Daily Tech Briefing: May 28, 2014

Apple users throughout Australia have reported that their iPhones,iPads and other iOS devices are being remotely locked and held for ransom by hackers. The ransomware attack has been leveraging the Find My Phone app, which lets users locate a lost device and lock it against unauthorized users.

In this case, hackers are getting control of users’ iCloud account information and locking their devices until they agree to pay a ransom. To help reduce the risk of attack, users can employ two-factor authentication. They can also change their Apple ID, log into the Find My iPhone app and make sure their devices are not in lost mode.

China is asking banks to remove IBM servers and replace them with systems built by Chinese companies. This is in response to China’s continuing cyber-security and spying dispute with the United States. Bloomberg reported that four unnamed people familiar with the Chinese government’s review on the matter have said that government officials from the People’s Bank of China and Ministry of Finance have called on banks to make the switch.

Japanese service provider NTT Docomo will offer services that leverage network-function virtualization by March 2016, following the completion of proof-of-concept trials with three top-tier networking vendors.

NTT Docomo officials announced that the trials were conducted with Cisco Systems, Alcatel-Lucent and NEC. NFV takes network services like firewalls, load balancing and intrusion-detection out of specialized networking equipment and into software capable of running on lower-cost commodity systems.

Yan Zhu, staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has revealed that the open-source WordPress blogging and content management platform harbors a security risk.

Zhu wrote in a blog post that there are insecure cookies in WordPress that allowed her to log in to another user’s account. WordPress developer Andrew Nacin has explained that this issue will be addressed in the next WordPress release.