Finding threats quickerImage by ThinkstockCyber security analysts are overwhelmed with the pressure of keeping their companies safe. Not only do they need to filter through countless alerts, many of which turn out to be false positives, but also the volume of real threats is growing exponentially. They quickly need to triage and move on, stopping the most pressing threats – but not always the most dangerous. Cyber analysts need a new, holistic approach to threat detection that monitors, analyzes and cross-references data across multiple dimensions to help them detect complex threats as early as possible.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services hopes to put a new technology to use in its ongoing effort to improve the health and well-being of Americans. The technology in question isn't something one might expect to see in the healthcare IT toolkit; rather, it's blockchain, the technology that underpins cryptocurrency and has primarily been associated with bitcoin. HHS sees blockchain as a potential salve for ills that plague the increasingly complex world of digital health records.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Hotel and restaurant chains, beware. A notorious cybercriminal gang is tricking businesses into installing malware by calling their customer services representatives and convincing them to open malicious email attachments.
The culprits in these hacks, which are designed to steal customers’ credit card numbers, appear to be the Carbanak gang, a group that was blamed last year for stealing as much as $1 billion from various banks.
On Monday, security firm Trustwave said that three of its clients in the past month had encountered malware built with coding found in previous Carbanak attacks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A U.K. official has ordered the extradition of a British man to the U.S. on charges of hacking government computers belonging to NASA and the Department of Defense.
Lauri Love, a 31-year-old hacktivist, has been fighting his extradition, but on Monday, U.K. Home Secretary Amber Rudd signed the order.
"Mr. Love has been charged with various computer hacking offences which included targeting U.S. military and federal government agencies," the U.K. Home Office said in a statement.
The U.S. originally charged Love in 2013 for allegedly stealing confidential data from thousands of government employees, including Social Security numbers and credit card details. U.S. investigators accuse Love and his accomplices of causing millions of dollars in damages.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Xbox One bundles can be had at a slew of big name retailers, from GameStop to Walmart, and what the deals lack in variety they make up for in being $50 cheaper than last year.Xbox One bundles are generally going for $250 this holiday shopping season, $50 off the regular price and $50 off the going price last holiday season. (Compare vs. 2015 Xbox Black Friday deals here.)But not all the deals are exactly alike, and if you shop around, you’ll find some are a bit better when you take into account gift cards and other goodies thrown into the packages.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Best Deals of the Week, November 7th - November 11th - Deal AlertCheck out this roundup of the best deals on gadgets, gear and other cool stuff we have found this week, the week of November 7th. All items are highly rated, and dramatically discounted.35% off Oster Cordless Electric Wine Bottle Opener with Foil CutterThis cordless electric wine opener from Oster removes the cork in seconds with one-button operation, and opens up to 30 bottles before needing to be recharged. It features a foil cutter for easily removing seals and a comfortable soft-grip handle. Currently averages 4 out of 5 stars from over 4,000 people (read reviews). It's discounted 35% on Amazon, so you can get it right now for just $12.99. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
I had my reservations about hitting HubSpot’s annual Inbound conference in Boston this week. Yes, it would be easy enough to swing by from our suburban Boston headquarters, but Network World caters to enterprise IT professionals, not software maker HubSpot’s sales and marketing crowd.Sure enough though, the 19,000 registered attendees at the flashy event full of funky seating arrangements and celebrity speakers (including President-elect Donald Trump, er, Alec Baldwin) were treated to a steady stream of tech talk, so I didn’t feel out of place at all. Neither did the target audience given that they are increasingly making the kinds of technology purchasing calls in this cloud-happy world of which IT staffs are well aware.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Technology trade groups are already pushing out their policy priorities for President-elect Donald Trump's administration, even though his campaign rarely touched on IT issues.With Silicon Valley largely opposed to Trump during the campaign and his tech policy agenda paper thin, policy recommendations from tech trade groups may be an exercise in wishful thinking. Still, several tech groups congratulated Trump on his unexpected victory and expressed optimism about this presidency.One point of optimism for the tech industry was the Trump campaign's last-minute addition of telecommunications networks to a long list of infrastructure projects he hopes to fund. Other infrastructure projects on Trump's list include roads, bridges, tunnels, airports, railroads, ports, pipelines, and the electricity grid, and it's unclear how he plans to pay for the plan, given that Trump also has promised large tax cuts, and whether telecommunications networks would be a priority. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Best Buy's Black Friday 2016 ad has been revealed, and it's chock full of electronics deals, including Apple tablets, LG and Samsung TVs, Dell PCs and more. Best Buy, which already has been streaming out deals of the day, will open its doors open at 5pm on Thursday, Nov. 24, Thanksgiving Day, but online shopping is expected to commence much earlier that day in advance of Black Friday itself on Nov. 25.Black Friday watchers such as BFads and Best Black Friday have been tracking new ads closely and we've been watching them closely.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Regulations to protect people from falling drones moved a little closer to takeoff at the European Parliament on Thursday.Ensuring drone safety took on a new urgency this week, with GoPro's recall of its Karma drone after unexplained mid-air power failures caused a number of them to drop out of the sky.Under the European Union's proposed regulations, drones will have to be registered so that their owners can be identified. While that won't in itself stop drones from falling, it could lead pilots to take their responsibilities more seriously, legislators hope.A 1-kilogram drone like the Karma falling from as little as 11 meters (around three stories) could kill even someone wearing a safety helmet, according to a calculator developed by the Dropped Object Prevention Scheme, which promotes safety in the oil and gas industry.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
