This column is available in a weekly newsletter called IT Best Practices. Click here to subscribe.Anyone who has spent any amount of time trying to secure their organization’s endpoints or network would not be surprised to learn that phishing is now the #1 delivery vehicle for malware and ransomware.According to Mandiant, phishing was used in about 95 percent of the cases of successful breaches where an attacker has been able to get into a target network and do something malicious. A phishing campaign is likely to have a 90 percent success rate—i.e., someone takes the bait—when the campaign is sent to 10 or more people.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Shadow Brokers revealed pricing and other details about its monthly dump service which kicks off in June. Subscribers of the dump of the month club will not be shelling out bitcoins, but a different cryptocurrency: 100 (ZEC) Zcash. At the time of publishing, 100 Zcash was equal to $23,251.Over the weekend, the Shadow Brokers moved bitcoins worth about $24,000 to over 30 smaller wallets. The bitcoins had been received back when the group was trying to auction off the hacking tools. Mikko Hypponen noticed the change after an alert he set on their bitcoin wallet went off.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Online ("cloud") file storage services are undeniably handy—for individuals and large organizations alike.Being able to toss files (spreadsheets, images, backups, etc.) somewhere, especially if that somewhere is easy to share with those you interact and work with, is crazy convenient. It certainly beats the pants off tediously sending files to your co-workers via email (or, worse, sneakernet).RELATED: Engineering firm uses cloud storage to speed file loads, and then unplugs its MPLS net
Services such as Google Drive and Dropbox are easy to setup and use. And as a result, just about everybody (and their dog) have an account on one or the other. Many companies even utilize one of these for storing files across their organization.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A major British Airways crash has highlighted the importance for businesses of testing backup systems and disaster recovery procedures to ensure that they work as planned.The airline experienced what CEO Alex Cruz described as "a major IT systems failure" that, he said, affected all check-in and operational systems.The failure on Saturday, May 27, resulted in the delay or cancellation of hundreds of flights, leaving thousands of passengers stranded at London's Heathrow Airport on a holiday weekend. Things were still not back to normal two days later.Cruz described the cause of the failure as "a power supply issue," without going into detail.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
At its massive customer conference held last week in Orlando, SAP made it clear that it was charting a new course for the future. In announcing Leonardo — what it calls a digital innovation system — and in interviews with company executives, the message was unambiguous: SAP is an important part of the enterprise digital transformation story.While the messaging around Leonardo was a bit muddled and at times felt like a bucket of buzzwords, it represents a decisive step forward in its effort to transform the company from a legacy, back-office technology player into the enterprise’s digital transformation platform and enabler of choice. According to its press release, the goal of Leonardo is to, “enable customers to rapidly innovate and scale that innovation to redefine their business for the digital world.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Can rent-to-buy plans make IoT devices affordable for thousands who need them, but can't afford to buy one?Solar panels can help African farmers with lighting and power, but are often out of reach. How can the purchase price be split into small installment payments that are manageable. How can IoT enable such a business model? How can low-cost devices communicate when both cellular and radio based transmitters aren't viable? How are such devices distributed and payments collected across a vast continent?Angaza’s approach combines IoT devices enabled with SMS based installment payments. BackgroundAround 1.2 billion people live without access to electricity. Off-grid energy appliances and services can address this issue, especially in developing countries. The Global Off-Grid Lighting Association (GOGLA) expects the off-grid energy and appliance market to be a $50 billion per year opportunity.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Among the many things we know about Donald Trump, his love of Twitter is perhaps his most comical passion. Whereas previous Presidents and even current politicians tend to tweet sparingly, Trump has a deep affinity for the social networking app and is prone to firing off tweetstorms and incendiary tweets at any given time. In the run-up to the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, for example, Trump made headlines when he went after former Miss Universe Alicia Machado on Twitter at 3 in the morning.Given Trump's love for all things Twitter, it remained unclear if Trump would continue his Tweeting ways once assuming the Oval Office. At the time, many people speculated that the responsibilities of being President, not to mention the strict security guidelines the President has to follow with respect to electronic devices, would result in Trump effectively kissing his Twitter stardom goodbye. Not to