IDG Contributor Network: Did Europe just fix emergency cellular call location?

The biggest challenge cellular mobile phones introduce for 911 is location accuracy—especially during an emergency call. The problem is a global one, inherited with any wireless technology. Getting the location wrong directly impacts the level of safety provided to citizens, as routing the call to the most appropriate Public Safety Answer Position (PSAP) specifically relies on this critical piece of data.Can you find me now? Many of us don't stop and think how our mobile devices determine where we are on the planet, and most of us will assume GPS plays a significant role in providing that answer. While GPS remains an important piece of the location puzzle, quite often it is not the answer by itself. Fundamentally, there are three sources for location information used by cellular phones.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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Thousands of hacked CCTV devices used in DDoS attacks

Attackers have compromised more than 25,000 digital video recorders and CCTV cameras and are using them to launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against websites.One such attack, recently observed by researchers from Web security firm Sucuri, targeted the website of one of the company's customers: a small bricks-and-mortar jewelry shop.The attack flooded the website with about 50,000 HTTP requests per second at its peak, targeting what specialists call the application layer, or layer 7. These attacks can easily cripple a small website because the infrastructure typically provisioned for such websites can handle only a few hundred or thousand connections at the same time.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Thousands of hacked CCTV devices used in DDoS attacks

Attackers have compromised more than 25,000 digital video recorders and CCTV cameras and are using them to launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against websites.One such attack, recently observed by researchers from Web security firm Sucuri, targeted the website of one of the company's customers: a small bricks-and-mortar jewelry shop.The attack flooded the website with about 50,000 HTTP requests per second at its peak, targeting what specialists call the application layer, or layer 7. These attacks can easily cripple a small website because the infrastructure typically provisioned for such websites can handle only a few hundred or thousand connections at the same time.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Thousands of hacked CCTV devices used in DDoS attacks

Attackers have compromised more than 25,000 digital video recorders and CCTV cameras and are using them to launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against websites.One such attack, recently observed by researchers from Web security firm Sucuri, targeted the website of one of the company's customers: a small bricks-and-mortar jewelry shop.The attack flooded the website with about 50,000 HTTP requests per second at its peak, targeting what specialists call the application layer, or layer 7. These attacks can easily cripple a small website because the infrastructure typically provisioned for such websites can handle only a few hundred or thousand connections at the same time.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco reinforces cloud security technology with $293M CloudLock buy

Cisco today said it would make its fifth acquisition of the year by acquiring cyber security provider CloudLock for $293 million.The move should bolster Cisco’s overarching cloud security offerings and the CloudLock team will join Cisco’s Networking and Security Business Group under Senior Vice President and General Manager David Goeckeler, Cisco stated.+More on Network World: Cisco: IP traffic will surpass the zettabyte level in 2016+In a blog post announcing the deal, Cisco’s Rob Salvagno, vice president of Cisco Corporate Business Development, said: “CloudLock specializes in Cloud Access Security Broker, or CASB, technology and helps organizations move faster to the cloud. CloudLock delivers cloud security to help track and manage user behavior and sensitive data in SaaS applications, such as Office365, Google Drive, and Salesforce. Enterprise IT can then enforce a granular security policy within these cloud applications. For example, CloudLock can help protect data and enforce access rules when an employee tries to access sensitive data stored in a SaaS application from an unprotected device, in a defined geography, at a specific time of the day – essentially, ‘security anywhere, anytime’ for content in the cloud. CloudLock extends these security controls to the IaaS and PaaS Continue reading

Cloud consortium says simpler EU electronic signature rules aren’t simple enough

European Union rules for electronic signatures change on Friday to make a clear distinction between the identity of the person signing, and that of the authority guaranteeing the integrity of the data, but the technology needs to be still simpler, vendors say.The new rules are intended to simplify the process of electronically signing contracts between businesses, or between businesses and persons, and across international borders where different and often incompatible electronic signature rules apply today.But while the new rules will simplify the legal environment, today's technical environment makes it too difficult to create and securely manage digital identities, according to the Cloud Signature Consortium.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

