Alongside its batch of mandatory security patches released Tuesday, Microsoft also issued an optional update aimed at protecting Windows computers against an attack that could hijack wireless mice to execute malicious commands.The attack, dubbed MouseJack, affects wireless mice and keyboards from many manufacturers, including Microsoft. It was discovered and presented earlier this year by security researchers from IoT security firm Bastille Networks.MouseJack exploits several vulnerabilities in the communications protocols between the USB dongles plugged into computers and the wireless mice and keyboards that are paired with them. These flaws allow attackers to spoof a wireless mouse from up to 100 meters away and send rogue keystrokes instead of clicks to a computer.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The first proposed federal encryption legislation has been released, and had it been established law earlier this year Apple would have had to provide the help the FBI asked for in accessing encrypted data on the iPhone used by a terrorist in San Bernardino.The draft published by Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina and Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California calls for encryption vendors and others to obey court orders that command them to deliver intelligible versions of encrypted data or to provide technical assistance to make it intelligible.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The burden of Microsoft's efforts to secure Windows 10 is now falling on PC, tablet, and smartphone makers.Microsoft is making a hardware-based security feature called TPM (Trusted Platform Module) 2.0 a minimum requirement on most Windows 10 devices. Starting July 28, the company will require device manufacturers shipping PCs, tablets and smartphones to include TPM 2.0.TPM has been available for years, mostly on business PCs. TPM 2.0 provides a hardware layer to safeguard user data by managing and storing cryptographic keys in a trusted container.The TPM requirement "will be enforced through our Windows Hardware Certification program," Microsoft said in a blog post.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Ever since North Korea directly connected to the Internet in 2010, there's been a lot of interest in how the world's most closed country maintains and uses the link.It connects a handful of Web sites in Pyongyang serving propaganda to the world and allows foreigners in the country largely unfiltered access to the Internet. It also provides monitored access to an unknown number of senior officials, scientists, and university students.Yet for everything we've learned, there's still a lot we don't know and now there's a new mystery: Last week, the country's sole Internet link with the rest of the world went down for about three hours. It was the longest outage of the year and meant the entire country was disconnected from the Internet, according to monitoring by Dyn Research.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Turning data into insight is one of the top business challenges today, and it becomes especially tricky when the data in question is unstructured. Artificial intelligence has a mixed track record there, but a young startup aims to get better results by bringing humans back into the picture.Spare5 on Wednesday released a new platform that applies a combination of human insight and machine learning to help companies make sense of unstructured data, including images, video, social media content, and text messages. The result, it says, are "game-changing insights delivered cost-effectively and at scale."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cable companies are already among the very biggest players in the wireless world, but analysts speaking at industry group CableLabs’ InformED Wireless event Wednesday in New York said that opportunities for further growth exist.Specifically, said Jonathan Chaplin of New Street Research, it’s a “matter of time” before the cable industry (presumably meaning either Comcast or TWC) moves more heavily into wireless, whether via an acquisition or some form of partnership with an existing player.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Verizon to replace copper with fiber optic Internet in Boston + Google Fiber to be free for select affordable housing residents+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The FBI reportedly paid professional hackers a one-time fee for a previously unknown vulnerability that allowed the agency to unlock the iPhone of San Bernardino shooter.The exploit allowed the FBI to build a device capable of brute-forcing the iPhone's PIN without triggering a security measure that would have wiped all of its data, the Washington Post reported Tuesday, citing unnamed sources familiar with the matter.The hackers who provided the exploit to the FBI find software vulnerabilities and sometimes sell them to the U.S. government, the newspaper reported.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Internal Revenue Service said today with the approaching tax filing April 18th deadline scammers are becoming even more desperate that ever to steal your money and identity.The IRS said there has been a 400% surge in phishing and malware incidents in this tax season alone and that scam artists are more frequently masquerade as being from the IRS, a tax company and sometimes even a state revenue department.+More on Network World: IRS warns of nasty W-2 phishing scheme+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In this edition of the Irari Report, Ira Winkler and Araceli Treu Gomes continue their interview of Chris Inglis, former Deputy Director of NSA. In this segment, they focus on how an organization that is so aware of the insider threat can be compromised by a person like Edward Snowden.
Inglis highlights how trust is critical to function, but verification must be implemented. This relies upon a stringent screening process, as you have to extend to trust to the people you hire. While Snowden was one traitor among 250,000, the damage one person can cause is clear, and it must be accepted as an eventuality.
