Intel's finally washing its hands of McAfee after seven up and down years, which included a lawsuit last year from John McAfee, after whom the company is named.The chip maker has divested its majority holdings in McAfee to investment firm TPG for US$3.1 billion.McAfee will now again become a standalone security company, but Intel will retain a minority 49 percent stake. The chip maker will focus internal operations on hardware-level security.For Intel, dumping majority ownership in McAfee amounts to a loss. It spent $7.68 billion to acquire McAfee in 2010, which was a head-scratcher at the time. Intel's McAfee acquisition will stand as one of the company's worst acquisitions.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Security researchers have uncovered the Android version of an iOS spyware known as Pegasus in a case that shows how targeted electronic surveillance can be.Called Chrysaor, the Android variant can steal data from messaging apps, snoop over a phone’s camera or microphone, and even erase itself.On Monday, Google and security firm Lookout disclosed the Android spyware, which they suspect comes from NSO Group, an Israeli security firm known to develop smartphone surveillance products.Fortunately, the spyware never hit the mainstream. It was installed less than three dozen times on victim devices, most of which were located in Israel, according to Google. Other victim devices resided in Georgia, Mexico and Turkey, among other countries.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The notorious hackers behind a string of banking heists have left behind a clue that supports a long-suspected link to North Korea, according to security researchers.The so-called Lazarus Group has been eyed as a possible culprit behind the heists, which included last February’s $81 million theft from Bangladesh’s central bank through the SWIFT transaction software.However, hackers working for the group recently made a mistake: They failed to wipe the logs from a server the group had hacked in Europe, security firm Kaspersky Lab said on Monday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
This column is available in a weekly newsletter called IT Best Practices. Click here to subscribe. Bring-your-own-device (BYOD) has become a fairly standard practice in most businesses today. Who among us hasn’t pulled out their cell phone to do a quick check of company email while killing time in a restaurant or a checkout line? The prevalence of public Wi-Fi makes it so easy to connect and tend to a little business while on the go.Many people look at public Wi-Fi as a convenience, or even as a requirement, when choosing where to spend time and money. Look in the window of any coffee shop today and count how many people are engaged with a laptop, tablet or mobile phone. How many of them would still be there if the shop didn’t provide free Wi-Fi?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
March came in like a lion with news breaking on March 6 that spamming operation River City Media exposed 1.34 billion email accounts, some of which included personal information including full names and addresses. How did this happen? The company failed to properly configure their Rsync backups, wrote CSO’s Steve Ragan.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Microsoft Windows 7 may not go quietly into the night, according to data published Saturday.March's Windows 7 user share -- an estimate of the percentage of the world's personal computers powered by the 2009 operating system -- was 49%, said analytics vendor Net Applications. However, Windows 7 ran 54% of all Windows machines: The difference between the user share of all PCs and only those running Windows stemmed from Windows powering 92% of the globe's personal computers, not 100%.More importantly, Windows 7's share has barely moved in the last 12 months. Since this time in 2016, it's dropped just 2.5 percentage points, representing a meager 5% decline. As a portion of just Windows personal computers, Windows 7 has been even more obstinate, remaining steady over the past year at 54%.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Users of Azure cloud services have a new option for stopping the misuse of privileges as well as managing vulnerabilities through an alliance with Beyond Trust.Azure customers who buy Beyond Trust licenses can host PowerBroker, the company’s privileged access management (PAM) and its vulnerability management (VM) platform, Retina, in their Azure cloud instances.They can host BeyondSaaS perimeter vulnerability scanning in Azure as well. Both are available via the Azure Marketplace.These new services give Beyond Trust customers a third option for how they deploy PAM and VM. Before they could extend a local instance of Beyond Trust’s security to the Azure cloud via software connectors or deploy it within the cloud using software agents deployed on virtual machines there.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Increasing the size of images and text will speed up web page delivery, say scientists. This counter-intuitive idea has been put forward as a solution to latency in browser page loading.The reason the idea works, in theory at least, is that the larger image pushes subsequent, following images farther down the page and out of the browser’s work area. Consequently the browser has less to do, pulls less data and provides a faster delivery of content.The researchers, who are from Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering, say this fiendishly simple idea will work particularly well for developers working with airplane networks, where it will stop browsers struggling to load a page. Airplane Wi-Fi can be hindered by latency, they explain.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Over the past few years, the world has seen ransomware threats advance from living inside browsers to operating systems, to the bootloader, and now to the low-level firmware that powers a computer's hardware components.Earlier this year, a team of researchers from security vendor Cylance demonstrated a proof-of-concept ransomware program that ran inside a motherboard's Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) -- the modern BIOS.On Friday, at the Black Hat Asia security conference, the team revealed how they did it: by exploiting vulnerabilities in the firmware of two models of ultra compact PCs from Taiwanese computer manufacturer Gigabyte Technology.