Joab Jackson

Author Archives: Joab Jackson

Blackberry delves deeper into security with AtHoc purchase

BlackBerry continues to shift its focus from selling mobile phones to securing them—as well as other portable devices, and increasingly connected items that are part of the Internet of things.“All of our investments and acquisitions go to one thing, to make the most secure mobile platform that the industry has to offer,” said John Chen, BlackBerry executive chairman and CEO, kicking off a morning of presentations at the company-sponsored BlackBerry Security Summit, held Thursday in New York.BlackBerry still sells handsets, but, to judge from the day’s presentations, it clearly sees a brighter future now in enterprise mobile security, where it can best leverage its remaining strengths in the market.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Five arrested in JPMorgan hacking case

U.S law enforcement officials have arrested five individuals who reportedly were involved in the high-profile 2014 computer hacking of JPMorgan.Three of the individuals were arrested for stock manipulation while the other two were arrested for running an illegal Bitcoin exchange, according to the FBI.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Amazon releases open source cryptographic module

Potentially saving the world from another online security disaster like last year’s Heartbleed, Amazon Web Services has released as open source a cryptographic module for securing sensitive data passing over the Internet.The software, s2n, is a new implementation of Transport Layer Security (TLS), a protocol for encrypting data. TLS is the successor of SSL (Secure Sockets Layer), both of which AWS uses to secure most of its services.The AWS engineers who designed s2n, short for signal-to-noise, reduced the amount of code needed to implement TLS, with the hopes of making it easier to spot potential security vulnerabilities.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

MIT tests ‘software transplants’ to fix buggy code

Like visiting a junk yard to find cheap parts for an aging vehicle, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have come up with a way to fix buggy software by inserting working code from another program.Using a system they call CodePhage, the researchers were able to fix flaws in seven common open-source programs by using, in each case, functionality taken from between two and four “donor” programs.Fixing such errors can help make code more secure, since malicious hackers often exploit flaws to gain entry to a system. CodePhage can recognize and fix common programming errors such as out of bounds access, integer overflows, and divide-by-zero errors.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft acquires BlueStripe for operations management

To help enterprise customers better manage applications sprawled across hybrid clouds, Microsoft has purchased BlueStripe Software, a provider of technology for watching over distributed applications.Microsoft plans to fold BlueStripe’s software into its System Center and Operations Management Suite software for managing IT resources, giving users more details on how their applications are running on premise and in the cloud.“BlueStripe’s enterprise-class solution enables IT professionals to move from monitoring IT at the infrastructure level to gaining visibility into applications at the transaction level,” Mike Neil, Microsoft general manager for the enterprise cloud operations, wrote in a blog post Wednesday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft Surface Hub goes on sale in September

Microsoft has a gigantic new member of its Surface family of touch-enabled devices called the Surface Hub, a widescreen all-in-one computer that can act as the focal point of conference-room meetings.Announced in January, the Surface Hub will go on sale in September, according to Brian Eskridge, senior manager for the Microsoft Surface Hub. Pre-orders for the computer begin Wednesday.The company is marketing the Surface Hub as a less expensive, and easier to maintain, replacement for the traditional assortment of office audio-video and computer equipment used in today’s conference rooms.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft fixes buggy browser in Patch Tuesday update

Internet Explorer, always heavily scrutinized by both security researchers and online attackers, has once again gotten the majority of patches in this month’s Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday round of monthly bug fixes.For June, Microsoft issued 8 bulletins, which collectively contain 45 patches. The bulletin for IE alone MS15-06 contains 24 patches, including 20 that cover critical flaws, meaning they should be applied as quickly as possible.Other bulletins cover faults in the Windows operating system, the Office suite, Windows Media Player, Active Directory, and the Exchange Server.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

CA acquires Grid-Tools for agile development

Adding to a growing portfolio of software development applications, CA Technologies has acquired Grid-Tools, whose software automates the process of testing newly-built applications.CA customers will be able to use Grid-Tools’ products to build software using agile development methodologies, in which small teams work in close collaboration to quickly build and update large applications.Last week, CA announced it is purchasing for $480 million Rally Software, which offers a set of software and cloud services to help developers manage complex software projects.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IBM muscles up on OpenStack with Blue Box buy

