Cisco unearths its inner startup culture via companywide innovation contest

For a giant 30-plus-year-old company, Cisco has a reputation for keeping things fresh via spin-ins, buyouts and venture investments. But late last year, the vendor launched the Innovate Everywhere Challenge just to make sure it wasn’t overlooking any great new ideas among its 74,000 employees. “We have phenomenal innovation programs for engineers, IT people, marketing people and sales, but what we’ve never really done is mix them up across functions and geographies,” says Cisco Director of Innovation Strategy & Programs Alex Goryachev, who counts Napster, Liquid Audio, IBM and Pfizer among his previous employers. “If you think about a true startup you have to have a great engineer, a great marketing/PR person, a business person, a finance person and a product person.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Know Your Virtual Workloads: Data Location & A Holistic View

Cost of a data breach: $4 million. Benefits of responding quickly: Priceless.

The bad news is that data breaches are becoming ever more common. The worse news is that the cost they represent for companies is going through the roof.Those are two conclusions from a study released Wednesday by IBM Security and the Ponemon Institute, which found that the average cost of a data breach has grown to US $4 million. That's a hefty jump compared with last year's $3.79 million, and it represents an increase of almost 30 percent since 2013."Data breaches are now a consistent 'cost of doing business' in the cybercrime era," said Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder of the Ponemon Institute, a research firm focused on security. "The evidence shows that this is a permanent cost organizations need to be prepared to deal with and incorporate in their data protection strategies.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cost of a data breach: $4 million. Benefits of responding quickly: Priceless.

The bad news is that data breaches are becoming ever more common. The worse news is that the cost they represent for companies is going through the roof.Those are two conclusions from a study released Wednesday by IBM Security and the Ponemon Institute, which found that the average cost of a data breach has grown to US $4 million. That's a hefty jump compared with last year's $3.79 million, and it represents an increase of almost 30 percent since 2013."Data breaches are now a consistent 'cost of doing business' in the cybercrime era," said Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder of the Ponemon Institute, a research firm focused on security. "The evidence shows that this is a permanent cost organizations need to be prepared to deal with and incorporate in their data protection strategies.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Flash Player zero-day exploit is being used in the wild by a cyberespionage group

Adobe Systems warned users Tuesday that an unpatched Flash Player vulnerability is currently being exploited in targeted attacks. The company expects to deliver a patch as soon as Thursday. The exploit was discovered by researchers from antivirus vendor Kaspersky Lab in attacks attributed to a cyberespionage group known in the security industry as ScarCruft. The group is relatively new, but is apparently quite resourceful, as this is possibly the second zero-day -- previously unknown and unpatched -- exploit that it used this year. The other exploit targeted a critical remote code execution vulnerability in Microsoft XML Core Services that was tracked as CVE-2016-0147 and was patched by Microsoft in April.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Flash Player zero-day exploit is being used in the wild by a cyberespionage group

Adobe Systems warned users Tuesday that an unpatched Flash Player vulnerability is currently being exploited in targeted attacks. The company expects to deliver a patch as soon as Thursday. The exploit was discovered by researchers from antivirus vendor Kaspersky Lab in attacks attributed to a cyberespionage group known in the security industry as ScarCruft. The group is relatively new, but is apparently quite resourceful, as this is possibly the second zero-day -- previously unknown and unpatched -- exploit that it used this year. The other exploit targeted a critical remote code execution vulnerability in Microsoft XML Core Services that was tracked as CVE-2016-0147 and was patched by Microsoft in April.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Directed ARP and ICMP Redirects

One of my readers sent me this question:

When I did my ***redacted*** I encountered a question about Directed ARP. The RFC (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1433) is in the "experimental" stage, and I found it really weird from ***** to include such a hidden gem in the ***redacted***.

Directed ARP is clearly one of those weird things that people were trying out in the early days of networking when packet forwarding and bandwidth were still expensive (read the RFC for more details), but I kept wondering “what exactly is going on when a host receives an ICMP redirect?” Time for a hands-on test.