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft announced on Friday it is shutting down CodePlex, its code hosting site for open-source projects, in favor of the more widely used GitHub. The move is something of a formality, since Microsoft has already been transitioning its open-source projects to GitHub for some time and you never hear about CodePlex any more. The company has had problems with the site, with spammers hitting it in 2015 seeking to take advantage of the CodePlex.com domain to boost their illicit activities. And Microsoft admits over the past few years, it has watched many CodePlex projects migrate to GitHub. Brian Harry, a corporate vice president at Microsoft, wrote in his blog announcing the closing of CodePlex that there has been a substantial decrease in usage. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Alpha Vertex is a year-old New York City startup with an ambitious agenda: It wants to create a graph database of global financial knowledge.CTO Michael Bishop says the goal is to use predictive modeling to help companies judge risk and investors get insight on what drives the market. To do so has required the company to build a massive technical back-end that uses some hottest emerging technologies. Two of the most important are Google’s cloud-based machine learning algorithms and IBM’s OpenWhisk, a serverless or Function-as-a-Service platform.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Serverless explainer: The next-generation of cloud infrastructure +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The first thing to know about serverless computing is that "serverless" is a pretty bad name to call it.Contrary to the vernacular, the technology that has burst onto the cloud computing scene in the past two years still does in fact run on servers. The name serverless instead highlights the fact that end users don’t have to manage servers that run their code anymore.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Serverless computing in practice | This company runs its app without managing servers or virtual machines +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Forerunner 230 is a running watch and activity tracker with smart features. It records steps, even when you’re not running. Tracks distance, pace, time, heart rate and VO2 Max on your runs. And when paired to your phone see incoming email, text messages, call alerts, calendar reminders and more. Right now its $250 list price on Amazon has been reduced 30% down to $175.84. See it now and learn more on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Micro-segmentation is nothing new. We starting talking about the concept a few years ago with the onset of software-defined networking (SDN) technologies such as OpenFlow. More recently, micro-segmentation was most often associated with establishing trusted connections between cloud-based workloads.Micro-segmentation is simply a new software-based spin on the old practice of network segmentation that organizations have done for years with a variety of technologies—firewalls, VLANs, subnets, switch-based access control lists (ACLs), etc. In fact, many organizations use a potpourri of some or even all of these technologies. According to ESG research:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Apple will soon stop using intellectual property from Imagination Technologies Group for graphics processing units for its iPhone and other devices, as it is working on a separate, independent graphics design for its products, the chip technology company said Monday.But the U.K. company is not giving up without a fight as it doubts Apple can develop a brand new GPU without infringing Imagination’s intellectual property.Apple held an 8.5 percent share of the issued share capital of Imagination as of April 30 last year. The iPhone maker said in a filing in March last year that it had discussions with Imagination about a possible acquisition, though it did not have plans to make an offer at that time. Apple is Imagination's largest customer and it described the iPhone maker as "essential to the business of the Group" in its annual report for 2016.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If I could give only one piece advice for CTOs and IT teams, it would be this: Data security is not just an IT task—it comes down to people and processes. As a startup CTO, you’re often going to lead the charge when it comes to information security for your firm. According to the Identity Theft Resource Center, U.S. companies and government agencies suffered a record 1,093 data breaches in 2016—a 40 percent increase over 2015. We’ve all seen the headlines and the high-profile victims, but attackers don’t discriminate when it comes to security breaches. Any company can become a victim, leading to losses of your data, your customers’ data, financial information, proprietary product information, and, ultimately, a loss of goodwill in the market. As more processes move online and into the cloud, companies increasingly feel this burden of staying secure.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Editor’s Note: First in a series of articles on the best ways to deploy and secure smart home technologyTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Microsoft’s big Windows 10 refresh, the Creators Update, is slated for release on April 11, bringing new features, enhancements and applications. The ones that have been getting the most attention revolve around the user interface (tweaks to the Start Menu), new capabilities for Cortana, and 3D design (the Paint 3D app).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
New products of the weekImage by MicroStrategyOur roundup of intriguing new products. Read how to submit an entry to Network World's products of the week slideshow.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The win in Ecuador’s presidential elections of leftist government candidate Lenin Moreno will likely have provided relief to WikiLeaks' founder Julian Assange, who had been threatened with eviction from the country’s embassy in London by the opposition candidate.The election in the South American country had aroused interest in part because the conservative opposition candidate, Guillermo Lasso, had said that if elected he would evict Assange within 30 days of assuming power, because it was costing the country too much to keep him at the embassy.The embassy is being constantly monitored by U.K. police ever since Assange slipped into it in 2012 and was granted asylum by the Ecuador government. Police say they will arrest Assange if he comes out of the embassy to meet an extradition request from Sweden in connection with an investigation into a sexual assault. Assange supporters are concerned that he may be moved from Sweden to the U.S. to face charges in connection with several leaks of confidential U.S. government information.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here