Daily Tech Digest - November 19, 2018

Tips for protecting your data when losing an employee


The hard reality is that the majority of your departing employees will try to take company data with them, but there are proactive steps companies can take to ensure their data is safe after the staffers leave. You can’t protect what you don’t know you have. So, the first step is to perform a detailed inventory of your organization’s data and where it’s stored. This involves a thorough audit of the files within your company, which may include in-depth questionnaires for every employee or department. The end result should be a data “map” that details where all of your data is kept, who has access to which files, and when those files were created and modified. Regardless of a former employee’s motives for removing data from your business, if you confront them with evidence of the file-copying, many times they will simply delete or return the files to settle the matter without the need for further action.


Cyber crime: why business should report it as soon as possible

Data breach investigations reveal that some organisations can takeweeks or months to discover a cyber attack, but some cyber criminal activities are identifiable immediately such as distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, ransomware and other types of extortion. The message here is not to delay in reporting cyber criminal activity. “Report as soon as possible, particularly if it is a crime in action. We have much more chance of being able to help and of being able to catch the criminals responsible if the crime is reported to us while it is taking place,” says Hulett. The NCA recognises that it can appear to be a “cluttered landscape” for the businesses’ point of view in terms of how to go about reporting a cyber crime, particularly as many organisations will have to report personal data breaches to their data protection authority for the first time under the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and new GDPR-aligned data protection laws in the UK.


What network pros need to know about IoT

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When it comes to IoT, latency is the enemy. With thousands of devices spread across offices, factories, hospitals, and remote locations, more and more data and computing resources will reside on the edges of the network. "I always say, 'I don't care how fast your network is, you don't deploy your car's airbag from the cloud,'" says Shepherd. "Similarly, if I'm an operations person who needs real-time control over a manufacturing line, I want to move computing for process control and quality as close as feasible to the line, so I'm not relying on a wide-area network to respond." By 2022, Gartner estimates that 75% of all enterprise data will be generated and processed on the network's edge. And that raises a host of new data governance issues. Determining which data stays on the edge and what travels across the network can be complicated, says Kimberly Clavin, vice president of engineering for Pillar Technology, which designs IoT solutions for the automotive, healthcare, and retail industries.


These are the programming language features that really matter to developers

In general, developers want more of a safety net when creating complicated applications, writes Thomas Elliott, data scientist at GitHub. That desire for safety and predictability is evident in the rise of languages that support static typing, where developers can specify the type of each variable, allowing many errors to be flagged when code is compiled. "With the exception of Python, we've seen a rise in static typing, likely because of the security and efficiency it offers individual developers and teams working on larger applications," writes Elliott, who adds there is also an increased appetite for languages that make it easier to build stable multi-threaded applications. "TypeScript's optional static typing adds an element of safety, and Kotlin, in particular, offers greater interactivity, all while creating trustworthy, thread-safe programs." Among the fastest-growing languages, Elliott identifies a common theme of modern, more fully featured languages that can interoperate with older languages, and that, in some cases, are starting to supersede them.


CarsBlues Bluetooth attack Affects tens of millions of vehicles

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A new Bluetooth hack, dubbed CarsBlues, potentially affects millions of vehicles, Privacy4Cars warns. The CarsBlues attack leverages security flaws in the infotainment systems installed in several types of vehicles via Bluetooth, it affects users who have synced their smartphone to their cars. Privacy4Cars develops a mobile app for erasing PII from vehicles, according to the firm tens of millions of vehicles could be affected worldwide, and it is an optimistic estimate because the number could be much greater. The riskiest scenario sees drivers who sync their phones to vehicles that have been rented, borrowed, or leased and returned. Their data might be exposed to attackers that can use them for various malicious purposes. “The attack can be performed in a few minutes using inexpensive and readily available hardware and software and does not require significant technical knowledge.” reads the post published by the company. “As a result of these findings, it is believed that users across the globe who have synced a phone to a modern vehicle may have had their privacy threatened. It is estimated that tens of millions of vehicles in circulation are affected worldwide, with that number continuing to rise into the millions as more vehicles are evaluated.”


