Although cybercriminals have been turning out specialized hacking and attack tools at a rapid pace, terrorists are often using legitimate, consumer-focused technologies, according to a new Trend Micro report."They're abusing legitimate technology for their own gain," said Ed Cabrera, vice president of cybersecurity strategy at Trend Micro.Sometimes, the vendors involved shut down accounts that are being used by terrorists, he said."As accounts become not usable, they pivot to other applications," he said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
“When it comes to agile development ... it is less about technology. It is more about mindset, more about culture, more about people and their passion,” says Sudhakar Gorti, CIO at Environmental Data Resources.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
If you want to maximize your productivity, this bundle of premium Mac apps is the ticket. Together, they’re valued at $946, but here’s your chance to pay what you want for them.
My colleagues Doug Cahill, Kyle Prigmore, and I just completed a research project on next-generation endpoint security. Just what the heck is next-generation endpoint security? Cybersecurity professionals remain pretty confused around the answer to this question. For the purposes of its research project, ESG defined next-generation endpoint security as (note: I am an ESG employee):Endpoint security software controls designed to prevent, detect, and respond to previously unseen exploits and malware.As part of this project, ESG interviewed dozens of organizations that were either supplementing or replacing traditional antivirus software on PCs of all kinds. I’ve written a few blogs about why these organizations were moving beyond AV alone, how they selected new endpoint security products, and some details about their testing and deployment methodologies. Aside from this technology overview however, I did come away with some strong theories about the next-generation endpoint security market in general. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Poor neighborhoods in the U.S. get 15 percent less cell phone coverage than their richer counterparts, a new study has found.This confirms the “existence of a mobile-divide in the U.S.,” say the researchers from Imperial College Business School in an abstract of their paper published in Telecommunications Policy via ScienceDirect.“Operators install two fewer mobile antennas per tract in lower income areas for equal distributions of subscribers,” the London business school says. That’s across the board, and it includes both urban and rural areas. So, it isn’t just a rural-divide issue, the researchers say.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Adobe Systems has released a security update for Flash Player in order to fix a publicly known vulnerability, as well as 24 privately reported security flaws.The company issued a warning about the zero-day -- previously unknown and unpatched -- vulnerability on Tuesday, saying that it is aware of an exploit available in the wild. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2016-4117, was reported by security researchers from FireEye.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Roughly half of all Web traffic comes from bots and crawlers, and that's costing companies a boatload of money.That's one finding from a report released Thursday by DeviceAtlas, which makes software to help companies detect the devices being used by visitors to their websites.Non-human sources accounted for 48 percent of traffic to the sites analyzed for DeviceAtlas's Q1 Mobile Web Intelligence Report, including legitimate search-engine crawlers as well as automated scrapers and bots generated by hackers, click fraudsters and spammers, the company said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
VANCOUVER, BC -- Last year's foundation of the Open Data Platform Initiative (ODPi), a collaborative project of The Linux Foundation that aims to reduce complexity surrounding the Hadoop ecosystem, made waves in certain parts of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) concerned by the creation of an external organization that could exert influence over Apache projects.At the Apache: Big Data North America conference in Vancouver, BC this week, the ODPi moved to ease those concerns through dialog and sponsorship of the ASF.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google has changed the way developers build applications that understand human language -- and in the finest tradition of the Internet, has named the result after Boaty McBoatface. The company announced a new SyntaxNet open-source neural network framework that developers can use to build applications that understand human language. As part of that release, Google also introduced Parsey McParseface, a new English language parser that was trained using SyntaxNet.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Internet is all-encompassing. Between mobile devices and work computers, we live our lives on it -- but our online existence has been tragically compromised by inadequate security. Any determined hacker can eavesdrop on what we say, impersonate us, and perform all manner of malicious activities.Clearly, Internet security needs to be rethought. Retrofitting security and privacy controls onto a global communications platform is not easy, but few would argue that it's less than absolutely necessary.[ Deep Dive: How to rethink security for the new world of IT. | Discover how to secure your systems with InfoWorld's Security newsletter. ]
Why should that be? Was the Internet built badly? No, but it was designed for a utopian world where you can trust people. When the fledgling Internet was populated by academics and researchers communicating with trusted parties, it didn’t matter that trust relationships weren’t well-implemented or communications weren’t secure by default. Today it matters very much, to the point where data breaches, identity theft, and other compromises have reached crisis levels.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