fear, Trump hasn't slowed down his tweeting since becoming President earlier this year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The shift to software-defined networks (SDN) was the catalyst to usher in a whole new way of running networks—and that’s through software. Some may argue that network engineers have been using software for decades, as every good router jockey had a laptop filled with scripts and templates that could be cut and pasted into the command line interface. This ad hoc model is highly error prone and not scalable, which is why human error still accounts for much of the downtime with respect to networks. Historically, Cisco hasn’t exactly helped its customers be more proficient with software. Oh sure, it had programs such as the Cisco Technology Developer Program (CTDP) that were targeted at developers, but what about the network engineer? The person who wants to do his job more efficiently? For that audience, Cisco didn’t have an answer. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Internet isn’t fast enough, or bandwidth capacious enough for data-intensive emergency traffic during disaster response such as in hurricanes and earthquakes, scientists think. Video streams of flood scenes, say, along with laser mapping theoretically helps responders quickly allocate resources, but it gets bogged down along with other responder traffic, video chats and social media during the incidents.Multi Node Label Routing (MNLR) is a new protocol that will solve this reliability problem by routing responder data through a “high-speed lane of online traffic,” says an article in Rochester Institute of Technology’s (RIT) University News. Researchers at the school have developed the tech.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
We are fortunate to live in an exciting time where multiple technological leaps are occurring. Specifically, I am thinking of the mobile industry transition from 4G to 5G, and the cross-industry IT paradigm shift to the Big Data approach. The 5G standards community is already planning to support the collection and transmission of massive amounts of data. This is one of its key requirements pillars in the area of supporting the IoT. What is left, however, is for the 5G community to ensure that the other component of Big Data, namely support for network and application intelligence, is also baked into the 5G architecture. Otherwise, 5G may become simply a pipe for Big Data passing between devices and the cloud infrastructure.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
I was recently invited to participate on a panel at a major IT conference, where questions from the audience provided an interesting window into the top issues that networking professionals are dealing with as part of their organizations’ digital transformation.Every enterprise, it seems, is planning a cloud strategy. On closer inspection, most are already using the cloud in the form SaaS ERP and CRM applications like Salesforce, NetSuite, etc. These applications have performed well enough on top of traditional, legacy networks.However, newer, more multi-dimensional cloud applications are forcing businesses to look for ways to make their networks more agile. One of these is Microsoft Office 365. Microsoft is aggressively investing in their infrastructure to provide a superior experience for users. Nevertheless, the enterprise network, and more specifically the wide area network (WAN), remains one of the biggest impediments to providing an on-premise caliber quality of experience for cloud applications. Finding the most efficient exit to Office 365 and best performance server are usually the culprits.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
One of the most accurate GPS-based location systems in the world isn’t a hyper-secret military technology or a top-of-the-line scientific device – it’s John Deere’s RTK network, a dual-band GPS system that lets farmers track their planting, harvesting and more to an accuracy of less than an inch.“It’s one of the most difficult and exciting programs that Deere’s ever done,” according to Terry Pickett, manager of advanced engineering at the company’s Intelligent Solutions Group.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: How Lyft gets a lift from Amazon’s cloud + Google’s machine-learning cloud pipeline explainedTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The M4 speaker from Omaker is IP54 rated, so its rugged splash, shock and dustproof design makes it ideal for shower and outdoor use. The latest Bluetooth 4.0 technology helps it pair quickly with your device (tap-to-pair with NFC capable devices) and maintain a long 33-foot connection range. Crystal clear sound quality and robust bass is realized through a 3W audio driver and passive subwoofer. The M4 is capable of producing 12 hours of music at 80% volume, up to three times longer than similar-sized portable speakers. It fully recharges in just 3 hours using an included Micro USB cable. The unit averages 4.5 out of 5 stars from over 5,000 people on Amazon (read reviews), many of which report sound quality that rivals more expensive speakers. Amazon indicates that its list price has been reduced significantly to just $22.99. See the discounted Omaker M4 speaker now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If your website, in common with roughly 25% of all websites, is running WordPress then it's pretty much certain that it's being constantly attacked. WordPress is to hackers what raw meat is to jackals because unless sites are assiduously maintained, they quickly become vulnerable to a huge number of exploits.The root cause of this vulnerability is WordPress' ecosystem of complex core software augmented by thousands of third party developers whose themes and plugins are often buggy and not quickly (or often, never) updated to fend off known security problems. Add to that many site owners being slow to update their core WordPress installation and you have an enormous and easily discovered collection of irresistible hacking targets.