What is EMV?



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U.S. banks are switching up the insides of your customers' credit cards. They're adding something called EMV technology, which stands for "Europay, MasterCard, and Visa." Translation: Credit cards will be equipped with a super-small computer chip that's extremely hard to counterfeit. If you've gotten a card recently, chances are it's souped up with this technology.

Why the changeover? Here's a crazy statistic: Almost half of the world's credit card fraud now happens in the United States—even though only a quarter of all credit card transactions happen here. The banks want to rein this in ASAP by moving away from magnetic-stripe cards, which are much easier to counterfeit. The recent Target and Neiman Marcus security breaches also added motivation.

More:
https://blog.squareup.com/townsquare/posts/emv

CIA Admits to Hacking Senate Computers



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In a sharp and sudden reversal, the CIA is acknowledging it improperly tapped into the computers of Senate staffers who were reviewing the intelligence agency's Bush-era torture practices.

More:

http://www.nationaljournal.com/tech/cia-admits-it-improperly-hacking-senate-computers-20140731

Government-Grade Stealth Malware In Hands Of Criminals



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Malware originally developed for government espionage is now in use by criminals, who are bolting it onto their rootkits and ransomware.

The malware, dubbed Gyges, was first discovered in March by Sentinel Labs, which just released an intelligence report outlining their findings. From the report: "Gyges is an early example of how advanced techniques and code developed by governments for espionage are effectively being repurposed, modularized and coupled with other malware to commit cybercrime."

More:
http://www.darkreading.com/government-grade-stealth-malware-in-hands-of-criminals/d/d-id/1297362

Apache Spark™ - Lightning-Fast Cluster Computing



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Apache Spark™ is a fast and general engine for large-scale data processing.

Speed

Run programs up to 100x faster than Hadoop MapReduce in memory, or 10x faster on disk.

Spark has an advanced DAG execution engine that supports cyclic data flow and in-memory computing.

More:
http://spark.apache.org/