When most people think of application containers – one of the most popular new trends in how software is built and run by developers – they associate the technology very closely with Linux.Now, Docker Inc. – perhaps the most well-known container startup - is teaming up with Microsoft to integrate Docker Engine in Windows Server.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Review: Windows Server 2016 steps up security, cloud support +Microsoft announced the news at its Ignite event in Atlanta this week, along with the general availability of Windows Server and Windows Systems Center 2016.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft continued its push to get companies on the hybrid cloud train on Monday, with the launch of several products all tailored at helping bridge on-premises datacenters and the public cloud.The company announced that Windows Server 2016 and System Center 2016 will be available for purchase on October 1, and generally available in mid-October. On top of that, it unveiled new Azure functionality that makes it easier to monitor both public cloud infrastructure and on-premises datacenters in one control plane.The second technical preview of Azure Stack is now also broadly available, after Microsoft launched it in private beta last month.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Meet MailSniper, a new pen tester tool that may be of interest to you if you need to find sensitive data such as passwords, credit card numbers and healthcare data, or need to access databases, or even to discover insider and network architecture information.MailSniper is a penetration testing tool, written in PowerShell, to allow for mass searching through email across every mailbox of an organization’s Microsoft Exchange environment.Beau Bullock, from the penetration testing firm Black Hills Information Security, cited a 2016 Mandiant M-Trends Report (pdf) which claimed organizations are compromised an average of 146 days before detecting a breach. That long of a window gives attackers plenty of time to locate, compromise and exfiltrate sensitive data; pen testers, however, may only have a window of five days or less to do the same thing in order to prove risk to an organization.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Concerns around BYOD once revolved around security with third-party services, but that's getting easier to manage, says Fred Ouawad, founder and CEO of TaskWorld, a company focused on employee performance and management. Now businesses are finding it more difficult to govern BYOD policies internally.Businesses are more focused on internal security. For example, if an employee doesn't perform regular updates on their smartphone, it can pose a risk to the business says Mouawad."At the moment, pushback mostly comes from highly regulated industries like banking and government agencies. But even they are slowly realizing that BYOD is something that can't be resisted," he says.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Even a failed result can be a successful test
If you live in the United States, it's likely that you've fallen asleep with the television on only to be woken in the middle of the night by shrill tones blaring from your television set, followed by a deep baritone voice letting you know that there is no active nuclear attack or alert and what you experienced was only a test. The Emergency Alert System (EAS) was designed as a tiered distribution mechanism, very much like a pyramid, with the President of the United States positioned at the pinnacle. As you move down the tiers of the pyramid, you become more regionalized and localized in the coverage area that is served. Using this logic, any participating station in the chain can initiate an emergency alert message, and by default, the information will trickle down to the lower tiers as stations monitor the tier above them. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Today, Microsoft announced the release to manufacturing of Windows Server 2016. In this piece, I'll comb through the product and offer my thoughts on this new operating system.The verdict on Nano ServerSecurity improvements with SDNShielded virtual machinesTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
iPhone and iPad owners adopted Apple's iOS 10 at a slower tempo during its first dozen days than they did last year's upgrade, according to data from an analytics vendor.At the 12-day mark, iOS 10 accounted for 41.9% of all iOS editions detected by Mixpanel, whose metrics platform is widely used by mobile app developers to track usage and user engagement.That was significantly lower than the 52.4% accumulated by iOS 9 last year at the same post-release point, but slightly higher than iOS 8's 40.6% in September 2014.+ ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD 25 iOS 10 features that will change your life +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Adopting single sign-on software to federate access to corporate applications is a key task priority for many CIOs seeking to make employees more efficient without sacrificing security.Experian has consolidated identity management with a single cloud application, laying the foundation for a hybrid cloud computing model that supports its credit scoring software. The company has standardized on software from startup Okta, which has quickly become a favorite among CIOs seeking to gain efficiencies in anything from adopting cloud and mobile services to onboarding employees.
Experian CIO Barry Libenson.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft is going big on features powered by machine learning in its productivity services, with the announcement of a handful of updates to Office 365 on Monday.As part of its Ignite conference in Atlanta, Georgia, the company unveiled a set of new capabilities for Word, Outlook, PowerPoint, Excel and Sway. Microsoft faces tight competition in the productivity space, and these services may help the company compete with Google for market share among businesses. Microsoft
Microsoft Word's Tap feature makes it easier for users to bring information from other Office files into a document. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Yahoo will recover from the latest news about its email data breach that happened in 2014. Looming much larger than the breach is the post-merger challenge Yahoo faces as part of Verizon. It is what Richard Windsor of Radio Free Mobile calls the irrelevant challenge. Can Yahoo’s assets pose a relevant challenge to Google, Facebook and other digital media companies after the merger?+ Also on Network World: A requiem for Yahoo +In the mobile-first world, Yahoo repeatedly missed the opportunity to convert its fixed internet users to mobile. Windsor suspects that most of Yahoo’s 600 million mobile monthly active users (MAU) are Yahoo email users. Though this sized audience is not insignificant, Yahoo does not have relevant mobile engagement with multiple mobile apps. How can post-merger Verizon, Yahoo and AOL turn its billions of MAU mobile users into an ecosystem that prints money like Google with search, Gmail, Maps and Youtube and like Facebook with Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
One of the biggest security risks for computer users is their web browser. According to Microsoft, 90 percent of phishing emails use the browser to initiate attacks, which can then be used to help attackers establish a beachhead inside a company.