America’s data centers are getting a lot more efficient

U.S. data centers have used about the same amount of energy annually over the past five years or so, despite substantial growth in the sector, according to a new report published by scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.In the Berkeley Lab’s previous analysis, which was presented to Congress in 2008, it was found that energy usage by data centers was quadrupling every decade – an unsurprising figure given the explosive overall growth in the sector. Data centers in the U.S. consumed 70 billion kilowatt-hours in 2014, the researchers estimated.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Windows 10’s biggest controversies + HPE's CTO is leaving amid more change at the companyTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

America’s data centers are getting a lot more efficient

U.S. data centers have used about the same amount of energy annually over the past five years or so, despite substantial growth in the sector, according to a new report published by scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.In the Berkeley Lab’s previous analysis, which was presented to Congress in 2008, it was found that energy usage by data centers was quadrupling every decade – an unsurprising figure given the explosive overall growth in the sector. Data centers in the U.S. consumed 70 billion kilowatt-hours in 2014, the researchers estimated.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Windows 10’s biggest controversies + HPE's CTO is leaving amid more change at the companyTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IoT botnet: 25,513 CCTV cameras used in crushing DDoS attacks

Over 25,000 hacked internet-connected CCTV cameras are being used for a denial-of-service botnet, according to researchers from the security firm Sucuri.The discovery came after Sucuri mitigated a DDoS attack against a jewelry store site; it had been generating 35,000 HTTP requests per second. But after bringing the website back up, researchers said the attacks increased to nearly 50,000 HTTP requests per second. When the attack continued for days, the researchers discovered the attack botnet was leveraging only IoT CCTV devices, which were located across the globe.Although this is not the first CCTV-based DDoS botnet discovered (900 had been used in attacks last year), it is the largest yet to be discovered.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IoT botnet: 25,513 CCTV cameras used in crushing DDoS attacks

Over 25,000 hacked internet-connected CCTV cameras are being used for a denial-of-service botnet, according the researchers from the security firm Sucuri.The discovery came after Sucuri mitigated a DDoS attack against a jewelry store site; it had been generating 35,000 HTTP requests per second. But after bringing the website back up, researchers said the attacks increased to nearly 50,000 HTTP requests per second. When the attack continued for days, the researchers discovered the attack botnet was leveraging only IoT CCTV devices which were located across the globe.Although this is not the first CCTV-based DDoS botnet discovered, since 900 had been used in attacks last year, it is the largest yet to be discovered. “It is not new that attackers have been using IoT devices to start their DDoS campaigns,” Sucuri wrote, “however, we have not analyzed one that leveraged only CCTV devices and was still able to generate this quantity of requests for so long.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Will Dell Networking Wither Away?

The behemoth merger of Dell and EMC is nearing conclusion. The first week of August is the target date for the final wrap up of all the financial and legal parts of the acquisition. After that is done, the long task of analyzing product lines and finding a way to reduce complexity and product sprawl begins. We’ve already seen the spin out of Quest and Sonicwall into a separate entity to raise cash for the final stretch of the acquisition. No doubt other storage and compute products are going to face a go/no go decision in the future. But one product line which is in real danger of disappearing is networking.

Whither Whitebox?

The first indicator of the problems with Dell and networking comes from whitebox switching. Dell released OS 10 earlier this year as a way to capitalize on the growing market of free operating systems running on commodity hardware. Right now, OS 10 can run on Dell equipment. In the future, they are hoping to spread it out to whitebox devices. That assumes that soon you’ll see Dell branded OSes running on switches purchased from non-Dell sources booting with ONIE.

Once OS 10 pushes forward, what does that Continue reading

Cloud computing slows energy demand, U.S. says

Ten years ago, power usage at data centers was growing at an unsustainable rate, soaring 24% from 2005 to 2010. But a shift to virtualization, cloud computing and improved data center management is reducing energy demand.According to a new study, data center energy use is expected to increase just 4% from 2014 to 2020, despite growing demand for computing resources.Total data center electricity usage in the U.S., which includes powering servers, storage, networking and the infrastructure to support it, was at 70 billion kWh (kilowatt hours) in 2014, representing 1.8% of total U.S. electricity consumption.ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Whatever happened to Green IT? Based on current trends, data centers are expected to consume approximately 73 billion kWh in 2020, becoming nearly flat over the next four years. "Growth in data center energy consumption has slowed drastically since the previous decade," according to a study by the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "However, demand for computations and the amount of productivity performed by data centers continues to rise at substantial rates."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cloud computing slows energy demand, U.S. says

