Data at riskImage by George HodanBefore his retirement, an employee of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) uploaded more than 10,000 OCC records onto two removable thumb drives. He retired in November 2015; the agency didn’t discover the breach until the following September. That left almost a year between breach and detection. The OCC was not able to recover the thumb drives.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
There has been a steady stream of reports and claims lately that many of us no longer need endpoint security, that antivirus (AV) programs on our PCs are worthless.Gizmodo flat out said that you really don't need an antivirus app anymore, arguing that Windows 10 and the browsers have tightened up security to the point that they adequately protect end users. Windows Central asked the same question, but determined that more protection is better than less.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Last October, when Google Home was announced, Google CEO Sundar Pichai christened AI as the next platform. Yesterday, AI became a Google product that could become as transformative and as large and potentially pervasive as Google Search.Google’s grand bargain with its users will not change: indispensable free apps in return for users’ data. Easier to use conversational interfaces such as Google Home and Google Assistant built with AI could be the next free indispensable Google app purchased with the users’ information as the currency. It is a virtuous cycle. User interaction with indispensable apps like Google Search, Translate and Assistant that use AI, creates more data to create new indispensable AI systems. Pichai confirmed this during the Google I/O keynote when he said:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Panda security solutions will fully protect you against the newly released malware and ransomware attacks, and Panda is offering 55% off all security products for home users using the coupon code ANTIRANSOMWARE at checkout. See Panda's Internet Security product here, or their Antivirus Pro product here, and enter the code at checkout to activate the 55% savings. This code will work for all Panda Security products for home users.
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The all-new Fire 7 and Fire HD 8 feature longer battery life, a thinner and lighter body, better Wi-Fi connectivity, and Alexa. It features a beautiful 7" IPS display with higher contrast and sharper text, a 1.3 GHz quad-core processor, and up to 8 hours of battery life. 8 or 16 GB of internal storage and a microSD slot for up to 256 GB of expandable storage. Amazon has also introduced two new Fire Kids Edition (Fire 7 and Fire HD 8 Kids Editions). To go along with the launch, customers who purchase any 3 new generation Fire Tablets save 20% by using the code FIRE3PACK at checkout. See the full lineup here.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As more enterprises tackle digital transformation and recognize the value of aligning their IT strategy, technology and processes with broader business goals, there's a growing need for talented pros who can reduce complexity, establish solid technology processes and ensure tech's used consistently across business units and functional areas.Increasingly that role is filled by an enterprise architect: someone who can translate a company's business strategy into concrete solutions, design and execute an IT systems architecture blueprint to support that strategy, says Rich Pearson, senior vice president of marketing and categories at technology skills marketplace Upwork.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
RackWare offers a management and automation platform that enterprises use to manage their computing resources to more closely follow demand. RackWare’s core proposition is that its management suite delivers cost savings to customers of a suggested 40 to 50 percent. Additionally, RackWare promises to deliver the highest levels of performance and availability to their customers.The company today released a new take on its management suite that aims to extend the existing core RackWare offering. The new platform promises to offer enterprises a single solution (they refrained from calling it a single pane of glass) to move applications, protect those same applications and manage all the different applications across the totality of their infrastructure. Justifying the move, RackWare points to a recent IDC report that suggests 70 percent of heavy cloud users are considering a hybrid cloud strategy.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Linux containers are gaining significant ground in the enterprise, which is not surprising, since they make so much sense in today’s business environment. With that said, container technology as we know it today is relatively new, and companies are still in the process of understanding the different ways in which containers can be leveraged.In a nutshell, Linux containers enable companies to package up and isolate applications with all of the files necessary for each to run. This makes it easy to move containerized applications among environments while retaining their full functionality.+ Also on Network World: Adapting the network for the rise of containers +
The recent Bain and Company study “For Traditional Enterprises, the Path to Digital and the Role of Containers” found that “respondents are beginning to benefit from faster innovation as well as improved development and deployment cycles. For example, adopters frequently report 15 to 30 percent reductions in development time. Adopters also report initial cost savings of 5 to 15 percent due to greater hardware and process efficiencies.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Many healthcare providers face the decision on if they should store protected health information (PHI) in the cloud. There are benefits and concerns to storing PHI in the cloud, and the decision to do so should be analyzed.PHI is any health-related or insurance payment information that is stored or managed by a healthcare provider that can identify a specific individual. Examples of PHI are patient names, addresses, Social Security numbers, X-ray images, lab results, insurance payment information and medical records. Even information about a patient’s planned future procedures is PHI. Government regulation of PHI is covered in the HIPPA Privacy Rule, and all healthcare providers in the United States must adhere to it or face fines.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The future of Android will be a lot smarter, thanks to new programming tools that Google unveiled on Wednesday. The company announced TensorFlow Lite, a version of its machine learning framework that’s designed to run on smartphones and other mobile devices, during the keynote address at its Google I/O developer conference.“TensorFlow Lite will leverage a new neural network API to tap into silicon-specific accelerators, and over time we expect to see [digital signal processing chips] specifically designed for neural network inference and training,” said Dave Burke, Google's vice president of engineering for Android. “We think these new capabilities will help power a next generation of on-device speech processing, visual search, augmented reality, and more.