Microsoft is aiming to better protect users and organizations from the threats that they face with a new feature called Windows Defender Application Guard. It's designed to isolate Microsoft Edge from the rest of the files and processes running on a user's computer and prevent computer exploits from taking hold.
This is a move that could drive greater adoption of Microsoft's browser in the enterprise, at a time when the company is fiercely competing with Google in that space. Security of company assets is a big problem for enterprises, and Microsoft is offering them another way to help protect their users without requiring those users to be security experts.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Virtual Desktop Interface is becoming easier to do, with potentially killer graphics, reasonable port virtualization, fine-grained administrative control, and with potential hosts other than Windows.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Unless you are a bad guy intent upon nefarious schemes to exploit technology in order to make money, then you probably have a great amount of respect for security reporter Brian Krebs. The crimes, breaches and attacks he has exposed have been so stunning that it boggles the mind. If cyber thugs have a “most wanted” list, then Krebs is likely at, or very near, the top. Yet what kind of messed up world do we live in if criminals can exploit horribly insecure internet-of-things devices with such success that it can silence the voice of a journalist like Krebs?He most recently ticked off allies of vDOS; Krebs wrote about the DDoS-for-hire company and the two teenagers allegedly behind it were arrested. Although it’s nothing new for his site, KrebsOnSecurity, to come under attack, like it did after his vDOS exposé, nearly two weeks later, Krebs’ site was hit “with the largest DDoS the internet has ever seen. 665 Gbps” (gigabits per second). Some of the POST request attacks included the string “freeapplej4ck,” referring to one of the alleged teenage owners of vDOS.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Vint Cerf is considered a father of the internet, but that doesn't mean there aren't things he would do differently if given a fresh chance to create it all over again."If I could have justified it, putting in a 128-bit address space would have been nice so we wouldn't have to go through this painful, 20-year process of going from IPv4 to IPv6," Cerf told an audience of journalists Thursday during a press conference at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum in Germany.IPv4, the first publicly used version of the Internet Protocol, included an addressing system that used 32-bit numerical identifiers. It soon became apparent that it would lead to an exhaustion of addresses, however, spurring the creation of IPv6 as a replacement. Roughly a year ago, North America officially ran out of new addresses based on IPv4. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Samsung Electronics may have some comfort after its debacle with faulty batteries in the Galaxy Note7 smartphone.The South Korean company reported Thursday that about 500,000 devices, or half of the recalled Galaxy Note7 phones sold in the U.S., have been exchanged through its program.Interestingly, "90 percent of Galaxy Note7 owners have been opting to receive the new Galaxy Note7," since the phones became available on Wednesday, Samsung said. That figure suggests that most of the users of the Note7 have chosen to stay with the smartphone model, with new batteries, rather than go in for a refund or exchange the phone with another Samsung model.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Dell wants to prove that you don't need a high-end GPU in your computer to create content for virtual reality headsets.
Instead, the company wants to move VR content creation into the cloud with new computing products it plans to release. The goal is to add more mobility and security to VR content creation.
Among the new products planned are thin clients that run applications stored in remote servers or appliances. The servers will have GPUs that power VR content creation on virtual desktops.
Virtual reality is an interesting market, and Dell will have products to talk about in the future, said Jeff McNaught, executive director of cloud client computing at Dell.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A hacker's attempt to sell user data he claimed was stolen from Yahoo actually led the company to uncover a far more severe breach.Yahoo confirmed Thursday a data breach, which affects at least 500 million users, but it could be unrelated to the black market sale of alleged Yahoo accounts, according to a source familiar with the matter.The information comes even as security experts have been questioning why Yahoo took so long to warn the public when it was known that a hacker was claiming to be selling the data online around early August.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The massive breach at Yahoo means that a treasure trove of stolen data is in the hands of hackers -- putting millions of internet users at risk.At least half a billion Yahoo accounts have been affected in one of the biggest data breaches in history. Information including names, email addresses, telephone numbers and hashed passwords may have been stolen.Yahoo has blamed the attack on a "state-sponsored actor," but it's far from clear who hacked the internet company and how the culprits pulled off the attack.Blaming it on a state-sponsored actor, however, indicates that Yahoo may have found evidence that the hackers were targeting the company over a long period of time, said Vitali Kremez, a cybercrime analyst at security firm Flashpoint.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
One of the more fascinating rumors surrounding Apple these days rests on whether or not the company will ever roll out an Apple branded electric car. Undoubtedly, Apple has been spending lots of R&D resources on its electric car initiative, but whether or not that research will actually result in a car remains to be seen.That said, there were some interesting rumors in the news this week. First and foremost, a report surfaced indicating that Apple was potentially interested in acquiring McLaren, a company that most people know as a purveyor of expensive sports cars and incredibly fast Formula 1 race cars. That rumor naturally got the Apple blogosphere going but it wasn’t long before a McLaren spokesperson came forward and denied the report.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here