Ten years ago, power usage at data centers was growing at an unsustainable rate, soaring 24% from 2005 to 2010. But a shift to virtualization, cloud computing and improved data center management is reducing energy demand.According to a new study, data center energy use is expected to increase just 4% from 2014 to 2020, despite growing demand for computing resources.Total data center electricity usage in the U.S., which includes powering servers, storage, networking and the infrastructure to support it, was at 70 billion kWh (kilowatt hours) in 2014, representing 1.8% of total U.S. electricity consumption.ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Whatever happened to Green IT? Based on current trends, data centers are expected to consume approximately 73 billion kWh in 2020, becoming nearly flat over the next four years. "Growth in data center energy consumption has slowed drastically since the previous decade," according to a study by the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "However, demand for computations and the amount of productivity performed by data centers continues to rise at substantial rates."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Lightning strikes Outlook in latest Salesforce-Microsoft integration

Microsoft's Outlook.com is used by some 400 million users around the world, so it's only natural that Salesforce wants its own software to play nicely with it. On Tuesday, the CRM giant announced a big step in that direction.The latest in a series of integrations resulting from the two-year-old partnership between Salesforce and Microsoft, Lightning for Outlook is an add-in that promises to let salespeople tailor their inboxes with smooth access to customer relationship management (CRM) data whenever they need it.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Backblaze wants to eliminate tape-based storage

Online backup company Backblaze made waves last year when it announced a beta test last year of B2, a new public cloud storage service that would be cheaper than competing offerings from Amazon and Microsoft. B2 has now exited beta with some new features that may make it more appealing to business users. It now has a service level agreement guaranteeing 99.9 percent uptime for all data stored within it, matching the baseline offerings from Amazon Web Services’ S3 and Microsoft Azure’s Blob Storage service. In addition, users can now purchase expanded support from Backblaze, which will give them guaranteed rapid responses to support questions and – at the highest level – access to a phone number for around-the-clock support.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Fully cashless society by 2036, study projects

Londoners are counting the years until cashless technologies take over. A significant three-quarters of the urban dwellers there think bank notes and coins are on the way out.The people there reckon those traditional instruments will be completely gone in 20 years, according to a survey conducted by London & Partners, a mayor-funded publicity company.The study of 2,000 U.K. consumers ties in with a London mayoral push for the city to become a financial technology (fintech) hub.“Financial technology companies will change the nature of money, shake the foundations of central banking and deliver nothing less than a democratic revolution for all who use financial services,” Mark Carney, The Governor of the Bank of England said, in the London & Partners press release for the survey.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

11 ways to fight off ransomware

Reinventing malwareImage by MartialArtsNomad.comJust like evolution from viruses, to botnets and malware families that we’ve seen over the past decade, bad actors continue to find new ways of reinventing old threats. Today, the top trend in modern malware is the proliferation of ransomware. Ransomware has come a long way from the non-encrypting lockscreen FBI scare warnings like Reveton. In 2016, there has been a constant flow of new ransomware families popping up, like Locky, Cerber, Madeba and Maktub, and this is only expected to pick up steam over the summer. Ransomware is very damaging. Nick Bilogorskiy , senior director threat operations at Cyphort, shares seven tips to help fend off ransomware attacks. More tips are provided near the end of the slideshow by Alert Logic. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

8 biggest email pet peeves

8 biggest email pet peevesImage by ThinkstockEmail is both an incredible workplace communication tool and the bane of most knowledge workers' existence. While it can definitely enhance productivity and communication, the written word often has the potential to misconstrue messages, introduce unnecessary stakeholders into the conversation and generally make your work life more stressful. Based on a survey of 2,000 U.S. knowledge workers who use email, corporate intranet provider Igloo Software has compiled a list of the eight biggest email pet peeves. 1. SpamImage by ThinkstockTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here