The Syrian government restored Internet access in the country, ending a widespread, 19-hour outage The government blamed a problem with fiber optic cables. The country has been locked in a civil war that has lasted about two years. However, diplomats and human-rights organizations claim the Syrian military is responsible for this outage and one that lasted three days in November 2012, as part of an effort to stifle opposition forces. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based group monitoring both sides in the civil war told Britain’s Daily Telegraph that the latest blackout was part of a government operation. Both sides in the ongoing civil war are using cyberattacks. US Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford said the Syrian government, with Iranian help, has been monitoring the Internet and using it to track, arrest, and kill opposition activists. (The Telegraph)(CNN)
 

Google Translate for Android now has additional features that Google says will make the application’s smartphone version considerably more functional for travelers. Users can now save sentences of their choosing to the Google Translate’s Phrasebook that can be automatically synched with their device so the information can be readily accessed. The smartphone application can now also be used in offline mode. Google Translate for Android will now also support 16 new languages with the application’s camera input feature, including Catalan, Danish, Indonesian, Icelandic, Latvian, Slovenian, and Swedish. The feature allows users to point their camera at text that may be difficult to input using traditional keyboard methods, and provides an immediate translation. Google Translate for Android does not yet support all the languages that the Web application offers. (Lifehacker)(SlashGear)(The New Age)(The Official Google Translate Blog)
 

Internet traffic to and from Syria halted abruptly Tuesday. The Syrian government claims the disruption is the work of terrorists. Western security analysts claim the more likely explanation is that the Syrian government shut down the Internet as it did for three days in November 2012. David Belson, product line director for custom analytics and MCDN, Akamai Technologies, an Internet-content delivery service provider, told the BBC “the failure of a single optical cable [due to being cut] is unlikely to cause a complete internet outage for the country.” Observers assume the move is meant to subvert communication among opposition members who have fought a civil war against President Bashar al-Assad’s regime for two years. The government-owned Syrian Arab News Agency reported that the fault would be fixed “as soon as possible.” (The Washington Post)(BBC)(CloudFlare)
 

Microsoft executives are dropping hints about an update for the oft-criticized Windows 8 scheduled for later this year. Codenamed “Blue,” the update would enable the company’s software products to work on devices with smaller screens. Julie Larson-Green, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for Windows, said during the Wired Developer Conference that a public preview of the Windows 8 update will be available prior to the Microsoft developers’ conference in June. This Windows version has come under fire for its new user interface, which International Data Corp., a market research firm, says is significantly contributing to the PC market’s erosion. Although there have been rumors the impending update might address some of the rampant criticism, Larson-Green claims there will be no major changes. (CNET -- 1)(ZDNet)(CNET -- 2)(Windows Blog)
 

Security researchers say mixing honeywords—decoy passwords—along with a real hashed password could prevent hackers from accessing websites and online services. Ari Juels, chief scientist at security firm RSA, and cryptographer and MIT professor Ronald Rivest say that storing multiple possible passwords on a system could not only provide security but also determine when an intrusion is occurring. Passwords are now considered a weak security strategy in part because users make poor password choices. This approach uses a honeychecker system with information about which passwords are legitimate and which are honeywords. This system stores randomly selected integers that point to the location where the password is stored to check whether a user is entering the correct password. If attackers accessed the honeychecker, they could not find the password. Their presence could be detected when they attempt to use one of the honeywords to access the system. (ZDNet)(The Honeywords Project)(MIT CSAIL)
 

New research shows cybercrime is increasing in the Caribbean and Latin America, with the number of incidents reported in regional countries up by as much as 40 percent. The new report, in which security vendor Trend Micro , compared statistics from 2011 and 2012, for the Organization of American States (OAS), suggests the percentages may actually be low because of a lack of reporting or inadequate detection of problems. Critical infrastructure, industrial control systems, and financial institutions are frequent targets of attacks in the Caribbean and Latin America. Trend Micro contends the traditional organized crime syndicates are responsible for creating sophisticated cybercrime tools used in these attacks. The report also finds hacktivism, attacking sites in the name of promulgating a particular cause, on the rise; Mexico alone saw a 40 percent increase in such attacks, particularly during the presidential election campaign. Trend Micro worked on the study with the OAS’s Secretariat for Multidimensional Security. They invited all 32 OAS member states to participate, but only 20 responded. Despite the overall upward cybercrime trend, Chile and Columbia reportedly saw fewer attacks in 2012. (Dark Reading)(ZDNet)(Trend Micro)
 

By a vote of 69 to 27, the US Senate passed a bill that would enable sales taxes to be collected from Internet transactions, regardless of where in the United States the seller is based. The Marketplace Fairness Act, which received support from most Democrats and some Republicans, was opposed by hard-line conservatives, states without sales taxes, and antitax activists. The House of Representatives and President Barack Obama will have to approve the measure before it becomes law. Businesses with less than $1 million in online sales would be exempt. Currently, a state can require retailers to collect sales taxes only if it has a store or other physical presence in the state. This exempts Internet-only firms such as eBay and Amazon, which collect taxes only in states where they have offices or distribution centers. (SlashDot)(The Washington Post)(The Wall Street Journal) 

Supercomputers typically sell for millions of dollars, but Cray Inc. is now offering a system for $500,000. The XC30-AC reportedly has the same software and processors as the XC-30, which sells for between $10 and $30 million. The system costs less because it is, in part, air cooled and does not use optical cables. For its new computer, Cray is targeting manufacturers from the Fortune 100 to 1,000, as well as pharmaceutical, oil and gas firms; smaller universities; government agencies; and research labs. Supercomputer sales are increasing with purchases up 30 percent in 2012, according to market-research firm IDC, as the hardware has become increasingly affordable for a greater number of organizations. Analysts expect the new Cray offering to attract first-time supercomputer buyers. (CNNMoney)(Information Week)
 

A new analysis of software integrity finds that the quality of both open source and proprietary software code surpasses industry quality standards. Coverity, a software-quality testing firm, conducted the analysis, based on code submitted to Coverity Scan, as it has been doing annually for the past seven years. The project originated in 2006 and was initially undertaken with the US Department of Homeland Security. Since then Coverity has analyzed almost 850 million lines of code from open source projects including Apache, Linux, and PHP and found an average defect density—defined as the number of defects found in every 1,000 lines of code—of 0.69. Coverity found that proprietary code’s defect density is 0.68. This is the second year both groups have had a defect density of less than 1.0, which is the industry standard, according to Coverity, which offered no additional details regarding the specific standard on which it bases the claim. (SlashDot)(Help Net Security)(Coverity Scan)
 

Microsoft has confirmed that a zero-day vulnerability exists in all versions of Internet Explorer 8, the company’s most popular browser. Security researchers say hackers have used the vulnerability in attacks against US Department of Energy nuclear-weapons scientists as well as US Department of Labor employees. The DoE’s Site Exposure Matrices website, used for information related to illnesses in employees who work in developing or disarming nuclear weapons, was specifically targeted in a watering-hole attack. In these attacks, hackers use website flaws to implant malware, which infects subsequent visitors. One security expert says these types of attacks will be successful unless users begin utilizing advanced browser protection software, such as virtual containers. Similar recent attacks have affected the Council on Foreign Relations think tank, NBC, and Capstone Turbine, a renewable energy firm, according to NextGov, a news and analysis website for US federal IT managers. Microsoft indicated it will issue a fix for its browser vulnerability but has not said when. The company’s next regularly scheduled security update will be on 14 May. (Computerworld)(ZDNet)(NextGov)