May 03, 2016

Now or Never: The Ultimate Strategy for Handling Defects

Let’s stop using the backlog as a trash can. Having a longer queue of issues will increase the average lead time of our system. We could say that any backlog isn’t just a “first in/first out” queue and manage it that way, but managing our bug log demands time and energy. In my experience, the benefits of these activities with long bug logs are overrated. Just stop doing it. If a bug is critical enough but we haven’t fixed it, it will remind us about itself — don’t worry about that. Just recently, one of my teams had such a case. They knew about the problem, which appeared rarely in unpredictable situations. After a quick analysis, the team decided it was not important enough (below the line) because of its infrequency and closed the issue. However, the bug reappeared in several weeks under different conditions.

Will Fintech Destroy The Banks?

Whether the conversation starts with a vague reference to bitcoin, blockchain or crowd-funding, we're increasingly hearing from clients who are curious or worried about the implications of "Fintech" on their business or investment portfolio, particularly as it pertains to the banks.  Although wrapped in jargon and buzz words, "fintech" or financial technology, is simply the application of technology to improve the efficiency or delivery of financial services, at scale. Put this way, the concept goes from complex and obscure to obvious and unavoidable. There are, however, different themes to the innovation that could be very disruptive for both financial institutions and their customers:

I'm Calling it: Social Networking is Over

Confusion about the difference between social networking and social media is why most people haven't noticed the decline of social networking. People don't stop to think about the difference. Social networking is personal content. Social media is professional content. The sharing of social media -- professionally produced videos, articles, podcasts and photos -- is gradually replacing the sharing of personal content about one's life. For example, as you read my column, this article is being shared on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and other so-called "social networking" sites. But that isn't social networking; it's social media. Micro-blogging, micro-schmogging. No matter what you call it, Twitter is included in every roundup, comparison or article about social networking. It's universally included in the "social network" category.

Strengthening authentication through big data

The idea is to unobtrusively gather information from several sources, including user behavior and device usage, to create a profile that is unique to the account owner and cannot be stolen or replicated by fraudulent users. The next steps would be to use the profile to detect activities that hint at malicious activity and only then initiate extra authentication steps to make sure the account hasn’t been hijacked or compromised. This model has many strengths. It’s not something you lose, such as physical tokens; it doesn’t require extra memorization efforts; it can’t be stolen or replicated, such as passcodes, or even fingerprint and retina scans; and, above all, it’s not cumbersome and it doesn’t introduce extra complexities to the user experience.

Forensics expert fights crime with digital weapons

As the volume of electronic data grows exponentially and the number and type of devices "owned" by people — such as smartphones and tablets — increases, the need to be able to identify, collect, consolidate, filter and analyse relevant data, compounded by "peripheral data" such as CCTV, physical access control logs, satnav or computer log files, becomes even more important. Historically, during an investigation numerous techniques and tools would be used to attempt to piece together the various pieces of the puzzle, especially around chronology. For example, when trying to link a call on a mobile phone with a person having just entered a secure office, against an unauthorised log onto a computer and the copying of files to a remote device.

The Rise of Threat Intelligence Gateways

Why is threat intelligence gaining momentum? Security professionals know that since they can’t block every conceivable cyber-attack, they need to collect, process, and analyze all types of internal and external security data to improve their incident detection and response capabilities. Many also want to use threat intelligence more proactively for threat prevention. In fact, 36% of enterprise cybersecurity professionals say that their organizations intend to use threat intelligence feeds to automate remediation actions over the next 24 months. ... When threat intelligence points to bad IP address, URL, or DNS lookups, why not simply block them from the get go? Unfortunately, this hasn’t always been easy in the past as it involved normalizing disparate threat intelligence feeds, building custom dashboards and rule sets, integrating various network security devices, etc.

Is There Really Such a Thing as a “Hybrid Agile” method?

