It should surprise no one that ransomware is on the rise, but it may be news that education -- not healthcare -- is outstripping other industries for rate of infection, according to a study by security ratings firm BitSight.Organizations in education had the highest rate of infection, with at least one in 10 experiencing ransomware on their networks, according to “The Rising Face of Cyber Crime: Ransomware” report.The study looks at businesses in finance, retail, healthcare, energy/utilities, government and education, which are listed in order from best to worst for ransomware infection rate. Education’s score is far behind that of the others, more than double that for government. The rate ranges from 13% of those in education down to 1.5% for those in finance.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Consultants like to warn CIOs that if they don't embrace modern technologies to meet customer demands that they will be left in the dust by more nimble rivals. Such sky-is-falling proclamations have been taken lightly because they've been difficult to back up. However, new research from Harvard Business School (HBS) suggests that a divide is forming between organizations that have accelerated their digital transformations and those that are still figuring out a working digital model.Digital leaders, defined by HBS as companies that landed in the top quarter of its research, generate better gross margins as well as better earnings and net income than organizations in the bottom digital quarter. Leaders post a three-year average gross margin of 55 percent, compared to just 37 percent for the laggards. Leaders also outstrip laggards in three-year average earnings 16 percent to 11 percent. And in three-year average net income, leaders have the advantage 11 percent to seven percent.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Apple launched its newest operating system, macOS Sierra 10.12, on Tuesday and aside from new and interesting features, it has a large number of important security fixes.The new OS patches 65 vulnerabilities in various core and third-party components. Some of these vulnerabilities are critical and can result in arbitrary code execution with kernel privileges.Flaws that allow local applications to execute malicious code with kernel or system privileges were fixed in Apple's HSSPI support component, AppleEFIRuntime, AppleMobileFileIntegrity, AppleUUC, the Bluetooth stack, DiskArbitration, the Intel Graphics Driver, the IOAcceleratorFamily and IOThunderboltFamily, the S2 Camera, the Security service and the kernel itself.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It’s been a little over a year since Chuck Robbins took the reins at Cisco from the venerated John Chambers. In that time, the face and pace of the IT realm has transformed -- from Dell buying EMC and HP splitting up to the swift rise of IoT and harsh impact of security challenges. Robbins has embraced this rapid change and, he says in this wide-ranging interview, moved the company forward with relentless speed to address everything from hyperconvergence to application-centric infrastructures. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Russia has tried to influence U.S. elections since the 1960s during the Cold War, U.S. Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper said Tuesday.It's not clear whether the interference, which has a long history, aims to influence the outcome of the election or tries to sow seeds of doubt about the sanctity of the process, Clapper said in an interview to The Washington Post.The remarks are the closest the U.S. spy chief has come to suggesting that Russia could be involved in recent hacks of Democratic party organizations.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
iHome's iPL23 is compatible with iPhones 5, 6 and 7 (including Plus models), features premium speakers, a Lightning charging dock, FM radio, and alarm clock in one compact device. This handy radio clock charges Lightning-capable iPhone and iPod devices, while letting you wake or sleep to your favorite songs, podcasts, audio books or FM radio station. Gradual wake/sleep function slowly increases or decreases volume as you drift off, or come to. A USB port allows for simultaneous charging of your iPad or Apple Watch as well. The iPL23 in white has been discounted 14% from $69.95 to $59.95. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Forget PCs and servers: D-Wave Systems is looking into the future with its quantum computer, up to 1,000 times faster than an earlier model.The company will start shipping a quantum computer with 2,000 qubits, twice the size of its current 1,000-qubit D-Wave 2X. The D-Wave 2X is considered one of the most advanced computers in the world today.The 2,000-qubit quantum computer will be 500 to 1000 times faster than its predecessor, said Jeremy Hilton, senior vice president of systems at D-Wave.An even larger quantum computer based on a whole new processor design will come out two to three years after that, Hilton said.Today's PCs and servers could ultimately be replaced by a quantum computer, which has been researched for decades. Beyond D-Wave, companies like IBM are also building quantum computers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If you’re worried that your data might end up in the hands of a hacker, one site is offering a free service that can give you a head’s up.Baltimore-based Terbium Labs has come up with a product called Matchlight, which crawls the dark recesses of the internet, looking for stolen data that’s circulating on the black market.On Tuesday, Terbium Labs opened the product to the public. That means any user can sign up to have five of their personal records monitored for free.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The internet in North Korea is an unsurprisingly small and circumscribed place – there are just 28 TLDs on the entirety of the country’s .kp domain, compared to almost 335 million globally.A misconfiguration early Tuesday morning allowed outsiders to get a rare look into the hermit kingdom’s vestigial online infrastructure, which is connected to the broader internet via China. It was detected by the TLDR Project, an automated, ongoing effort to track all global zone transfer requests among DNS providers, and log them to GitHub.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Why this hospital is moving to Amazon’s cloud + Be careful not to fall for these ransomware situationsTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Black Friday 2016 is still about 2 months away, but the first ad leaks touting bargains on everything from the latest iPhones to tablets, TVs and PCs could surface by the end of next month. Look for Amazon to once again push the definition of Black Friday, with sales starting at the beginning of November (hey, they've already had Prime Day).FROM THE ARCHIVES: 40+ jaw dropping Black Friday 2015 tech dealsTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Apple today released Sierra, 2016's edition of the Mac's operating system.