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google is making it easier for people to dash off a quick email reply from Gmail on their smartphones. The Smart Reply feature, which offers a handful of contextually-aware, computer-generated responses, is coming to Google’s flagship email app for iOS and Android, the company announced at its I/O developer conference Wednesday.The feature provides users with three machine-generated responses, based on the content of whatever message the user is replying to. It’s built using machine learning, and is designed for use with smartphones, so that people on the go can dash off a reply to their correspondence partners without much effort.Smart Reply began its life as part of Inbox, Google’s alternate email client for smartphones. Right now, 12 percent of all email replies sent through that app are Smart Replies.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google has made another leap forward in the realm of machine learning hardware. The tech giant has begun deploying the second version of its Tensor Processing Unit, a specialized chip meant to accelerate machine learning applications, company CEO Sundar Pichai announced on Wednesday.The new Cloud TPU sports several improvements over its predecessor. Most notably, it supports training machine learning algorithms in addition to processing the results from existing models. Each chip can provide 180 teraflops of processing for those tasks. Google is also able to network the chips together in sets of what are called TPU Pods that allow even greater computational gains.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Welcome to the rise of the digital enterprise, where vendors and customers engage via applications and data is the new currency. Digital enterprises operate with radically different datanomics than conventional physical businesses. Here, digital information is the business.A successful digital enterprise is constantly updating applications in response to user context, market and environment—all of which is quantified, measured and delivered with data. Everything and everyone is personified by a digital footprint. Learning that the user just bought a new house requires change in recommendation from renters to home insurance. Reduction in price by a competitor or a new promotion needs a fast response. It is increasingly clear that a company’s ability to generate high-quality apps more rapidly is a critical differentiator. Fast is the new big.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If yet another cybersecurity expert wanted to warn the general public about the risks associated with the Internet of Things (IoT), it is likely the warning would go in one ear and out the other. But when a sixth-grader hacks an audience of security experts and “weaponizes” his smart teddy bear, it might just snag the attention of parents who have disregarded warnings about the dangers and bought internet-connected toys for their kids anyway.At the International One Conference in the Netherlands on Tuesday, 11-year-old Reuben Paul set out to ensure that “the Internet of Things does not end up becoming the Internet of Threats.” Judging by security experts’ awed reactions on Twitter, Paul made a lasting impression.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
With the move to the cloud, and the increasingly hostile threat landscape, protecting the enterprise network using positive user authentication is more critical than ever. However, as security threats multiply and morph, and user devices and locations diversify, multi-factor authentication (MFA) has emerged as a trusted method for preventing misuse.While adopting and deploying MFA solutions requires a careful and thorough approach, with most challenges also come opportunities and potential new benefits. We reached out to influential IT leaders to understand their views regarding adoption of MFA in the cloud era. Here’s what they said:The User Comes FirstTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In today’s digital era, a mobile, distributed workforce is common—and growing. According to IDC, the number of mobile workers will rise to more than 105 million by 2020—almost three-quarters of the U.S. workforce. While offering employees this flexibility makes it easier to recruit new job candidates, it has also made securing the corporate network and providing access to enterprise applications behind the firewall more complex than ever.The reasons for this growing complexity go beyond just anywhere, anytime, any device access to corporate data and applications, both on premises and in the cloud. The growing number of devices (employees, customers, or partners) accessing the network from beyond the traditional perimeter has increased the attack surface. The number and variety of cyber threats continue to grow. Compliance and regulations, especially for privacy and protecting customer data, are stricter than ever. Add to this the growing volume of newly connected devices, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), and the remote-access challenge becomes even more daunting.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The reports came swiftly on Friday morning, May 12—the first I saw were that dozens of hospitals in England were affected by ransomware, denying physicians access to patient medical records and causing surgery and other treatments to be delayed. Said the BBC:
The malware spread quickly on Friday, with medical staff in the UK reportedly seeing computers go down "one by one".NHS staff shared screenshots of the WannaCry programme, which demanded a payment of $300 (£230) in virtual currency Bitcoin to unlock the files for each computer.Throughout the day other, mainly European countries, reported infections.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The French data protection watchdog has imposed its harshest penalty on Facebook for six breaches of French privacy law.The breaches include tracking users across websites other than Facebook.com without their knowledge, and compiling a massive database of personal information in order to target advertising.The French National Commission on Computing and Liberty (CNIL) began its investigation of Facebook and its European subsidiary, Facebook ireland, after the company made changes to its terms and conditions outlining the practices in January 2015.CNIL wasn't the only organization concerned by Facebook's changes: data protection authorities in Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain and Hamburg, Germany also began investigations around the same time.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Last Friday’s massive WannaCry ransomware attack means victims around the world are facing a tough question: Should they pay the ransom?Those who do shouldn't expect a quick response -- or any response at all. Even after payment, the ransomware doesn’t automatically release your computer and decrypt your files, according to security researchers. Instead, victims have to wait and hope WannaCry’s developers will remotely free the hostage computer over the internet. It's a process that’s entirely manual and contains a serious flaw: The hackers have no way to prove who paid off the ransom."The odds of getting back their files decrypted is very small," said Vikram Thakur, technical director at security firm Symantec. "It's better for [the victims] to save their money and rebuild the affected computers."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here