Are there projects that don’t require business cases and annual budget planning? Probably. But not many in larger organisations. So finding a way of making the existing waterfall processes more lean, will enable us to shift from “Hybrid Agile” to “real Agile”. The go-live preparation is different. I think there are many technologies for which we already have good answers that allow us to go-live as required using Continuous Delivery practices. For other technologies, COTS come to mind, we will likely continue to see some waterfall validation and testing practices being used before we can go live, but as the technologies and tools evolve this will become shorter and shorter until this final phase disappears.

IT leaders pick productivity over security

Security is on the top IT leader's mind, especially as hacks become more frequent, sophisticated and malicious, but the report also uncovered some shocking truths about cybersecurity in the enterprise. The report showed major flaws in how businesses and IT leaders approach security, and it boils down to a lack of communication between the C-Suite and IT leaders, as well as a general frustration with how security slows down overall productivity in the company. But just because security might bog down productivity, or IT leaders and executives suffer from a lack of communication, businesses need to remain vigilant regarding security. Jack Danahy, CTO and co-founder of Barkly, says efficiency should be redefined. "Good security does not bog down efficiency.

The race to create smart homes is on

Two things are needed to make homes truly “smart.” First are sensors, actuators and appliances that obey commands and provide status information. There are already hundreds if not thousands of smart home products on the market. These have evolved in recent years beyond simple door sensors and light switches to smart thermostats such as Nest and voice command devices such as the Amazon Echo. Second are protocols and tools that enable all of these devices, regardless of vendor, to communicate with each other. However, this is a major undertaking and it won’t happen overnight. In the meantime, smartphone apps, communication hubs and cloud-based services are enabling practical solutions that can be implemented right now.

Enterprise UX: Past, present and future

Looking ahead, there are multiple technology developments underway that will affect how user experiences -- for both consumers and business users -- are created. Wearables, IoT devices, virtual and augmented reality, and increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) will all profoundly change the way humans and computers interact with one another, and with the world around them. Gesture and voice control, for example, are set to play an increasingly important roles. The emerging umbrella term for where all this is heading is the 'post-app' world of pervasive computing, where desktop WIMP and mobile touch-driven interfaces are augmented or superseded by more 'natural' methods of user interaction.

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Quote for the day:

"I never look at the glass as half empty or half full. I look to see who is pouring the water and deal with them." -- Mark Cuban

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May 02, 2016

The expanding landscape of exploit kits

If you have systems and files being encrypted or file share becomes encrypted, that’s a huge impact. Dozens of hospitals have been attacked recently, and for some it has taken them days to recover. That means massive down time, rescheduling major surgeries. It’s literally putting lives at risk,” Williams said. Through their networks in the dark web, nefarious actors are informed that new exploits are seen in the wild, making them aware of even zero-day vulnerabilities before the general public. Leonard said, “Under responsible disclosure, a researcher will identify the use of a brand new exploit script to a vendor. The vendor then releases a patch that can be applied to the business.” Businesses, though, struggle to apply those patches expeditiously. The level of sophistication and the relative ease with which criminals can access exploit kits compromises business operations and has security teams on overdrive trying to expedite the patching process.

Ways to craft a better enterprise IT security roadmap

You need to be able to detect those threats and attacks. And detecting a threat, a vulnerability and an attack are three separate things, and that's important to understand. Lots of companies sell you vulnerability detection. Vulnerability detection is basically like telling you which doors you have unlocked. Attack detection is telling you when the burglar is coming through your door. And threat detection is, "Hey, the burglar has been seen on your street with a big bag of loot and he's heading for your house." So those are three separate things and, ideally, you want to know all three things. And that distinction is important because sometimes people say, "Well, I do vulnerability scanning so I'm covered." No, that just tells you which doors are unlocked. Maybe the burglars are getting smart enough to come in through the chimney.

Unified Storage That Can Sync and Share

Many siloed storage, data management, file sync and share and security solutions exist to provide for these individual requirements, but are typically cobbled together in costly, inefficient and unreliable ways. Nexsan UNITY addresses all of these requirements in a single unified solution which delivers high performance and multi-site collaboration at LAN speed to support business continuity and disaster recovery processes as well as mobile access to primary storage data. UNITY's patented technology is designed to support all devices – from mobile devices to tablets, laptops and desktops running Android, iOS, Mac and Windows– and provides a secure connection to data stored and managed within the enterprise totally eliminating the drudgery of using unpopular and aging VPN technologies.

