Crooks are stealing code from the purveyors of Petya ransomware and using it to extort money from innocent victims, stiffing the creators of the malware out of the cut they are supposed to get.Rather than following the rules of licensing Petya, another criminal group is stealing and modifying the ransomware so they can use it without paying, according to the SecureList blog by researchers at Kaspersky Lab.+More on Network World: DARPA fortifies early warning system for power-grid cyber assault+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The U.S. Department of Justice yesterday argued that it should not have to reveal the maker of a tool used last year to crack an alleged terrorist's iPhone or disclose how much it paid for the hacking job, court documents showed.That tool was used last year by the FBI to access a password-protected iPhone 5C previously owned by Syed Rizwan Farook, who along with his wife, Tafsheen Malik, killed 14 in San Bernardino, Calif., in December 2015. The two died in a shootout with police later that day. Authorities quickly labeled them terrorists.In March 2016, after weeks of wrangling with Apple, which balked at a court order compelling it to assist the FBI in unlocking the iPhone, the agency announced it had found a way to access the device without Apple's help. Although the FBI acknowledged it had paid an outside group to crack the iPhone, it refused to identify the firm or how much it paid.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
First off, CBRS is an acronym for Citizens Broadband Radio Service, and the upshot for enterprise IT pros is that it could result in improved LTE services from service providers as well as enable enterprises to build their own private LTE networks (See also: "The big CBRS promise: Private LTE networks"). Here’s a primer on CBRS — because you are going to want to know about this.Citizens Band/CB, as in CB radio?No, good buddy, this has nothing to do with the Citizens’ Band radio service used by truckers for two-way voice communications and that lives in the 27 MHz spectrum band in the U.S. CBRS lives in the 3.5 GHz band.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Be prepared for restarts and big day of patching after Microsoft skipped Patch Tuesday in February. For March, Microsoft released 18 security bulletins split into nine critical and nine important security updates.Rated criticalMS17-006 patches 12 security issues in Internet Explorer. One of three information disclosure flaws has been publicly disclosed but is not being exploited, one of the three memory corruption bugs has been publicly disclosed but is not being exploited, and one of them has not been publicly disclosed but is being exploited. Both of the browser spoofing vulnerabilities have been publicly disclosed as has the Internet Explorer elevation of privilege flaw. The patch also addresses a scripting engine information disclosure bug and two scripting engine memory corruption flaws.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) continues to hone the system it hopes would quickly restore power to the U.S. electric grid in the event of a massive cyberattack. The research agency this week said it awarded defense system stalwart BAE Systems an $8.6 million contract to develop a system under its Rapid Attack Detection, Isolation and Characterization (RADICS) program that has as its central goal to develop technology that will detect and automatically respond to cyber-attacks on US critical infrastructure.+More on Network World: Cisco’s Jasper deal – one year, 18 million new IoT devices later, challenges remain+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
This high-precision 5-in-1 wireless weather sensor from AcuRite accurately measures the temperature, humidity, wind speed, wind direction and rain. PC Connect feature interfaces with a Windows computer via USB, allowing you to remotely view your weather from anywhere. Set up programmable weather alarms for temperature, humidity, wind, rain, dew point, heat index and storm alerts, as well as email and text alerts to notify you when conditions change or your presets are reached. The weather station averages 4 out of 5 stars from nearly 1,200 people on Amazon (read reviews), where the typical list is currently reduced 42% from $169.99 down to $99. See this deal now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In a case of no honor among thieves, a group of attackers has found a way to hijack the Petya ransomware and use it in targeted attacks against companies without the program creators' knowledge.A computer Trojan dubbed PetrWrap, being used in attacks against enterprise networks, installs Petya on computers and then patches it on the fly to suit its needs, according to security researchers from antivirus vendor Kaspersky Lab.The Trojan uses programmatic methods to trick Petya to use a different encryption key than the one its original creators have embedded inside its code. This ensures that only the PetrWrap attackers can restore the affected computers to their previous state.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If your home has dead zones or areas where coverage is weak, boost your existing WiFi coverage with the Netgear N150 WiFi extender. For a limited time Amazon will sell it to Amazon Prime members (or anyone with a free trial, located here) for a significant 67% off its list price, or just $14.67. See this deal now on Amazon. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Zuora aims to win the next IT stack war – but it’s probably not the stack war that’s comes most readily to your mind. Tien Tzuo, CEO and co-founder of Zuora, wants to own the application stack that drives your subscription business and he believes that virtually every company will be a subscription business before long.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
For months now, we’ve been hearing about Microsoft Teams, Microsoft’s much-heralded Slack killer for corporate chat. It’s now in official release (what Microsoft calls “general availability”) as part of Microsoft’s Office 365 enterprise plans. Sadly, Teams is underwhelming in its formal debut and definitely not a match for the hype Microsoft has been providing since October 2016. For a product so late to market, Microsoft should have delivered much more.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Before Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone was the go-to low-cost developer board for enthusiasts. It's still used by many, and a new BeagleBone board is now being targeted at robots.The US $79.95 BeagleBone Blue from BeagleBoard.org is a credit-card sized board with all the components needed to operate a robot or even a drone. It is open source, as its schematics have been published, and developers can replicate the board.Robots have unique requirements, and some computer boards specialize in specific features. For example, Nvidia's Jetson TX2 and Intel's Joule excel at computer vision and can give robots digital eyes to steer past obstacles. These boards also have powerful graphics processors and 64-bit CPUs.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
