March 05, 2016

IoT will crash and burn if security doesn't come first

It's important to understand the damage lax security can do -- to your company and the industry -- and address IoT security early. Hibbard said he has seen firsthand how a lot of players in the space do not consider security as a competitive advantage. "If you're thinking about buying or making IoT, offshoring it to an APAC region, make no assumptions that they're going to know anything about security. You won't be able to retrofit it, so if you want it, order upfront," he said. ... "Show your work," he added. "You need ... to make sure you're properly documenting processes that you went through; you want to make sure you get credit later. You don't want to say to the FTC that you don't have the records."


Global fintech survey results: 51 experts reveal 2016 trends

Payments tech continues to be top of mind for the influencers – followed by security and lending. In 2014, the respondents predicted security technology will be the hottest sector in fintech, however, the sector continues to have a large gap between what is available and what is needed in the market, with a huge interest predicted to continue into 2016. ... 43% of the respondents thought Blockchain adoption by banks will be the single largest trend of 2016. Larger deal sizes, an increased geographical spread and capturing the unbanked market followed with almost an equal amount of interest as the key highlight for the coming year.


Cashless societies: The pros and cons

Thanks to its aggressive adoption of IoT, Sweden is on its way to becoming the world’s first cashless society, according to a study from Stockholm's KTH Royal Institute of Technology. Currently, 80% of payments in the country are made by cards. By the end of 2014, four out of every five transactions in Sweden was cashless. Swedes mainly use debit cards (pin required) and the mobile payment app Swish, which is largely responsible for the nation’s decreasing circulation of cash. Eric B. Delisle, founder of the cyber security company ICLOAK, says the more citizens use cashless systems, which require a computer or device, the more people who have preferred living in an analog world will be pushed into the 21st century. This means new security measures will be needed.


Popular WordPress Plugin Comes with a Backdoor, Steals Site Admin Credentials

The hacker's alterations made sure that he was able to control user login, creation and edit commands, intercepting user data before being encrypted, and sending the user's cleartext passwords to wooranker's server. Furthermore, wp-options.php also created an admin account on the infected website, with the credentials support / support@wordpresscore.com, which he could use if anything else failed. All of this meant that wooranker would always have an admin account on all infected websites, and he would always be notified of what passwords users were using when accessing infected sites.


Bridging the operational technology and Internet of Things divide

By its very nature, a connected world has zero tolerance for downtime yet IoT does not only change the requirement for systems availability; it significantly increases the threat landscape, creating greater security risks and challenges. Indeed, while IT may be willing to accept the fact that a very high proportion of organisations (80%) have experienced outages over the last three years, this fact will not play well within OT, which has actively embraced predictive monitoring in order to achieve 100% uptime. Moreover, organisations are also missing out on essential business information. By failing to consolidate OT into the core network, organisations cannot enable CxOs to take advantage of a depth of real-time analytics that should be informing changes to every part of the building, estate and production systems.


The Trends Disrupting The World of Financial Technology

The battle already underway will create surprising winners and stunned losers among some of the most powerful names in the financial world: The most contentious conflicts (and partnerships) will be between startups that are completely reengineering decades-old practices, traditional power players who are furiously trying to adapt with their own innovations, and total disruption of established technology & processes ...  The blockchain is a wild card that could completely overhaul financial services. Both major banks and startups around the world are exploring the technology behind the blockchain, which stores and records Bitcoin transactions. This technology could lower the cost of many financial activities to near-zero and could wipe away many traditional banking activities completely.

How hackers attacked Ukraine's power grid: Implications for Industrial IoT security

Some aspects of the Ukraine cyber-attack remain opaque -- specifically, whether a modular component called KillDisk (a hard disk wiper) actually caused the power outage, or whether it simply made it impossible to restore the compromised systems using SCADA protocols. As if further evidence of a political motive was required, researchers at security companyTrend Micro recently reported that the same combination of BlackEnergy and KillDisk "may have been used against a large Ukrainian mining company and a large Ukrainian rail company" around the same time as the attacks on the power utilities. Whether the perpetrators' ultimate goal was to destabilise Ukraine via coordinated cyberattacks on its critical infrastructure...


Software - Looking into the Future

dominates. Software is changing practically all industries and is the major driver of innovation across all industries. While we used to distinguish components, systems, and services, we today see flexible boundaries driven entirely by business cases to determine what we should package, at which level, and in which component, whether it’s software or silicon. ... Software is getting more complex, more connected, and more life-critical. This complexity’s sources are hidden in the nature of software, which often consists of many components from different vendors and runs on hardware manufactured by different vendors. Also, software teams frequently are multifunctional, and team members are responsible for many activities such as planning, developing, and executing plans, roadmaps, and strategies—without adequate training.


Scrum with Trello

Trello recently passed the 10M user mark and is fast becoming a popular tool for Agile teams of all flavours. Its simplicity and the great web and mobile experience seem to win some teams over versus other more complex solutions out there. It is also pretty un-opinionated on how you use it, which can lead to some confusion as to how best to implement a Scrum process in Trello. I've been talking to a lot of people over the last year about how they're using Trello for their Scrum and Kanban processes, as well as reading everything I could on the internet relating to running Agile processes in Trello. So, today I present to you with the fruits of that labour:


An AI way to make call centre interaction less hideous?

What makes this interesting though, is that it is very different to the usual visions of AI in customer service. These tend to focus on Virtual Assistants – by the likes of Nuance and IPSoft – which want to replace real agents with digital ones wherever possible.In this scenario AI is used to help machines learn from human interactions and these solutions have become part of the “robots stealing our jobs” debate. It is not as cut and dried as many make out, of course. And individuals involved in this type of tech argue that employing Virtual Assistants simply frees up human employees for more sophisticated forms of customer interaction. Yet Farmer is adamant: “We’re the first people to use AI to improve quality [in customer service].”



Quote for the day:


"Authentic leaders will sometimes push and sometimes pull but either way, they will always keep things moving." -- @LeadToday


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