IDG Contributor Network: Basic training: Cybersecurity lessons inspired by an opportunistic developer

Today, not only do we see a significant increase in the number of cyber attacks, but by design the incidents are also more fearless and larger in their scale and impact to the business. According to Cisco, the frequency of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks has increased more than 2.5 times since 2013, with the current average DDoS attack large enough to take many organizations completely offline.RELATED: Machine learning offers new hope against cyber attacks Most businesses have cybersecurity initiatives, but how can we be sure the policies and people are keeping pace with the threats that are becoming more dynamic as technology progresses? TechRepublic reported that an estimated 90 million cyber attacks occurred in 2016, which means 400 attacks every minute. As data travels through a virtual ecosystem, security must extend beyond the device itself. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Basic training: Cybersecurity lessons inspired by an opportunistic developer

Today, not only do we see a significant increase in the number of cyber attacks, but by design the incidents are also more fearless and larger in their scale and impact to the business. According to Cisco, the frequency of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks has increased more than 2.5 times since 2013, with the current average DDoS attack large enough to take many organizations completely offline.RELATED: Machine learning offers new hope against cyber attacks Most businesses have cybersecurity initiatives, but how can we be sure the policies and people are keeping pace with the threats that are becoming more dynamic as technology progresses? TechRepublic reported that an estimated 90 million cyber attacks occurred in 2016, which means 400 attacks every minute. As data travels through a virtual ecosystem, security must extend beyond the device itself. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google Expands Enterprise Cloud With Machine Learning

Google’s Cloud Platform is the relative newcomer on the public cloud block, and has a way to go before before it is in the same competitive sphere as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, both of which deliver a broader and deeper range of offerings and larger infrastructures.

Over the past year, Google has promised to rapidly grow the platform’s capabilities and datacenters and has hired a number of executives in hopes of enticing enterprises to bring more of their corporate workloads and data to the cloud.

One area Google is hoping to leverage is the decade-plus of work and

Google Expands Enterprise Cloud With Machine Learning was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Building Reliability

Systems are inherently reliable. Until they aren’t. On a long enough timeline, even the most reliable system will eventually fail. How you manage that failure says a lot about the way your build your system or application. So, why is it then that we’re so focused on failing?

Ten Feet Tall And Bulletproof

No system is infallible. Networks go down. Cloud services get knocked offline. Even Facebook, which represents “the Internet” for a large number of people, has days when it’s unreachable. When we examine these outages, we often find issues at the core of the system that cause services to be unreachable. In the most recent case of Amazon’s cloud system, it was a typo in a script that executed faster than it could be stopped.

It could also be a failure of the system to anticipate increased loads when minor failures happen. If systems aren’t built to take on additional load when the worst happens, you’re going to see bigger outages. That is a particular thorn in the side of large cloud providers like Amazon and Google. It’s also something that network architects need to be aware of when building redundant pathways to handle problems.

Take, for example, Continue reading

22% off 4 Person Premium 72 Hour Survival Kit Backpack – Deal Alert

If you like to be prepared for the unexpected, consider this 4-person premium survival kit for disasters and emergency preparedness, which contains enough food, water and emergency supplies to last a family of 4 for 72 hours. Over 245 pieces that meet or exceed Red Cross guidelines for preparedness are packaged neatly in packs. The included food and water are U.S. Coast Guard certified, and the kit contains a hard-shell Lifeline First Aid kit and LifeGear LED Flashlight. Its typical list price of $179.95 has been reduced 22% to $139.95. See this deal now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Astro is an AI-powered email client with big dreams

If there’s one source of technological frustration at work, it’s email. Getting a job done often still relies on sending chains of messages back and forth to the extent that it would be nice to have an assistant to help deal with it all.That’s the idea behind Astro, a new app that applies artificial intelligence to email in an attempt to make life easier for its users. Its marquee feature is Astrobot, a chatbot powered by machine learning that’s designed to keep users abreast of what’s important in their inbox.For example, Astrobot will read through users’ emails and notify them when they’ve been asked important questions. It can also be used to unsubscribe from emails, clean out a user’s inbox and more. That functionality sits on top of a solid, modern email client, which entered public beta on Mac and iOS Thursday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IBM technology moves even closer to human speech recognition parity

IBM this week said its speech recognition system set an industry record of 5.5% word error rate, a percentage that lets a computer understand human conversation almost as well as the average person does.According to IBM human parity was considered a 5.9% word error rate but IBM who partnered with Appen, a speech and technology service provider, reassessed the industry benchmark and determined that human parity is lower than what anyone has yet achieved: 5.1%.+More on Network World: Gartner: Artificial intelligence, algorithms and smart software at the heart of big network changes+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IBM technology moves even closer to human speech recognition parity

IBM this week said its speech recognition system set an industry record of 5.5% word error rate, a percentage that lets a computer understand human conversation almost as well as the average person does.According to IBM human parity was considered a 5.9% word error rate but IBM who partnered with Appen, a speech and technology service provider, reassessed the industry benchmark and determined that human parity is lower than what anyone has yet achieved: 5.1%.+More on Network World: Gartner: Artificial intelligence, algorithms and smart software at the heart of big network changes+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IBM technology moves even closer to human speech recognition parity

