Salesforce now accessible from Outlook

The lovefest between Microsoft and Salesforce.com continues, this time with a new connector for Outlook that links Salesforce connections to the Outlook contact and calendar manager.Microsoft made the announcement via the Office blog, noting that sales reps rely on two primary tools Customer Relational Management (CRM) and email. "Yet, CRM and email have traditionally been disconnected tools, and sales reps have had to spend valuable time toggling between these apps," the company noted.Manually adding contacts or calendar events from email to CRM or having to move back and forth between the two waste a lot of time.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Need to integrate a few apps to solve a business problem? There is recipe for that

 Vijay Tella has been neck deep in application integration technology for years, first as the SVP of engineering at TIBCO, the company that introduced the information bus, and then at Oracle, where he helped launch the company’s booming middleware platform. Today Tella is founder and CEO of Workato, a company that is putting integration tools directly into the hands of app users.  Network World Editor in Chief John Dix recently caught up with Tella to learn more about how he is trying to democratize the world of app integration. Workato founder and CEO Vijay TellaTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Avaya’s edge network adapter is an IoT onramp

Avaya today released the 1.0 version of its Open Networking Adapter (ONA), a device the size of a deck of cards that plugs into any Ethernet-enabled machine and automatically connects it to a broader network while enforcing strict security policies on network traffic.Avaya’s ONA is a network edge device meant to usher in an era of connected devices to create an internet of things environment. The first use case Avaya is targeting with ONA is the health care industry with a custom software GUI for controlling the ONAs.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Top 5 Storage vendors shows a massive shift to the cloud | Why Brexit could cause major data privacy headaches for US companies + ONA is a small proxy device with two Ethernet inputs on each end. The aluminum casing holds a dual core CPU running Open vSwitch. It’s equipped with two-factor authentication so that when the device is on boarded for the first time there’s a key that’s shared between the ONA and a software defined networking (SDN) controller to verify it. The device doesn't store any data, so if it were stolen, it would be a brick without the 2FA connection. “It Continue reading

Wave 2 Wi-Fi may be a sleeper, but it’s great for some

As the Wi-Fi Alliance starts certifying the latest gigabit-speed products to work together, users may not get as excited as they did for some earlier standards.On Wednesday, the industry group launched its certification program for IEEE 802.11ac Wave 2, a technology that’s been on the market for more than a year.Wave 2 can deliver up to 6.8Gbps (bits per second) and lets an access point talk to more than one device at a time. But due to issues like timing and wired backhaul, Wave 2 adoption has been relatively slow.The new technology builds on the first wave of 802.11ac, which started to emerge in 2013 and now makes up nearly three-quarters of the Wi-Fi market in terms of revenue. The new wave adds a few features with real advantages, at least for some users.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Wave 2 Wi-Fi may be a sleeper, but it’s great for some

As the Wi-Fi Alliance starts certifying the latest gigabit-speed products to work together, users may not get as excited as they did for some earlier standards.On Wednesday, the industry group launched its certification program for IEEE 802.11ac Wave 2, a technology that’s been on the market for more than a year.Wave 2 can deliver up to 6.8Gbps (bits per second) and lets an access point talk to more than one device at a time. But due to issues like timing and wired backhaul, Wave 2 adoption has been relatively slow.The new technology builds on the first wave of 802.11ac, which started to emerge in 2013 and now makes up nearly three-quarters of the Wi-Fi market in terms of revenue. The new wave adds a few features with real advantages, at least for some users.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

5 hidden iOS 10 features that are instant game changers

Apple’s latest version of iOS is only available for developers right now, but we’ve already found plenty of reasons to get excited about iOS 10. The big features in iOS 10 are impressive: Photos has facial recognition, Messages gets an emoji overload, and Siri will be able to hail you a Lyft.MORE: 10 mobile startups to watch But iOS 10 is exciting not only because of the major makeovers. Apple’s upcoming mobile OS also has a lot of small, dare-we-say hidden surprises, too. Here are five of the best-kept secret features coming to your iPhone this fall.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Apple sued for $10 billion for ‘stealing’ his iPhone invention from 1992

A Florida man has accused Apple of infringing a 1992 patent on an “electronic reading device” that, in our view, looks nothing like the iPhone. He’s asking for $10 billion in damages. No, this isn’t an article from The Onion. It’s real life.MORE: 10 mobile startups to watch Thomas Ross included drawings of his device, a boxy rectangle with a screen and physical keyboard, in his court filing in Florida Southern District Court, which was obtained by The Telegraph. As you may recall, the original iPhone was the first smartphone without a physical keyboard. No matter, Ross says he was the first person “to have created a novel combination of media and communication tools.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Why CIOs should care about click fraud

The ancient Chinese military strategy guide The Art of War says that if you want to have a chance of prevailing in battle, you need to know your enemy. It’s good advice for the battlefield, and it's also good advice if you want to beat hackers in their constant attempts to take over your network.But in order to know these hackers you need to understand their motivations, and in many cases those motivations may not be what you expect. That's according to Dan Kaminski, the security expert who discovered a fundamental flaw in the Internet's Domain Name System (DNS) protocol in 2008 and who discovered flaws in the widely used SSL protocol a year later. Kaminski is a frequent speaker at Black Hat Briefings, and now works as Chief Scientist at White Ops, a security firm specializing in detecting bot and malware fraud.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Why CIOs should care about click fraud

