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The Reg's review of 2014: Naked JLaw selfies, Uber and monkey madness

Put it on a stick and 'cheesie'

Anonymous? That's so 2013. Norks are now!

Big in 2013, Anonymous slipped from 2014’s headlines but not the actions of hackers per se. JP Morgan Chase, one of the world’s largest and most successful investment firms and the company that help underwrite Twitter’s IPO in 2013, suffered a cyber attack estimated to be one of the largest on record: 76m household and seven million small business accounts compromised.

The attack took place in the summer but JP Morgan only copped to it in a securities filing in October having refused to comment on reports of the attack at the time. A rather basic mistake by the bank's security team not a zero-day assault was reported to have been the source of the breach.

US retailer Home Depot admitted the details of 56m customer payment cards had been exposed between April and September after malware was installed on its point-of-sale systems. The malware was a variant of BlackPOS that targets point of sale systems running Windows, installed on Target POS in 2013 and that was responsible for swiping details of 70m people.

Home Depot, which operates 1,800 stores across the US, believes customers’ names and contact details were swiped but not credit and debit card details.

Firms weren't getting the message, and seemed to think "it" couldn't happen to them.

Social networks got a dab of the hacks: shifty coders claimed to have lifted usernames and phone numbers of 4.6m Snapchat users, taking advantage of a vulnerability in the service that the social network had dismissed as “theoretical.”

Kim Jong-un

Kim Jong-un: don't mention the hair. Or the film

Ebay, a perennial favourite, warned hundreds of millions of users to change their passwords after its customer database was compromised.

The system was cracked after somebody obtained an eBay employee’s log-in credentials and succeeded in penetrating the corporate network.

Sony is tops for hackers, too, only this time state-sponsored attackers were in the frame: a group calling itself Guardians of Peace, miffed at Sony Pictures’ The Interview film about the assignation of tiny dictator Kim Jong-Un, crippled the company’s networks, pinching employee’s details and posting them online along with five un-released films posted to file-sharing sites and a string of emails that proved embarrassing for all concerned (here, here and here) and that helped sustain the gossip press.

Sony Pictures was reported to have launched a DDoS attack on sites holding the stolen film material, using Amazon's AWS as its base. North Korea denied it sponsored the attack, but welcomed it with Sony initially killing plans to release the flick. Sony, however, relented - showing the film on a select basis.

The US government was said to have launched a revenge cyber attack knocking the Hermit Kingdonm offline but the real culprit was more likely China: China Unicom is North Korea's main supplier and the People Republic the Communist state's biggest ally. Bejing was likely whipping the rogue state to heel as the whole Interview incident escalated.

As of writing, the Facebook page of the M&M Hair Academy that so grievously insulted Jong-Un’s barnet had escaped the attention of the GoP.

Apple Pay - now the wallet, not just your money in it

We’ve come to expect disruption from Apple: the plucky firm has consistently punched above its weight, up-ending personal music players, mobile phones, and personal computers with the iPod, iPhone and iPad. Is money next? With iOS 8.1 in October the Cupertino gadget king released Apple Pay, letting owners of the Apple Watch and skinny and reputedly bends-to-breaking-point iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus make payments when their device is held next to a store scanner.

Those accepting Apple Pay included US outlets of Subway and McDonalds, Groupon and Uber, and - naturally - Apple’s 258 US retail stores, plus 500 banks. Apple Pay works using an NFC chip in the device with touch finger-print sensor.

Mobile payments is a fragmented scene, with banks such as Barclays in the UK already offering services - PingIt - that’s available for Apple and Android phones from the respective app stores.

As Apple was revving up the PR machine in September a UK smartphone payment scheme called Weve from EE, O2 and Orange and unveiled in February was abandoned and the participants ran for cover in the face of Apple’s beach landing, unable to agree on how the mobile wallet should operate. Google, meanwhile, already has its own mobile payment system with PayPal also available on your smartphone.

And then there was PayPal. PayPal, started in 1998 by Peter Thiel and Max Levchin, was bought by eBay in 2002, and has become ensconced as online auctioneer’s payments wing. PayPal shifted $180bn in revenue in 2013, and accounting for 41 per cent of eBay’s revenue and 36 per cent of its profits. But in September, eBay said it would spin out its payments arm.

So why split? Was eBay rattled at the prospect of owning PayPal with Apple now on the field? Was eBay stripping down to focus its attention on Chinese e-commerce shop Alibaba, which went public in September in one of the world’s largest IPOs - $25bn. Twelve years after buying PayPal, CEO John Donahoe believed nothing more could be done together and both face different challenges. Either way, it will have satisfied eBay activist investor Carl Ichan, who’d lobbied for the split.

For all that, the Apple payments menace failed to materialize in 2014: the vast majority of iPhone 6 and 6 Plus users who could have used Apple Pay on Black Friday in November didn’t. More than 90 per cent didn’t even bother trying it.

Maybe Apple Pay is more Mobile Me than the next iPad.

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