Betting that demand for hybrid clouds will grow strongly, IBM has acquired Blue Box, which specializes in offering OpenStack open source cloud hosting services.IBM will use Blue Box’s technology and infrastructure to help its customers adopt hybrid cloud computing, so that their workloads can be easily moved between a public cloud and their own data centers.A private company, Blue Box gives organizations an alternative to setting up and deploying the OpenStack internally, offering the software stack as a service instead. This allows an organization to control workloads from a single console whether they run on Blue Box’s private cloud or on internal infrastructure.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Silk Road mastermind Ulbricht sentenced

The creator and chief operator of the Silk Road has been sentenced to two life sentences in jail for running the online drug marketplace, which federal prosecutors estimated facilitated the sales of more than US$213 million worth of drugs and other unlawful goods between 2011 and 2013.The life sentences are to be served concurrently, along with a five-year sentence for hacking and twenty years for money laundering. The government is also seeking $183 million from Ulbricht based on the profits he made.In February, Ross Ulbricht was found guilty of multiple charges related to the operation of Silk Road, including narcotics conspiracy, engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise, conspiracy to commit computer hacking and money laundering. The narcotics and criminal enterprise charges carry maximum penalties of life in prison. Under current federal sentencing laws, Ulbricht faced at least 20 years behind bars.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

EMC scoops up Virtustream for cloud management in $1.2B deal

EMC is purchasing the privately held Virtustream software provider for approximately $1.2 billion to expand its portfolio of cloud management tools.Storage systems provider EMC will use Virtustream technology to aid customers moving to cloud-based services as an alternative to running data centers in-house. Virtustream's software can be used to manage complex enterprise applications, such as SAP's S/4HANA, so they can be run effectively on hosted infrastructure services.MORE M&A: 2015 Enterprise networking & IT M&A tracker Based in Bethesda, Maryland, Virtustream will be the basis of a new business unit at EMC. Rodney Rogers, the CEO of Virtustream, will lead the new business cloud services unit and report to EMC CEO Joe Tucci.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Survey claims New York startup scene is more innovative

A new survey is attempting to kick-start a rivalry between New York and Silicon Valley, claiming tomorrow’s innovative tech companies will pick east over west to set up shop.Out of 318 executives surveyed, more picked New York over Silicon Valley as the superior place to start a business, due to factors such as growing interest from venture capitalists, support from city and state government, and the considerable talent pool from Wall Street firms and Fortune 500 companies in the city.The survey was conducted by a New York-based data analysis company, 1010data, so we should probably take the findings with a grain of salt. But it claims the executives surveyed, taken from its customer base, were from companies throughout the U.S.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google launches a service for storing big data

Google has introduced a service for storing large amounts of data online, potentially enabling organizations to execute big data analysis as a cloud service.The offering, called Google Cloud Bigtable, "is based on technology that Google has been running internally for many years, so it is not a brand new thing," said Tom Kershaw, who is Google's director of product management for the Google Cloud Platform.Bigtable powers many of Google's core services, including Google Search, Gmail, and Google Analytics.MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: Big data's biggest challenges The service could be used to store sensor data from an Internet-of-things monitoring system. Finance companies could house petabytes of trading data on the service to analyze for emerging trends. Telecommunications companies, digital advertising firms, energy, biomedical, and other data-intensive industries might benefit from the technology as well.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft picks security for the enterprise win

Microsoft is betting that good security support will be key to keeping its enterprise customers from straying to rivals.At the kickoff of the company’s Ignite conference for IT professionals, Microsoft executives unveiled a number of advanced security services, and took jabs at competitor Google for not being as mindful of security.“Google takes no responsibility to update their customers’ devices, leaving end-users and businesses increasingly exposed every day they use their Android devices,” said Terry Myerson, Microsoft’s executive vice president of operating systems. “Google just ships a big pile of code, and then leaves you exposed with no commitments.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft Build: Windows 10 starts here

