Spam rate falls below 50 percent for first time in a decade

Spam fell to less than 50 percent of all email in June, the lowest in a decade, Symantec said Thursday in its latest Intelligence Report.The levels of spam have been slowly falling since 2010 for multiple reasons. Network providers are more tuned into the problem and take action faster when there are issues on their services.Also, unlike six or seven years ago, sending billions of messages per day from massive botnets isn’t as feasible anymore.Law enforcement, along with companies including Microsoft, have aggressively gone after some of the largest botnets over the last few years and worked to technically shut them down. Although some botnet operators have been able in some instances to regain control, the increased attention makes it more difficult for them to work.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Bogus news app used to deliver Hacking Team spy tool

Data stolen from Hacking Team continues to yield information about the company’s infiltration techniques. The latest find is a fake Android news app, which was used to install its flagship surveillance tool.The app is called “BeNews,” the same name as a long-shuttered news website, wrote Wish Wu, mobile threat response engineer, on Trend Micro’s blog.Inside the app is a backdoor that appears to have been used to load the Android version of Hacking Team’s Remote Control System (RCS), also known as Galileo, a data-collecting tool the company sold to law enforcement and security agencies worldwide.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The average mobile YouTube session is now 40 minutes, Google says

Why stop your video for a snack, or when nature calls, when you’ve got a smartphone?On mobile devices, the average length of a viewing session on YouTube is now more than 40 minutes, Google reported Thursday. That’s double what it was last year, CFO Ruth Porat said during the company’s quarterly earnings call.Google didn’t say what types of video people are watching for that long of a stretch. You can imagine how individual music videos, movie trailers, and tutorials could add up throughout the day, but the fact that Google’s figure is for uninterrupted viewing shows how popular it’s become to watch video on mobile devices.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google reports strong earnings, propelling its stock

Google’s stock jumped more than 7 percent in the after-market hours on Thursday, after the company reported strong earnings results for the second quarter.Total income for the period ended June 30 was US$3.93 billion, up 17 percent from $3.35 billion in the second quarter of 2014, Google announced Thursday. Excluding certain expenses, Google reported earnings of $6.99, beating analysts’ estimates of $6.71, as polled by the Thomson Financial Network.The company’s stock was trading at around $620 after Google reported its earnings at the end of trading, up from closing at $579.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google reports strong earnings, propelling its stock

Google’s stock jumped more than 7 percent in the after-market hours on Thursday, after the company reported strong earnings results for the second quarter.Total income for the period ended June 30 was US$3.93 billion, up 17 percent from $3.35 billion in the second quarter of 2014, Google announced Thursday. Excluding certain expenses, Google reported earnings of $6.99, beating analysts’ estimates of $6.71, as polled by the Thomson Financial Network.The company’s stock was trading at around $620 after Google reported its earnings at the end of trading, up from closing at $579.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft snaps up FieldOne to enrich Dynamics CRM

Microsoft and FieldOne have been partners for several years already, but on Thursday Microsoft took the relationship a step further and acquired the New Jersey-based provider of field-service software.Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but it comes just four months after the two companies signed a global strategic agreement to integrate Microsoft Dynamics CRM and FieldOne’s Sky platform, which offers features such as automated routing, scheduling and dispatch, work-order management, mobile collaboration and more.Field-service management software is used by companies that need to send workers to customers’ locations to provide on-site support. Typically, it relies heavily upon cloud and mobile technologies, with an increasing use of data science and predictive analytics.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Here’s how to keep your employees engaged in their jobs

What matters most in improving employee engagement levels--defined as the sense of purpose and commitment employees feel toward their employer and its mission— is valuing employees, that is, an authentic focus on their performance, career development, and inclusion and involvement in decisions affecting their work. The key is identifying what practices to implement and how to implement them.+GAO: Early look at fed’s “Einstein 3” security weapon finds challenges+Those thoughts were but a few found in a report on employee engagement from the watchdogs at the Government Accountability Office this week which took a look at how private- and public-sector organizations increased levels of engagement to see what can lead to better organizational performance.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Illumio takes a unique approach to adaptive security

Earlier this year, I wrote a post discussing why security needs to be adaptive. The high-profile breaches of big-name firms like Target and Bank of America, not to mention the Office of Personnel Management, have acted as a wake-up call to businesses. No matter how much money and how many people are thrown at securing the perimeter, it will not stop 100% of malicious traffic from penetrating the enterprise.Solving the security challenge continues to confound IT professionals as well. In the 2015 Network Purchase Intention Study, run jointly by ZK Research and Tech Target, we asked over 1,000 respondents globally, "What are your company’s top 3 priorities for next 12 months?" To no surprise, security came back as the No. 1 response. Another question we asked was, "What IT products are taking up more time than in previous years?" Again, security was overwhelmingly the No. 1 response. So security is a top initiative for IT, but it’s taking more and more time. Something has to change if the acceleration of breaches the industry has seen over the past few years is going to reverse course (disclosure: I am an employee of ZK Research).To read this article Continue reading

Replace your NAS with cloud storage: the 8 key requirements

This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter’s approach.

The economics, scale, and manageability of cloud storage simply cannot be matched even by the largest enterprise datacenters.

Hyperscale cloud storage providers like AWS, Google and Azure dropped prices by up to 65% last year and promised a Moore’s Law pricing model going forward. AWS provides eleven 9’s of durability, meaning if you store 10,000 objects with Amazon S3, you can, on average, expect to incur a loss of a single object once every 10,000,000 years. Further, Amazon S3 is designed to sustain the concurrent loss of data in two facilities by storing objects on multiple devices across multiple facilities.  

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New point-of-sale malware distributed by Andromeda botnet

Cybercriminals are casting increasingly wider nets in their search for new point-of-sale systems to infect. This appears to be the case with a new memory scraping malware program called GamaPoS that’s distributed by a large botnet known as Andromeda.GamaPoS was recently discovered by security researchers from antivirus vendor Trend Micro, who found systems infected with it inside organizations from 13 U.S. states and Vancouver, Canada.The program is written in Microsoft’s .NET, which is unusual for RAM scraping malware. These type of threats monitor the memory of point-of-sale systems for payment card data and steal it while it’s being passed from the physical card readers to the commerce applications.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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