Forty hours is considered a typical American workweek. The U.S. BLM reports that the average weekly hours and overtime of all IT employees is just over 36 hours. Add all of those minutes spent answering emails on your phone or stealing glances at your computer when you’re off the clock, you feel like it may easily turn into fifty or more.
Turkish workers average 51.2 hours a week, the most by far! Northern European countries Denmark and the Netherlands had the shortest work weeks – 38.3 hours and 39.1 hours. Here is an infographic from GetVoIP.com who put together a chart of average full-time workweeks in forty countries around the world. How does your workweek stack up with those in your own country and those in other countries?
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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.
The U.S. Secret Service has warned (PDF) financial institutions of logical (jackpot) attacks on Automated Teller Machines (ATMs). These ATM attacks originated in Mexico and have spread to the US. These jackpotting attacks are an industry-wide issue and as one vendor stated, are “a call to action to take appropriate steps to protect their ATMs against these forms of attack and mitigate any consequences.”
The attack mode involves a series of steps to defeat the ATM’s existing security mechanisms and the authorization process for setting the communication within the ATM. Internal communications are used when computer components like the mainboard or the hard disk have to be exchanged for legitimate reasons.
In a Jackpotting attack, the criminal gains access to the internal infrastructure of the terminal to infect the ATM PC or by completely exchanging the hard disk (HDD). There are a number of steps the attacker has to take for this type of attack:
In other Jackpotting attacks, portions of a third-party multi-vendor application software stack to drive ATM components are used. Brian Krebs at Krebs on Security reports that Secret Service issued a warning that organized criminal gangs have been attacking stand-alone ATMs in the United States using “Ploutus.D,” an advanced strain of jackpotting malware first spotted in 2013.
Mr. Krebs also reports that “During previous attacks, fraudsters dressed as ATM technicians and attached a laptop computer with a mirror image of the ATMs operating system along with a mobile device to the targeted ATM. Once this is complete, fraudsters own the ATM and it will appear Out of Service to potential customers according to the confidential Secret Service alert. At this point, the crook(s) installing the malware will contact co-conspirators who can remotely control the ATMs and force the machines to dispense cash.
“In previous Ploutus.D attacks, the ATM 
continuously dispensed at a rate of 40 bills every 23 seconds,” the alert continues. Once the dispense cycle starts, the only way to stop it is to press cancel on the keypad. Otherwise, the machine is completely emptied of cash, according to the alert. While there are some risks of the money mule being caught by cameras, the speed in which the operation is carried out minimizes the mule’s risk.”
The most common forms of logical attack against ATMs are “Black Box” and “Offline Malware”. The steps to minimize the risks to ATMs are the same as any other enterprise device.
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Followers of the Bach Seat know how to secure their PCs, I have written about securing PCs many times here. So the question is why not ATMs? Research says that consumers go into the branch less every year. The experts say that by 2022 customers will visit a branch only 4 times a year. In many cases, ATMs are the bank’s surrogates for most cash transactions. It makes sense to get it right.
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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.
While the massive Equifax data breach is still fresh in everyone’s minds and the cybersecurity workforce is expected to be short nearly 2 million people. IT security expenditures to top $1 Trillion by 2022. Private equity giant Thoma Bravo, LLC has jumped back into the IT security market with both feet. Barracuda Networks has been bought by the private equity firm in a deal that’s valued at $1.6 billion.
Barracuda (CUDA) sells appliance and cloud-based cybersecurity and data protection services. Clients include; Boeing, Microsoft and the U.S. Department of Defense. Barracuda says it has over 150,000 customers. Upon the close of the transaction, Barracuda will operate as a privately held company.
Barracuda Network was founded in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 2003. From Ann Arbor, it raised at least $46 million in venture funding prior to its IPO. CUDA went public on the New York Stock Exchange in November 2013, pricing its IPO at $18. Barracuda acquired Yosemite Technologies in 2009 to expand its offerings into the storage market.
Barracuda continued to innovate in the run-up to its acquisition. eWeek reports that in March 2017, Barracuda debuted new data backup and recovery capabilities for VMware and Microsoft virtual machines. In June 2017 Barracuda announced its new Sentinel service. The service uses artificial intelligence (AI) and container-based technologies to improve email security.