House Republican lawmakers have introduced legislation intended to bolster the scrutiny of people entering this country. Its impetus is last year's terrorist attack by a married couple who killed 14 people in San Bernardino, Calif. and wounded 22. But the bill's provisions will affect all visas, including the H-1B.The legislation, submitted Thursday and led by Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), the chair of the House Judiciary Committee, specifically requires analytics software "to ensure proactive detection of fraud" in the immigration process.The software analysis requires the government "to utilize social media and other publicly available information" to determine whether an applicant is a security threat. One of the San Bernardino attackers, Tashfeen Malik, had allegedly posted allegiance to ISIL on Facebook, something which wasn't revealed until after the attack. She and her husband, Syed Rizwan Farook, were killed by police in a shootout.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Financial transaction network SWIFT has renewed its warning to customers to be on their guard following the discovery of malware at another bank using its services.The bank first asked customers to take steps to secure their systems in the wake of an attempt to steal US$951 million from Bangladesh Bank in February. Attackers there appear to have used custom malware installed on computers at the bank to send fraudulent messages over the SWIFT network seeking to transfer money from the bank's account with the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank of New York.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The march towards the release of this summer's Windows 10 Anniversary Update continues with the May 10th release of the latest preview: build 1432. It's a minor update focusing primarily on improving the Edge browser's extension installation process and launching four new extensions.There's also a surprise in this build: The death of the most controversial aspect of Wi-Fi Sense, the feature that some people worried could invade their privacy by sharing their Wi-Fi passwords with their friends and contacts.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Transportation Security Administration’s IT department has persistent security problems including unpatched software, inadequate contractor oversight, physical security and inadequate vulnerability reporting.+More on Network World: 26 of the craziest and scariest things the TSA has found on travelers+Those were the main conclusions outlined in a report this week from the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General which specifically took a look at the TSA’s Security Technology Integrated Program (STIP) which it defines as a “mission-essential data management system that connects airport transportation security equipment to servers. Connection to a centralized server allows remote management of passenger and baggage screening equipment and facilitates equipment maintenance, including software changes in response to emerging threats.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
This column is available in a weekly newsletter called IT Best Practices. Click here to subscribe. If you want to get some insight to the trends of mobility in the enterprise, the guy to talk to is Ojas Rege, vice president of strategy for MobileIron. I caught up with him recently and he talked about four major trends that will have a big impact in the years ahead.The first trend is what is happening from the application security perspective. Enterprises started to get interested in mobile apps about five or six years ago. The larger screen real estate of the Apple iPad really opened companies' eyes to what could be done with mobile apps. The earliest applications were rather ad hoc, usually project-based. Then organizations began building apps around their business workflow, and security became a bigger issue.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Instant messaging between desktops and phones hasn't exactly taken off despite the ubiquity of both. There is Skype. Microsoft has done a good job of making it available everywhere, but most instant messengers are limited to either the PC or mobile phones, and PCs do a surprisingly bad job of supporting SMS texting.Well, things took a step forward now that WhatsApp, a popular smartphone instant messenger, has finally launched on PC and Mac. The smartphone app, which Facebook bought for an incredible $19 billion last year, has over a billion users worldwide.Up to now, if you didn't have it on your smartphone, you had to use the Web site, WhatsApp Web. The desktop app, like the Web site and smartphone app, is designed as "an extension of your phone," as the company put it in announcing the app, synchronizing your conversations and messages between the two devices.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Anyone can get into the private beta of MIcrosoft's new GigJam productivity service, which is aimed at helping teams of people collaborate in real time over the Internet, the company announced Thursday. GigJam combines data from a variety of services including Microsoft's own Office 365, Trello, Dropbox, and Salesforce. Users can then bring that information into a shared workspace, allowing them to quickly work together.Users can easily redact part of the information they're sharing with other people, meaning they can selectively share only what needs to be seen in order to get a job done. There's no way around it: GigJam is a kind of wacky product Microsoft has built to help people get work done together. But what's interesting is that it's emblematic of the company's current approach to the productivity market -- focused on letting people quickly and independently collaborate across different services while maintaining a secure environment. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
This super thin HD antenna averages 4 out of 5 stars from nearly 3,300 people on Amazon (read reviews). With a regular price of $46.99, this 36% discount puts the list price at $29.99. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Because no one was physically injured or worse, headline writers such as yours truly felt able to characterize the August 2013 incident thusly: “Verizon worker thankful 911 operator could hear him now.”
Today the 73-year-old Massachusetts man who perpetrated the criminal act against that Verizon worker must be equally thankful that a lenient judge has sentenced him to only a year of probation plus an apparently long-overdue anger management class.
From a story in the Worcester Telegram & Gazette:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Wi-Fi has moved from a nascent technology to one that is widely accepted and become so commonplace that we wonder how we ever functioned without it.It started from autonomous access points and was followed up by controller-based architecture (with a centralized controller and thin access points). And, as we learned from the challenges in deploying Wi-Fi and the ability of the environment to impact user experience, companies have constantly tried to innovate. Some focused on building dynamic channel or power planning, some built controller-less networks, and others tried to make it work in single channel. (Don't deploy single channel until you have read the challenges here.)To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here