Fighting ransomware: A fresh look at Windows Server approaches

Ransomware is evil, and it continues to prey upon thousands of businesses every year. Most infections are fairly quiet affairs: A small business gets infected, almost always by some employee opening an email attachment he or she mistakes as legitimate but that really contains the payload of a virus. Then several undetected hours later, all of the business' files -- at least those the employee had access to, which in a lot of businesses without good security and permissions policies is all of the files -- are encrypted, and demands for payment of a ransom in Bitcoin are made in exchange for the decryption key.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Fighting ransomware: A fresh look at Windows Server approaches

Ransomware is evil, and it continues to prey upon thousands of businesses every year. Most infections are fairly quiet affairs: A small business gets infected, almost always by some employee opening an email attachment he or she mistakes as legitimate but that really contains the payload of a virus. Then several undetected hours later, all of the business' files -- at least those the employee had access to, which in a lot of businesses without good security and permissions policies is all of the files -- are encrypted, and demands for payment of a ransom in Bitcoin are made in exchange for the decryption key.Of course, secure email use and employee behavior is a problem in businesses of all sizes, and there have been some high-profile ransomware infections. Most recently in the news was the attack on the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA), or Muni as it is known by Bay Area residents. Muni had to give free trips to all comers over the Thanksgiving weekend while it worked to restore access to its machines. The hacker who infected the utility also claims to have access to 30GB of stolen Muni data; the utility disputes this claim, Continue reading

Fighting ransomware: A fresh look at Windows Server approaches

Ransomware is evil, and it continues to prey upon thousands of businesses every year. Most infections are fairly quiet affairs: A small business gets infected, almost always by some employee opening an email attachment he or she mistakes as legitimate but that really contains the payload of a virus. Then several undetected hours later, all of the business' files -- at least those the employee had access to, which in a lot of businesses without good security and permissions policies is all of the files -- are encrypted, and demands for payment of a ransom in Bitcoin are made in exchange for the decryption key.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

What the rise of social media hacking means for your business

A product marketing manager at your company just posted a photo on LinkedIn. The problem? In the background of the image, there’s a Post-It note that contains his network passwords. You can barely see it, but using artificial intelligence algorithms, hackers can scan for the publicly available image, determine there are network passwords, and use them for data theft.According to data security expert David Maynor, this is not rocket science. In fact, the AI program is easier to use than a search engine. “The AI can identify objects in an image and the environment of the photo, guess at a description of the image contents as well as your likely age, gender, facial expression, and more,” says Maynor. “And these tools are becoming increasingly powerful with every image they scan, learning and becoming more accurate.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How to conquer a CRM monster

Richard Bexon has a succinct way to describe the previous CRM software used by the NAMU Travel Group: "a monster.""We had what I suppose you could call a legacy system here," says Bexon, COO of NAMU, a network of luxury travel agencies. Over the eight years that they used the system, too many people had their fingers into the code, and the monster didn't have a manual in case one of those fingers broke the entire system.That could be why, when in 2015, NAMU decided to scrap it and instead start using a cloud-basedCRM application from Bpm'online, the results were off the charts: 271 percent ROI, payback in four months and an annual average benefit of $271,767, according to Bexon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How Apple and Google approach enterprise apps

Apple and Google both try to woo enterprise customers with unique strategies for business app development that mirror their respective visions. And as might be expected, each company elevates its strengths in enterprise and downplays points of weakness, according to IT leaders who spoke to CIO.com.Google cultivates a large group of partners to help organizations integrate Google apps with business processes, and it recently released a self-service tool, called App Maker, that's designed to speed up development. Meanwhile, Apple forged partnerships with a select group of enterprise heavyweights to build key business features into the core of iOS. It also made deals with other companies that work directly with customers to guide their businesses through the transition to mobile. Both approaches bring different enterprise appeals.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Trump effect on cybersecurity: Tough to tell

