U.S. car sales 4% during the month of March 2015, a loss of nearly 28,000 units compared with March 2014 in an auto market which grew by some 8400 sales. Only three of America’s ten best-selling cars in March reported year-over-year increases.
The other seven members of the top ten – Camry, Altima, Fusion, Civic, Accord, Cruze, and Focus – combined for an 11% loss of 25,000 sales.

Although there were no new entries to the fleet of passenger cars in March, a number of refreshed cars displayed at the New York Auto Show this week should prompt greater sales of those nameplates at this time next year.

The Chevrolet Malibu’s first-quarter volume slid 12% in 2015, but the new car looks to be a huge step forward. Honda Civic sales fell 6% over the last three months, but Honda is greatly modernizing the Civic for MY2016.

Nissan Maxima sales are down 50% this year, and while the new car is a wild thing to behold, it should fare better than the current car. Lincoln’s new Continental is set to replace the failure that was (and is) the MKS, sales of which are down 16% in 2015.

Indeed, the Toyota Camry’s 7% improvement over the last three months follows a swift refresh of the 2014 car. Similarly, sales of the second-best-selling Toyota Corolla have jumped 17% this year, the second model year for the 11th-gen Corolla.

Links to sources: http://www.campusviral.com/here-are-the-april-2014-big-8-us-auto-sales-numbersford-g-m-chrysler-toyota-honda-nissan-kiahyundai-volkswagen/

Malware writers are interested in Linux after all. Russian security firm Dr Web has reportedfinding a shadowy Trojan that sets out to steal passwords on the open source platform as well as OS X.

Technical details of Wirenet.1’s operation and technique for spreading are sparse for now, but the company reports that the backdoor program targets browser passwords for Opera, Firefox, Chrome, Chromium, and as well as applications such as Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, Pidgin.

Under Linux it copies itself to the ~ / WIFIADAPT directory before attempting to connect to a command and control server hosted at 212.7.208.65 using an AES encrypted channel. That at least offers a simple way of blocking communication and any further payloads.

Dr Web made a name for itself earlier this year reporting on the infamous Flashback Trojanthat hit Mac users on an unprecedented scale.

It’s not clear whether Wirenet’s cross-platform capabilities extend to targeting Windows systems but it is possible that avoiding Microsoft’s OS is a way of keeping off the radar of security firms.

Cross platform malware is rare but not unheard of, the usual technique being to hook into Java in search of victims using OS X.

Malware specifically designed to steal credentials from Linux systems is almost unheard of but might, on the basis of this new discovery, become a little less so in future.

Should Linux users be worried? Probably not. the details of how this malware might grab root mode on a Linux system are unknown. Atacking Linux users would also be a pretty rarified activity unless it was part of a highly-targeted attack.

Links to sources: http://www.techworld.com/news/security/linux-users-targeted-by-password-stealing-wirenet-trojan-3378804/