Business

As Spring cracked the Moscow frosts and March rains doused the streets, a computer in an innocuous server farm somewhere in the heart of the city winked to life. It was 2007, a year when many people became truly invested in online life. Twitter was a year old and the most popular smartphone was the Blackberry Curve – a pure email machine. It was a year ripe with promise for cyber-everything. And a group of hackers, unnamed to this day, wanted to grab their piece. The server first sent a blast of emails containing a link to a piece of software that many around the world wanted to download. Once they grabbed the Trojan Horse, the infected program took over computer after computer, creating something security experts call a botnet – a collection of infected machines controlled by a central command and control unit (CnC). This Moscow server, hidden behind IP address 72.232.49.214, began receiving incoming messages from a number of computers around the world. A whole swath of California l...

Palo Alto Networks shares climbed 26% in its first day of trading today on the New York Stock Exchange.  Shares closed at $53, up from its $42 offering price.The company offered 6.3 million shares in trading. The price of the share were originally offered at range of $34 to $37. It was increased to a range of $38 to $40 earlier in the week. Palo Alto Networks has a proprietary hardware and software technology that detects data threats as they come into an enterprise environment. It’s made for the new types of attacks that come through the web in the form of malware. It is designed for all the ways people access the web, either through their laptops or their mobile devices. It goes beyond what traditional firewalls are capable of doing. Most networking technology is meant for threats that come from basic email or web browsing. But today’s threats come in the form of botnet attacks and other modern techniques such as phishing attacks. Here’s how the company describes what they do when ...