The Week in Internet News: Japan to Probe Residents’ IoT Devices

Government hacking: Japanese government workers will be able to hack into residents’ Internet of Things devices in an attempted survey of IoT insecurity, ZDNet reports. The Japanese government recently approved an amendment that allows the survey by employees of the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology. The government hacking effort is part of Japan’s preparation for the Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympics. Government officials are worried that other hackers might use compromised IoT devices to launch attacks against the games.
Evolving encryption: A story at TechTarget looks at the evolution of the Let’s Encrypt certificate authority, established in 2016. The free and automated certificate authority is “changing the industry in interesting ways” by making the certificate process less cumbersome, the story says. Meanwhile, a story at CSO Online looks at the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s efforts to encrypt the entire Internet and says that Let’s Encrypt is an important piece of that campaign.
Lagging encryption: Less than 30 percent of enterprise businesses encrypt their data across their on-premises environments, within their cloud services or on their mobile devices, according to a survey from French aerospace and security vendor Thales Group. A Computer Business Review story notes that encryption still isn’t widespread, Continue reading


SDxCentral Weekly Wrap for Feb. 1, 2019: Cisco expands its Application Centric Infrastructure into AWS and Azure, Vodafone pauses Huawei purchases, and Juniper's disappointing results.
Microsoft has been chasing AWS as it tries to overtake its larger rival as the leading cloud infrastructure vendor. But it doesn’t look like that will happen any time soon.