Akamai deserves credit for the way it disclosed why it stopped protecting the Krebs on Security Web site last week after defending it for three days from the largest botnet it had ever encountered.It must have been embarrassing for the company to acknowledge that it was a business decision it was forced to make because of the expense and consumption of resources to keep the site up was too great.But the company did so and addressed a more important issue, namely that the attack was generated by a botnet of Internet of Things devices, mainly cameras, routers and DVRs, according to Krebs.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Does the thought of 600 Gbps-plus of traffic hitting your URLs excite you? Do you get tingles up and down your spine thinking about watching your line of business apps frying? Perhaps that wonderful text, where an alert from you financial processor says “We’ve gone black, again, and expect to be back online perhaps maybe possibly tonight” thrills you.The Internet of Thingies (IoT) is actually nuclear, and we’ve witnessed the first use of a nuclear internet weapon. Brian Krebs’ Krebs on Security site was smashed. It could happen to you. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
For hundreds of years, engineers have built sensors into systems and devices to gather information from the physical world. Sensors have done much to automate systems, make the world smarter and advance our way of life, but only recently have consumers engaged with sensor information in personal ways.+ Also on Network World: Homeland Security issues call to action on IoT security +The sensor industry is growing at a very healthy pace. “The IoT (Internet of Things) is impacting growth across many market sectors, including sensors, where the number of units produced and employed will exceed 35 billion units by 2018,” according to Semico Research & Consulting Group. Vendors are shipping discrete sensors, as well as combo sensors that incorporate more than one function.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Thermacell Mosquito Repellent Lantern effectively repels mosquitoes and other biting insects in a 15 x 15-foot zone. It has no open flames, operates on a single butane cartridge, and is perfect for a deck, porch or campsite. It averages 4.5 out of 5 stars on Amazon and is currently discounted to $31.02. See it now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Security researchers have been warning for years that poor security for internet of things devices could have serious consequences. We're now seeing those warnings come true, with botnets made up of compromised IoT devices capable of launching distributed denial-of-service attacks of unprecedented scale.
Octave Klaba, the founder and CTO of French hosting firm OVH, sounded the alarm on Twitter last week when his company was hit with two concurrent DDoS attacks whose combined bandwidth reached almost 1 terabit per second. One of the two attacks peaked at 799Gbps alone, making it the largest ever reported.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Writing secure applications doesn't mean simply checking the code you've written to make sure there are no logic errors or coding mistakes. Attackers are increasingly targeting vulnerabilities in third-party libraries as part of their attacks, so you have to check the safety of all the dependencies and components, too.In manufacturing, companies create a bill of materials, listing in detail all the items included when building a product so that buyers know exactly what they're buying. Processed food packaging, for example, typically tells you what's inside so that you can make an informed buying decision.[ Also on InfoWorld: 19 open source GitHub projects for security pros. | Discover how to secure your systems with InfoWorld's Security newsletter. ]
When it comes to software, untangling the code to know what libraries are in use and which dependencies exist is hard. It's a challenge most IT teams don't have the time or resources to unravel.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As we’ve come to expect from new versions of Windows Server, Windows Server 2016 arrives packed with a huge array of new features. Many of the new capabilities, such as containers and Nano Server, stem from Microsoft’s focus on the cloud. Others, such as Shielded VMs, illustrate a strong emphasis on security. Still others, like the many added networking and storage capabilities, continue an emphasis on software-defined infrastructure begun in Windows Server 2012.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
There’s a lot going on in macOS SierraSiri, Universal Clipboard, Auto Unlock with Apple Watch—these are just three of the features that Apple showcases for macOS Sierra, the latest version of the company’s Macintosh operating system that made its debut last Tuesday. We go over the marquee features in our review, but there are a few features that go unheralded. We’ll shine a little bit of the spotlight on them in this slideshow. These are less glamourous, but they make your Mac a lot easier to use.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Many people resist backing up their data to an online backup service like MozyHome, Carbonite, or Backblaze because they worry their data will be poked through by company employees, hijacked by criminals, or provided to law enforcement or government agents without due process. The sanctity of your data boils down to whether the encryption key used to scramble your data can be recovered by anyone other than yourself. Below I outline the various methods and levels of encryption that can be employed by these services, and then evaluate six of the best options for home users. Several give subscribers full control of their encryption. If you’re already using a service, it’s possible you can even upgrade to take advantage of greater ownership options.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The warnings about the longevity of email are regular and ominous: Don’t be careless with it. Email is forever.Indeed, in some very high-profile cases it seems that way. Former CIA director and retired US Army General David Petraeus lost his job and his reputation, and "gained" a criminal record in 2012, when emails from an account he thought was private exposed his mishandling of classified information and an affair with his biographer.Much more recently – just in the past couple of weeks – a trove of embarrassing correspondence from the email account of former secretary of state Colin Powell was posted on the website DCLeaks.com. In the words of an anonymous television anchor, they upended the perception of Powell, also a retired four-star US Army general, as a stoic diplomat and revealed him to be, “just as gossipy as everyone else.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Christopher Reeve is famous as Superman in movies. As the man of steel with amazing superpowers, he was unbeatable.In real life, though, a bad fall from his horse left Reeve a quadriplegic. How suddenly life changes. One day you’re a hero with superpowers. The next day you’ve lost control of your body.The loss of control over their bodies is devastating for spinal cord injury (SCI) patients. An Israeli startup now offers the hope to regain some of the lost control with its app, Sesame Enable.Background
The spinal cord is the main pathway for transmitting information between the brain and the nerves that lead to muscles, skin, internal organs and glands.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
New products of the weekOur roundup of intriguing new products. Read how to submit an entry to Network World's products of the week slideshow.Adaptiva OneSite 6.0Key features – OneSite 6.0 is the IT industry’s first serverless option for distributing software from the cloud at on-premise speeds, using Microsoft System Center Configuration (ConfigMgr). More info.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)
Millimeter-wave Wi-Fi technology, better known as 802.11ad, is a powerful new wireless standard, for which products are just beginning to hit the market – a router from TP-Link and a laptop from Acer are the only ones so far.
