March 2013

The cyberattack that rocked South Korean TV stations and banks apparently wiped out the hard drives of the affected computers, according to an analysis of the incident by McAfee.

The involved malware infections destroyed the master boot record of the hard drives of the machines attacked. The MBR on a hard drive contains crucial information on how file systems on the drive are organized. The malware involved overwrote data in the MBR with the following string of characters: “PRINCPES, PR!NCPES, HASTATI.” It also overwrote random parts of the file system with the same characters. After that the system was given a forced reboot command, but because the MBR and file system had been corrupted, it was unable to restart, McAfee said.

The team at bit.ly, a popular link-tracking service, has come out with an interesting new analysis on how people use social media around the world.

1. Almost everyone uses Twitter, Facebook and YouTube heavily — except in China, where those services are blocked. (Bit.ly doesn’t have data for North Korea or a few African and Pacific countries, possibly because there’s too little data.)
2. Despite heavy censorship, plenty of Iranians still use Western sites. Google+, LinkedIn and Reddit are particularly popular, perhaps because Twitter and Facebook are blocked in Iran.
3. Twitter is quickly becoming a phenomenon in Saudi Arabia. Its apparent popularity backs up recent analysis by the Saudi social media firm Social Clinic, which claimed 12 percent of the tweets in the kingdom. The country’s Twitter base is ballooning by 3,000 percent each year.
4. Given their social media-fueled revolutions, Egypt and Libya would — you’d think — overindex on sites such as Facebook, Youtube and Twitter. In reality, both countries underindex significantly on all 12 of the major networks Bit.ly tracked except Facebook. Flickr is also moderately popular in Egypt.
5. China’s Twitter-like Weibo network is the social medium of choice there, but it’s also popular in a couple of odd places — including Uganda. China’s deep involvement in the Ugandan economy, including projects managed by Chinese workers, could be responsible.
6. On the flip side, some countries you might expect to use Weibo — nearby Hong Kong and Taiwan, for instance — haven’t embraced the Chinese social network, maybe because they have access to the Western services.
7. Several South American countries, including Brazil, Colombia, Argentina and Peru, underindex across the board. “It’s a shame about the Colombian results,” one national commented on the bit.ly post, “but they show the true state of social media maturity in our country.”
8. Flickr, the once beloved photo-sharing site, is relatively popular in very few countries; Bolivia and Madagascar are two of them. Both countries have sizable communities on the site, built largely around touristy photos of scenic landscapes.
9. South Koreans really love Tumblr.

The Food and Drug Administration said it has no plans to subject smartphones and tablets to a controversial tax in President Obama’s healthcare law.

Republican members of House Commerce Committee’s Investigations subcommittee this week seized on reports that the agency could extend the healthcare law's tax on medical devices to iPhones, BlackBerrys and Android devices. But an agency official assured lawmakers that smartphones will be exempt from the tax. “They would not be regulated as medical devices, therefore not subject to the medical device tax,” said Christy Foreman, director of FDA’s Office of Device Evaluation, Center for Devices and Radiological Health.

House Republicans criticized the Obama Administration's response to cyber espionage campaigns stemming from China and Russia, saying officials have failed to outline a set of repercussions that countries would suffer if they steal trade secrets or launch another type of cyberattack against the United States.

At a House hearing, GOP members of the House Foreign Affairs subpanel on Emerging Threats said the Administration needs to take stronger action against China other than just sharpening the tone of its comments to Beijing about reports of Chinese hackers siphoning billions of dollars of intellectual property from American companies. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), the chairman of the subcommittee, said the U.S. can no longer rely on technology to deter future cyberattacks. The U.S. must "tell Beijing and others in clear terms we cannot allow hacking to continue without retaliation," he said.