Category Archives: Blog

Posted on Author Atlantic Computer Services Categories Blog

Cross Platform Messaging Service Plan Canceled by Mobile Carriers

About eighteen months ago, a number of big mobile carriers got together to create the “Cross-Carrier Messaging Initiative.” Their goal was to roll out a Rich Communication Services (RCS) platform designed to allow for text messaging across a variety of platforms, creating a seamless user experience.

It’s something that sounds simple enough, and it’s a great idea on paper.

Unfortunately, putting that idea into practice is another matter entirely. To date, their efforts to do so have been a disaster. In fact, it’s been such an epic failure that Verizon recently confirmed that the initiative is dead. Eighteen months of concerned effort by some of the biggest names in the mobile business have resulted in essentially nothing.

Originally, RCS was envisioned as being a massive upgrade for SMS, which was born in 1992 and has served since as the default basic carrier messaging service. Unfortunately, SMS hasn’t kept pace, feature-wise with more modern messaging services like Facebook Messenger, iMessage and WhatsApp.

Unfortunately, even RCS as envisioned by the carriers participating in the project still wouldn’t have been as feature rich as the apps mentioned above. However, it would be a step up from SMS and include features like typing information, read receipts, location sharing and presence information.

The single biggest issue with RCS is the fact that since messaging is free, there was never any way to monetize it. That meant that there was no real incentive for the big carriers to put serious resources into the initiative.

Then there’s the fact that Apple never supported the initiative, and without Apple, there’s really not much point in pressing ahead anyway.

If there’s any hope at all, it lies in Google’s 2015 purchase of Jibe, which is a middleware company offering RCS solutions to carriers. That, combined with Google’s recent deal with T-Mobile may make something like RCS a reality, though Google has been keeping their longer-term plans close to the vest.

For the moment though, RCS remains an unrealized dream. That’s a pity.

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Posted on Author Atlantic Computer Services Categories Blog

Watch Out For Vaccine Survey Phishing Emails

Scammers have found a new way to take advantage of people, so be on your guard.

The U.S. Department of Justice has recently issued an alert warning people of fake emails sent out asking recipients to take advantage of a post vaccination survey.

Naturally, as part of taking the survey, each participant will be asked a number of questions designed to trick the unsuspecting into parting with sensitive and personal information, which can be used to steal identities. In a bid to increase the response rate, these scammers promise a cash prize or other award for completing the survey and filling out the capture box at the end to claim their prize.

It should go without saying, but in case there was any doubt, there is no prize. Anyone who answers the survey questions and fills out the capture boxes is simply handing their personal information over to the scammers.

Vaccination resistance is down to around 20 percent and falling, and an average of more than 3 million people a day are now being vaccinated. So, this is a vast market indeed and the scammers have shown no signs of stopping, or even slowing down. Unfortunately, we can expect to see more of these kinds of campaigns for months; probably until spring of next year when we should finally put the pandemic behind us.

At that point, there will be increasingly little to gain by continuing the campaign, and it’s a safe bet that the scammers will move onto something with a larger victim pool. Until that happens though, if you know anyone who isn’t especially tech savvy and is likely to be taken in by this sort of thing, be sure they’re aware of the risks. If we all work together, we can minimize the impact of this latest campaign and hopefully save a few of our friends and loved ones from getting themselves into trouble.

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Posted on Author Atlantic Computer Services Categories Blog

Cryptomining Worm Botnet Seeking And Attacking Vulnerable Devices

There’s a new cryptomining worm threat to be aware of, and it’s making the lives of IT Administrators who manage Windows and Linux environments nightmarish.

This news comes from a recently published report offered by a research firm called Juniper, which began monitoring the activities of the new Sysrv Botnet back in December of 2020.

One of the things that makes Sysrv a serious threat is the fact that it has worm-like abilities and can spread from one vulnerable device to another connected vulnerable device with ease. It can do that in record time, so what starts off as a small, manageable problem can quickly spiral out of control.

Worse, the hacker or group behind the new botnet has been busily updating their malicious minions, giving the botnet an arsenal of exploits that has grown in size almost continually since the company first started tracking its activities.

