ThreatList: Pharma Mobile Phishing Attacks Turn to Malware
“The reason that mobile devices have become a primary target is because a
well-crafted attack can be close to impossible to spot,” said Schless. “Mobile
devices have smaller screens, simplified user interfaces, and people generally
exercise less caution on them than they do on computers.” Meanwhile, while
previously cybercriminals were relying on phishing attacks that attempted to
carry out credential harvesting, in 2020, the aim shifted to malware delivery.
For instance, in the fourth quarter of 2019, 83 percent of attacks aimed to
launch credential harvesting while 50 percent aimed to deliver malware.
However, in the first quarter of 2020, only 40 percent of attacks targeted
credentials, while 78 percent aimed to deliver malware. And, in the third
quarter of 2020, 27 percent targeted credentials, and 81 percent looked to
load malware. Researchers believe that this shift signifies that attackers are
investing in malware more for pharmaceutical companies. For one, successful
delivery of spyware or surveillanceware to a device could result in
longer-term success for the attacker. Furthermore, said researchers, attackers
want to be able to observe everything the user is doing and look into the
files their device accesses and stores. ...”
Don't put data science notebooks into production
Putting a notebook into a production pipeline effectively puts all the
experimental code into the production code base. Much of that code isn't
relevant to the production behavior, and thus will confuse people making
modifications in the future. A notebook is also a fully powered shell, which
is dangerous to include inside a production system. Safe operations require
reproducibility and auditability and generally eschews manual tinkering in the
production environment. Even well intentioned people can make a mistake and
cause unintended harm. What we need to put into production is the concluding
domain logic and (sometimes) visualizations. In most cases, this isn't
difficult since most notebooks aren't that complex. They only encourage linear
scripting, which is usually small and easy to extract and put into a full
codebase. If it's more complex, how do we even know that it works? These
scripts are fine for a few lines of code but not for dozens. You’ll generally
want to break that up into smaller, modular and testable pieces so that you
can be sure that it actually works and, perhaps later, reuse code for other
purposes without duplication. So we’ve argued that having notebooks running
directly in production usually isn’t that helpful or safe. It’s also not hard
to incorporate into a structured code base.
Why the CMO and CIO are no longer strange bedfellows
The CIO’s mandate is all systems, both customer-facing and internal. We know
that more and more this involves capturing and interpreting market and
customer data through artificial intelligence derived from data sensors. In
turn, IT leaders supply the capabilities needed to meet Line of Business
demands for agility and speed. The CMO’s mandate is to apply the derived
customer intelligence, needs, and habits, and profile customers down to the
individual level, to create an experience that meets the customer wherever,
whenever, and on any device. Understanding the customer is therefore central
to both mandates. The CIO needs to connect technology capabilities all the way
from the customer interaction back to the workload related to the customer,
sitting on the chosen infrastructure platform. The CMO needs an entire profile
of the customer, and the CIO builds the systems in order to create the
profile. In the current climate, businesses who fail to understand the
importance of the digital customer experience will undoubtedly fall behind.
Embracing the customer as a digital experience is essential for business
competitiveness and even survival.
Understanding Microsoft .NET 5
Technically this new release should be .NET Core 4, but Microsoft is
skipping a version number to avoid confusion with the current release of the
.NET Framework. At the same time, moving to a higher version number and
dropping Core from the name indicates that this is the next step for all
.NET development. Two projects still retain the Core name: ASP.NET Core 5.0
and Entity Framework Core 5, since legacy projects with the same version
numbers still exist. It’s an important milestone, marking the point where
you need to consider starting all new projects in .NET 5 and moving any
existing code from the .NET Framework. Although Microsoft isn’t removing
support from the .NET Framework, it’s in maintenance mode and won’t get any
new features in future point releases. All new APIs and community
development will be in .NET 5 (and 2021’s long-term support .NET 6). Some
familiar technologies such as Web Forms and the Windows Communication
Foundation are being deprecated in .NET 5. If you’re still using them, it’s
best to remain on .NET Framework 4 for now and plan a migration to newer,
supported technologies, such as ASP.NET’s Razor Pages or gRPC. There are
plans for community support for alternative frameworks that will offer
similar APIs
Top 8 trends shaping digital transformation in 2021
Consumers want consistent engagement with brands across their preferred
channels. Seventy-three percent of shoppers use more than one channel during
their shopping journey. Per Deloitte, seventy-five percent of consumers
expect consistent interactions across all departments of a company.
Eighty-six percent of consumers say they want the ability to move between
channels when talking to a brand. Ninty-two percent of customers are
satisfied using live chat services -- making it the support channel that
leads to the highest customer satisfaction. And 78% of consumers use mobile
devices to connect with brands for customer service -- the number jumps to
90% of Millennials. Organizations need to invest in new digital methods of
customer service. ... Research shows that Lines of business (LoBs) are
participating in digital transformation with 68% of LoB users believe IT and
LoBs should jointly drive digital transformation. In addition, 51% of LoB
users are frustrated at the speed their organizations' IT department can
deliver digital projects. Outside of IT, the top three business roles with
integration needs include business analysts, data scientists, and customer
support.
