Media fails to tell consumers about device flaws in Friday’s internet outage

Hacked cameras, DVRs and other internet-connected consumer devices were conscripted by perpetrators who installed botnet malware, causing last Friday’s internet outages. The national media reported the event, but it failed to tell consumers what they need to know about buying those types of devices. For example, before making a purchase, consumers need to ask: Does the manufacturer routinely update this device with security patches? Can I change the default passwords when I install the device? The national media could have talked to someone who has first-hand experience with this type of attack, such as Brian Krebs, former Washington Post journalist and now one of the leading security industry bloggers, who would have repeated what he posted on Friday:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Operators Want Flexibility & Reduced Costs From SD-WAN & vCPE, Report Says

Service providers want reduced costs while the enterprise looks for flexibility.

Yahoo! User Data Breach: The Case for Pervasive Security and Monitoring

These breaches are now affecting millions and sometimes hundreds of millions of people.

Not robocop, but robojudge? AI learns to rule in human rights cases

An artificial intelligence system designed to predict the outcomes of cases at the European Court of Human Rights would side with the human judges 79 percent of the time.Researchers at University College London and the University of Sheffield in the U.K., and the University of Pennsylvania in the U.S., described the system in a paper published Monday by the Peer Journal of Computer Science."We formulated a binary classification task where the input of our classifiers is the textual content extracted from a case and the target output is the actual judgment as to whether there has been a violation of an article of the convention of human rights," wrote the paper's authors, Nikolaos Aletras, Dimitrios Tsarapatsanis, Daniel Preoţiuc-Pietro and Vasileios Lampos.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

What are the Top NFV Risks for Carriers?

In the move to the telco cloud and NFV, there are a number of risks associated with implementing a fully virtualized system.

Worth Reading: Hack Cameras, DVRs, and DDoS

A massive and sustained Internet attack that has caused outages and network congestion today for a large number of Web sites was launched with the help of hacked “Internet of Things” (IoT) devices, such as CCTV video cameras and digital video recorders, new data suggests. —Krebs on Security

The post Worth Reading: Hack Cameras, DVRs, and DDoS appeared first on 'net work.

Where to find the world’s best programmers

Donald Knuth, Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Grace Hopper: The United States has produced some of the greatest software engineers who have ever lived.But outside the United States computer technology and education have become far more accessible over the last 20 years or so, and that means that in China and many other less developed countries there are now plenty of young minds that have been trained to become skilled programmers.So which countries produce the best coders is an interesting question to ask. Perhaps more importantly why do some countries lead the way? [ Also on CIO.com: The 13 developer skills you need to master now ]To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Who is most likely to buy Avaya’s networking business?

Earlier this year Forbes posted an article speculating that Avaya’s private equity firm, Silver Lake was exploring a sale of the company or at least parts of it. Private equity companies typically hold its portfolio companies for three to five years and then divest themselves of it through an IPO or a sale to another organization. The Avaya situation is somewhat of a rarity because it’s coming up on 10 years since Silver Lake took ownership of it.Avaya is a strong company with good products that has been trying to transform itself into more of a software and services company, but it is saddled with debt. A sale of its contact center and/or networking business could help offset that debt and put the rest of Avaya in a much better position.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

SnapChat, Skype among worst messaging apps for not respecting users’ right to privacy

Amnesty International set out to determine which technology companies met “their human rights responsibilities in the way they use encryption to protect users’ online security.” The research resulted in ranking messaging apps of 11 tech companies based on the use of encryption to protect users’ privacy.According to the detailed list of Message Privacy Rankings (pdf), Facebook did the best, scoring 73 out of 100 for WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. Both Apple for iMessage and FaceTime and Telegram for the Telegram Messenger scored 67. Google came in with a score of 53 for Allo, Duo and Hangouts.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

SnapChat, Skype among worst messaging apps for not respecting users’ right to privacy

Amnesty International set out to determine which technology companies met “their human rights responsibilities in the way they use encryption to protect users’ online security.” The research resulted in ranking messaging apps of 11 tech companies based on the use of encryption to protect users’ privacy.According to the detailed list of Message Privacy Rankings (pdf), Facebook did the best, scoring 73 out of 100 for WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. Both Apple for iMessage and FaceTime and Telegram for the Telegram Messenger scored 67. Google came in with a score of 53 for Allo, Duo and Hangouts.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Does Southwest’s new ‘password’ commercial need to get away?

If you watched any football yesterday, chances are you saw the latest in Southwest Airlines’ “Wanna get away?” commercial series, this one featuring a military general and his comical willingness to surrender his network access password.While funny on its face, the commercial is not exactly a lesson in proper password management. Watch or read the transcript that follows: Transcript:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Does Southwest’s new ‘password’ commercial need to get away?