Watch the first part of this series.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
PC shipments plummeted in the first quarter, dropping 11.5% compared to the year before, researcher IDC said Monday.The impressively dismal decline was a poor opening for a year that IDC once believed would see the bottom of the PC industry's years-old trough. But just a month ago, IDC revised its forecast, saying that shipments in 2016 would fall by 5.4% from 2015.Rival market research vendor Gartner, which also issued its Q1 shipment numbers this week, pegged the drop-off at 9.6%, with the difference largely attributed to how each company tallies shipments. Gartner, unlike IDC, counts tablets with detachable keyboards, like Microsoft's Surface Pro, as personal computers, and so usually comes up with larger shipment figures.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook Messenger will become the next platform with the addition of chat-bots and AI linked to Facebook business pages. Did he really mean the next platform will replace Android and iOS mobile platforms? Unquestionably he did. Messenger has now been promoted to the Messenger platform, raising expectations of former PayPal President and Facebook Messaging Vice President David Marcus.Zuckerberg has an uncontestable vision: consumers would rather interact with businesses via a text chat that resembles one with a friend instead of telephoning a call center or using another frustrating form of B2C communications. In this scenario, customer service is delivered via the Messenger platform that can be programmed with a chat-bot to respond to customer chat messages. A B2C merchant will be able build Messenger plug-ins for customer service and sales assistance. The bot could learn on its own to be more helpful by adding a separate AI and machine-learning module. It’s still a vision; the chat-bot and AI beta was released yesterday for innovators to start testing.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
With rivals Nvidia and AMD both offering graphics processors, Intel is now deploying screaming co-processors of its own in the form of FPGAs.FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays) are extremely fast chips that can be reprogrammed to do specific tasks. Intel last year acquired Altera for $16.7 billion as it started thinking beyond CPUs and stressing co-processors for demanding computing tasks.Intel recently started shipping server chips paired with FPGAs as part of a pilot program. The company is packing Altera Arria 10 FPGAs along with its Xeon E5-2600 v4 processors, code-named Broadwell-EP, in a multichip module. The Xeon E5 chips were introduced last month.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A U.S. House of Representatives committee has advanced a bill to give email and cloud-stored data new privacy protections from law enforcement searches.
The House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday voted 28-0 to approve an amended version of the Email Privacy Act, which would require law enforcement agencies to get court-ordered warrants to search email and other cloud-stored data that's more than six months old.
Some privacy advocates and tech companies have been pushing Congress to update a 30-year-old law called the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) for the last six years.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
I’ve become that dad - you know, the one who goes around the house turning off the lights because his kids haven’t learned how to flip a light switch, or the one who opens the cupboard to discover an empty bag of Oreos (See it on Amazon).So instead of disdain, I want to congratulate and applaud GE for inventing a refrigerator that has an automatic refill water pitcher function. The press release says it best:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
There’s a storm brewing on the SmartThings forums as the SmartThings community suffered a big loss when community developer Bruce Ravenel announced his decision to pull Rule Machine.You can set up “routines” and add “actions” such as turning all the lights on, opening garage doors, unlocking doors and setting the thermostat in the SmartThings app. If you wanted those devices to be smarter and interact with other apps, then IFTTT lets people setup If This Then That recipes. But Rule Machine added another level of “smart” to smart devices. As was explained on the HA (Home Automation) Forums, Rule Machine is “like IFTTT but with an extra ‘This.’ If This and This, then do an action.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
We all live in fear of the Internet going down, whether it be via a government kill switch or a nefarious hacking group. The operators of one swanky hotel in Japan understand the public's unease, and have taken pains to assure patrons that really, the Internet will only be inaccessible from the facility for 1 minute, and at 4AM at that.A friend who is working in Japan this week shared the photo above of a note from the Palace Hotel Tokyo's housekeeping staff, and she commented: "Only in Japan... The detail and thoughtfulness and modesty that pervades everything here is truly admirable."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The U.S. spends a lot of money—Congressionally encumbered funds, but also unknown/untold amounts of money on its domestic, international and military-based espionage and intelligence activities.You’d think the U.S. was getting a good deal. Yet its citizenry is being robbed blind—and frequently. A mysterious hacking group, APT6, has been noodling around inside our infrastructure for years undetected until recently.This is to say: the greatest “superpower” on planet Earth has let the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), IRS and only heaven knows what infrastructure get cracked open like an egg. Your data, my data, yes, our information assets are in some cache resting in some dark data center somewhere—but not in the original spot where it belonged.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Privacy Shield trans-Atlantic data transfer arrangement is better than its predecessor, Safe Harbor, but still not good enough, European Union data protection authorities said Wednesday.
They want the European Commission improve the deal it has negotiated with U.S. authorities to ensure that EU citizens' personal information receives privacy protection equivalent to that of EU law when it is exported to the U.S.
The authorities have been examining Privacy Shield since it was unveiled in February, and announced the results of their study Wednesday.
The deal is too complex, they say, as it is composed of a collection of legal instruments, letters and annexes rather than a single, easily understandable document.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Drew Como credits his enterprise backup and recovery technology of choice – Veeam Availability Suite -- with helping his company to recover from a disastrous third-party software upgrade.“Once, we had a software vendor who assured us that an upgrade would be quick and easy, so we went ahead with it. In fact, it destroyed a key database,” says Como, who is senior manager of global datacenter platform services at Take-Two Interactive Software. “Everyone panicked, but I said, ‘Hey, I think Veeam’s got this.’ I crossed my fingers, did a restore, and in 15 minutes the entire database was back online.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In what will probably be a long series of parries, the International Trade Commission this week granted a full review of certain patents in the now 15-month old patent suit between Cisco and Arista Networks.Specifically the ITC granted full review of the three patents that Arista is allegedly infringing under the initial determination issued by the presiding judge on Feb 2. In February, the ITC made an initial determination that Arista infringed on three Cisco patents in its switches -- patents associated with a central database for managing configuration data (SysDB) and private VLANs.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here