go-Digital Blog on Digital Marketing

Zynga Is About To Lose Its Global Director Of Brand Advertising

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/sources-zynga-is-about-to-lose-its-global-director-of-brand-advertising-2012-2

Manny Anekal, the global director of brand advertising at Zynga, is leaving the company to become COO of Kiip, a firm that operates a network that places branded rewards inside mobile games for advertisers, according to two sources.

Anekal’s Linkedin page currently states he has been on extended medical leave from Zynga. He is expected at Kiip next week.

Kiip has 20 employees, is based in San Francisco, and its clients include Best Buy, Disney and Sony. The company inserts branded rewards inside mobile games for advertisers. When players reach a new level, for instance, Kiip can reward them with free merchandise from advertisers.

Anekal leaves Zynga after its sales and marketing budget rose to $234 million, according to its Q4 2011 results.

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The security PIN system that Google Wallet users have to enter to verify transactions has been compromised. Thankfully, the chances of your wallet being used against you is relatively low—assuming you haven’t rooted your phone, that is.

Since Wallet saves your PIN in an encrypted file on the phone itself, rather than the secured NFC chip, if your phone falls into the wrong hands, that person could lift your PIN file from the phone and simply crack it using brute force. From there, he’d have access to—and use of—your Wallet account.

Security firm, Zvelo, discovered and reported the issue to Google, but because Wallet’s security architecture, the change will require a fundamental rejiggering of the security protocols. Man, talk about an oversight. According to Zvelo,

The lynch-pin, however, was that within the PIN information section was a long integer “salt” and a SHA256 hex encoded string “hash”. Knowing that the PIN can only be a 4-digit numeric value, it dawned on us that a brute-force attack would only require calculating, at most, 10,000 SHA256 hashes…This completely negates all of the security of this mobile phone payment system.

So, if you are rooted, be sure to take some additional security steps to protect yourself like activating the lock screen, disabling the USB debugging option in settings, and enabling full-disk encryption. Or maybe not losing your phone in the first place. [Zvelo via Android Central via The Verge]

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