Safari 10 to turn off Flash by default

Apple's Safari is driving another nail in the coffin of Adobe Flash by no longer telling websites that offer both Flash and HTML5 that the plug-in is installed on users' Macs.The Mac maker is planning similar measures with other plug-ins like Java, Silverlight and QuickTime. This move will force websites with both plug-in and HTML5-based media implementations to use their HTML5, it said.When Safari 10, the new version of its browser,  ships this fall, it will by default behave as though common legacy plug-ins on users’ Macs are not installed, wrote Apple software engineer Ricky Mondello in a post.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Safari 10 to turn off Flash by default

Apple's Safari is driving another nail in the coffin of Adobe Flash by no longer telling websites that offer both Flash and HTML5 that the plug-in is installed on users' Macs. The Mac maker is planning similar measures with other plug-ins like Java, Silverlight and QuickTime. This move will force websites with both plug-in and HTML5-based media implementations to use their HTML5, it said. When Safari 10, the new version of its browser,  ships this fall, it will by default behave as though common legacy plug-ins on users’ Macs are not installed, wrote Apple software engineer Ricky Mondello in a post.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

US company’s China employee allegedly stole code to help local government

The U.S. has charged a Chinese national, Xu Jiaqiang, with economic espionage and theft of the source code of a clustered file system belonging to his former U.S. employer, which he is alleged to have stolen for his own benefit and that of the National Health and Family Planning Commission in China.The charges against Xu highlight the intellectual property risks faced in other countries by development operations of U.S. companies, particularly in those countries the U.S. suspects could be involved in economic espionage.Xu, who was initially arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in December and was charged with one count of theft of trade secrets, is scheduled to be arraigned on a superseding indictment of charges of economic espionage on Thursday in a federal court in New York, the Department of Justice said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

US company’s China employee allegedly stole code to help local government

The U.S. has charged a Chinese national, Xu Jiaqiang, with economic espionage and theft of the source code of a clustered file system belonging to his former U.S. employer, which he is alleged to have stolen for his own benefit and that of the National Health and Family Planning Commission in China.The charges against Xu highlight the intellectual property risks faced in other countries by development operations of U.S. companies, particularly in those countries the U.S. suspects could be involved in economic espionage.Xu, who was initially arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in December and was charged with one count of theft of trade secrets, is scheduled to be arraigned on a superseding indictment of charges of economic espionage on Thursday in a federal court in New York, the Department of Justice said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Major Windows 10 update nears as Microsoft stops adding features

Microsoft is hurtling towards the consumer release of its big Windows 10 Anniversary Update with the latest beta build for its operating system that launched on Tuesday. The launch of build 14366 signals a temporary end to Microsoft releasing new features for Windows 10, according to a blog post by Dona Sarkar, the voice of the Windows Insider Program. The focus of this update is on a "Bug Bash" event this week that's supposed to help beta testers find bugs so Microsoft can fix them before broadly releasing its big Anniversary Update. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The future of Office may lie in ‘decomposable’ documents

Microsoft wants you to spend less time thinking about Office and more time getting things done.An executive who helped design one of Office's most iconic features outlined a plan for its future on Tuesday, one that calls for smarter software assisted by AI and "decomposable" documents that are easier to find."No one wants to necessarily learn about the ins and outs of the tool; they have something that they're trying to get done," said Julie Larson-Green, chief experience officer for Microsoft Office, when asked about the future of the software at a Bloomberg conference.Microsoft has already added AI-powered features to the latest versions of Office that help people find functions they're looking for, and more AI is coming. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Raspberry Pi maker gets bought for $867 million