Mobile Banking Trends Will Lead Change in Banking in 2016

Mobile banking offers many advantages: Users can authenticate their identity and open new accounts, sign up for direct deposit, pay bills, take out loans, and deposit checks by photographing them, all from their mobile devices. Mobile apps such as Venmo let users make and share payments instantly, and Quicken Loans’ Rocket Mortgage even offers a mortgage approval in eight minutes through a process that automatically collects pay and credit information and requires minimal typing by the user, letting them sign their name right from their mobile device. In the U.S., Simple and Moven are the leaders in developing banking apps that allow people to pay by mobile, track their expenditures, and save for future goals in electronic envelopes — whether it’s for large expenses such as vacations or a down payment on a house, or for smaller things like a tattoo or a bike tune up.

What's Wrong with Open Data Sites--and How We Can Fix Them

The second non-obvious design problem, which is probably the most important, is that most open data sites bury data in what is known as thedeep web. The deep web is the fraction of the Internet that is not accessible to search engines, or that cannot be indexed properly. The surface of the web is made of text, pictures, and video, which search engines know how to index. But search engines are not good at knowing that the number that you are searching for is hidden in row 17,354 of a comma separated file that is inside a zip file linked in a poorly described page of an open data site. In some cases, pressing a radio button and selecting options from a number of dropdown menus can get you the desired number, but this does not help search engines either, because crawlers cannot explore dropdown menus.

Here's why analytics is eating the supply chain

This is not to say that supply-chain professionals are newcomers to the world of analytics. On the contrary: Demand forecasting, for example, has "been around forever" and relied heavily on data, said Paul Myerson, an author and professor of practice in supply chain management at Lehigh University. What's new today are the tools. "Today we have very visual tools that are much quicker to run," Myerson explained. "What used to take overnight can now be done in minutes." New software is also enabling more collaboration among partners, including key customers and suppliers. Point-of-sale data provides better insight for everyone involved, leading to better forecasting decisions. "It's about agreeing on forecasts and collaborating on inventory throughout the supply chain," Myerson said. "It really improves efficiency, cost and quality, and not just for manufacturers."

Embracing Agile

When we ask executives what they know about agile, the response is usually an uneasy smile and a quip such as “Just enough to be dangerous.” They may throw around agile-related terms (“sprints,” “time boxes”) and claim that their companies are becoming more and more nimble. But because they haven’t gone through training, they don’t really understand the approach. Consequently, they unwittingly continue to manage in ways that run counter to agile principles and practices, undermining the effectiveness of agile teams in units that report to them. These executives launch countless initiatives with urgent deadlines rather than assign the highest priority to two or three. They spread themselves and their best people across too many projects.

Cloud Economics – Are You Getting the Bigger Picture?

Most enterprises have hardware utilization rates significantly below 20% because of the excess capacity required to handle peak demand. As such, many companies carry up to 5 times the required hardware, networking, and data center space during steady state business cycles. If their computing demand is spiky, utilization rates outside of peak cycles are commonly below 10%. As a result, enterprises are spending much more on compute and storage than is required. Figure 1 depicts the traditional model where cloud shifts fixed CapEx expenses to variable OpEx expenses. To understand the full value of cloud for your enterprise, you must look beyond the CapEx vs. OpEx benefits and assess the other value drivers at play.

Zen and the art of big data digital IoT transformation

Despite the obvious levels of machine automation in the Internet of Things — and the machine-learning capabilities that some of these machines will benefit from — we must also keep the human factor top of mind. The first beneficiaries of efficient data management and effective data analysis will often be the worker-stakeholders within the business. When we empower employees with intelligence to be able to perform their jobs better (with better machines and processes around them), we ultimately derive greater business value at the end of the day. For want of more tangible examples here, if big data digital IoT transformation is focused on plant machinery, then we could see turbine sensors reporting performance statistics to enable more efficient predictive maintenance. Our business model states: less downtime + better serviced machines = greater business value.

