Android now 'mobile world's equivalent' of Windows for hackers

Android platform

CSO - The capabilities of malware targeting the market-leading Android platform are mimicking those of Trojans that have wrung profits from Windows PC users for years, a new study shows.

With nearly an 80 percent market share, Android's mobile dominance parallels Windows in the PC world, making Google's operating system the "mobile world's equivalent," Kaspersky Lab said in its latest Threat Evolution report, released on Thursday.

The difference between Windows and Android malware is that the latter is evolving much quicker, as criminals borrow from what they learned in targeting PCs since the 1990s.

"The evolution of Android malware has gone much more quickly than the evolution of Windows malware," Roel Schouwenberg, a senior researcher for Kaspersky Lab, toldCSOonline.

Android now 'mobile world's equivalent' of Windows for hackers | Network World

Hard disk hacking - Intro

Hard disk hacking

Hard disks: if you read this, it's pretty much certain you use one or more of the things. They're pretty simple: they basically present a bunch of 512-byte sectors, numbered by an increasing address, also known as the LBA or Logical Block Address. The PC the HD is connected to can read or write data to and from these sectors. Usually, a file system is used that abstracts all those sectors to files and folders.

If you look at an HD from that naive standpoint, you would think the hardware should be pretty simple: all you need is something that connects to a SATA-port which can then position the read/write-head and read or write data from or to the platters. But maybe more is involved: don't hard disks also handle bad block management and SMART attributes, and don't they usually have some cache they must somehow manage?

Hard disk hacking | Sprites mods