IoT Home Assistant API for Raspberry Pi

Home Assistant is an open-source home automation platform running on Python 3. It is used to track and control all devices at home and has many utilities to help us with automation control. You can check at Home Assistant blog how dynamic is the community with constant updates and upgrades for the platform. We expect to interact Home Assistant with the embryo API available at the IoT.Starter.Pi thing device. There are many ways to install Home Assistant, since it supports many different hardware platforms. This project focus on Haspbian, a disk image that contains all needed to run Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi. The Haspbian image is built with same script that generates the official Raspbian image's from the Raspberry Pi Foundation. The same tool used to create the raspberrypi.org Raspbian images was forked from home-assistant/pi-gen repository. The final stages were ripped off and a new stage-3 was replaced to install Home Assistant. With the exception of git , all dependencies are handled by the build script.


Can Artificial Intelligence Improve Learning?


Hard data can indeed help identify learning challenges for individual students. Virtual reality can enliven a science lesson visually, and for engineering students, in particular, simulate and break down connections between moving parts in ways that even the most imaginative teacher cannot put together in a lecture. Engineering education in India is being criticized for churning out unemployable graduates in large numbers. Most of them seem to lack communication skills and find themselves at a loss when asked to solve practical challenges in the workplace. Technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality can help monitor and identify personal preferences and aptitudes. And they can do this much faster than any human, providing the opportunity for much-needed intervention at exactly the stage at which it is required. That is the crux of providing students with a complete vocational experience and making their education relevant to what is required by industry.


A quick guide to important SDN security issues

Traditional network security vulnerabilities are bad enough without adding SDN security issues to the mix. But, as organizations deploy SDN, they risk exposing their networks to new types of threats and attacks, especially if they don't have proper plans in place. A prevalent concern with SDN security focuses on the SDN controller. The controller contains and provides intelligence for the entire network. Whoever has access to the controller has control of the network. This means organizations need to configure policies and design the network to make sure the right people are in charge. Here are four useful tips to help organizations avoid detrimental SDN security issues and get the most from their SDN deployments. ,,, The SDN controller is a vital part of the security discussion, because successful attacks on the controller can totally disrupt network operations, he said. To combat these attacks, organizations can configure role-based authentication to make sure the right people get access to applications and data. 


How open source makes lock-in worse (and better)

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Open source creates lock-in? Surely not! Well, surely yes, at least in the enterprise. Why? Because enterprise computing doesn't like change. As hard as it is to get an enterprise to embrace new technologies, once they do, they tend to stick around forever. Remember when mainframes died a decade or two back? Except, of course, they didn't die: Enterprises continue to spend billions each year on old-school tech that had its day back when Flock of Seagulls was still on the radio. Fast forward to Amazon vs. Oracle. Amazon, with a multi-billion dollar database business of its own that directly competes with Oracle's, had every reason to move off the legacy database vendor. And yet it didn't. Year after year, Amazon wrote massive checks worth tens of millions to Oracle, its stated enemy. Finally, on November 9, AWS chief Andy Jassy said that Amazon's consumer business finally weaned itself off Oracle's data warehouse for Amazon Redshift, and was getting close to moving all other applications to Amazon Aurora and DynamoDB.


Robots and the NHS: How automation will change surgery and patient care

Surgeons are one of the first medical specialties to welcome their robot overlords: in the NHS, surgical robots can already be found assisting with a range of operations, including urology, colorectal, and prostate procedures. These robots -- which are made up of a set of arms wielding cameras, lights and medical instruments -- are controlled by a surgeon sitting at a console who is then able to control the actions of the robot's arms with great precision. Using robots means surgeons can make smaller incisions, reducing blood loss and pain for patients, which can mean a faster recovery time and a shorter stay in hospital. That's good news for the patients, who can get back to their normal life quicker, but also good news for the NHS, which has fewer infections and complications to deal with, and sees beds freed up faster. Another attraction is that these robots can reduce the physical burden on surgeons -- bending over patients for several hours a day over years is not kind on the back -- which can allow clinicians to carry on operating for longer.



Quote for the day:


"Honor bespeaks worth. Confidence begets trust. Service brings satisfaction. Cooperation proves the quality of leadership." -- James Cash Penney


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