PCI's new rules focus on the chiefs

Troy Leach, the chief technology officer for the PCI Security Standards Council, said in an interview that he finds this lack of involvement problematic and that he fought for the new rule. The rule itself sounds innocuous and possibly even obvious, but there's a lot more to it. The rule, within Requirement 12, mandates that "executive management establish responsibilities for the protection of cardholder data and a PCI DSS compliance program." To Leach's mind, that means that they have to dig in and assume responsibilities for payments security and stopping the simple act of delegating it away. "The intent is that we at least push the visibility to the executive level," Troy said, referring to the full text of the new guidelines. "We need for there to be different C-levels aware of compliance responsibilities."

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Quote for the day:

"An organization's ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage." -- Jack Welch

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May 01, 2016

Blockchain Platform Emercoin is Moving Beyond Cryptocurrencies

Now, Emer is a platform that offers two primary product umbrellas, a blockchain-based platform for a variety of of services including security, advertising, and legal. It is also a payment services unit in Emercoin which also runs through the Emer platform. While the name Emercoin might be recognizable from the standpoint of being a cryptocurrency used to send and receive payment and is ultimately tradeable, it is just a piece of what makes the Emer platform so valuable in the services it offers and the problems it can solve. For developers seeking to build products or solutions based off of the Emer platform, they’ve provided a quick-start guide for deploying an Emercoin wallet on an Ubuntu instance within Microsoft Azure.

IT leaders inundated with bimodal IT meme

At first glance, it certainly seems to make sense, and from my perspective bimodal is intellectually useful as a concept in creating a dividing line between legacy technology efforts that change much more slowly and must be managed more carefully on one side and high velocity new digital projects that must more faithfully match the rate of exponential change of market conditions today, while also effectively applying the latest technologies and techniques. Where the concept breaks down, as I explored in my original critique of bimodal, is in actual execution. The real world of technology and the activities that make it bear fruit cannot be neatly compartmentalized into a dual structure. Not only do the actual needs and demands of individual IT initiatives vary widely, the team skills and processes on the ground are unique for nearly every project as well.

Quantifying Benefits of Network Virtualization in the Data Center

Network virtualization allows IT organizations to deploy their network resources whenever and wherever they need them. IT can rapidly add the capacity to make sure the network delivers the performance and reliability demanded by evolving data center environments. NV provides improved, centralized management and offers microsegmentation to improve data center security and increase compliance. For organizations facing network upgrades, the option to deploy network software on white-box switches can result in significant capex savings. NV deployment is becoming mainstream in leading data center deployments. Organizations are likely to see strong ROI benefits from operational efficiencies – although this ROI is challenging to quantify.

Data Tower: a Data Center for Saruman

As our society increasingly relies on digital services, the unique problems in data center design attract attention from designers outside of the data center world, who propose unorthodox design ideas in attempts to envision new, better ways to build data centers in the future. Another example of this trend is an Estonian startup called Project Rhizome, which is thinking of ways to better integrate data centers into densely populated urban areas. eVolo, an architecture and design journal, has held its futuristic skyscraper design competition since 2006. The other two winners in this year’s contest were a design that proposes a continuous horizontal skyscraper around New York City’s Central Park, which is sunken to create more space for housing with unobstructed views, and a vertical control terminal for drones that would provide services to New York residents.

Data Storytelling: The Essential Data Science Skill Everyone Needs

It’s important to understand how these different elements combine and work together in data storytelling. When narrative is coupled with data, it helps to explain to your audience what’s happening in the data and why a particular insight is important. Ample context and commentary is often needed to fully appreciate an insight. When visuals are applied to data, they can enlighten the audience to insights that they wouldn’t see without charts or graphs. Many interesting patterns and outliers in the data would remain hidden in the rows and columns of data tables without the help of data visualizations.