IBM this week said its speech recognition system set an industry record of 5.5% word error rate, a percentage that lets a computer understand human conversation almost as well as the average person does.According to IBM human parity was considered a 5.9% word error rate but IBM who partnered with Appen, a speech and technology service provider, reassessed the industry benchmark and determined that human parity is lower than what anyone has yet achieved: 5.1%.+More on Network World: Gartner: Artificial intelligence, algorithms and smart software at the heart of big network changes+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Recent Amazon outage highlights need for cloud automation

As most internet users are aware, last week Amazon faced one of its largest service outages since the launch of Amazon Web Services (AWS). The list of disrupted businesses read like a dire who's who of the internet, from Netflix to Pinterest to Airbnb. The cause of the AWS S3 outage appears to be a fat-finger typo by an authorized Amazon system administrator who was troubleshooting an unrelated problem.It happens, and it happens often.According to research from Ponemon Institute in 2016, at least 22 percent of data center outages each year are caused by human error. Outages have far-ranging impacts, from business disruption and lost revenue, to end user productivity. The average cost of an outage has increased by 38 percent since 2010 from $505,502 to $740,357 in 2016.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Review: QNAP TVS-882T NAS piles on the features

We’ve seen a steady flow of multifunction NAS boxes over the years. What began as relatively straightforward uses of Linux software RAID and mildly customized hardware has blossomed into a crop of multifaceted appliances that sport a full-on rampage of capabilities. In some cases, the NAS functionality may be one of the more minor considerations. QNAP’s TVS-882T is a prime example of this new class of NAS.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Review: QNAP TVS-882T NAS piles on the features

We’ve seen a steady flow of multifunction NAS boxes over the years. What began as relatively straightforward uses of Linux software RAID and mildly customized hardware has blossomed into a crop of multifaceted appliances that sport a full-on rampage of capabilities. In some cases, the NAS functionality may be one of the more minor considerations. QNAP’s TVS-882T is a prime example of this new class of NAS.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Google machine learning gains Kaggle and more

Google has already carved out a niche for itself in machine learning with projects like TensorFlow and Google Brain. Now, it's adding data science provider Kaggle, which runs contests related to machine learning and provides services for data discovery and analysis, to the fold. The company also is moving ahead with other machine learning projects, including an API providing intelligence for video.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Profiling 10 types of hackers

Different shapes and sizesImage by ThinkstockHackers, like the attacks they perpetrate, come in many forms, with motivations that range from monetary to political to ethical. Understanding the different types of hackers that exist and what motivates them can help you to identify the attackers you are most susceptible to and properly defend yourself and your organization against cyberattacks. Travis Farral, director of security strategy at Anomali, outlines the top 10 types of hackers you should have on your radar.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Profiling 10 types of hackers

Different shapes and sizesImage by ThinkstockHackers, like the attacks they perpetrate, come in many forms, with motivations that range from monetary to political to ethical. Understanding the different types of hackers that exist and what motivates them can help you to identify the attackers you are most susceptible to and properly defend yourself and your organization against cyberattacks. Travis Farral, director of security strategy at Anomali, outlines the top 10 types of hackers you should have on your radar.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Bots: Biggest player on the cybercrime block

In the world of cybercrime, ransomware and DDoS attacks had the highest profile by far during the past year. There was an entire day devoted to a ransomware “summit” at the recent RSA conference in San Francisco.But when it comes to money being lost (and made), bot fraud is king – by a lot.Most estimates of losses in the US from ransomware during 2016 were in the $1 billion range. By contrast, a study published in January 2016 by White Ops and the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) titled “Bot Baseline: Fraud in Digital Advertising,” estimated global losses in 2016 would be $7.2 billion.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Bots: Biggest player on the cybercrime block

In the world of cybercrime, ransomware and DDoS attacks had the highest profile by far during the past year. There was an entire day devoted to a ransomware “summit” at the recent RSA conference in San Francisco.But when it comes to money being lost (and made), bot fraud is king – by a lot.Most estimates of losses in the US from ransomware during 2016 were in the $1 billion range. By contrast, a study published in January 2016 by White Ops and the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) titled “Bot Baseline: Fraud in Digital Advertising,” estimated global losses in 2016 would be $7.2 billion.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Darktrace finds more attacks, cuts response time, saves money for Blackhawk Network

Blackhawk Network, a $1.9 billion multinational in the prepaid-card industry, was undergoing a consolidation of its security architecture in an effort to give better visibility into threats as they unfolded and that would also adapt to the threat environment as attackers changed their strategies. That included hiring a new head of cyber defense, Vari Bindra, in December of 2015, who wanted to create a central security operations center and consolidate the company’s varied data centers down to just two. As he set out on that mission, he came across the Enterprise Immune System made by Darktrace that uses machine learning to detect threats, including those it has never seen before.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here