If you watched any football yesterday, chances are you saw the latest in Southwest Airlines’ “Wanna get away?” commercial series, this one featuring a military general and his comical willingness to surrender his network access password.While funny on its face, the commercial is not exactly a lesson in proper password management. Watch or read the transcript that follows: Transcript:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Does Southwest’s new ‘password’ commercial need to get away?

If you watched any football yesterday, chances are you saw the latest in Southwest Airlines’ “Wanna get away?” commercial series, this one featuring a military general and his comical willingness to surrender his network access password.While funny on its face, the commercial is not exactly a lesson in proper password management. Watch or read the transcript that follows: Transcript:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cybersecurity, Business, and IT Relationships

As the old adage states:  People are the weakest link in the cybersecurity chain.  This is a problem because strong cybersecurity depends upon both individual skills and organizational collaboration between cybersecurity, business, and IT groups. To use another analogy, cybersecurity is a team sport.  If the cybersecurity team doesn’t communicate and collaborate well with other groups within an organization, it will be difficult if not impossible to stay current with what’s needed for security incident prevention, detection, and response.Unfortunately, this is the situation too often today.  According to a new research report from ESG and the Information Systems Security Association (ISSA), 20% of cybersecurity professionals claim that the relationship between cybersecurity and IT teams is “fair or poor” today, while 27% rate the relationship between cybersecurity and business team as “fair or poor” (Note: I am an ESG employee).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cybersecurity, Business, and IT Relationships

As the old adage states:  People are the weakest link in the cybersecurity chain.  This is a problem because strong cybersecurity depends upon both individual skills and organizational collaboration between cybersecurity, business, and IT groups. To use another analogy, cybersecurity is a team sport.  If the cybersecurity team doesn’t communicate and collaborate well with other groups within an organization, it will be difficult if not impossible to stay current with what’s needed for security incident prevention, detection, and response.Unfortunately, this is the situation too often today.  According to a new research report from ESG and the Information Systems Security Association (ISSA), 20% of cybersecurity professionals claim that the relationship between cybersecurity and IT teams is “fair or poor” today, while 27% rate the relationship between cybersecurity and business team as “fair or poor” (Note: I am an ESG employee).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cybersecurity, business and IT relationships

As the old adage states: People are the weakest link in the cybersecurity chain. This is a problem because strong cybersecurity depends upon both individual skills and organizational collaboration between cybersecurity, business and IT groups. To use another analogy, cybersecurity is a team sport. If the cybersecurity team doesn’t communicate and collaborate well with other groups within an organization, it will be difficult—if not impossible—to stay current with what’s needed for security incident prevention, detection and response.Unfortunately, this is the situation too often today. According to a new research report from ESG and the Information Systems Security Association (ISSA)—The State of Cybersecurity Professional Careers—20 percent of cybersecurity professionals claim that the relationship between cybersecurity and IT teams is “fair or poor” today, while 27 percent rate the relationship between cybersecurity and business team as “fair or poor."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

20% off Micca Speck G2 1080p Full-HD Ultra Portable Digital Media Player – Deal Alert

The Micca Speck G2 provides convenient playback of all popular photo, music, and video formats up to 1080p Full-HD resolution on any TV or HDTV. It has a 1080p HD output for sending sharp and clear video and audio in pure digital format to HDTVs, as well as composite AV output for use with analog TVs. The Speck G2 reads media from USB Drives, USB Hard Drives, SD/SDHC Flash Memory Cards, MBR FAT32 and NTFS file systems, up to 2TB. File formats supported are:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Using communities to filter BGP announcements

The post Using communities to filter BGP announcements appeared first on Noction.

5 strategies to reboot your IT career

Technology changes faster than many of us can keep up with it. New paradigms like software-defined networks and the cloud emerge, and the old ones continue to hang around.But while the hotshot programmers and big data geeks get to play with the shiny new toys, you're busy waiting for the robots to come and take away your job.[ Find out how to get ahead with our career development guide for developers. | The art of programming is changing rapidly. We help you navigate what's hot in programming and what's going cold. | Keep up with hot topics in programming with InfoWorld's Application Development newsletter. ] It doesn't have to be that way. Whether you cut your teeth on Unix and AIX or you tire of doing the necessary but thankless tasks that come with keeping the lights on and the datacenter humming, there's still time to reinvent yourself.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Are microservices killing the API conversation?

In a couple of weeks, I will be attending the API Strategy and Practice conference in Boston. As program chair of the 2015 edition (held in Austin last October), I am excited to see this year’s schedule, led by 2016 program chair (and senior product manager at Capital One DevExchange) Lorinda Brandon. When I attend, and as I talk with participants across the two and a half days, there is one question I will be asking speakers and participants alike: Are microservices killing the API conversation?Let’s look back quickly at what has happened in the last two years:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here