Microsoft

The Kelihos botnet that sent up to 3.8 billion spam e-mails per day before being taken offline by Microsoft and Kaspersky Lab four months ago was created and controlled by a software developer who formerly worked for an antivirus firm, Microsoft said in a civil lawsuit updated yesterday.

"Defendant Andrey N. Sabelnikov is an individual residing in St. Petersburg, Russian Federation," Microsoft writes in a US District Court complaint against Sabelnikov. "Defendant currently works on a freelance basis for a software development and consulting firm. Prior to his current employment, Defendant worked as a software engineer and project manager at a company that provided firewall, antivirus and security software."

Sabelnikov wrote or helped create the malware used by the Kelihos botnet and he "used the software to control, operate, maintain and grow the Kelihos botnet, by among other things, infecting innocent users’ computers," Microsoft said in the amended complaint (PDF download link). Microsoft notes that Sabelnikov is not the first named defendant in the case, but is the first alleged to have created the software and directly controlled the botnet. Overall, Microsoft has said Kelihos was operated by more than 20 people, but most remain unidentified. The Kelihos botnet controlled 41,000 computers worldwide before being shut down and thousands of computers are still infected by its malware, Microsoft said.

One security firm Sabelnikov formerly worked for was Agnitum, a Russian antivirus vendor in St. Petersburg, the Krebs On Security blog notes, pointing to the defendant's LinkedIn page. "A source close to the investigation told Krebs On Security that Sabelnikov’s alleged role was discovered after a security researcher obtained a copy of the source code to Kelihos," the blog states. "The researcher noticed that the source contained debug code that downloaded a Kelihos malware installer from the domain sabelnikov.net, a photography site registered to Sabelnikov’s name." Sabelnikov was a developer and project manager for Agnitum between 2005 and 2008. The LinkedIn page states he was also lead research engineer for Returnil, another security vendor, between 2008 and 2011.

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Microsoft has revealed a little more of the Windows 8 Store experience, with screenshots and video of browsing the store, application search, and the install and upgrade experience.

The store will be the sole source for non-enterprise users to get Metro applications; it will also include links, but no purchasing or installation, to certain desktop applications. The post describes the major parts of the store—browsing, searching, the descriptions for each application—and showed how application pages will pick up their particular application's branding.

The store will handle installation and updating for Metro applications. Updates will be automatically downloaded in the background—though only when using an unmetered Internet connection—and installed on-demand.

Recognizing the growth in multi-PC households, the store also handles reacquisition of previously purchased/downloaded applications on different PCs. Apps can be installed on up to five machines, and the store can show you all the apps you've bought or installed on other systems plus allow you to install them all together on the current machine. Applications can even implement roaming, allowing not just the app itself, but also all its states and settings to be installed on a different computer.

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Windows 8 will contain built-in support for mobile broadband devices and smarter use of metered Internet connections, as detailed in the lastest post on Microsoft's Building Windows 8 blog.

Most 3G mobile broadband connections are subject to usage limits, and keeping track of data usage at the moment normally means running an application from the mobile operator, or even checking on their website. Windows 8 will have its own usage counters so that users can keep track of how much data they've burned through over the current billing cycle.

Applications will also be able to treat metered connections differently from unlimited ones. For example, a Flickr front-end might stick to low-resolution preview images when on a mobile broadband connection, fetching high-resolution images only when on an unmetered connection. Application bandwidth usage will also be shown in Task Manager, with separate counters for metered and unmetered usage.

The blog post also demonstrates Windows 8's faster Wi-Fi connectivity, with hot spots being found and connected to in under a second, and its new support for Wi-Fi hotspots that use authentication portals. Instead of having to open a browser to enter a username and password, it will be possible to type credentials directly into Windows itself.

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Microsoft has jumped onto the free-to-play bandwagon with its latest game, a text-driven adventure called Visual Studio 2010. The innovative new game marries the traditional interactive fiction text adventure with its arcane commands and exploration with the free-form, open-ended gaming pioneered by the likes of SimCity.

There are two major modes to the game, a textual spell-casting game, and a more complex interactive puzzle mode.

Software giant Microsoft has posted its earnings results for the second quarter of its 2012 financial year. It was another record-breaking quarter for the company, buoyed by strong holiday season demand. Revenue for the quarter was $20.89 billion, up 5 percent year over year. Operating income and net income were both down, at $7.99 billion and $6.62 billion, drops of 2 percent and less than one percent respectively. Earnings per share were up 1 percent to $0.78 per share.

The Windows and Windows Live Division's performance declined. Revenue was $4.74 billion, down 6 percent year over year. This was due to a weak PC market; it declined by between 2 and 4 percent, which Microsoft is attributing to the hard disk shortage, economic uncertainty, and "competing form factors" (which is to say, tablets). Though the market as a whole fell, this drop was limited to consumer purchases. The business PC market was up 2 percent; the consumer PC market dropped 6 percent.

Storage Spaces will give Windows 8 flexible, fault-tolerant pooling of disk space, and will make storage management simpler and much more powerful. But there's more to robust file storage than replicating data between disks: preventing and detecting corruption, and ensuring that damage to one file does not spread to others are also important. When describing Storage Spaces, Microsoft was silent on how it hoped to tackle these needs. The answer has now been revealed: a new file system, ReFS (from "Resilient File System").

Storage Spaces make it easy to cope from a failed disk, but are no help if a disk is merely producing bad data. The Storage Space will be able to tell you if two mirrored drives differ or if the parity check fails, but have no way of determining which drive is right and which is wrong. Erasures, where the data is missing altogether, can be corrected; errors, where the data is wrong, can only be detected.

Microsoft's System Center 2012 is available today as a Release Candidate, the last milestone before a final release. Along with Hyper-V and Windows Server, the upgraded System Center forms the key building blocks for Microsoft's private cloud strategy, providing management tools for desktops, mobile devices, both physical and virtual servers, and a mix of resources across private data centers and public clouds such as Windows Azure.

While Release Candidates for some pieces of System Center 2012 were already out, as of today all eight components of the suite are free for anyone to download at this link, with final versions out in the first half of 2012. The exact release date has not been specified, but Microsoft Management & Security Division Vice President Brad Anderson tells Ars Microsoft is shooting for the early side of that time frame.

Microsoft has published the hardware requirements that manufacturers must follow if they want to slap a "Designed for Windows 8" sticker onto their systems. In among many innocuous requirements—multitouch systems must support at least five points of touch, there must be at least 10 GB of free space available to the user, and more—are a set of requirements for Windows 8 systems' firmware. These requirements have reignited Linux users' fears that they will be locked out of Windows 8 hardware.

The concerns revolve around the use of a new feature called UEFI Secure Boot. All Windows 8 systems that meet Microsoft's certification requirements must use UEFI firmware with Secure Boot enabled.