A major underground marketplace acting like an eBay for criminals is selling access to more than 70,000 compromised servers allowing buyers to carry out widespread cyber-attacks around the world, security experts said on Wednesday.Researchers at Kaspersky Lab, a global computer security firm based in Moscow, said the online forum appears to be run by a Russian speaking group. It offers access to hacked computers owned by governments, companies and universities in 173 countries, unbeknownst to the servers’ legitimate owners.

Access goes for as little as $6 for a compromised server. Each comes pre-equipped with a variety of software to mount denial-of-service attacks on other networks, launch spam campaigns, illicitly manufacture bitcoin currency or compromise online or retail payment systems, the researchers said.Starting at $7, buyers can gain access to government servers in several countries, including interior and foreign ministries, commerce departments and several town halls, said Costin Raiu, director of Kaspersky’s research and analysis team.

He said the market might also be used to exploit hundreds of millions of old, stolen email credentials reported in recent months to be circulating in the criminal underground.“Stolen credentials are just one aspect of the cybercrime business,” Raiu told Reuters in an interview. “In reality, there is a lot more going on in the underground. These things are all interconnected.”The marketplace goes by the name xDedic. Dedic is short for dedicated, a term used in Russian online forums for a computer under remote control of a hacker and available for use by other parties.

XDedic connects sellers of compromised servers with criminal buyers. The market’s owners take a 5 per cent up-front fee on all money put into trading accounts, Raiu said.Kaspersky found the machines run remote desktop software widely used by network administrators to provide technical support for Microsoft Windows users. Access to servers with high capacity network connections may cost up to $15.Low prices, searchable feature lists that advertise attack capabilities, together with services to protect illicit users from becoming detected attract buyers from entry-level cybercriminals to state-sponsored espionage groups.

An unnamed Internet service provider in Europe alerted Kaspersky to the existence of xDedic, Raiu said.High-profile targets include a U.S. aerospace firm, banks in the United States, Philippines, Kazakhstan, Jordan, Ghana, Cyprus, South Korea and Saudi Arabia, chemical firms in Singapore and Thailand and oil companies in China and the United Arab Emirates, Kaspersky found.Raiu declined to name the organizations. He said Kaspersky has notified national computer emergency response teams in several countries.

Oppo has achieved a major milestone with its popular F1 Plus smartphone in India and around the world. The company announced on Wednesday that the global sales of the F1 Plus smartphone averaged one sale per 1.1 second, adding up to a whopping seven million units so far.

Oppo launched the F1 Plus in India in April, but its international variant R9 was released in China in March. Ever since its release, the F1 Plus has been ranked among the best sellers, which helped Oppo stand well against some of the biggest industry giants. In March, the sales of R9 aka F1 Plus helped Oppo beat Samsung, Huawei and Apple in offline sales in China. Now, the company is celebrating yet another milestone, and on a global scale this time.

“We are very excited with the performance of OPPO F1 Plus. Our focus on camera technology and photography-focused F series has resulted in excellent results for the brand — first with OPPO F1 becoming the best-selling model and now OPPO F1 Plus recording great sales,” Sky Li, OPPO Global VP, said in a statement. “The acceptance from the consumers has been great and we believe that the reason behind this is the brand’s focus on taking consumer feedback seriously.”

Oppo’s new achievement follows recent feats, where it ranked fourth in the list of top five smartphone vendors globally and claimed the title of the best performing brand in the first quarter of 2016. Oppo said the promotional campaigns, distributors’ participation and undivided focus on the product were the key areas for its road to success.”We listen to users, and bring them meticulously designed, top-quality products that they’ll truly love. That’s what’s brought us this far and what will continue to drive us going forward,” Li added.

We reviewed Oppo F1 Plus in April and found it to be a complete bundle of great camera, performance and design. The handset comes with cutting-edge VOOC flash charging technology, an advanced 16MP front camera, excellent metallic design and ultra-fast fingerprint scanner among other features. The handset is priced at Rs. 26,990 in India, competing against the likes of Vivo V3 Max, OnePlus 2 and others.

London: Social media has emerged as a leading source of news among online users who increasingly access it on their smartphones, a think-tank said on Wednesday, warning that the embrace of free news was becoming a challenge for publishers of quality news.More than half of online users get their news from Facebook and other social media platforms, refusing to pay for news and using ad-blocking, which hurts publishers’ revenue, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (RISJ) said.But although free news distributed through social platforms creates an opportunity to reach more readers, it also makes it more difficult for publishers to get recognised and connect with their audience, the RISJ said in its annual Digital News Report.

“These things are happening because of us,” Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, Reuters Institute director of research, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a phone interview.”We prefer news in the digital form because it’s convenient but you get what you pay for. It takes money to do professional journalism.”Facebook is playing an increasingly significant role in the distribution of online news, with 44 per cent of people using it as their source of news, followed by 19 per cent of people using YouTube and 10 per cent using Twitter, the report said.Nielsen said that in developing countries, where access to independent and reliable news was limited, there were even more people who relied on social media for news.

“Many people in Asian and African countries are using mobile phones to get their online news and in those regions social media is even more important as source of news,” he said.Thirty-six percent of people preferred news to be selected for them by algorithms compared with 30 per cent who relied on editors or journalists, although some feared missing key information or challenging viewpoints, the report said.For the first time social media has overtaken television as the main source of news for 18 to 24-year-olds, with 28 per cent of them citing social media as their main source of news compared with 24 per cent who said they watched news on television.

More than half of the respondents said they were using smartphones to access news, with highest levels in Sweden (69 per cent), Korea (66 per cent) and Switzerland (61 per cent), the study said.In Britain and the United States the use of smartphones to access the news has for the first time overtaken computers and laptops.The survey was carried out online in 26 countries in Europe, Asia, North America and South America.

It has been four years since the inception of social image messaging app Sanpchat and it is going through a lot of transitions to further enhance the platform.While numerous features have been integrated to make the platform better, the company is now aiming to incorporate ads and inserts between stories to boost revenue.According to a report on Adweek, the company is all set to include ads inside the application, an effort to increase profit maximisation from its 150 million user base.

Soon most Snapchat stories will have ads in between when users skips one person’s list to another. According to the report, the ads will have random occurrence rate.Other than that, the image messaging platform will also come up with expandable snap ads, allowing users to install promoted applications, watch videos, access websites, or view articles. The new application programming interface of ads will allow advertisers to buy campaigns, which will make it easier to post ads on the platform.While revenue maximisations in an important issue for the team, they will review the quality of each ad. Snapchat has estimated that the new ad platform will increase click-through rate by five times in contrast to other similar apps.

The company has reported revenue of $59 million last year, and is working very hard to attain its target revenue of $250 to $350 million this year.By 2017, the company has set a target of $1 billion. While the revenue generated by the in-story ads will be a boost, the company’s far-fetched targets need much more than that.