Daily Tech Briefing: June 17, 2014

AT&T has acknowledged that in April, three employees of one of its vendors hacked into the AT&T network and gained access to customer records, including call records and in some instances, Social Security numbers.

This hack was part of a larger effort to unlock older phones for use on other networks. While the company hasn’t said exactly how many customers have been impacted, California law requires companies businesses to alert customers when more than 500 customers are at risk. According to an official statement to the press, AT&T has said that they are taking steps to prevent this from happening again.

The Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization platform was released recently, which offers new features that make hypervisor-based virtualization easier to deploy and manage. RHEV 3.4 is based on the upstream open-source oVirt project. RHEV provides additional hardening and commercial enterprise support. One new feature is that RHEV 3.4 allows a server administrator to run virtual machine guests on the same server as the RHEV management engine.

This past Sunday, retailer Target suffered technical difficulties with its checkout payment systems. This problem caused long lines at cash registers. However, in the wake of its data breach last year, company officials are not blaming hackers for the incident and Target was able to remedy the situation soon after the issue was noticed.

Starbucks will be working with Duracell Powermat to install wireless chargers for mobile phones, tablets and other devices throughout its coffee shops. Initial installations will be made in San Francisco Bay Area Starbucks locations, and a full national rollout in Starbucks company-operated stores and Teavana Fine Teas + Tea Bars eventually.

The chargers are known as “Powermats” are flat devices users can place their compatible mobile devices on top of for wireless charging. Select Starbucks stores in Boston and San Jose already offer Powermat services for early users. However, the charging stations are not yet compatible with all devices.