. The new cloud storage service will upload all of them from your computer to its data center.

This is all well and good, but this process involves downloading everything over your home Internet connection and then re-uploading it. Your home Internet connection is probably the slowest part of the process, so this just isn’t efficient if you have a massive amount of data. The solution is a service that grabs the files for you and then pushes them to the new service.

Mover.io

We first became aware of Mover.io when they partnered with Canonical to help get people’s files out of Ubuntu One and onto other services before its shutdown. Mover.io supports more services than that, and it’s actually free for personal use. This means it’s a great way to get files out of any consumer cloud storage service and onto another without the hassle. Mover.io supports Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive, Google Drive, Box, Copy, Yandex, and PutIO for its free consumer service.

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Add your accounts and mover.io will gain access to them via OAuth. You can then run an immediate transfer of the files from one location to another, or set up a scheduled transfer to have this happen automatically on a schedule. This is faster than doing this yourself, because it uses mover.io’s Internet connection, which will likely have faster download and upload speeds than yours. You also don’t have to leave your computer for the duration of the process, as it all happens on their servers (or “in the cloud,” as we say nowadays).

After performing the file transfer, you can revoke the service’s access to your files if you don’t plan on continuing to use this service on a continual basis. You can and should revoke any service’s access when you’re done using it.

Otixo

Otixo isn’t designed only for moving files between different services. It’s a cloud storage aggregator that allows you to see all your cloud storage services and their files in a single interface. Otixo also lets you easily transfer files between these services with a quick drag-and-drop.

The nice thing about Otixo is that it supports a wider variety of cloud storage services, including SugarSync, Amazon S3 storage, FTP servers, and WebDAV sites. Otixo does have a limit in that it can only move a single file at a time between services if you have a free account. However, if you need such a service to move large files — for example, ISO files, large videos, or archive files — this may not be that much of a downside.

IFTTT

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There are other services like Mover.io, but we can’t resist doing this with IFTTT – short for “IF This, Then That.” We love IFTTT for its ability toput together “recipes” that operate on certain triggers. To do this, IFTTT has functions that can grab files from a cloud storage service and push them to another. Enterprising IFTTT users have already created recipes that use IFTTT to push files from one cloud storage service to another, and they can be found with a quick search on the IFTTT site. Indeed, there are recipes for syncing your Dropbox folder to OneDrive or adding files to Google Drive by moving them to a specific Dropbox folder.

Unfortunately, there’s no way to use OneDrive or Google Drive as a source in IFTTT. It’s not just that no one has created the recipes yet, but that a created recipe can’t start with OneDrive or Google Drive — they can only be a destination. This could be a good way to migrate files from Dropbox, though — especially if you already use and trust IFTTT, as many geeks do.

---

There are more services beyond these, of course. You can find them with a quick Google search. Be sure to look at the fine print — many services require a payment, even for personal use. You’re also granting such a service service access to both of your cloud storage accounts if you do this, so you should try to find a trustworthy service that won’t abuse that access.

FBI: Public Service Announcement

14 November 2014

Alert Number

I-111414-PSA

CRIMINALS POST FRAUDULENT ONLINE ADVERTISEMENTS FOR AUTOMOBILES, RECREATIONAL VEHICLES, BOATS, AND OTHER OUTDOOR EQUIPMENT LEADING TO FINANCIAL LOSSES IN EXCESS OF $20 MILLION

From June 2009 to June 2014 the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) received over 6800 complaints regarding criminals targeting online consumers by posting false advertisements for high priced items such as automobiles, boats, heavy equipment, recreational vehicles, lawn mowers, tractors, and other similar items. These complaints total more than $20 million in reported losses.

The scam initiates when the criminals post a false advertisement offering the item for sale. The advertisement usually includes a fraudulent photo to entice the consumer to purchase the item. Within the advertisement, the criminal includes a contact telephone number. The consumer leaves a message and the perpetrator responds via text message. The text message normally requests that the consumer provide an e-mail address. Once the e-mail address is provided the consumer is sent additional details to include multiple images of the item for sale. The perpetrator provides logical reasons for offering the item at such a discounted price such as moving to another location; therefore, the item needs to be sold quickly; the sale was part of a divorce settlement; or overseas deployment.

Consumers normally negotiate a price. Many scammers advise the consumer the transaction will be conducted through Ebay to ensure a safe and easy transaction. In reality the scammer is only pretending to use Ebay. The consumer receives a false e-mail that appears to be legitimate from Ebay. The e-mail provides instructions on how to complete the transaction. The perpetrator provides the consumer with all the information necessary to complete the wire transfer - the bank account name, address, and account number. The scammer provides a fraudulent toll-free Ebay customer service number for the consumer to use when they are ready to wire the money. These numbers were also used by many victims to confirm a successful wire transfer or to check transaction status and shipping information. After the transaction, the consumer is sent a false Ebay confirmation e-mail that includes the fraudulent transaction or confirmation number and the expected delivery date of the item.