A key manufacturer of the Raspberry Pi is being acquired for US$867 million, but the foundation that develops the ultra-cheap computers says it hopes that business will continue as usual.Premier Farnell of the U.K. has manufactured the Raspberry Pi under contract to the Raspberry Pi Foundation since the product first shipped about four years ago. The boards start for as low as $5, and more than 8 million have been sold. They're particularly popular among hobbyists, who use them to build cheap gaming consoles, laptops and smart glasses.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Raspberry Pi maker gets bought for $867 million

A key manufacturer of the Raspberry Pi is being acquired for $867 million, but the foundation that develops the ultra-cheap computers says it hopes that business will continue as usual.Premier Farnell of the U.K. has manufactured the Raspberry Pi under contract to the Raspberry Pi Foundation since the product first shipped about four years ago. The boards start for as low as $5, and more than 8 million have been sold. They're particularly popular among hobbyists, who use them to build cheap gaming consoles, laptops and smart glasses.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

VMware Acquires Virtual Network Manager Arkin Net

Gartner: Colin Powell says he used insecure email during State Department tenure; Oh and we should vote out Congress

National Harbor, Md. -- Former Secretary of State Colin Powell acknowledged using insecure email during his tenure at the State Department – but as a way to create more immediate communication among those within and outside the department.During his keynote address at Gartner Security and Risk Management Summit he told the 3,400 in attendance that he had two computers on his desk, one the official secure computer – “clunky and difficult to use” – and the other a laptop with a phone line and modem that he used exclusively for his AOL account.+More on Network World: Gartner: ‘Insider threat is alive and well on the dark Web’+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

47 must-see PC gaming gems revealed at E3 2016: Watch every trailer

PCs everywhere, out of sightE3 is a console show. It’s common knowledge. The big-name publishers trip over themselves to announce PlayStation and Xbox exclusivity deals during blockbuster “Day Zero” conferences, and Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft’s booths eat up mammoth chunks of the conference floor.But here’s the thing: While consoles get all the E3 hype, the vast majority of the games revealed at the show actually wind up on PCs as well, thanks to the inclusion of AMD hardware in every major next-gen console. Every time you hear the term “console exclusive” at E3—rather than PlayStation or Xbox exclusive, specifically—that means the game’s destined for computers, too. And this year there were a whole lot of “console exclusives,” not to mention a whole show devoted solely to PC gaming.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Ericsson will lay off 3,000 this summer, says Swedish newspaper

Ericsson is preparing to lay off between 3,000 and 4,000 staff this summer, according to Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet. Thousands more may have to go at the network equipment manufacturer as management look for additional cost savings of 10 billion Swedish kronor (US$1.2 billion), the newspaper said, citing anonymous sources. Ericsson had around 115,000 staff in April, 17,000 of them in Sweden A spokeswoman declined to discuss Tuesday's news report, saying the company does not comment on rumors and speculation. Ericsson is facing increasing competition from a more focused Nokia, which swallowed its Franco-American rival, Alcatel-Lucent, earlier this year, and especially from Chinese vendors such as Huawei Technologies or ZTE. It's a critical time for wireless infrastructure vendors and their carrier customers, as they taper off investment in fourth-generation networks in preparation for the next, still largely undefined, generation of technology.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Ericsson will lay off 3,000 this summer, says Swedish newspaper

Ericsson is preparing to lay off between 3,000 and 4,000 staff this summer, according to Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet. Thousands more may have to go at the network equipment manufacturer as management look for additional cost savings of 10 billion Swedish kronor (US$1.2 billion), the newspaper said, citing anonymous sources. Ericsson had around 115,000 staff in April, 17,000 of them in Sweden A spokeswoman declined to discuss Tuesday's news report, saying the company does not comment on rumors and speculation. Ericsson is facing increasing competition from a more focused Nokia, which swallowed its Franco-American rival, Alcatel-Lucent, earlier this year, and especially from Chinese vendors such as Huawei Technologies or ZTE. It's a critical time for wireless infrastructure vendors and their carrier customers, as they taper off investment in fourth-generation networks in preparation for the next, still largely undefined, generation of technology.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here