Among other things, it can add SSH keys and use any of the following exploits:

  • Drupal Ajax
  • Mongo Express
  • Saltstack
  • ThinkPHP
  • XML-RPC

The main goal of the person or persons behind this new threat seems to be to maximize cryptocurrency mining rewards.

The malware is set up to mine for the following mining pools:

  • Xmr-eu1.nanopool.org:14444
  • f2pool.com:13531
  • minexmr.com:5555

The malware is currently designed to mine XMR, and they’ve infected such a sufficient number of machines that they’re averaging about 1 XMR every two days. Between March 1st and March 28th of this year (2021) the wallet associated with the malware saw an increase of 8 XMR, worth about $1700.

Unfortunately, while the drain on computing power is bad enough on its own, that’s not the worst of it. Once a machine is infected, it is entirely possible that Sysrv’s controllers could upload additional malware that could be genuinely destructive. All that to say, be on the alert for this one, it’s bad news and a growing threat.

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Posted on Author Atlantic Computer Services Categories Blog

Recent Study Finds Mobile App Spending Is Up

Since the pandemic began, there has been an enormous boom in app spending, and that trend shows no signs of stopping.

In fact, app sales broke a new record in the first quarter of 2021, with the total clocking in at an impressive $32 billion. That’s up $9 billion from just one year ago.

Apple is the big winner here, capturing a staggering $21 billion of the total, with Android users making up the $11 billion difference and taking a distant second place. Even so, based on statistics by app analytics firm App Annie, both the Apple and Google Play Stores saw their virtual store revenues increase by 40 percent year over year, an impressive feat indeed.

Although the rates of growth in revenues were identical, there were some interesting differences in the kinds of apps that drew the most attention on the two stores. On Google’s Play Store, for example, the most popular apps that people spent money on tended to be social, financial, and productivity tools, while on the Apple Store, the biggest draws were games, financing and networking apps.

Across the app ecosystem, the single fastest growing app in the first quarter of 2021 was Signal, which got a lot of attention and attracted legions of new users after What’s App released a “take it or leave it” privacy policy that allows the company to share user profile data with Facebook.

It seems that a significant chunk of What’s App’s user base rebelled and sought other alternatives with many of them gravitating to Signal. It’s unclear at this point whether the mass migration away from What’s App will cause the company to change their minds and revise their privacy agreement, and if they do, it’s unclear that their departed users would bother to return.

Interesting times indeed, and the app ecosystem is bustling. If you’re considering launching an app for your company with a paid option, now looks like a fantastic time to do so.

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Posted on Author Atlantic Computer Services Categories Blog

Microsoft Cortana Will Be Removed From The App Store

It’s no secret that Microsoft is one of the 800-pound gorillas of the tech world. Even so, there are areas where the company undeniably struggles.

Their Internet Explorer browser was a disaster from day one. It was ultimately retired in preference for Microsoft Edge, which has some supporters, but still lags far behind Chrome and Safari, and even Mozilla’s Firefox.

In a similar vein, Microsoft has struggled to make a name for itself in the virtual assistant arena. Amazon’s Alexa app boasts more than fifty million installs on the Google Play store, and legions of loyal users are addicted to Google’s native assistant. On the other hand, Cortana boasts a little over a million installs on the Google Play store. It is a pale shadow compared to the other two, and is a virtual non-entity in the Apple ecosystem, where Siri reigns supreme.

Given this, Microsoft recently decided to pull the plug, and Cortana has begun to vanish from the app ecosystem. The virtual assistant clearly isn’t going anywhere; it is embedded in the OS after all, and it will remain there. However, in terms of competing with other VA’s in the app space, the company has wisely decided not to attempt to fight that battle and focus their energies elsewhere. So Cortana is soon to be a thing of the past on mobile devices.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Microsoft can continue to refine Cortana’s capabilities, making it an indispensable part of the OS, while Alexa, Siri, and Google’s ubiquitous assistant battle it out in the mobile market where they’ve already firmly established and entrenched themselves.

Kudos to Microsoft for reading the room correctly and focusing their energies where they can do the most good. While Cortana will barely be missed in the mobile ecosystem, we look forward to seeing what enhancements the company has in store for their VA in the Windows environment.

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