At MIT, a glimpse into our techno future

In the future, you may use aeroponic systems at home to bring in water mixed with nutrients. You'll use this water to grow vegetables, home-grown food that can cut your produce costs in half.Your commute to work may be on a covered, quasi-bike vehicle that uses battery power to assist the pedaling rider (who gets healthier from the effort).And the era of the large suburban homes will end. Why have multiple rooms for various purposes?"The cost of transformable furniture is much less than a mortgage," said David Rose, a visiting scientist at the MIT Media Lab and author of Enchanted Objects: Innovation, Design and the Future of Technology. Rose was at Tuesday's MIT "Connected Things" Enterprise Forum.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Hospitals hacks put patient health at risk

A report that highlights the vulnerabilities in medical devices and the risks they pose to patient health issued by Independent Security Evaluators comes at an opportune time as the past month has shown that hospitals are becoming targets for criminals.Ted Harrington, executive partner at Independent Security Evaluators said, "It’s a scary report in a lot of ways, but our hope is to organize an industry in recognizing these problems. We are trying to make an entire industry start changing, especially one that is very regulated and complex. The conversations need to start happening."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Kinder, gentler hacks: A bevy of low-stakes early computer breaches

When the world was newImage by National Security AgencyToday, IT security is a deadly serious business. But in the early days of computing, the stakes were a bit lower. Maybe it's just that we're seeing it through a nostalgic lens, but the computer breaches in the '70s, '80s, and '90s just seemed a bit more ... fun? We spoke to some people who were there, who enjoyed reminiscing about a gentler era, whether they were the ones hacking or the ones being hacked.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Are you failing Security Basics 101?

Security tools are getting more sophisticated. DevOps is bringing us automation in operations, and a more holistic way of looking at how we manage infrastructure. But all too often, we’re not doing basic things to improve security and reliability, like protecting against known vulnerabilities.Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s 2016 Cyber Risk Report points out that “29 percent of all exploits samples discovered in 2015 continued to use a 2010 Stuxnet infection vector that has been patched twice.” It takes an average of 103 days for companies to patch known network and security vulnerabilities, according to a study vulnerability risk management vendor NopSec ran last year; that goes down to 97 days for healthcare providers and up to 176 days for financial services, banking and education organisations. That’s not taking into account misconfigurations, or lack of communication between different teams.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Who’s the boss of workplace culture?

Who really drives culture in your workplace? According to a study from The Workforce Institute at Kronos and the research and consultancy firm WorkplaceTrends.com, HR believes it does. So do managers and executives. So, too, do your employees.There's clearly a disagreement about who's in charge of creating, maintaining and supporting workplace culture, but there's one thing every group agrees on: Workplace culture is incredibly important. The disconnect, though, isn't just comical. Without understanding the who, what and why of workplace culture and how it affects engagement, retention and loyalty, organizations risk destroying it and losing out on top talent.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How to build cybersecurity into outsourcing contracts

Any time a company shares data or provides access to third-parties, it increases its vulnerability to unauthorized access or breach. So in today’s IT environment in which enterprises partner with multiple IT service providers, who in turn may have multiple subcontracters, cyber risks increase exponentially.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

How to build cybersecurity into outsourcing contracts

Any time a company shares data or provides access to third-parties, it increases its vulnerability to unauthorized access or breach. So in today’s IT environment in which enterprises partner with multiple IT service providers, who in turn may have multiple subcontracters, cyber risks increase exponentially.[ Related: Why CIOs can’t wait to renegotiate their outsourcing contracts ]“Customer data and systems are only as secure as the weakest link in the vendor ecosystem,” says Paul Roy, a partner in the business and technology sourcing practice of Mayer Brown. “The risks for customers are twofold: not only does the customer increase its risk of a data breach, it also increases the risk that it will be in breach of its regulatory or contractual obligations if its vendors fail to comply with such obligations.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Hands-on with Surface Hub: Microsoft’s huge tablet has some productivity holes

For $21,999, I expected a little more from Microsoft’s new Surface Hub.Don’t get me wrong: the Hub's 84-inch 4K touchscreen, flanked by a pair of eye-height, 1080p cameras, videoconferencing, and full Windows 10 capabilities—all makes for one very impressive package, especially when it dominates one wall of a room. Heck, it practically is the wall. Mark Hachman Microsoft’s Surface Hub is, in a word, enormous.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Software-Based Switching Is not SDN

Russ White made an excellent remark while discussing the news that the CloudRouter pushed 650 Gbps through commodity hardware: “If this is software defined networking, then we’ve been doing this since sometime in the 1990’s, perhaps even earlier…”

He’s absolutely right – the first routers (like AGS or IGS from Cisco) did all packet forwarding in software, so as I explained during the Introduction to SDN webinar while reaching dozens of gigabits with software-based packet forwarding is exciting, calling it SDN doesn’t make much sense.