802.11ad is based on very high-frequency radio waves – where today’s 802.11n and 802.11ac standards use 5GHz frequencies, ad uses 60GHz. That means that it’s both capable of handling a lot more data than earlier standards, and a lot more short-ranged, since higher frequency signals dissipate much faster.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Trump Hotel Collection has arrived at a settlement with New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman over hacks that are said to have led to the exposure of over 70,000 credit card numbers and other personal data.The hotel chain, one of the businesses of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, has agreed to pay US$50,000 in penalties and promised to take measures to beef up its data security practices, according to the attorney general’s office.The chain is one of many hotels and retailers that have been hit recently by malware that skimmed payment card information.The key charges apparently against Trump Hotel Collection (THC) are that it didn’t have adequate protection and even after the attacks became known, did not quickly inform the people affected, in breach of New York law.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
While some of the scariest IoT hacks envisioned – those involving hijacked medical devices such as pacemakers and insulin pumps – have yet to surface in the real world, those in the medical and IT security fields are not letting down their guard. They’ve seen enough ransomware and other attacks on healthcare outfits of late to know they are major cyberattack targets.The reality is that more medical devices are becoming connected ones, and that’s increasing the security threat surface, said panelists this past week at the Security of Things Forum in Cambridge, Mass.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
News today from quiet 2-year-old startup Podium Data, which has raised $9.5 million by way of a series A funding round. The round comes from a syndicate of investors led by Malibu Ventures. The company was founded back in 2014, and since then it has quietly been going about building its offering.The founding team has broad experience within the big data industry, having wrangled data warehousing, advanced high-performance computing, systems integrations, business intelligence and database systems within Fortune 100 companies.+ Also on Network World: Data lakes: A better way to analyze customer data +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A majority of enterprises say the internet of things is strategic to their business, but most still take a piecemeal approach to IoT security.Those results from a global IDC survey conducted in July and August reveal both the promise and the growing pains of IoT, a set of technologies that may help many industries but can’t simply be plugged in. The 27-country survey had more than 4,500 respondents, all from organizations with 100 or more employees.For 56 percent of enterprises, IoT is part of their strategic plans for the next two or three years, IDC analyst Carrie MacGillivray said on a webcast about the results. But the state of adoption varies widely among industries. Manufacturing companies are investing the most in the technology, with retail and financial services – especially insurance – also on the cutting edge.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Oscar Curet is an assistant professor at Florida Atlantic University. For the past couple of years, he's studied the movement of the Knifefish, an animal native to the Amazon River, that uses a long ribbon fin to propel itself through the water and navigate its complex environment.
"As a engineer, we try to solve problems, and nature has solved some of the problems that we are facing, and one of them is mobility," Curet said.
Curet, along with other researchers from Florida Atlantic University (FAU), has created a robot fish to identify the differences between engineering systems and what occurs in nature. The prototype is composed of 3D-printed materials, 16 motors, and a number of sensors. The team also recently received a grant from the U.S. Navy to equip their prototype with a Volumetric Particle Image Velocity System, or PIV. The system, which uses four cameras synchronized with a laser light to capture currents in three dimensions, will help researchers measure how fluid dynamics interact with the flexible propulsors the team has developed to make underwater vehicles more maneuverable. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Security vendor Imperva is shopping itself around and may be attractive to the likes of Cisco and IBM, according to Bloomberg.The Motley Fool reports that Imperva’s stock rose 20% today after Bloomberg’s report, which the Fool notes could actually drive buyers away because it would mean a more costly deal.Bloomberg named a number of other possible buyers including Forecpoint (owned by Raytheon and Vista Equity Partners), Akamai and Fortinet.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here