Any follow-up calls, text messages or e-mails to the perpetrator(s) are normally ignored and many victims report the toll-free customer service telephone numbers provided are constantly busy. As a result, the consumer never receives the purchased item(s) and suffers a financial loss.

The FBI recommends that consumers ensure they are purchasing the actual merchandise from a reputable source by verifying the legitimacy of the seller. Below are some consumer tips when purchasing items online:

• Use search engines or other websites to research the advertised item or person/company selling the item.
• Search the Internet for any negative feedback or reviews on the seller, their e-mail addresses, telephone numbers, or other searchable identifiers.
• Research the company policies before completing a transaction. For example, ensure the seller accepts payments via credit card as Ebay does not conduct wire transfers and only uses PayPal to conduct transactions.
• Be cautious when responding to advertisements and special offers.
• Be cautious when dealing with persons/companies from outside the country.
• Maintain records for all online transactions.

As a consumer, if you suspect you are a victim of an Internet-related crime, you may file a complaint with the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center atwww.IC3.gov .

The Baffling Math That Determines What People Actually Pay for Obamacare (BusinessWeek)

By John Tozzi  November 17, 2014

The Obamacare marketplaces opened for business over the weekend, and so far the website is working better than last year. That doesn’t mean picking a plan is easy. One of the difficulties shoppers face: How much they’ll pay for health insurance is determined by lots of factors that individuals can’t control—and those factors can change in unexpected ways.

Officials and experts are urging people to look at different plans, even if they’re fine with the coverage they bought last year, because premiums are going up. But most people in the Affordable Care Act marketplaces don’t pay the full premium price: Last year, 87 percent of those shopping on the federal healthcare.gov site got subsidies to reduce their costs of coverage. And it turns out those credits are also changing in the new plan year.

First, a little background on how subsidies, also known as premium tax credits, are calculated. The subsidies limit how much people have to pay for health plans to a percentage of their income. To qualify, people can earn up to four times the federal poverty level—nearly $96,000 for a family of four.

STORY: What We Still Need to Know About Obamacare

It’s also possible to earn too little for subsidies. Those who earn less than poverty incomes may qualify for Medicaid, though not in states that chose not to expand access to the public insurance program for the poor. Yet even once people qualify, it’s not straightforward to determine how much money they’ll get. The subsidy amount is based both on income and the cost of health insurance in an individual’s market. More precisely, it’s based on the price of the second-lowest-cost silver plan in the marketplace, which is known as the benchmark plan. That means even in the unlikely event that a person’s income and their health plan’s premium stay the same, how much they pay could change if the price of the benchmark plan that subsidies are pegged to has changed.

In most markets examined by the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit that focuses on health care, the silver plan premiums, after tax credits, have stayed basically the same. But in a couple of places, there were big changes. At the top of the list is Minneapolis, where the low-priced health plan PreferredOne dropped out of the marketplace after one year. Premiums, after subsidies, went up 18.5 percent in Minneapolis for a 40-year-old making $30,000, according to a Kaiser presentation. In other places, prices (after subsidies) dropped in some places, too—10 percent or more in Phoenix and Albuquerque, according to the Kaiser Foundation.

Other things can change how much individuals pay from year to year. Moving into a different age bracket that’s subject to higher premiums is the most common. Colorado residents are finding that the rating areas in their state have changed. Changes to income, or the number of people in a family, will affect insurance rates as well.

STORY: Obamacare: Six Tools to Make You a Smarter Health-Care Shopper

A subsidy calculator may help individuals figure out how much help they’re eligible for. Beyond that, it’s basically impossible to tell how much they’ll pay for the same health plan they bought last year—or whether another one would be less expensive—without going to the website and checking out all the options. The good news is that individuals have until Feb. 15, the close of the open enrollment period, to change their minds. That’s new this year.

STORY: Obamacare's Problem With Patients as Shoppers

Tozzi is a reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek in New York.

The Central Banker Bubble Needs to Pop (BusinessWeek)

By Allison Schrager November 11, 2014

In my first year of graduate school a professor offered my class a warning: “There is only one thing we know for certain in macroeconomics,” he cautioned. “Bad monetary policy can do a lot of damage, but we don’t know what good policy can really achieve.”

Fourteen years and $4.4 trillion later, that advice sounds dated. Many agree the Federal Reserve’s extraordinary policies, like quantitative easing, pulled the American economy from the brink at the height of the last recession. But my professor’s warning may explain why central bankers are under fire today. My colleague Peter Coy worries a Republican congress may be out to curb Fed Chair Janet Yellen’s power. In Europe the national bankers, especially from Germany, are trying to block or discredit European Central Bank President Mario Draghi. This could foretell the end of the central banker power bubble.

A recent essay by Harvard economist Ken Rogoff warns that’s a risk. A compelling narrative has emerged since the Greenspan era, he writes, that casts the central banker as a powerful technocrat who can foresee where the economy is headed, keep it robust without risk, and buoy the stock market at the same time. The markets and media hang on the technocrat’s every word. Expectations of central bankers have heightened since the financial crisis because legislative bodies largely stayed away from fiscal stimulus.

