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Turkey Revenge
The turkeys are pissed this Thanksgiving they are seeking revenge.
Germs Infest 60% of Americas Phones
60% of Americans sleep with their phones, harboring germs. Cleaning regularly with UV sanitizer or alcohol wipes can help keep your phone and bed germ-free.
Smartphone Sanitizing: A Practical Guide
Securely erase personal data from your old smartphone before recycling. Protect your identity from hackers—easy steps to follow.
Why Soft Skills Matter in Today’s Job Market
Boost your career with essential soft skills like communication, teamwork, and emotional intelligence. Learn why they’re crucial for workplace success.
Spies Say Encryption Best to Protect Data
Updated August 01, 2019 – Trump’s top cop U.S. Attorney General William Barr rehashed the time-worn government demands for private firms to break encryption. AG Barr closed his July 23, 2019 speech at the International Conference on Cyber Security, by saying that U.S. citizens should accept encryption backdoors because backdoors are essential to our security.
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Despite what current US policy appears to be, a newly leaked document courtesy of Edward Snowden revealed that some U.S. officials are encouraging the use of encryption to protect data. GigaOm points out a 2009 document penned by the U.S. National Intelligence Council, which explained that companies and the government are prone to attacks by nation-states and criminal syndicates “due to the slower than expected adoption…of encryption and other technologies.” The report detailed a five-year prognosis on the “global cyber threat to the US information infrastructure” and stated that encryption technology is the “[b]est defense to protect data.”
Seems that these spooks were right. FierceITSecurity reports there were 750 major data breaches in the U.S. last year, exposing more than 81 million private records. FierceITSecurity cites data from SysCloud, a provider of security and data backup for enterprises which provided the following infographic about data breaches.
2015 will be worse. The WSJ reports a single data breach at the U.S.’s second-biggest health insurer Anthem Inc., lost personal information for about 80 million of its customers when attackers broke into a database. According to the WSJ, the breach exposed names, birthdays, addresses, and Social Security numbers. Anthem said in a statement that the affected (plan/brands) include Anthem Blue Cross, Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Georgia, Empire Blue Cross and Blue Shield, Amerigroup, Caremore, Unicare, Healthlink, and DeCare. Anthem did not encrypt the stolen PII according to reports.
GigaOm explains that encryption makes it possible for documents and messages to be unreadable to people who don’t have the proper cryptographic key.
A cryptographic key is the core part of cryptographic operations which scramble information. Cryptographic systems include pairs of operations, such as encryption and decryption. A key is a part of the variable data that is provided as input to a cryptographic algorithm to execute this sort of operation. The security of the scheme is dependent on the security of the keys used.
The spooks also encouraged multi-factor authentication, which adds another step to the security process beyond simply entering a password.
Despite the totally porous nature of online security, GigaOm points out that the Obama administration is a vocal opponent of encryption technology. According to Bruce Schneier the gooberments opposition to encryption on phones is all bluster and sound bites.
Encryption is no doubt a hot topic in the security space. GigaOm says there’s been a wave of security start-ups focusing on encryption scoring millions of dollars in investment in recent months. Security start-ups Veradocs, CipherCloud, and Ionic Security have recently landed over $100 million in investments.
Despite political pushback, it’s clear that companies won’t slow down on implementing encryption any time soon, so long as large-scale data breaches continue to occur on a seemingly weekly basis.
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Is it time to go back to a cash economy?
Related articles
- Crypto-Wars Escalate: Congress Plans Bill To Force Companies To Comply With Decryption Orders (thenewsdoctors.com)
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
Category: Uncategorized |
Tags: 2015, Anthem, Barack Obama, Blue Cross and Blue Shield, Data breach, Edward Snowden, Encryption, HIPAA, Multi-factor authentication, Security
ISPs – Brits Speed U.S. Squabble
British Telecom has announced its plan to transform the UK broadband landscape from superfast to ultrafast. CircleID reports that the company plans to deliver much faster broadband for homes and small businesses via a widespread deployment of “G.fast” (G.9701) — a technology the company will pilot test this Summer. G.fast is aimed to help BT deliver ultrafast speeds of up to 500 Mbps to most of the UK within a decade. The deployment will start in 2016–2017, BT says.
The day before, the FCC announced that they have re-defined the meaning of broadband in the United States. Under the new definition, US broadband has changed from a measly 4 Mbps down and 1 Mbps up to an anemic 25 Mbps down and 3 Mbps up. There will be little impact for the end-user because this is just gooberment posturing. This will put the US in some low rank internationally. While the UK global telecom giant BT sets its sites on 500 Mbps. The FCC’s presser states that the ruling is meaningless. Their own document says:
… its 25/3 benchmark as a standard to measure the progress of broadband deployment. However, the benchmark is not a minimum speed requirement and does not prevent broadband service providers from advertising or describing slower service as broadband.
