IDG Contributor Network: Tech crime as a service escalates

Criminals are increasingly offered crime as a service (CaaS) and are using sharing-economy ride-sharing and accommodation services, too, a major law enforcement agency says.Europol, the European Union’s policing office says tech-oriented CaaS is being offered to swathes of the underbelly of Europe. Criminals gain an advantage because they can perform crimes better and more efficiently, and they can work at scales greater than their existing technical proficiency.+ Also on Network World: Anonymous hacker causes dark web to shrink by as much as 85% + An estimated 5,000 internationally operating crime gangs are currently being investigated in the trading bloc, according to Europol.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Tech crime as a service escalates

Criminals are increasingly offered crime as a service (CaaS) and are using sharing-economy ride-sharing and accommodation services, too, a major law enforcement agency says.Europol, the European Union’s policing office says tech-oriented CaaS is being offered to swathes of the underbelly of Europe. Criminals gain an advantage because they can perform crimes better and more efficiently, and they can work at scales greater than their existing technical proficiency.+ Also on Network World: Anonymous hacker causes dark web to shrink by as much as 85% + An estimated 5,000 internationally operating crime gangs are currently being investigated in the trading bloc, according to Europol.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Anonymous hacker causes dark web to shrink by as much as 85%

An attack by Anonymous, the shadowy hacker crew that seems to alternate between good guys and bad guys depending on the issue, help cut the dark web down by as much as 85 percent, according to a new report. Anonymous turned its sights on Freedom Hosting II, a hosting service for Tor-based sites, at the start of February. Freedom Hosting II (FHII) was the host to over 10,000 dark web sites, many of them hosting images of sexually abused children. It was named after another host, Freedom Hosting, that Anonymous took down in 2011. An Anonymous hacker went after the service after they discovered the provider knew what was going on and did nothing to stop it. The hacker who did it told Vice it was his first hack, and he didn't intend to take down the site—just look through it. When he found large amounts of child porn, he deduced the site knew what was going on and he decided to take down the hosts. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Anonymous hacker causes dark web to shrink by as much as 85%

An attack by Anonymous, the shadowy hacker crew that seems to alternate between good guys and bad guys depending on the issue, help cut the dark web down by as much as 85 percent, according to a new report. Anonymous turned its sights on Freedom Hosting II, a hosting service for Tor-based sites, at the start of February. Freedom Hosting II (FHII) was the host to over 10,000 dark web sites, many of them hosting images of sexually abused children. It was named after another host, Freedom Hosting, that Anonymous took down in 2011. An Anonymous hacker went after the service after they discovered the provider knew what was going on and did nothing to stop it. The hacker who did it told Vice it was his first hack, and he didn't intend to take down the site—just look through it. When he found large amounts of child porn, he deduced the site knew what was going on and he decided to take down the hosts. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google Courts Enterprise For Cloud Platform

Google has always been a company that thinks big. After all, its mission since Day One was to organize and make accessible all of the world’s information.

The company is going to have to take that same expansive and aggressive approach as it looks to grow in a highly competitive public cloud market that includes a dominant player (Amazon Web Services) and a host of other vendors, including Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle. That’s going to mean expanding its customer base beyond smaller businesses and startups and convincing larger enterprises to store their data and run their workloads on its ever-growing

Google Courts Enterprise For Cloud Platform was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

IBM pledge: Not only does Notes/Domino live, there’s no end in sight

Having begun my time here covering the late 1990s email/collaboration battles between Lotus Notes/Domino, Microsoft Outlook/Exchange, and, yes, Novell GroupWise, it’s interesting to see IBM, which bought Lotus in 1995, pledging to support Domino and Notes for, well, an open-ended long period of time.Not surprising, though.    In a blog post published yesterday, Ed Brill, vice president of product management and design for IBM Collaboration Solutions, laid out the company’s current thinking: “Notes/Domino 9.0 shipped in 2013, and IBM’s normal five-year support model meant that mainstream support could have ended in 2018. However, we know how important these products are to your business, and we are continuing to invest in new functionality. For IBM Notes/Domino 9.0, we have announced that product support will be extended through at least 2021, and extended support through at least 2024. There is no end of life planned for Notes and Domino, and we will continue to update the timeline for support as appropriate based on future releases and market requirements.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IBM pledge: Not only does Notes/Domino live, there’s no end in sight

Having begun my time here covering the late 1990s email/collaboration battles between Lotus Notes/Domino, Microsoft Outlook/Exchange, and, yes, Novell GroupWise, it’s interesting to see IBM, which bought Lotus in 1995, pledging to support Domino and Notes for, well, an open-ended long period of time.Not surprising, though.    In a blog post published yesterday, Ed Brill, vice president of product management and design for IBM Collaboration Solutions, laid out the company’s current thinking: “Notes/Domino 9.0 shipped in 2013, and IBM’s normal five-year support model meant that mainstream support could have ended in 2018. However, we know how important these products are to your business, and we are continuing to invest in new functionality. For IBM Notes/Domino 9.0, we have announced that product support will be extended through at least 2021, and extended support through at least 2024. There is no end of life planned for Notes and Domino, and we will continue to update the timeline for support as appropriate based on future releases and market requirements.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For March 10th, 2017

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

 

Darknet is 4x more resilient than the Internet. An apt metaphor? (URV)

If you like this sort of Stuff then please support me on Patreon.

