Microsoft is boosting security through hardware in Windows 10 PCs, phones

The burden of Microsoft's efforts to secure Windows 10 is now falling on PC, tablet, and smartphone makers. Microsoft is making a hardware-based security feature called TPM (Trusted Platform Module) 2.0 a minimum requirement on most Windows 10 devices. Starting July 28, the company will require device manufacturers shipping PCs, tablets and smartphones to include TPM 2.0. TPM has been available for years, mostly on business PCs. TPM 2.0 provides a hardware layer to safeguard user data by managing and storing cryptographic keys in a trusted container. The TPM requirement "will be enforced through our Windows Hardware Certification program," Microsoft said in a blog post.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Something strange just happened with North Korea’s Internet

Ever since North Korea directly connected to the Internet in 2010, there's been a lot of interest in how the world's most closed country maintains and uses the link.It connects a handful of Web sites in Pyongyang serving propaganda to the world and allows foreigners in the country largely unfiltered access to the Internet. It also provides monitored access to an unknown number of senior officials, scientists, and university students.Yet for everything we've learned, there's still a lot we don't know and now there's a new mystery: Last week, the country's sole Internet link with the rest of the world went down for about three hours. It was the longest outage of the year and meant the entire country was disconnected from the Internet, according to monitoring by Dyn Research.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

This big-data startup combines AI with human savvy to help make sense of your data

Turning data into insight is one of the top business challenges today, and it becomes especially tricky when the data in question is unstructured. Artificial intelligence has a mixed track record there, but a young startup aims to get better results by bringing humans back into the picture.Spare5 on Wednesday released a new platform that applies a combination of human insight and machine learning to help companies make sense of unstructured data, including images, video, social media content, and text messages. The result, it says, are "game-changing insights delivered cost-effectively and at scale."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cable industry players eye wireless expansion, say analysts

Cable companies are already among the very biggest players in the wireless world, but analysts speaking at industry group CableLabs’ InformED Wireless event Wednesday in New York said that opportunities for further growth exist.Specifically, said Jonathan Chaplin of New Street Research, it’s a “matter of time” before the cable industry (presumably meaning either Comcast or TWC) moves more heavily into wireless, whether via an acquisition or some form of partnership with an existing player.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Verizon to replace copper with fiber optic Internet in Boston + Google Fiber to be free for select affordable housing residents+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

FBI reportedly bought exploit from hackers to access San Bernardino iPhone

The FBI reportedly paid professional hackers a one-time fee for a previously unknown vulnerability that allowed the agency to unlock the iPhone of San Bernardino shooter.The exploit allowed the FBI to build a device capable of brute-forcing the iPhone's PIN without triggering a security measure that would have wiped all of its data, the Washington Post reported Tuesday, citing unnamed sources familiar with the matter.The hackers who provided the exploit to the FBI find software vulnerabilities and sometimes sell them to the U.S. government, the newspaper reported.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

FBI reportedly bought exploit from hackers to access San Bernardino iPhone

The FBI reportedly paid professional hackers a one-time fee for a previously unknown vulnerability that allowed the agency to unlock the iPhone of San Bernardino shooter.The exploit allowed the FBI to build a device capable of brute-forcing the iPhone's PIN without triggering a security measure that would have wiped all of its data, the Washington Post reported Tuesday, citing unnamed sources familiar with the matter.The hackers who provided the exploit to the FBI find software vulnerabilities and sometimes sell them to the U.S. government, the newspaper reported.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IRS: Tax deadline looms, scammers get more frantic

The Internal Revenue Service said today with the approaching tax filing April 18th deadline scammers are becoming even more desperate that ever to steal your money and identity.The IRS said there has been a 400% surge in phishing and malware incidents in this tax season alone and that scam artists are more frequently masquerade as being from the IRS, a tax company and sometimes even a state revenue department.+More on Network World: IRS warns of nasty W-2 phishing scheme+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IRS: Tax deadline looms, scammers get more frantic

The Internal Revenue Service said today with the approaching tax filing April 18th deadline scammers are becoming even more desperate that ever to steal your money and identity.The IRS said there has been a 400% surge in phishing and malware incidents in this tax season alone and that scam artists are more frequently masquerade as being from the IRS, a tax company and sometimes even a state revenue department.+More on Network World: IRS warns of nasty W-2 phishing scheme+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IRS: Tax deadline looms, scammers get more frantic

The Internal Revenue Service said today with the approaching tax filing April 18th deadline scammers are becoming even more desperate that ever to steal your money and identity.The IRS said there has been a 400% surge in phishing and malware incidents in this tax season alone and that scam artists are more frequently masquerade as being from the IRS, a tax company and sometimes even a state revenue department.+More on Network World: IRS warns of nasty W-2 phishing scheme+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

CCIE SPv4 Rack Rentals Now Available

Rack Rentals for INE’s CCIE Service Provider v4 topology are now available at rentals.ine.com.