The ancient Chinese military strategy guide The Art of War says that if you want to have a chance of prevailing in battle, you need to know your enemy. It’s good advice for the battlefield, and it's also good advice if you want to beat hackers in their constant attempts to take over your network.But in order to know these hackers you need to understand their motivations, and in many cases those motivations may not be what you expect. That's according to Dan Kaminski, the security expert who discovered a fundamental flaw in the Internet's Domain Name System (DNS) protocol in 2008 and who discovered flaws in the widely used SSL protocol a year later. Kaminski is a frequent speaker at Black Hat Briefings, and now works as Chief Scientist at White Ops, a security firm specializing in detecting bot and malware fraud.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Rio’s airport preps for Olympics with new Wi-Fi network and mobile app

The 2016 Olympics Games are already off to a rough start -- and we haven’t even seen opening ceremonies yet. Worries about the Zika virus, polluted competition waters, doping scandals and Rio’s precarious finances could mean a complicated time in August for the Summer Games.[ Related: Jumping hurdles on the road to Rio 2016: AOC's head of IT Anthony Soulsby ]One thing thing poised to go well: communication at Rio de Janeiro–Galeão International Airport, Brazil’s biggest airport and how most people will get into the country for the games.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Rio’s airport preps for Olympics with new Wi-Fi network and mobile app

The 2016 Olympics Games are already off to a rough start -- and we haven’t even seen opening ceremonies yet. Worries about the Zika virus, polluted competition waters, doping scandals and Rio’s precarious finances could mean a complicated time in August for the Summer Games.[ Related: Jumping hurdles on the road to Rio 2016: AOC's head of IT Anthony Soulsby ]One thing thing poised to go well: communication at Rio de Janeiro–Galeão International Airport, Brazil’s biggest airport and how most people will get into the country for the games.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Lizard Brain of LizardStresser

LizardStresser is a botnet originally written by the infamous Lizard Squad DDoS group. The source code was released publicly in early 2015, an act that encouraged aspiring DDoS actors to build their own botnets. Arbor Networks’ ASERT group has been tracking LizardStresser activity and observed two disturbing trends: The number of unique LizardStresser command-and-control (C2) […]

Researchers dismantle decade-long Iranian cyberespionage operation

The infrastructure used by an Iranian cyberespionage group to control infected computers around the world has been hijacked by security researchers.Researchers from Palo Alto Networks came across the group's activities earlier this year, but found evidence that it has been operating since at least 2007. Its main tool is a custom malware program dubbed Infy, which was repeatedly improved over the years.The researchers have worked with domain registrars to seize the domains used by the attackers to control Infy-infected computers and to direct victims' traffic to a sinkhole server -- a server the researchers controlled.Control of the server was then transferred to the Shadowserver Foundation, an industry group that tracks botnets and works with ISPs and other parties to notify victims.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Researchers dismantle decade-long Iranian cyberespionage operation

The infrastructure used by an Iranian cyberespionage group to control infected computers around the world has been hijacked by security researchers.Researchers from Palo Alto Networks came across the group's activities earlier this year, but found evidence that it has been operating since at least 2007. Its main tool is a custom malware program dubbed Infy, which was repeatedly improved over the years.The researchers have worked with domain registrars to seize the domains used by the attackers to control Infy-infected computers and to direct victims' traffic to a sinkhole server -- a server the researchers controlled.Control of the server was then transferred to the Shadowserver Foundation, an industry group that tracks botnets and works with ISPs and other parties to notify victims.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: The allure of free storage with FormationOne

Interesting news from Formation Data Systems, an enterprise storage vendor, around the launch of a new technology that should help IT departments eke out greater efficiencies from their existing storage assets. The new feature allows enterprises to recapture unused storage in their virtualized server environments.Fetchingly called Virtual Storage Recapture (VSR) this technology allows Formation customers to extend their FormationOne deployments beyond standard software-defined storage implementations to be able to utilize storage capacity that is “stranded” within most virtual servers and hypervisor clusters. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Split Tunnel Insecurities

I really dislike corporate VPNs that don’t allow split tunneling—disconnecting from the VPN to print on a local printer, or access a local network attached drive, puts a real crimp in productivity. In the case of services reachable over both IPv6 and IPv4, particularly if the IPv6 path is preferred, split tunneling can be quite dangerous, as explained in RFC7359. Let’s use the network below to illustrate.

rfc7359-illustrated

In this network, host A is communicating with server B through a VPN, terminated by the VPN concentrator marked as “VPN.” Assume the host is reachable on both 192.0.2.1 and 2001:fb8:0:1::1. The host, the upstream router, the network in the cloud, and the server are all IPv6 reachable. When the host first connects, it will attempt both the IPv6 and IPv4 connections, and choose to use the IPv6 connection (this is what most current operating systems will do).

The problem is: the VPN connection doesn’t support IPv6 at all—it only supports IPv4. Because IPv6 is preferred, the traffic between the host and the server will take the local IPv6 connection, which is not encrypted—the blue dash/dot line—rather than the encrypted IPv4 tunnel—the red dashed line. The user, host, and Continue reading