Technology - Google News

People can’t stop buying Samsung’s new foldable phones - SamMobile
Microsoft Exchange Under Attack With ProxyShell Flaws; Over 1900 Servers Hacked! - The Hacker News
"Halo Infinite" Skips Forge, Co-Op At Launch - Dark Horizons

People can’t stop buying Samsung’s new foldable phones - SamMobile

Posted: 22 Aug 2021 04:25 AM PDT

It's been over a week since Samsung unveiled the Galaxy Z Fold 3 and Galaxy Z Flip 3. The company is now focusing on actually selling these devices. Pre-orders are open for customers across the globe with the devices scheduled for release before the end of this month.

Samsung wants to bring foldable smartphones into the mainstream. It continues to significantly improve its foldable devices and has even made it cheaper. These steps seem to be achieving the objective as pre-orders for the new devices are impressive.

The Galaxy Z Fold 3 and Galaxy Z Flip 3 are flying off the shelves

Like other markets, the Galaxy Z Fold 3 and Galaxy Z Flip 3 are also available for pre-order in Samsung's home country of South Korea. Local media reports suggest that the pre-order performance of the new foldables is very impressive. Samsung has apparently received 450,000 pre-orders of both devices combined.

Market analysts are now expecting total pre-orders for the Galaxy Z Fold 3 and Galaxy Z Flip 3 to reach at least 600,000 units combined. It's important to note that this figure only represents pre-orders for carrier-locked units. If unlocked units are counted as well, the total pre-orders could cross well over 800,000 units.

That's a massive improvement over previous handsets. You'll be surprised to hear that only 80,000 units of the Galaxy Z Fold 2 were pre-ordered in South Korea when it was launched last year. At this rate, the new foldable smartphones are actually selling better than Samsung's conventional flagship series. Pre-orders have reached twice that of the Galaxy S21 and 1.5 times that of the Galaxy Note 20 series.

It's the younger demographic that's particularly keen on buying the new foldable smartphones. Stats from a local mobile carrier reveal that 49% of Galaxy Z Fold 3 pre-orders came from customers in their 20s and 30s. The same demographic accounted for 57% of all Galaxy Z Flip 3 pre-orders.

Samsung's strategy of significantly improving the devices and making them cheaper seems to be working out. Pre-orders are likely holding strong in other markets across the globe as well. Samsung could well achieve its goal of selling millions of foldable smartphones this year.

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Microsoft Exchange Under Attack With ProxyShell Flaws; Over 1900 Servers Hacked! - The Hacker News

Posted: 22 Aug 2021 02:51 AM PDT

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is warning of active exploitation attempts that leverage the latest line of "ProxyShell" Microsoft Exchange vulnerabilities that were patched earlier this May, including deploying LockFile ransomware on compromised systems.

Tracked as CVE-2021-34473, CVE-2021-34523, and CVE-2021-31207, the vulnerabilities enable adversaries to bypass ACL controls, elevate privileges on the Exchange PowerShell backend, effectively permitting the attacker to perform unauthenticated, remote code execution. While the former two were addressed by Microsoft on April 13, a patch for CVE-2021-31207 was shipped as part of the Windows maker's May Patch Tuesday updates.

"An attacker exploiting these vulnerabilities could execute arbitrary code on a vulnerable machine," CISA said.

The development comes a little over a week after cybersecurity researchers sounded the alarm on opportunistic scanning and exploitation of unpatched Exchange servers by leveraging the ProxyShell attack chain.

Originally demonstrated at the Pwn2Own hacking contest in April this year, ProxyShell is part of a broader trio of exploit chains discovered by DEVCORE security researcher Orange Tsai that includes ProxyLogon and ProxyOracle, the latter of which concerns two remote code execution flaws that could be employed to recover a user's password in plaintext format.

"They're backdooring boxes with webshells that drop other webshells and also executables that periodically call out," researcher Kevin Beaumont noted last week.

Now according to researchers from Huntress Labs, at least five distinct styles of web shells have been observed as deployed to vulnerable Microsoft Exchange servers, with over over 100 incidents reported related to the exploit between August 17 and 18. Web shells grant the attackers remote access to the compromised servers, but it isn't clear exactly what the goals are or the extent to which all the flaws were used.

More than 140 web shells have been detected across no fewer than 1,900 unpatched Exchanger servers to date, Huntress Labs CEO Kyle Hanslovan tweeted, adding "impacted [organizations] thus far include building manufacturing, seafood processors, industrial machinery, auto repair shops, a small residential airport and more."

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"Halo Infinite" Skips Forge, Co-Op At Launch - Dark Horizons

Posted: 21 Aug 2021 07:35 AM PDT

Microsoft and 343 Industries have announced that campaign co-op and Forge mode won't be available in time for the launch of "Halo Infinite" on PC and Xbox.

Instead, both modes will be added to the game next year and will be among many parts of the game undergoing lengthy testing.

Halo Infinite's head of creative Joseph Staten tells YouTube that the lack of campaign co-op and Forge were not ready for launch as the team began winding down its development polish:

"Unfortunately, as we focused the team for shutdown and really focused on a quality experience for launch, we made a really tough decision to delay shipping campaign co-op for launch. And, we also made the tough call to delay shipping Forge past launch, as well."

Campaign co-op is expected to come to Infinite in its second season around three months after launch. Forge will follow in season three around six months after launch.

The game still does not have an actual release date to share beyond the Holiday 2021 timeframe.

Kotaku

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