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Adobe to issue emergency patch for Flash vulnerability

Adobe is working on an emergency patch for its Flash Player after attackers are reportedly exploiting a critical flaw.The vulnerability, CVE-2016-1019, affects Flash Player version 21.0.0.197 on Windows, Mac, Linux and Chrome OS, according to an advisory published on Tuesday.The flaw is being actively exploited on Windows XP and 7 systems running Flash Player versions 20.0.0.306 and earlier."Successful exploitation could cause a crash and potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system," it said.A patch could be released as soon as Thursday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Adobe to issue emergency patch for Flash vulnerability

Adobe is working on an emergency patch for its Flash Player after attackers are reportedly exploiting a critical flaw.The vulnerability, CVE-2016-1019, affects Flash Player version 21.0.0.197 on Windows, Mac, Linux and Chrome OS, according to an advisory published on Tuesday.The flaw is being actively exploited on Windows XP and 7 systems running Flash Player versions 20.0.0.306 and earlier."Successful exploitation could cause a crash and potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system," it said.A patch could be released as soon as Thursday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Ouch, Red Hat gets a slapping. Volkswagen chooses Mirantis for its OpenStack needs

To understand the context here readers need a bit of history. RedHat is, of course, a company that has been wildly successful commercializing open source software (in particular Linux). It is also a big part of the OpenStack open source cloud computing initiative. Mirantis is a company focused solely on helping companies move to OpenStack. These two parties were once upon a time best of friends with Red Hat making a significant investment early in Mirantis' life. And then things soured, to the point where Red Hat started telling customers that it didn't support its own Linux distribution, RHEL, on Mirantis' flavor of OpenStack. There was lots of back and forth, and lots of minutiae around the move, but essentially it indicated, very publicly, that Red Hat and Mirantis' bromance was finished forever.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Server software poses soft target for ransomware

An alternate method for infecting computers with ransomware signals a shift in tactics by cybercriminals that could put businesses at greater risk, according to Symantec.A type of ransomware called Samsam has been infecting organizations but is not installed in the usual way."Samsam is another variant in a growing number of variants of ransomware, but what sets it apart from other ransomware is how it reaches its intended targets by way of unpatched server-side software," Symantec wrote.The perpetrators behind Samsam use a legitimate penetration tool called Jexboss to exploit servers running Red Hat's JBoss enterprise application server.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Server software poses soft target for ransomware

An alternate method for infecting computers with ransomware signals a shift in tactics by cybercriminals that could put businesses at greater risk, according to Symantec.A type of ransomware called Samsam has been infecting organizations but is not installed in the usual way."Samsam is another variant in a growing number of variants of ransomware, but what sets it apart from other ransomware is how it reaches its intended targets by way of unpatched server-side software," Symantec wrote.The perpetrators behind Samsam use a legitimate penetration tool called Jexboss to exploit servers running Red Hat's JBoss enterprise application server.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

WhatsApp turns on end-to-end encryption

Facebook-owned WhatsApp has strengthened the encryption of its widely used instant messaging app, a development that in theory makes it harder for law enforcement to gain access to communications.WhatsApp's founders said Tuesday that the application now implements end-to-end encryption, which means only authorized users can decrypt messages."The idea is simple: when you send a message, the only person who can read it is the person or group chat that you send that message to," Jan Koum and Brian Acton wrote in a blog post. "No one can see inside that message. Not cybercriminals. Not hackers. Not oppressive regimes. Not even us."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

WhatsApp turns on end-to-end encryption

Facebook-owned WhatsApp has strengthened the encryption of its widely used instant messaging app, a development that in theory makes it harder for law enforcement to gain access to communications.WhatsApp's founders said Tuesday that the application now implements end-to-end encryption, which means only authorized users can decrypt messages."The idea is simple: when you send a message, the only person who can read it is the person or group chat that you send that message to," Jan Koum and Brian Acton wrote in a blog post. "No one can see inside that message. Not cybercriminals. Not hackers. Not oppressive regimes. Not even us."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Sigfox’s slow but thrifty IoT network is going Down Under

The Sigfox low-power IoT network is due for an expansion that may not be game-changing in practical terms but will certainly look good on a map.Sigfox announced a deal on Tuesday with a partner that will build a network across Australia and New Zealand using the French company's technology. That's a visible win for a vendor competing to connect small Internet of Things devices like sensors and meters around the world.Several vendors and industry groups are pushing technologies for networking small, far-flung objects that may need to run on a single battery for years. These LPWANs (low-power wide-area networks) don't push a lot of data through the air but are more efficient than the cellular infrastructure that talks to smartphones.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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