Online Supermarket Sells Stolen Credit Cards

If you've ever wondered where stolen credit card numbers end up, Finjan might have part of the answer. The security company-cum-cybersleuthing outfit has uncovered a Web site supermarket for stolen card data.

The 'SellCVV2' Web site, as it is called, was found to be trading the card numbers and other data in a number of sophisticated ways. Criminals visiting the site would be able to earn discounts based on volume bought and choose from a range of tiers, starting at the least valuable Classic Visa or MasterCard -- those with the lowest credit limits -- through more valuable Gold, Platinum, and Corporate levels.

According to Finjan, prices ranged from US$38 for small volumes of premium card numbers, down to $10 for the equivalent low-limit cards in chunks of 100 at a time. Criminals worried about being stung themselves by non-working cards were being offered "guarantees" as well as trial data sets.

No breakdown was given on where or how the cards might have been stolen, but they are believed to be from around the globe and possibly culled using online Trojan-related techniques.

"The site, which appears to use Google's Blogspot service, is typical of a number of portals promoting the exchange of fraudulent card data. But what is apparent from the SellCVV2 site is the level of commercialization of the traders involved," said Finjan's CTO Yuval Ben-Itzhak.

The site gets its rather apt name from the three-digit CVV2 (Card Verification Value 2) number on the reverse of credit cards, essential for remote transactions, and implying that the numbers themselves are also being supplied.

All this after Finjan reported recently on a similar site found to be selling a large number of valid FTP server logins, many used by large companies around the world. As with SellCVV2, that site used a sophisticated trading model.

"If further proof were needed that there is a very serious problem facing the card acceptance and processing industry, this is it. The level of sophistication shown on the site, acts as a clear warning to anyone who thinks card fraud is a containable problem," said Ben-Itzhak.

Oldest recorded voices sing again

An "ethereal" 10 second clip of a woman singing a French folk song has been played for the first time in 150 years.
The recording of "Au Clair de la Lune", recorded in 1860, is thought to be the oldest known recorded human voice.

A phonograph of Thomas Edison singing a children's song in 1877 was previously thought to be the oldest record.

The new "phonautograph", created by etching soot-covered paper, has now been played by US scientists using a "virtual stylus" to read the lines.

"When I first heard the recording as you hear it ... it was magical, so ethereal," audio historian David Giovannoni, who found the recording, told AP.

"The fact is it's recorded in smoke. The voice is coming out from behind this screen of aural smoke."

Sheet music

The short song was captured on April 9, 1860 by a phonautograph, a device created by a Parisian inventor, Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville.

The device etched representations of sound waves into paper covered in soot from a burning oil lamp.

Lines were scratched into the soot by a needle moved by a diaphragm that responded to sound. The recordings were never intended to be played.

It was retrieved from Paris by Mr Giovanni, working with First Sounds, a group of audio historians, recording engineers and sound archivists who aim to make mankind's earliest sound recordings available to all.

To retrieve the sounds scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) in California made very high-resolution digital scans of the paper and used a "virtual stylus" to read the scrawls.

However, because the phonautograph recordings were made using a hand-cranked device, the speed varied throughout, changing the pitch.

"If someone's singing at middle C and the crank speeds up and slows down, the waves change shape and are shifting, Earl Cornell, a scientist at LBNL, told AP.

"We had a tuning fork side by side with the recording, so you can correct the sound and speed variations."

Previously, the oldest known recorded voice was thought to be Thomas Edison's recording of Mary had a little lamb. The inventor of the light bulb recorded the stanza to test another of his inventions - the phonograph - in 1877.

"It doesn't take anything away from Thomas Edison, in my opinion," Mr Giovannoni told Reuters.

"But actually, the truth is he was the first person to have recorded [sound] and played it back."

The new recording will be presented on 28 March at a conference of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections at Stanford University in California.

Corporate iPhone to challenge the BlackBerry

(Fortune) -- As anticipated, Apple announced a series of software developments Thursday to make the iPhone more useful to business customers while venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers said it is starting a $100 million "iFund" to finance startups developing applications for the iPhone.

Speaking at the company's town hall session in Cupertino, Calif., CEO Steve Jobs took direct aim at smartphone rival Research in Motion (RIMM) with the introduction of a plan to have the iPhone sync with office desktops.

The plan, according to iPhone enterprise chief Phil Schiller, is to license software that allows the device to work on Microsoft's Exchange platform for so-called push email as well as calendar and contact syncing.

Schiller explained that the business-user targeted iPhone will have network and information security features similar to BlackBerry devices in conjunction with Cisco (CSCO, Fortune 500). This would allow users and IT departments to perform similar functions that the BlackBerry does like swiping clean the devices if they are lost or stolen.

The move comes as iPhone sales start to droop ahead of a new faster 3G model due out mid-year. The business market, if Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500) is successful, would represent a reasonable strong opportunity for added growth. RIM fans, however say the niche is pretty tightly locked up at the moment.

On the software development front, Apple says "starting today" the company is opening up some of its development tools to application writers outside the company. This development kit, which many had speculated would not be ready or made fully available to outsiders, will allow people to create widgets and other software applications to work with the iPhone.

The company demonstrated a Facebook interface and an online banking screen that works with Bank of America. The company also introduced Cocoa Touch, software for the iPhone's multitouch screen that opens the way for more interactive video games.

Apple showcased some of the new applications that will be possible on the iPhone, including a screen for Salesforce.com's business software allowing salespeople to measure performance against benchmarks and import new customer leads.

The company says it will open "The App Store," available in the next release of iPhone software. Presumably like iTunes, the feature will allow people to buy new applications for their phones.

It appears that Apple's business plan for developers will be a revenue sharing arrangement. Apple will keep 30 percent of sales from every app sold. Plus Apple will host and take care of credit card fees. The software developers get to keep 70% of the proceeds, said Jobs.

Jobs ended the event by bringing venture capitalist John Doerr to the stage. "We're all here today because we love Apple products. And I'm here because I love Apple entrepreneurs," he said.

Doerr called Jobs the "supreme commander" of the world's entrepreneurial rebels. "Today we are very proud to announce the iFund," he said. "We decided the iFund should be $100 million," Doerr said. "That should be enough to start a dozen Amazons, or even four Googles."

Satellite shows Saturn moon might have rings

PASADENA, California (AP) -- New observations by a spacecraft suggest Saturn's second-largest moon may be surrounded by rings.

If confirmed, it would the first time a ring system has been found around a moon.

The international Cassini spacecraft detected what appeared to be a large debris disk around the 950-mile-wide moon Rhea during a flyby in 2005. Scientists proposed that the halo likely contained particles ranging from the size of grains to boulders.

The finding was described in a study published in the March 7 issue of the journal Science.

Unlike the rings around Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune, the apparent arcs around Rhea remain invisible and have not been directly seen. Scientists inferred their existence based on measurements by Cassini, which detected a drop in electrons on both sides of the moon, suggesting the presence of rings was absorbing the electrons.

It's unclear where the rings would have originated, but one explanation is they may be the result of an ancient asteroid or comet collision that spewed material around Rhea.

"Rings may even have survived since Rhea's formation," wrote lead author Geraint Jones, a space physicist from University College London.

Until now, only planets were known to have rings, said Jones, who began the research while at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany.

The Cassini mission, funded by NASA and the European and Italian space agencies, was launched in 1997 and reached Saturn in 2004. The mission is managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.