Sierra is the first under the "macOS" label Apple introduced in June when it retired the older "OS X" and synchronized the Mac's moniker with other operating systems from the Cupertino, Calif. company, like the iPhone's iOS and the Apple TV's tvOS.
Also known as macOS 10.12, Sierra's launch followed the first "golden master," or GM build, by two weeks.
Sierra was available Tuesday for free download from the Mac App Store. Although the upgrade was not immediately visible on the front page of the e-mart, a search using sierra quickly located the 4.8GB installation file.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Larry Ellison made a splash this week when he said that Oracle would give Amazon a run for its money in the cloud. Then, the company outlined the pillar of the tech titan's infrastructure offering: beefy, bare-metal servers running in the cloud. That's right: Oracle is going after a market that's full of virtualized workloads with servers that clock in with a whopping 36 physical CPU cores, according to Vice President of Engineering Don Johnson. Rather than starting from the low end of the infrastructure market and working its way up, Oracle is starting at the top and working its way down. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Summer 2016 was not a good time for data breaches.First, news broke that the Democratic National Committee was hacked, leading to the resignation of DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz and driving a wedge between Democratic Party members.Later, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) announced that Russian hackers had illegally accessed its Anti-Doping Administration and Management System (ADAMS) database, leaking confidential medical information for U.S. athletes, including Simone Biles and Serena Williams.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Website security and performance vendor CloudFlare has made the newest version of the TLS secure communications protocol available to all of its customers.The TLS (Transport Layer Security) 1.3 specification is yet to be finalized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the body that develops internet standards. However, the protocol is already supported in beta versions of Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, and it's being hailed as an important step forward in securing internet communications.TLS 1.3 removes some cryptographic algorithms present in TLS 1.2 that are known to be vulnerable. This makes it easier for server administrators to deploy secure-by-default HTTPS configurations. HTTPS (HTTP Secure) is a mix between HTTP and TLS.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Engineers at Stanford University have invented a new technology that would give broadband customers more control over their pipes and, they say, possibly put an end to a stale net neutrality debate in the U.S.The new technology, called Network Cookies, would allow broadband customers to decide which parts of their network traffic get priority delivery and which parts are less time sensitive. A broadband customer could then decide video from Netflix should get preferential treatment over email messages, for example.The technology could put an end to the current net neutrality debate focused on whether broadband providers are allowed to prioritize some network traffic and block or degrade other traffic, said the researchers, Professors Nick McKeown and Sachin Katti and electrical engineering grad student Yiannis Yiakoumis.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Get ready for a Google hardware-palooza.The company is set to not only unveil a pair of smartphones during its just-announced Oct. 4 event in San Francisco, but we also may also see some other gear that will surely make it onto the holiday wish list of anyone that’s a fan of Google services.The story behind the story: Late Monday, the company sent out a press invite and a playful tweet that takes you to a not-so-subtle teaser site. It’s clearly a phone and the URL of madeby.google.com tells us that instead of this being just another Nexus partnership, Google is more fully in control of its latest smartphones. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
SanDisk today showcased its upcoming 1TB SDXC card prototype at a European trade show for photo and video professionals."There is no definitive timing for availability as of now," a company spokesperson said in an email to Computerworld. "Western Digital plans to monitor industry trends and demands, and introduce the card in retail accordingly. Price would depend on market conditions at the time it’s released." Amazon
SanDisk's current 512GB SD card retails for $345.77 on Amazon.com.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The spin-in culture that developed some major innovations and once shaped a ton of advanced technologies at Cisco isn’t dead but it sure is unrecognizable.That’s because the notions of innovation and developing new ways of bringing cutting-edge technology to the networking arena at least from Cisco has changed.+More on Network World: Cisco unearths its inner startup culture via companywide innovation contest; Cisco names winners of Innovate Everywhere Challenge+ To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A site that's been warning the public about data breaches might actually be doing more harm than good.Enter LeakedSource, a giant repository online that can potentially make hacking easier. Your email address and the associated Internet accounts -- including the passwords -- is probably in it.In fact, the giant repository is made up of stolen databases taken from LinkedIn, Myspace, Dropbox, and thousands of other sites. It bills itself as a data breach monitoring site and for months now, it's been collecting details on hacks, both old and new, and alerting the media about them.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Zuznow is a little-known vendor that offers a mobile development platform. Essentially Zuznow is focused on enabling businesses, even those businesses without technical development resource on staff, to create mobile applications. It’s a busy space, and it's getting busier—large vendors (Salesforce, BMC), smaller vendors (Caspio, Mendix) and standalone mobile application development platforms (Xamarin) are all trying to solve this problem.+ Also on Network World: Will companies trust their communications to AI chatbots? +
Zuznow wants to steal a march on the opposition with the introduction of its intelligent voice assistant. The tool can be thought of as a plug-and-play Siri. Indeed Zuznow has even called the offering Susie, as an homage of Apple’s Siri voice assistant. Zuznow promises that it is delivering the world's first intelligent assistant plugin that brings voice-control and chatbots to any enterprise mobile app within hours. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here