This bias lighting strip, currently discounted by 64% on Amazon from $49.99 down to just $17.99, reduces eye-strain caused by differences in picture brightness from scene to scene in movies, shows and games, by adding a subtle backlight to your monitor or TV. The LED lights can be changed with up to 20 color selections customizing and setting the mood of your workspace. The strip is easy to install and can be cut to size and plugs directly in the USB port of the TV or monitor. Just Plug-and-play!To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Daydream mobile virtual reality experience proves critics who call VR a fad wrong. Google’s new platform will attract many new apps and experiences and create new business models.Daydream VR combined with the Pixel hardware’s powerful performance and thoughtful design of the headset will create a market of hundreds of millions of VR-capable phones. The Pixel is expensive, but the relentlessly declining price performance of mobile components will quickly bring affordability into alignment with consumers’ budgets.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
When it was announced a year ago, the Cisco/Ericsson partnership was hailed as “the right move for us right now,” according to Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins to create the networks of the future.While the partnership has done well – the companies say they have closed 60 deals together -- Ericsson is being battered financially this year and the impact that will have on the partnership could change it in the future.+More on Network World: Cisco CEO Robbins: Wait til you see what’s in our innovation pipeline+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Security expert Bruce Schneier has a new essay out that makes this case: The only way to prevent the exploitation of insecure internet of things devices from causing catastrophic damage is government regulation, noting “our choice is between smarter government involvement and stupider government involvement.”His premise would appear unassailable. The problem is we don’t necessarily get to choose; sometimes the difference between smarter and stupider is foisted upon us.Schneier writes of the growing IoT threat:
It's a form of invisible pollution. … And, like pollution, the only solution is to regulate. The government could impose minimum security standards on IoT manufacturers, forcing them to make their devices secure even though their customers don't care. They could impose liabilities on manufacturers, allowing companies like Dyn to sue them if their devices are used in DDoS attacks. The details would need to be carefully scoped, but either of these options would raise the cost of insecurity and give companies incentives to spend money making their devices secure. …To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
InfiniBand is set to hit 200Gbps (bits per second) in products that were announced Thursday, potentially accelerating machine-learning platforms as well as HPC (high-performance computing) systems.The massive computing performance of new servers equipped with GPUs calls for high network speeds, and these systems are quickly being deployed to handle machine-learning tasks, Dell’Oro Group analyst Sameh Boujelbene said.So-called HDR InfiniBand, which will be generally available next year in three sets of products from Mellanox Technologies, will double the top speed of InfiniBand. It will also have twice the top speed of Ethernet.But the high-performance crowd that’s likely to adopt this new interconnect is a small one, Boujelbene said. Look for the top 10 percent of InfiniBand users, who already use 100Gbps InfiniBand, to jump on the new stuff, she said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Application development used to happen inside an IT bubble, the purview of employees of Microsoft, for example, working on the next version of Word or Excel. Applications back in those days were built and deployed by experts onto desktop computers.Those days weren’t so long ago, and we certainly still use applications, but the way apps are developed, deployed and used has changed dramatically. Many of them still accomplish the same goals of workers—Microsoft Word, Office 365 or Google Docs still provide me the blank pages I need to write on—but their features have expanded beyond what we could have imagined to include sharing, instant edits and updates, notifications, and more.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A pulse is missing. Is it the patient? Or is the pulse monitor not functioning?Life-and-death IoT systems literally have no margin for error.How are readings from health sensors merged and analyzed immediately?How can single point of failures be eliminated?An IoT backbone to connect sensors, apps and analytics into a responsive system is needed. It has to be secure, flexible and scalable. The challenge of combining data from multiple sources
Medical errors are the third leading cause of death.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Databases. Alongside networking, they're arguably one of the less exciting areas of the technology world.But no matter how boring they are, databases are, of course, a critical part of delivering technology. And we live in a changing time for the humble database, with new models challenging incumbent approached. A case in point is graph databases.For a quick primer, per Wikipedia, a graph database is a database that uses graph structures for semantic queries with nodes, edges and properties to represent and store data. A key concept of the system is the graph (or edge or relationship), which directly relates data items in the store. The relationships allow data in the store to be linked together directly and, in most cases, retrieved with a single operation.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cloud repositories are actively supplying malware, according to computer experts. And problematically, it’s insidious and hard to find.Hundreds of buckets have been undermined, says Xiaojing Liao, a graduate student at Georgia Tech who’s the lead author on a study that’s looking into the problem. Buckets are chunks of storage used in cloud operations.It’s “challenging to find,” Georgia Tech writes in an article on its website. The problem being that the resulting malware is quick to “assemble from stored components that individually may not appear to be malicious.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Instant messaging is hard.There are untold numbers of instant messaging networks (not even taking SMS into consideration)—with companies like Google having, all by themselves, created a half dozen competing applications and networks. And, if you want those messages to be secure? Well, things get even more difficult—there simply aren’t many options. In my ongoing quest to make my life as secure and private as possible, I’ve found three instant messaging networks that are worth talking about. They’re not perfect, but they are significant improvements over using the many, astoundingly insecure platforms out there (such as Google’s Hangouts or Apple’s iMessage). Let’s go over those here, with their benefits and pitfalls. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here