January 20, 2015

The Truth About Malvertising
Malvertisements can appear on any website at any given time, and there is little that the website owner can do to prevent them. That’s because they are planted on Web pages via third-party ad delivery networks. These networks auction website placements to advertisers using a high bid, free market system. There is currently very little oversight in this industry. This system was built for efficiency, so the marketplace has very little regulation to force better security practices. To make matters worse, malvertisers use various techniques to disguise the true purpose of their advertisements, often building entire infrastructures designed to redirect users between URLs.


Drones That Can Suck Up Water Hunt Oil Leaks, Invasive Species
It takes the form of a seaplane and has a pump mounted on its pontoons that can handle even viscous swampwater thick with bugs, mud, or algae. The water is sucked into a container and then carried to a lab to check for signs of oil leaks or spills. (See a short video of the drone in action.) “If you go up to Northern Canada or Alaska, there are literally thousands of ponds and lakes that are a few acres in size,” says PrecisionHawk CEO Ernest Earon. “Trying to walk through or take a boat to get water samples, it’s an almost impossible task.” Earon says his team is now researching the possibility of a drone carrying a small spectrometer to analyze water for itself. That would save on energy-draining trips back to the lab.


How To Pitch Hybrid Cloud To Your CFO
“In some instances, organisations can still have data sovereignty and security concerns, even with hybrid cloud solutions. The beauty of using a hybrid cloud solution is that you can choose which data should remain private and which elements you’re happy to store in the public cloud. One solution is to select a co-located data centre, which is close to the cloud provider, but not actually in the cloud. That way, organisations can get all the benefits of the cloud, combined with the security of storing data in a co-located data centre.”


How the Cloud is Reshaping Small Business Productivity
Taking a look at small businesses and the cloud, the Emergent Research study revealed 78 percent of small businesses (companies with less than 50 employees) will be fully adapted to the cloud by 2020 - up from 37 percent in 2014. Though today’s small businesses are reporting using cloud-based applications chiefly for email, online banking and social media, the expansion of the small business community’s utilization of diverse cloud applications, tools and platforms is anticipated to greatly increase. As this trend grows, Emergent Research forecasts that cloud computing will completely change how small businesses operate by 2020 — as the small business landscape fully adapts to cloud computing.


We Still Don’t Know the Difference Between Change and Transformation
Transformation is another animal altogether. Unlike change management, it doesn’t focus on a few discrete, well-defined shifts, but rather on a portfolio of initiatives, which are interdependent or intersecting. More importantly, the overall goal of transformation is not just to execute a defined change — but to reinvent the organization and discover a new or revised business model based on a vision for the future. It’s much more unpredictable, iterative, and experimental. It entails much higher risk. And even if successful change management leads to the execution of certain initiatives within the transformation portfolio, the overall transformation could still fail.


Cisco builds switch ports to feed faster Wi-Fi
But with speed comes a series of challenges: To enjoy more than a gigabit out on the wireless edge of the LAN, network engineers need to have a switch port with greater than Gigabit Ethernet for each access point. They can do it with 10-Gigabit Ethernet, but that protocol requires Category 6a cable to cover a common 100-meter network link. Most enterprises are outfitted with older cable types, and it can be expensive to pull new wires through a building. That's the idea behind 2.5Gbps and 5Gbps Ethernet, which is under development in an official IEEE task group that only recently began meeting. But vendors aren't waiting for a standard to be set for these so-called multigigabit speeds.


Gap between perception and reality of cyberthreats widened in 2015
The spam writers are also carefully tracking their response rates and continuously adjusting the text of the spam emails. "In one campaign we saw 95 different iterations of their spam messages," he said. And the spam messages are being increasingly customized to target individual recipients, helping them bypass spam filters. There was also a 250 percent increase in malvertising last year, Brvenik added. The criminals use a variety of tactics, including spending actual money to buy their own advertising. "They buy short-term ads on high-exposure websites, and then they're gone," he said.


Rule of law on internet cracks down on cybercrime: Cisco
"Some of those countries where you don't have a strong rule of law, you find there's more organised crime. This is an indication that there's a link between organised crime and their activities, and governments of those countries. We're getting better, but we're not there yet, because some countries aren't as lawful as other countries," he said. The report also revealed that it's up to security teams within organisations to constantly improve their approach to defend against sophisticated attacks. In fact, while 90 percent of the companies surveyed said they were confident about their security policies, 54 percent admitted that they have faced public scrutiny following a security breach.


The business case for reputation risk management
The case for effective reputation risk management in this Age of Hyper-Transparency can be made in two ways – accentuating the positive and exposing the negative. There is growing quantitative and qualitative evidence that smart reputation risk management can add value to the bottom line – through liability avoidance, cleaner and leaner processes and improved products and services. Indeed, properly deployed and integrated, effective reputation risk management can be transformational, actually adding value to the financial bottom line. The financial sector has certainly been in the eye of this storm in recent years given the massive impact of questionable, illegal and downright criminal behaviours exhibited in this sector.


5 Advanced Java Debugging Techniques Every Developer Should Know About
BTrace is a helpful tool that lets you run Java-like scripts on top of a live JVM to capture or aggregate any form of variable state without restarting the JVM or deploying new code. This enables you to do pretty powerful things like printing the stack traces of threads, writing to a specific file, or printing the number of items of any queue or connection pool and many more. This is done using BTrace scripting, a Java-like syntax in which you write functions that are injected into the code in locations of your choice through bytecode transformation (a process we’ll touch on below). The best way to try out the tool is to attach its sample scripts into a live application.



Quote for the day:

"Leaders think and talk about the solutions. Followers think and talk about the problems." -- Brian Tracy

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