Not surprisingly, 100% of US ISP’s are against this redefinition of broadband the cable lobby is opposed to the FCC’s plan. Ars Technica reports that the Telecommunications Association (NCTA) wrote in an FCC filing Thursday (PDF) that, “Customers do just fine with lower speeds.”
In addition to the CableCo lobby’s opposition, PCWorld reports that Republicans blasted the FCC report and new definition of broadband.
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The Register notes how little things have changed. Haters are going to hate. In 2008, Commissioner Robert McDowell opposed increasing the speed definition of broadband from 200Kbps to 768Kbps. McDowell today represents Washington DC law firm Wiley Rein and appeared last week in Congress arguing that the FCC should not introduce net neutrality rules.
Do you want Comcast in charge of the web? Support net neutrality.
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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
Are Firms Ignorant About BYOD Issues?
Enterprises are being ignorant towards the issues BYOD is causing to their business says backup vendor Acronis. James Rawbone, Senior Partner Account Manager EMEA, Enterprise Mobility Solutions at Acronis, shared his opinions with Desire Athow at ITProPortal on why and how enterprises are being ignorant towards BYOD issues.
The Acronis 2013 Global Data Protection Trend Report developed by the Ponemon Institute identified five surprising BYOD trends:
1. There are big gaps in secure BYOD policies across organizations. The Acronis survey found that 60% of businesses have no personal device policy in place, and those with policies 24% make exceptions for executives, who are most likely handling the most sensitive corporate data. As a result, these organizations are increasingly vulnerable to data loss and serious compliance issues.
2.Simple security precautions are not being adopted. The survey found only 31% of companies mandate a device password or key lock on personal devices, and only 21% do remote device wipes when employees leave the company, drastically increasing the risk for data leakage.
3.Businesses underestimate the dangers of public clouds. The researchers report that corporate files are commonly shared through third-party cloud storage solutions such as DropBox, but 67% of organizations don’t have a policy in place around public clouds and 80% haven’t trained employees in the correct use of these platforms.
4.The growth of Apple (AAPL) devices is complicating BYOD security for administrators. 65% of organizations will support Macs in the next year, and 57% feel compatibility and interoperability are still big obstacles to getting Macs compliant with their IT infrastructure. This puts data stored and shared across the corporate network and on Apple devices at risk.
5.Some organizations are ignoring the benefits of mobile collaboration altogether. More than 30% surveyed actually forbid personal devices from accessing the network.
Mr. Rawbone sees two reasons organizations are not educating or training their employees on the risks of BYOD. First is time and money. Most companies have tight budgets across the board and in particular within their IT department, as well as their overall staffing. The second excuse for not training their staff is that they are unaware that their staff is using these solutions, or they are turning a blind eye to the issues effect their corporate data and overall IT infrastructure.
The Acronis Senior Partner told ITProPortal there are legal and compliance issues associated with BYOD; but generally BYOD can be adapted to each compliance regulation and rule. The main concern of BYOD is data protection and ensuring that as employees bring devices to-and-from the workplace, confidential corporate data is adequately protected while remaining easily accessible. An important part of data protection, often not addressed by BYOD strategies, includes ensuring that information and records comply with privacy laws like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), as well as specific industry and regional privacy regulations.
Mr. Rawbone concludes by reminding the author that the important thing every business needs to remember is that mobile devices can be replaced for a small cost in comparison to having your confidential data stolen and used incorrectly.
Companies need to embrace technological evolution and look at the business benefits of BYOD. Otherwise, he claims they will be facing some serious network and data issues and worst of all potentially facing some legal problems in the coming future.
Creating a mobile device security policy doesn’t have to be complicated, but it needs to encompass devices, data, and files. The article lists a number of simple things organizations should do, like require users to key-lock their devices with password protection. 68% of those surveyed use VPN or secure gateway connections across networks and systems, and 52% use Microsoft (MSFT) Active Directory and/or LDAP. The simplest place to start is to use device key-lock and password protection.
Related articles
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
What Holds the Internet Together
Those that have followed the Bach Seat for a while, know that I am fascinated by maps. A well-done map can say so much more than a written description. One of my favorite things to do at work is to work on maps; network maps, rack elevations, logical diagrams, they just make it so much easier to discuss how to get from A to B if you can see it.