Donald Trump’s effect on cybersecurity after he’s sworn in as president next month will likely be toward military uses of cyber weapons and stronger tools for law enforcement to crack encryption, but the impact is hard to predict due to the vagueness of his proposals so far.The most detailed Trump cyber plan is just 175 words long and includes some initiatives that sound like what’s already in place.On the campaign trail and during debates he occasionally hit the topic, but again with little detail and perhaps little understanding of how the internet works. For example, he called for Microsoft founder Bill Gates to find a way to shut off parts of the internet to ISIS as a way to halt its recruitment efforts.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Trump effect on cybersecurity: Tough to tell

Donald Trump’s effect on cybersecurity after he’s sworn in as president next month will likely be toward military uses of cyber weapons and stronger tools for law enforcement to crack encryption, but the impact is hard to predict due to the vagueness of his proposals so far.The most detailed Trump cyber plan is just 175 words long and includes some initiatives that sound like what’s already in place.On the campaign trail and during debates he occasionally hit the topic, but again with little detail and perhaps little understanding of how the internet works. For example, he called for Microsoft founder Bill Gates to find a way to shut off parts of the internet to ISIS as a way to halt its recruitment efforts.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: Hyper Moore’s Law

Over the last year in particular, we have documented the merger between high performance computing and deep learning and its various shared hardware and software ties. This next year promises far more on both horizons and while GPU maker Nvidia might not have seen it coming to this extent when it was outfitting its first GPUs on the former top “Titan” supercomputer, the company sensed a mesh on the horizon when the first hyperscale deep learning shops were deploying CUDA and GPUs to train neural networks. —The Next Platform

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Ixia’s GUI faster, more accurate than Gigamon’s command line or Flowmap

The IT infrastructure that powers an organization's business strategy has become increasingly more dynamic and distributed. The introduction of new technologies to increase IT agility has made it significantly more difficult to manage and secure the infrastructure using traditional tools.That challenge has given rise to several new specialized tools that network managers have had to figure out how to integrate into their environment. The explosion of new security and management applications has something called “tool sprawl” where the number of tools has become unmanageable.Trying to connect every tool to every network device is extremely complicated and inefficient. The desire to simplify things has created strong demand for network packet brokers (NPBs). If you’re not familiar with the technology, it sits between the network infrastructure and a tool layer and performs a number of tasks to make tools more efficient and easier to deploy.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Ixia’s GUI faster, more accurate than Gigamon’s command line or Flowmap

The IT infrastructure that powers an organizations business strategy has become increasingly more dynamic and distributed. The introduction of new technologies to increase IT agility has made it significantly more difficult to manage and secure the infrastructure using traditional tools.That challenge has given rise to several new specialized tools that network managers have had to figure out how to integrated into their environment. The explosion of new security and management applications has something called “tool sprawl” where the number of tools has become unmanageable.Trying to connect every tool to every network device is extremely complicated and inefficient. The desire to simplify things has created strong demand for network packet brokers (NPBs). If you’re not familiar with the technology, it sits between the network infrastructure and a tool layer and performs a number of tasks to make tools more efficient and easier to deploy.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

20% off Hamilton Beach Breakfast Sandwich Maker – Deal Alert

This kitchen gadget from Hamilton Beach is all about making a fresh breakfast sandwich that you can grab and go. Just choose your bread and layer on the fixings: egg, cheese, precooked meat, or other ingredients of your choice. In five minutes or less, your perfectly assembled breakfast sandwich is ready to eat. All removable parts simply go in the dishwasher for an easy cleanup. The sandwich maker averages 4.5 out of 5 stars from over 3,000 people on Amazon (read reviews). It's typical list price of $30 has been reduced to $24, saving you 20%. See it on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Prepare for a spike in SSD prices

SSD prices have been in a freefall for the last few years thanks to increased output by NAND flash memory makers and those vendors converting their production to 3D NAND, which offers increased density at a lower cost. That's why you are seeing so many 1TB SSDs on the market these days, but it's also why prices are going up.However, going into the busy fourth quarter, the industry has been hit with a double-whammy of lower production and increased demand, and at that point it's basic economics of supply and demand. The result could be a spike in prices in the coming months.A report in China's CTimes states that revenue is up considerably for NAND flash makers such as Samsung, SK Hynix and Toshiba because prices have risen recently. Part of the reason is the increasing demand of 3D NAND flash, which stacks the memory cells in layers to achieve greater density in a smaller space. Vendors are converting their fabrication plants to handle 3D, but it takes time and money. Lots of money. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

