Hackers in MasterCard, Visa onslaught

Hackers have attacked the Web sites of credit card giants MasterCard and Visa, reports the BBC.

The attacks came after the Anonymous group of hackers pledged to pursue firms that have withdrawn services from WikiLeaks. MasterCard payments were disrupted, but the firm said there was “no impact” on people's ability to use their cards.

Visa's Web site also experienced problems. The attacks came after both companies stopped processing payments to the whistle-blowing site. Entries on the Twitter page of Operation Payback, the Anonymous campaign, said the Visa site had been taken down.

Google has defended its decision to run native code inside its Chrome browser, while calling its Native Client plug-in a “very important part" of the company's Chrome OS strategy, according to The Register.

In unveiling its Cr-48 beta Chrome OS machine, Google did not mention Native Client. But when asked what role the plug-in would play in the company's all-Web-all-the-time OS, Google engineering director Linus Upson made it quite clear that Native Client - aka NaCL - isn't just a side experiment.

"Native Client is a very important part of our [Chrome OS] strategy," Upson said. "While the [Chrome] team has made JavaScript tremendously faster over the last two years, there's a lot of applications out there that have existing audiences that are [written in native code, such as C and C++], and there are a few that are specialised applications that need every last bit of performance the hardware can offer. Native Client is a way of addressing both those issues."

Security experts are warning Web users to be on their guard after discovering two attacks using the WikiLeaks scandal as a social engineering hook, says V3.co.uk.

Symantec Hosted Services malware operations engineer Tony Millington wrote in a blog post that a new virus has been disguised as a PDF attachment named “WikiLeaks” in a highly-targeted attack aimed at a government body.

A brief sentence in the body of the e-mail alludes to "the release of thousands of confidential US cables" designed to persuade the user into clicking on the malicious attachment to find out more.

Apple released a firmware update for the new 11-inch and 13-inch MacBook Air models to address problems with booting and responsiveness, notes Yahoo News.

MacBook Air EFI Firmware Update 2.0 targets two specific issues that Apple says are rare in its latest notebooks: booting to a black screen or simply becoming unresponsive.

The update applies to the two newest Air models that Apple revealed at its Back to the Mac event in October.