In some important ways, the media has a tendency to distort the reality where hacking and data breaches are concerned. The stories that tend to make the headlines are the external breaches that see hackers making off with tens of millions, or even hundreds of millions of customer records.
Although a number of tech companies have been working hard to create new and ever more robust security and authentication protocols, a recent survey revealed that the American public in general remains highly skeptical of the new procedures, and only a tiny fraction of the population actually employs them.
You probably don’t know the name Benson Leung. He’s one of the internet’s unsung heroes, and in recent months, he’s been quietly waging a one-man war against manufacturers producing faulty USB-C chargers. Many users have reported having their smartphones fried by the faulty cables, which did not properly regulate the amount of current flowing through them.
There has been an explosive growth in companies offering private cloud as part of a broader offering of managed services, and businesses are responding positively to the trend.
Interestingly, while companies are moving to embrace the private cloud and managed services in general, overwhelmingly, the push to do so is being led by CIOs. This data, from a recent industry survey, found that 67% of companies that have moved to the cloud, or are planning to do so in the next 12 months, are doing so at the urging of the CIO. The same survey found that just 6% of CEOs, 4% of CFOs, 3% of company Boards of Directors were the driving force behind migration to the cloud.
Sage, LLC, a British company providing business software solutions for clients around the world, was the latest victim of a data breach. This one, however, came from inside the company itself. This is an increasingly common problem, though not as widely reported as the high profile data breaches from hackers outside the company’s firewall.
What do you do when you get a popup window generated by some piece of software you use, informing you of a critical update? Do you stop what you’re doing right then and perform the needed update? Most people don’t, according to recent research. In fact, a full ninety percent of users simply close the window and carry on doing whatever it was they were doing.
You’ve probably seen the headlines. This year, hardly a week goes by that there isn’t a report of a company in some way connected to the health care industry falling victim to ransomware. If you think it feels like they’re being specifically targeted, you’re not imagining things.
Researchers at University College London have created a fascinating algorithm that can take a sample of hand-written text, and imitate it with eerie similarity. At first glance, that might seem like a silly, or even trivial thing to spend time on, but make no mistake.
Adobe’s beleaguered Flash player may finally be seeing its last days, at least if Google has anything to say about it. The player has been exceedingly popular, and at its peak, a vast number of websites relied on it heavily to display content and advanced features to website visitors.
Microsoft is a company that definitely understands the need for better and more secure information systems. Like many other tech companies, they’ve been pushing hard for two-factor authentication protocols covering large swaths of their online ecosystem.