Barracuda also enhanced its network security products and services in 2017. eWeek reported in November that the company expanded the cloud capabilities for its Web Application Firewall (WAF) and NexGen Firewall products. The new capabilities include usage-based billing for the NextGen firewall running in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. The firewall included automated configuration capabilities for the WAF, thanks to an integration with the Puppet DevOps tool.
CEO BJ Jenkins commented on the transaction, “We will continue Barracuda’s tradition of delivering easy-to-use, full-featured solutions that can be deployed in the way that makes sense for our customers.”
Thoma Bravo is a Chicago-based private equity firm with $17 billion under management. Their appetite for IT firms is rather broad. Some of it’s most notable purchases have been:
September 2014 – $2.4 billion purchase of Detroit-based Compuware.Their portfolio has included brands such as; Bomgar, Digicert, Digital Insight, Dynatrace, Hyland Software, Imprivata, iPipeline, Nintex, PlanView, Qlik, SailPoint, and SonicWall.
Thoma Bravo has resold many of its holdings in recent years.
TechCrunch notes that private equity firms began more aggressively buying up software companies last year. The thinking seems to be they can generate reliable returns from such investments. The biggest take-private deals lately include:
Other notable IT security equity funding recipients include; Attivo Networks, Darktrace, and SentinelOne.
Investopedia speculates that Thoma Bravo is paying a pretty high premium for Barracuda. CUDA now trades at 139 times earnings and 4 times sales. But under private management, its products will likely be integrated with the firm’s other software products to generate synergies.
CRN notes that being a privately owned company will give Barracuda a stronger ability to chart its own destiny. They will not have to “tap-dance to the Wall Street music,” Michael Knight, president and chief technology officer at solution provider Encore Technology Group, Greenville, S.C., said. He hopes Thoma Bravo’s infusion of capital will enable Barracuda to continue driving its public cloud business, a more solidified SD-WAN toolset, and more integrated endpoint security protection.
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I have used Barracuda products at past jobs. Including their SPAM-Email firewall appliances and their cloud-based backup up system. The pricing was adequate. Renewals were easy. The email firewalls were really robust and almost set and forget.
The few times when I needed tech support, it was available in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Barracuda, founded in Ann Arbor, was one of the early believers in the area as a high-tech hub. Barracuda has plans to spend $2.3 million on the expansion of its operations center in the former Borders Books offices at 317 Maynard Street. The expansion will add 115 new jobs in downtown Ann Arbor over the next four years. I hope that after Barracuda Networks has been bought by Thoma Bravo, the deal does not have a “Chainsaw Al” that will kill that growth.
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.
Tax day 2017 was delayed one day due to a hardware failure in a system supporting the oldest IT system in the U.S. federal government. (rb- I wrote about the almost 60 years old system here.) Nextgov reports that 18-month-old hardware supporting the Internal Revenue Service’s Individual Master File experienced a caching issue causing the system to fail.
The failure disrupted almost all other IRS systems and services because those systems ingest data from the Individual Master File. When those systems—such as Direct Pay and the structured payments portal—called to the Individual Master File mainframe and got no response, they too failed.
Dave Powner, GAO’s director of IT management issues, told Nextgov, “This was our biggest fear about one of these mission-critical systems crashing. Fortunately, it wasn’t down for a long period of time, so in that way, we dodged a bullet.”
The crash delayed the submission of some 14 million tax forms. It could be several years before the Individual Master File is fully modernized and rid of 1960’s-era technology. The article speculates that the update timeline could slip because the IRS says it needs to hire at least 50 more employees—while backfilling any attrition—plus an extra $85 million per year in annual non-labor funding over the next five years. Trump’s fiscal 2018 budget request called for a $239 million reduction in funding for the IRS, which has faced many cuts in recent years.
The author explains that the Individual Master File has data from 1 billion taxpayer accounts dating back several decades and is the chief IRS application responsible for receiving 100 million Americans’ individual taxpayer data and dispensing refunds. IRS first attempted to replace the system with a modernized Customer Account Data Engine, but that effort was canceled in 2009. A delivery date for CADE 2, the IRS’ subsequent modernization effort, has slipped several years even as contractors working on the project have earned as much as $290 million.
GAO identified the Individual Master File as the oldest technology system still working in government in 2016.
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.