OpenVPN will be audited for security flaws

The next major version of OpenVPN, one of the most widely used virtual private networking technologies, will be audited by a well-known cryptography expert.The audit will be fully funded by Private Internet Access (PIA), a popular VPN service provider that uses OpenVPN for its business. The company has contracted cryptography engineering expert Matthew Green, a professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, to carry out the evaluation with the goal of identifying any vulnerabilities in the code.Green has experience in auditing encryption software, being one of the founders of the Open Crypto Audit Project, which organized a detailed analysis of TrueCrypt, a popular open-source full-disk encryption application. TrueCrypt has been abandoned by its original developers in 2014, but its code has since been forked and improved as part of other projects.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

OpenVPN will be audited for security flaws

The next major version of OpenVPN, one of the most widely used virtual private networking technologies, will be audited by a well-known cryptography expert.The audit will be fully funded by Private Internet Access (PIA), a popular VPN service provider that uses OpenVPN for its business. The company has contracted cryptography engineering expert Matthew Green, a professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, to carry out the evaluation with the goal of identifying any vulnerabilities in the code.Green has experience in auditing encryption software, being one of the founders of the Open Crypto Audit Project, which organized a detailed analysis of TrueCrypt, a popular open-source full-disk encryption application. TrueCrypt has been abandoned by its original developers in 2014, but its code has since been forked and improved as part of other projects.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

AMD strengthens gaming and VR on Linux with graphics improvements

Windows is the indisputable platform of choice for gaming and VR, but Linux is catching up fast as graphics companies ramp up driver and hardware support for the OS.AMD is showing more love for Linux than ever before. The company on Thursday announced some hardware and driver updates that will strengthen gaming and VR on the OS.The biggest news is AMD's support for FreeSync on Linux PCs. FreeSync can improve the rendition of games and high-definition video by allowing GPUs to communicate directly with displays, reducing image stutter and lag time. Images are drawn up on the screen while they are being rendered in GPUs.This is the first time AMD is bringing FreeSync support to Linux. It was earlier available only on Windows PCs.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Moore’s Law lives on with speedy 7-nm mobile chips coming in 2018

How do mobile devices keep get faster, thinner, and more power efficient? It's thanks to the quick advances in chip manufacturing, which help churn out smaller chips packed with new features.The next round of premium smartphones early next year could feature chips like Qualcomm's Snapdragon 835, made using the latest, 10-nanometer process.Continuing with the famous Moore's Law observation, it's likely that two years after that, smartphones will get even faster and smaller chips will be made using a 7-nanometer process.On Monday, ARM, with its chip designs in most smartphones, said it is working with prominent chip manufacturer TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.) to make 7-nm chips. ARM shared intellectual property for its 7-nm designs, allowing chips to be designed for manufacturing in TSMC's factories.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Need for Speed—Coming Changes in oVirt’s CI Standards

oVirt's CI standards have been in use for a while in most oVirt projects and have largely been a success.

These standards have put the control of what the CI system does in the hands of the developers without them having to learn about Jenkins and the tooling around it. The way the standards were implemented, with the mock_runner.sh script, also enabled developers to easily emulate the CI system on their own machines to debug and diagnose issues.

From the oVirt infra team's point of view, the CI standards have removed the need to constantly maintain build dependencies on the Jenkins slaves and also eliminated most of the situations where jobs running on the same slave influenced one another.

The CI standards implementation we have has one shortcoming, it is not particularity fast.

We started seriously looking at this after one of the VDSM maintainers reported that the check_patch jobs for his project are running for far too long a time. In the end it turned out that a major reason for the delay was in the way the tests themselves worked, but still, we looked at mock_runner.sh and managed to speed it up quite a Continue reading

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