The BusinessInsider published some cool maps from telecom data company TeleGeography of the submarine cables that hold the Internet together around the world. The maps are interesting to me for a couple of reasons, first, is the engineering wonder of how all those cables get installed, and the mind-boggling amount of information they enable, and the small number of places where they all come out of the water. My first thought looking at some of these maps was I wonder what the no such agency is doing at those sites.
The main map charts out all the undersea fiber optic cables that send Internet communication from country to country. There are more fiber optic cables that are land-based, but they’re not charted here. Here is a map of the current undersea fiber connections on the US eastern seaboard.
Paul Brodsky, an analyst at Telegeography explained to BI how data gets around the world.
The vast majority of Internet traffic travels on fiber optic cables … Many people think Internet connections go through satellites … but that’s not the case. They run through these undersea cables.
This map shows the undersea cables that link China, Japan, South Korea, and Russia to the Internet. It also shows that North Korea does have a dedicated direct connection to the rest of the world, the Hermit Kingdom, indeed. The picture is kind of awkward because China is in blue, which you would expect to be water.
TeleGeography’s Brodsky explained to BI how the cables get installed. The companies that lay these cables have giant spools of fiber optic cable on their ships. The ship goes from country A to country B and literally lays it on the bottom of the ocean. Close to the shore, they trench it out, but at a certain distance from the coast, it just lies on the bottom of the ocean.
The biggest risk to the cables are trawlers, and ships dragging anchors. Sometimes there are natural disasters like earthquakes. But if one cable breaks, Internet traffic can be redirected to another cable.
Mr. Brodsky says the companies that lay the cables can track problems. If they spot something, they can go out to the middle of the ocean, pull up the cable and cut out the damaged section, and splice in a new segment of cable.
In the future, expect more cables, Mr. Brodsky told BI. Now that the world is connected, the next step is to add more connections. Any country with just one cable will want two or three.
Related articles
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
Category: Uncategorized |
Tags: 2015, China, Fiber optic cable, Hong Kong, Internet, Korea, Networking, Seoul, TeleGeography, Undersea, United States, Vietnam
Palm Now A Chinese Mobile Company
Let’s take a trip on the way-back machine and visit the first cool – gotta-have-it tech toy, the Palm Pilot. I had several versions of the Palm Pilot, The Palm V was the best version, but the PalmOne-m515 had a color screen. The oft traded PDA builder moved from Palm to modem-maker US Robotics. Which was later purchased by 3Com, and then Handspring. Next, it was PalmOne/Source and finally purchased in 2010 for $1.2 billion by HP, where many tech firms go to die.
Now ChinaTechNews.com reports that the Chinese consumer electronics group TCL recently announced that they will acquire the Palm brand. HP is selling Palm as part of Meg Whitman’s struggles to right the floundering HP (HPQ).
Li Dongsheng, chairman of TCL Group, claims the Palm acquisition is different from their purchase of Alcatel’s mobile division. According to the Chinese firm, Palm has its fans in America and its operating ideas are similar to Apple (AAPL). They believe this type of fandom can give Palm strength. Li said the Palm brand still has value in some of the global markets and people expect its re-emergence to continue to offer innovative products.
According to the article, TCL will launch new Palm products at the end of 2015. TLC plans to position Palm as a high-end smartphone brand. Maybe in China, the Palm name is an innovative mobile terminal brand, which will be closely related to users and fans.
Variety reports from CES that TCL said that it will re-create Palm in Silicon Valley. In the statement TCL claims:
Palm has always carried a lot of affect and emotions … That’s why TCL has set the direction to rebuild the brand involving Palm’s very own community, making it the largest scale crowdsourced project ever seen in the industry.
The firm will back the crowdsourced development of new Palm products with 5,000 engineers and seven research and development centers around the world.
Guo Aiping, CEO of TCL Communication, told ChinaTechNews.com that this acquisition is limited to the Palm brand and it does not include other assets such as employees.
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First, another US company sold to the competition. Just saying.
I agree with ArsTechnica they hypothesize this move could be seen as TCL’s attempt to break into the U.S. smartphone market under a well-known brand. Other Chinese companies such as Lenovo, which now owns Motorola, have a similar strategy of operating in America under a well-known brand.
Related articles
- World, face Palm: PDA brand to RISE FROM THE GRAVE (go.theregister.com)
Category: Uncategorized |
Tags: 2015, AAPL, Apple, China, crowdsource, Hewlett-Packard, HPQ, Palm, Silicon Valley, TCL, Wireless