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As artificial intelligence (AI) increases in importance in new technology and applications, several people have risen to the top of the field—achieving expert-level status and providing insight into breakthroughs, new applications and ideas about the technology.The people on this list are an interesting collage with very different backgrounds. Some are traditional AI Ph.D. scholars who have slogged through research long before AI’s recent resurgence. Others are cross-over experts from one advanced science who saw the benefit of AI in their research and became experts in a second field. + Also on Network World: What AI can and cannot do today +
The short summaries of each persons’ biographical information add depth to the tweets. The biographical information was extracted from public sources, such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, university websites, Crunchbase and business websites. Given the suspicions about the authenticity of news stories, the biographical information about each person adds a level of diligence to choose if the reader finds personal value in following one of them.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Prolific developers of Raspberry PiImage by Mark GibbsWelcome to the third collection of Killer Raspberry Pi Projects. Our first and second collections were such a hit that we just had to produce another. There are so many interesting applications of the Raspberry Pi it's getting hard to pick and choose but, once again, we've sorted the wheat from the chaff to bring you ten more projects that embody the creativity and enthusiasm that defines the Raspberry Pi market. We have animatronic horror driven by Alexa, toy cars driven by deep learning, a couple of display projects, and cats recognized and monitored by Raspberry Pis. In short, more RPi goodness than you can shake a stick at.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Artificial intelligence is where the competition is in IT, with Microsoft and Google both parading powerful, always-available AI tools for the enterprise at their respective developer conferences, Build and I/O, in May. It's not just about work: AI software can now play chess, go, and some retro video games better than any human -- and even drive a car better than many of us. These superhuman performances, albeit in narrow fields, are all possible thanks to the application of decades of AI research -- research that is increasingly, as at Build and I/O, making it out of the lab and into the real world.Meanwhile, the AI-powered voice technologies behind virtual assistants like Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana, Amazon.com's Alexa and Samsung Electronics' Bixby may offer less-than-superhuman performance, but they also require vastly less power than a supercomputer to run. Businesses can dabble on the edges of these, for example developing Alexa "skills" that allow Amazon Echo owners to interact with a company without having to dial its call center, or jump right in, using the various cloud-based speech recognition and text-to-speech "-as-a-service" offerings to develop full-fledged automated call centers of their own.To read this article in full Continue reading
In my last few blogs I’ve talked about the journey from the Software Defined WAN to the Self-Driving WAN. Applying artificial intelligence and machine learning to the WAN might seem futuristic, but it’s already happening with our Unity EdgeConnect SD-WAN solution. A great example is our revolutionary First-packet iQ application classification technology which we announced at the end of March.Traditional Application ClassificationTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
With networking pros unable to trust the security of Internet of Things devices, Cisco says they should focus on implementing network-based security protections that limit the blast radius of IoT security breaches.This week Cisco unveiled a new package named IoT Threat Defense at the company’s IoT World Forum in London. IoT Threat Defense combines seven separate offerings, including network-segmentation rule creator TrustSec, network behavior analytics platform Stealthwatch and device-visibility offering named Cisco Identity Service Engine. +MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: 8 Tips to secure IoT devices | IoT security guidance emerges +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
This USB 3.0 adapter from Inateck can interface with up to three drives simultaneously. It is compatible with 2.5"/3.5" IDE/SATA hard drives and 5.25" IDE/SATA CD/DVD drives, and features a one-touch backup function. Use it to read an old internal drive from a crashed computer, or to use an internal drive similar to an external backup drive. You might find a lot of uses for this one. The typical list price of $47.99 has been reduced on Amazon 38% right now to $29.99. See this deal on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here