Q&A on the Book Virtual Teams Across Cultures
Firstly, it is important to understand the meaning of culture. In the book,
I go into more detail, but for now we can say that culture is the meaning
that a group of people give to understand life and interpret their
experience. Culture is a social construct, meaning that it develops through
the interaction of people. As humans, we are influenced by many cultures,
such as company culture. The book focuses on country or location
culture. When we work with people from the same culture, things tend to
go smoothly. In general, we understand each other’s communication style,
work approach, reactions and ideas. It all makes sense because the
assumptions that drive us are similar. However, when we meet someone from a
different culture, we may not understand or we may be surprised by their
communication style, work approach, reactions and ideas. The assumptions
that drive their behavior are fundamentally different. This is what we call
culture shock – that feeling of confusion because the other person does not
make sense to us. People who work internationally have most likely
experienced culture shock. The critical aspect is how we respond to
it.
Can Low Code Measure Up to Tomorrow’s Programming Demands?
There is some disagreement on whether AI and machine learning will be able
to write code, says Forrester’s Jeffrey Hammond, vice president and
principal analyst serving CIO professionals. “One camp is saying, ‘In the
future, AI is going to write a lot of the code that developers might write
today,’” he says. That could lead to less demand for developers, with fewer
positions to be filled. The counter view, Hammond says, is that software
development is a creative process and profession. For all its capabilities,
AI has limits that might not match the novel thinking of developers, he
says. “Some of the most valuable code that’s written is also the most
creative code.” Today AI is used successfully in testing, Hammond says,
which many developers might be loath to writing test cases for. He sees
market adjacencies to that with development tools such as Microsoft Visual
Studio that has a feature that can predict what a developer may type next,
then make that available for the developer to click. “You’ve got examples of
where these tools are augmenting developers’ working habits and making them
more productive,” Hammond says. In the creative space, Adobe Sensei
technology can help designers automate tedious tasks, he says, such as
stitch together photos or remove undesired artifacts from content.
Vulnerability Prioritization Tops Security Pros' Challenges
This should come as no surprise to anyone working in software development.
Software development organizations are using more application security tools
than ever before and from the earliest stages of development. Most are on top
of detection, but that's only the first step. Next comes prioritization: Once
you've detected the security issues, how can you make sure you are addressing
the most critical issues first? While prioritization is essential for
organizations that want to get ahead of their backlog, they are still
struggling to formulate a standardized prioritization process. Even though
vulnerability prioritization rated very high on application security
professionals' list of top challenges, the WhiteSource survey found that most
security and development teams don't follow a shared process for
prioritization. The survey asked to what extent the security and development
teams in their organization agree on which vulnerabilities need to be fixed,
and the results were concerning: 58% of respondents said they sometimes agree,
but each team follows ad hoc practices and separate guidelines. Only 31% of
respondents said they have an agreed-upon process to determine priorities.
Fast-Tracking AI Ethics Is Dicey And Shortsighted, Especially For Self-Driving Cars
Somehow, there needs to be a balance found that can appropriately make use of
the AI Ethics precepts and yet allow for flexibility when there is a real and
fully tangible basis to partially cut corners, as it were. Of course, some
would likely abuse the possibility of a slimmer version and always go that
route, regardless of any truly needed urgency of timing. Thus, there is a
chance of opening a Pandora’s box whereby a less-than fully AI Ethics protocol
becomes the default norm, rather than serving as a break-glass exception when
rarely so needed. It can be hard to put the Genie back into the bottle. In any
case, there are already some attempts at trying to craft a fast-track variant
of AI Ethics principles. We can perhaps temper those that leverage the urgent
version with both a stick and a carrot.The carrot is obvious that they are
seemingly able to get their AI completed sooner, while the stick is that they
will be held wholly accountable for not having taken the full nine yards on
the use of the AI Ethics. This is a crucial point that might be used against
those taking such a route and be a means to extract penalties via a court of
law, along with penalties in the court of public opinion.
How to boost your enterprise's immunity with cyber resilience
Cyber security and cyber resilience are often used interchangeably. While they
are related concepts, they're far from being synonyms, and it's crucial for
everyone to understand the difference. Security is like wearing a mask or
using other forms of personal protective equipment to reduce your risk of
being infected with a virus. Resiliency is, after having been infected,
fighting through the illness and giving your body a chance to return to good
health. This means that cyber security is the protection and restoration of IT
assets—hardware and software, in the cloud and on premises—and the data they
contain, to ensure their availability and integrity. Resiliency, on the other
hand, focuses on the ability of the business to withstand and recover from
these breaches. The scope extends beyond IT and information to business
operations and processes. The U.S. National Institute of Standards and
Technology (NIST) defines cyber resilience as "the ability of an information
system to continue to operate under adverse conditions or stress, even if in a
degraded or debilitated state, while maintaining essential operational
capabilities; and to recover to an effective operational posture in a time
frame consistent with mission needs."
Quote for the day:
"Limitations live only in our minds. But if we use our imaginations, our possibilities become limitless." -- Jamie Paolinetti
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