At the Google NEXT cloud conference last week the company announced new Committed Use Discounts (CUDs) in which customers receive a reduced rate on virtual machine rentals in exchange for signing a one or three year contract.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: 10 Ways Google improved its cloud at its big NEXT conference +It’s not a completely novel concept because Microsoft offers enterprise agreements and Amazon Web Services has Reserved Instances, which are a similar concept.One of the main arguments Google made was that its CUDs are more flexible than competitors though. Users don’t have to commit to a specific virtual machine instance type for three years, the company said. Instead, they just estimate how much aggregate virtual compute and/or memory they will use over the life of the contract. CUDs are in beta in Google’s cloud, you can read more about them here.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The move to more complex and distributed applications has done wonders for organizational agility and the ability to innovate, but it has also had some flow-on effects for those poor people responsible for managing application uptime on a day to day basis.Lots of disparate application components means lots of new potential sources of error, and people who carry a pager to be alerted of any issues suffer an increasing number of ill-timed calls.+ Also on Network World: Application monitoring becomes table stakes in the digital age +
A new offering from application monitoring vendor Datadog seeks to change this paradigm by offering a far more flexible alerting approach. Datadog’s new composite alert feature is intended to reduce alert noise for DevOps and operations teams. The idea being that these practitioners will have less call to spend time on insignificant alerts and will be alerted of orly major issues. In a kind of “boy who cried wolf” metaphor, this should result in better response to issues that matter.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If you can get past that unappealing acronym, you just might find that CBRS (Citizens Broadband Radio Service) is worth paying attention to as a serious wireless network alternative for enterprises in the not-too-distant future.
It’s been hard to ignore the so-called CBRS "innovation band" of late, as everyone from Google to the big carriers to GE has been touting the potential benefits of indoor and outdoor LTE services within shared 3.5 GHz spectrum opened up by the FCC for commercial use. We’re talking carrier-based cellular service extensions, cable companies looking to get into wireless as well as private LTE networks within enterprises, sports stadiums and conference centers. Such services promise to complement -- and in some cases replace -- Wi-Fi, as well as pave the way for 5G wireless services. (See also: "FAQ: What in the wireless world is CBRS?")To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Last week, I wrote about my interview with IBM security general manager Marc van Zadelhoff, where we talked about his perspective about the transition from security analytics and operations point tools to an integrated event-based security analytics and operations platform architecture (SOAPA). In part 2 of the interview, we talked about SOAPA requirements, intelligence and the need for SOAPA to scale. You can view the interview here. Some of the highlights include:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Efforts to stop Mirai, a malware found infecting thousands of IoT devices, have become a game of whack-a-mole, with differing opinions over whether hackers or the security community are making any headway.The malicious code became publicly available in late September. Since then, it’s been blamed for enslaving IoT devices such as DVRs and internet cameras to launch massive distributed denial-of-service attacks, one of which disrupted internet access across the U.S. in October.The good news: Last month, police arrested one suspected hacker who may have been behind several Mirai-related DDoS attacks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Today, on the 28th anniversary of the web, its creator warned of three trends that must die for the web to be all that it should be. One of those is the spreading of fake news.On March 12, 1989, Tim Berners-Lee submitted his original proposal for the creation of the World Wide Web. 28 years later, in an open letter, Berners-Lee said that in the last 12 months, “I’ve become increasingly worried about three new trends, which I believe we must tackle in order for the web to fulfill its true potential as a tool which serves all of humanity.”
We’ve lost control of our personal data.
It’s too easy for misinformation to spread on the web.
Political advertising online needs transparency and understanding.
As it stands now for most of the web, people get free content in exchange for their personal data. Once companies have our data, we no longer have control over with whom it is shared. We can’t pick and choose what gets shared; it’s generally “all or nothing.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who 28 years ago this March 12 submitted a document laying out his vision for what would become the worldwide web, is proud of what his creation has become but he's also concerned enough about certain issues that he's released an open letter about them today through the Web Foundation.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Long time reader and old friend, Jim Sterne, recently wrote to me with a question:
Dear Gearhead,I'd like to start publishing a newsletter about a specific area of interest, using the latest in feeds, bots, scrapers and content management organizers to make things as automated as possible but still being able to keep my eye on what gets posted, emailed, tweeted and projected directly into the corneas of avid, would-be readers.What’s out there at the moment?Many thanks,Jim Sterne One more publisher on the InterWebsTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft gave its Cortana app for iOS a facelift Friday, replacing its old black and blue aesthetic with a new look that puts the assistant’s key features at users’ fingertips.The app now features Quick Actions, so that users can tap a couple buttons and get Cortana to create an alarm, set a reminder, or tell them a joke. That means users can get at key features without having to talk or type queries, and it also gives them a framework for what they can do with the app, without them having to discover it on their own.The virtual assistant market is a crowded one, between Cortana, Siri, Alexa and the Google Assistant all competing for users’ time and interest. Microsoft’s assistant is built deeply into PCs with Windows 10, but the company also needs to keep its apps for other mobile platforms up to date in order to meet users where they are.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here