STORY: 2015 Global Economic Outlook: Better Than 2014—but Not By Much

Under these circumstances, the bubble the Fed should worry about isn’t in financial markets or housing, but in its own reputation. Writes Rogoff:

These other factors have combined to create a bubble around central-bank pronouncements and decisions that grossly exaggerates their economic significance.

Is this a bubble that central bankers should worry about? The answer is clearly yes. The news bubble is of particular concern, because it reinforces the idea that central bankers somehow care disproportionately about financial markets, which is generally not the case.

Most central bankers really are targeting growth, inflation, and financial stability, if not necessarily in that order. The political bubble is an inevitable product of central-bank independence, and preventing monetary policy from becoming a target for elected officials requires constant effort. The predictability bubble is perhaps the trickiest to navigate, though my instinct is that less would be more. Exaggerated importance is one kind of bubble that central bankers should always be eager to burst.

When the Fed becomes more visible, it attracts more attention—most of it not helpful. In some ways the bubble Rogoff describes is more dangerous than a stock bubble, because it threatens financial stability and possibly Fed independence. Richard Fisher, the hawkish president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, defended Fed independence on Bloomberg TV, saying, “Nothing’s changed—it’s just changed parties. … Think about this: Here’s a Congress that can’t get its own budget together. Do you want it running the central bank?”

Fisher is probably right: Fed independence is now under more serious threat than ever. But an increased reliance on monetary policy, coupled with unrealistic expectations, undermines the Fed’s ability to stabilize the economy. The Fed doesn’t really have much sway over the long-term real economy; what little it does have hinges on its credibility. If the Fed says it will keep inflation at 2 percent, and people believe it, contracts and investment decisions are made with that in mind. The 2 percent inflation target becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The certainty around Fed targets emboldens risk-taking and growth. If the Fed loses its credibility, its tools are less effective.

STORY: Five New Rules for Banks in 2015

Central bankers are among the most powerful people on the planet. But as Rogoff points out, the only way they can maintain unchecked power is by setting humble and realistic expectations on what they can do. That may require popping their own power bubble.

STORY: The Hawaiian Tropic Effect: Why the Fed's Quantitative Easing Isn't Over

Schrager is an economist and writer in New York City. Follow her on Twitter: @AllisonSchrager.

Export Ban Be Damned: BHP Billiton to Start Exporting Texas Oil (BusinessWeek)

By Matthew Philips   November 05, 2014

The Federal Crude Helium Enrichment Unit near Amarillo, Texas

Updated to reflect Bloomberg News coverage

The 40-year ban on oil exports is starting to crack without Congress or the Obama administration lifting a finger. On Tuesday evening, just as election results were starting to come in, Bloomberg News and the Wall Street Journal reported that BHP Billiton (BHP), the giant Anglo-Australian mining and energy company, would soon sell oil from Texas to foreign buyers without getting permission from the U.S. government.

According to the Journal, Billiton says it has agreed to sell about 650,000 barrels of ultralight sweet oil from Texas to undisclosed buyers in a deal worth about $50 million. It’s not clear what, if anything, the Obama administration, or Congress, for that matter, can do to stop them. As Washington is caught in a post-midterm election haze, with Republicans celebrating their gains and Democrats licking their wounds, Billiton’s move seems well-timed to go unnoticed. At least for a few days.

STORY: Do We Still Need to Ban U.S. Oil Exports?

Over the summer, the Commerce Department gave two Texas oil companies permission to start exporting a type of ultralight oil called condensate without first sending it through the traditional refining process. That kicked off market chatterthat the Obama administration was preparing to end the ban. But Commerce quickly came back and said that was not its intention. Some oil analysts and members of Congress have privately said they don’t think Commerce understood the full import of its ruling and the way the market would interpret it. In subsequent statements, Commerce said the ruling doesn’t open the door to abolishing the export ban.

But Commerce’s ruling clearly changed the conversation in the U.S. oil patch about the future of the ban, or at least the current willingness of the government to enforce it. That ruling has also led to a huge increase in the amount of crude that is being exported. Since May, U.S. crude exports have jumped from about 75,000 barrels a day (mostly to Canada) to more than 400,000.

BloombergCrude exports are up 400 percent since the summer

With oil prices down more than 25 percent since June, U.S. oil producers are desperate to start selling their oil overseas and getting it out of the U.S., where the export ban, coupled with the shale boom, has lowered the price of oil to the point where it’s starting to threaten the profitability of drilling for it. By selling U.S. crude to foreign buyers, producers will probably be able to fetch higher prices than they would if it stuck in the U.S. The Commerce Department did not reply to requests for comment.

STORY: The Strong Dollar Weighs Heavily on the Commodities Market

It’s unclear whether other oil companies will follow Billiton’s lead and start exporting oil without first getting approval. But as they say, sometimes it’s better to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission.

STORY: Expert Outlook: Continental Resources' Harold Hamm

Philips is an associate editor for Bloomberg Businessweek in Washington. Follow him on Twitter@matthewaphilips.

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