  • > 5 9s: Spanner availability; 200MB: random access from DNA storage; 215 Pbytes/gram: DNA storage; 287,024: Google commits to open source; 42: hours of audio gold; 33: minutes to get back into programming after interruption; 12K: Chinese startups started per day; 35 million: tons of good shipped under Golden Gate Bridge; 209: mph all-electric Corvette; 500: Disney projects in the cloud; 40%: rise in CO2; 

  • Quoteable Quotes:
    • Marc Rogers: Anything man can make man can break
    • @manupaisable: 10% of machines @spotify rebooted every hour because of defunct #docker - war stories by @i_maravic @qconlondon
    • @robertcottrell: “the energy cost of each bitcoin transaction is enough to power 3.17 US households for a day”
    • Eric Schmidt: We put $30 billion into this platform. I know this because I approved it. Why replicate that?
    • dim: It uses p30 technology. Just basic things, gliders and lightweight spaceships. Basically, the design goes top-down: At the very top, there's the Continue reading

The First DockerCon with Windows Containers

DockerCon 2017 is only a few weeks away, and the schedule is available now on the DockerCon Agenda Builder. This will be the first DockerCon since Windows Server 2016 was released, bringing native support for Docker containers to Windows. There will be plenty of content for Windows developers and admins – here are some of the standouts.

Windows and .NET Sessions

On the main stages, there will be hours of content dedicated to Windows and .NET.

Docker for .NET Developers

Michele Bustamante, CIO of Solliance, looks at what Docker can do for .NET applications. Michele will start with a full .NET Framework application and show how to run it in a Windows container. Then Michele will move on to .NET Core and show how the new cross-platform framework can build apps which run in Windows or Linux containers, making for true portability throughout the data center and the cloud.

Escape From Your VMs with Image2Docker

I’ll be presenting with Docker Captain Jeff Nickoloff, covering the Image2Docker tool, which automates app migration from virtual machines to Docker images. There’s Image2Docker for Linux, and Image2Docker for Windows. We’ll demonstrate both, porting an app with a Linux front end and a Continue reading

Google offers new ‘Always Free’ cloud tier to attract users

Google is letting its customers get a taste of its cloud for free, without a time-limited trial. The company quietly launched a new “Always Free” tier on Thursday that lets people use small amounts of its public cloud services without charge, beyond the company’s limited-time trial.The tier includes — among other things — 1 f1-micro compute instance, 5 GB per month of Regional Storage and 60 minutes per month of access to the Cloud Speech API. Using the free tier requires users to provide a credit card that Google can automatically bill for any use over the limits.In addition, the cloud provider expanded its free trial so that users get $300 in credits that they can use for up to 12 months. Google will halt users’ workloads if they eat up all of the credits before the end of 12 months.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Well-funded doesn’t mean well-secured

Three of my four children are of school-going age. When they arrive home in the afternoon, the youngest usually makes a dash for the games console, the middle one is tired to the point of being miserable, and the eldest announces herself loudly, wanting to share every detail from her day with anyone who will lend an ear. The only thing they all seem to have in common is that they are hungry and want dinner.RELATED: What IT admins love/hate about 8 top network monitoring tools While I'm the type of parent who makes the children fish-finger sandwiches and declares them fed, my wife prefers to serve a lavish five-course meal. In the past, she would often customize meals to meet each child's individual taste and preference. After a while, I had to put a stop to it.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IBM’s position on Security Analytics and Operations (SOAPA)

Just what is a security operations and analytics platform architecture (SOAPA) anyway? In the past, most enterprises anchored their security analytics and operations with one common tool: Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems. Now, SIEM still plays a major role here, but many organizations are supplementing their security operations centers (SOCs) with additional data, analytics tools and operations management systems. We now see SOCs as a nexus for things like endpoint detection and response tools (EDR), network analytics, threat intelligence platforms (TIPs) and incident response platforms (IRPs). In aggregate, security operations is changing, driven by a wave of new types of sensors, diverse data sources, analytics tools and operational requirements. And these changes are driving an evolution from monolithic security technologies to a more comprehensive event-driven software architecture along the lines of SOA 2.0, where disparate security technologies connected with middleware for things like data exchange, message queueing and business-level trigger conditions. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here