Build 2015 is where the Microsoft truly begins the work of selling Windows 10, starting with developers.“This is a really important Build for Microsoft, probably the most important developer conference it has ever done. The company is on the brink of launching a new wave of operating system technologies that will affect almost everything it delivers over the next few years,” said Al Hilwa, IDC analyst who covers enterprise development, by email.Held this week in San Francisco, with the first keynote kicking off Wednesday morning, Build 2015 also promises to provide developers with more information about how to prepare their applications for the cloud, and may even offer a glimpse into HoloLens, the Windows 10-based virtual reality headset.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Amazon says its cloud is ‘a $5 billion business’

Amazon has finally shared some numbers about its cloud business, and not surprisingly they show that it’s thriving and profitable.Amazon Web Services brought in US$1.566 billion in net sales for Amazon’s first quarter, it said Thursday, up 49 percent from $1.05 billion AWS generated the same time a year ago. For this quarter, AWS netted a profit of $265 million, up from $245 million a year ago.AWS is a $5 billion business “and still growing fast—in fact it’s accelerating,” Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was quoted as saying in a press release. He also called the group an “example of how we approach ideas and risk-taking at Amazon.”AWS now generates nearly 7 percent of Amazon’s total revenue. Overall, Amazon’s net sales for the quarter, which ended March 31, totaled $22.7 billion, up 15 percent from the $19.7 billion collected in the same period a year earlier. The company posted a net loss of $57 million in this first quarter, down from the $108 million it lost in last year’s first quarter.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Qualys devises a virtual patch to protect against vulnerabilities

If you can’t wait for that critical patch to secure your system from some just-discovered bug, IT security firm Qualys may have an answer, through new security software that can secure the trouble spot until the patch arrives.The feature, called virtual patching, comes with the newly released version 2 of the company’s Web Application Firewall, a set of software for securing Web applications against malicious behavior.Virtual patching can address one of the most thorny problems in enterprise IT security, that of protecting against a recently discovered software flaw. Sometimes attackers can start misusing a software bug as soon as it is discovered —- this is called a zero day flaw.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Raytheon forms defense-grade security unit with $1.9 billion Websense buy

Ever since its acquisition of Q1 Labs back in 2011, IBM has been selling its QRadar security event management software in the traditional way, whereby customers pay a price and download the version they want.On Tuesday, however, the company launched two new services that make the technology available through a cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS) model instead.IBM Security Intelligence on Cloud, for instance, is designed to help organizations determine whether security-related events are simple anomalies or potential threats. Built as a cloud service using IBM QRadar, the tool lets enterprises correlate security-event data with threat information from more than 500 supported data sources for devices, systems and applications. More than 1,500 predefined reports are also available for a variety of use cases.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Raytheon forms defense-grade security unit with $1.9 billion Websense buy

Defense contractor Raytheon is purchasing Websense, which it plans to combine  with its own security unit to create a new, separately operated business to  battle criminal networks and state-funded espionage.Today's Internet attacks "are becoming increasingly more sophisticated and are  being perpetuated by state sponsored groups, criminal organizations,  hacktivists and insiders," said David Wajsgras, president of Raytheon  intelligence, information and services business, in a conference call Monday  announcing the acquisition. "Our goal is to provide defense-grade solutions  that allow our customers defend against [attacks], detect them early, decide  how to counter and defeat such attacks in real-time."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

VMware prepares its virtualization stack for Docker

VMware may have pioneered enterprise virtualization, but until Monday it had been relatively quiet when it comes to Docker containers, the popular lightweight form of application virtualization.Now it’s addressing the market for Docker with two open source software packages that will allow its customers to more easily deploy containers in their existing VMware infrastructure.The company has released a Linux distribution, called Project Photon, which was designed to run within a VMware virtual machine hypervisor and contains only the barest essentials that an operating system would need for running containers. The company has also released access management software, called Project Lightwave, that gives system administrators a way to control the access to their containers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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