Both CCIE RSv5 Full Scale Labs and CCIE SPv4 now share the same topology in the scheduler, which consists of the following devices:

  • 20 x IOS XE virtual machine instances (R1 – R20)
  • 4 x IOS XRv virtual machine instances (R21 – R24)
  • 4 x Catalyst 3560 physical switches (SW1 – SW4)

IOS XRv instances can be managed through the control panel similar to other devices in the topology, as seen below:

cPacket Provides Distributed, Line-Rate, Real-Time Packet Analysis

The core cPacket value proposition is that of deep packet inspection and analysis at line rate in a scalable, distributed manner. Rather than merely directing traffic to various tools for analysis by creating a visibility fabric, cPacket handles both the functions of visibility fabrics as well as traffic analysis tools.

The post cPacket Provides Distributed, Line-Rate, Real-Time Packet Analysis appeared first on Packet Pushers.

cPacket Provides Distributed, Line-Rate, Real-Time Packet Analysis

The core cPacket value proposition is that of deep packet inspection and analysis at line rate in a scalable, distributed manner. Rather than merely directing traffic to various tools for analysis by creating a visibility fabric, cPacket handles both the functions of visibility fabrics as well as traffic analysis tools.

The post cPacket Provides Distributed, Line-Rate, Real-Time Packet Analysis appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Did NSA underestimate the insider threat?

In this edition of the Irari Report, Ira Winkler and Araceli Treu Gomes continue their interview of Chris Inglis, former Deputy Director of NSA. In this segment, they focus on how an organization that is so aware of the insider threat can be compromised by a person like Edward Snowden. Inglis highlights how trust is critical to function, but verification must be implemented. This relies upon a stringent screening process, as you have to extend to trust to the people you hire. While Snowden was one traitor among 250,000, the damage one person can cause is clear, and it must be accepted as an eventuality. Watch the first part of this series.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Did NSA underestimate the insider threat?

In this edition of the Irari Report, Ira Winkler and Araceli Treu Gomes continue their interview of Chris Inglis, former Deputy Director of NSA. In this segment, they focus on how an organization that is so aware of the insider threat can be compromised by a person like Edward Snowden. Inglis highlights how trust is critical to function, but verification must be implemented. This relies upon a stringent screening process, as you have to extend to trust to the people you hire. While Snowden was one traitor among 250,000, the damage one person can cause is clear, and it must be accepted as an eventuality. Watch the first part of this series.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Grim PC business shows no sign of recovery

PC shipments plummeted in the first quarter, dropping 11.5% compared to the year before, researcher IDC said Monday.The impressively dismal decline was a poor opening for a year that IDC once believed would see the bottom of the PC industry's years-old trough. But just a month ago, IDC revised its forecast, saying that shipments in 2016 would fall by 5.4% from 2015.Rival market research vendor Gartner, which also issued its Q1 shipment numbers this week, pegged the drop-off at 9.6%, with the difference largely attributed to how each company tallies shipments. Gartner, unlike IDC, counts tablets with detachable keyboards, like Microsoft's Surface Pro, as personal computers, and so usually comes up with larger shipment figures.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

New for Virtual DNS Customers: Self-Service Dashboard and APIs, and Two New Features

Today we're launching two new features and a brand new dashboard and API for Virtual DNS. Virtual DNS is CloudFlare’s DNS proxy that sits in front of some of the largest hosting providers in the world, shielding their DNS infrastructure from attacks and providing them with the DNS performance benefits of CloudFlare's network and caching.

It's been a year since we launched Virtual DNS, and the service has expanded a lot since then. Virtual DNS now answers 7 billion DNS queries a day, 4.6 billion of which are served from our cache, saving our Virtual DNS customers a collective 65% of their bandwidth. Beyond the bandwidth savings, Virtual DNS also protected its customers from a large vulnerability in BIND when it was discovered in August.

Virtual DNS is different from CloudFlare’s core authoritative DNS service, which comes included in CloudFlare’s standard plans. In authoritative DNS, CloudFlare hosts DNS records for a zone on its own infrastructure. In Virtual DNS, the customer hosts all of the DNS records for all of their zones, and CloudFlare serves as a front end proxy to them.

A brand new dashboard and API

The new Virtual DNS dashboard makes it fast and easy Continue reading

Zuckerberg wants the Facebook Messenger platform to replace iOS and Android platforms

Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook Messenger will become the next platform with the addition of chat-bots and AI linked to Facebook business pages. Did he really mean the next platform will replace Android and iOS mobile platforms? Unquestionably he did. Messenger has now been promoted to the Messenger platform, raising expectations of former PayPal President and Facebook Messaging Vice President David Marcus.Zuckerberg has an uncontestable vision: consumers would rather interact with businesses via a text chat that resembles one with a friend instead of telephoning a call center or using another frustrating form of B2C communications. In this scenario, customer service is delivered via the Messenger platform that can be programmed with a chat-bot to respond to customer chat messages. A B2C merchant will be able build Messenger plug-ins for customer service and sales assistance. The bot could learn on its own to be more helpful by adding a separate AI and machine-learning module. It’s still a vision; the chat-bot and AI beta was released yesterday for innovators to start testing.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here