A Google executive creative director explains what he does for a living 

While Vranakis says there are many agencies out there that have taken a more modern working approach he thinks - without wanting to make sweeping statements about the industry - there are a couple of things that separate the Lab from a traditional agency setup. One is the way in which the creative directors and other experienced executives at agencies often take credit for a team effort. He points to the annual Gunn Report, which showcases the year's most successful campaigns. "I think there are still structures that incentivize the contributor as opposed to the group," Vranakis said. "If you look at Gunn Reports and things like that, they all name individuals. I know that it's just business. If you win an award and your name is attached to the award, you'll get a pay-rise as they'll need to keep you as you'll be headhunted."

Identity Management: Where Cloud Security Falls Short

It's obvious that thinking outside the traditional security perimeter is necessary. Less obvious is how much "controlling the access to data" will contribute to firms being able to adopt cloud services and technologies more safely, Yeoh and Baron continued. The survey identifed seven types of perimeter-based security products, and asked respondents how many of them were in use in their organizations. As the table below shows, antivirus, anti-spam, and Virtual Private Networks were the top three solutions in use by respondents. ... When the question turns to which access measures are in place for partners, outsourced IT, and other third parties, the picture changes quite a bit. Only 62% of respondents said they had privileged access management in place for such users, 25% had application to application password management, and 32% had secure password storage.

Why image recognition is about to transform business

Not every company has the resources, or wants to invest in the resources, to build out a computer vision engineering team. Even if you’ve found the right team, it can be a lot of work to get it just right, which is where hosted API services come in. Carried out in the cloud, these solutions offer menus of out-of-the-box image recognition services that can be easily integrated with an existing app or used to build out a specific feature or an entire business. Say the Travel Channel needs “landmark detection” to show relevant photos on landing pages for specific landmarks, or eHarmony wants to filter out “unsafe” profile images uploaded by their users. Neither of these companies needs or wants to get into the deep learning image recognition development business, but can still benefit from its capabilities.

2016: The year of application layer security in public clouds

In 2016, private datacentres will reflect public cloud security realities and secure internal network traffic as well. Encrypted layers of security within a datacentre or public cloud network will help organisations control access and encryption to limit malicious east/west movement. This ‘application segmentation’ at the application layer will add security within the network to strengthen existing datacentre hardware and virtualisation layer security. Enterprise application owners will realise the value of true virtual networks in concept in practice. No more will network operators believe a VLAN is actually virtual! The limitations of the physical network architectures will be magnified once enterprises see the difference between an underlay for bulk transport and an overlay for application specific use-case tuning. The glaring security holes in physical networks once obfuscated will reveal themselves.

Controlling Hybrid Cloud Complexity with Containers: CoreOS, rkt, and Image Standards

CoreOS Linux is an interesting example of system architecture decisions informed by the reality of container clusters. If the container makes applications self-contained, portable, standard units, the operating system should adapt to empower this dynamic use case. In CoreOS, the operating system and basic userland utilities are stripped to their bare minimum and shipped as an integral unit, automatically updated across a cluster of machines. CoreOS may be thought of as a “hypervisor” for containers, that is itself packaged in a discrete and standard way. Utilizing this single image distribution, CoreOS foregoes individual package management in favor of frequent and coordinated updates of the entire system, protected by a dual-partition scheme providing instant and simple rollbacks in the event of trouble.

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Quote for the day:

"When data disproves a theory, a good scientist discards the theory and a poor one discards the data." -- Will Spencer

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April 30, 2016

Advice To Fintech Firms: How To Partner With Banks

Banks need help, and they have recognized that some of that help will come from Fintech firms. That is why so many banks have created incubators and accelerators. Banks and Fintech firms need each another. It took a while to sink in, but most players now agree. But Fintechs struggle with how to partner with banks, and vice versa. What will a good Fintech partner look like? Without a doubt, banks are looking for partners. They want companies that will share their business goals and understand their vision. They want partners who will measure success the way they do. But what partnering model are we talking about? There are several existing or emerging models.

The Open Group IT4IT Architecture Offers a New Direction

Within IT, there are places where we want to move in a more agile way -- where we want to move faster. There are also certain activities where waterfall is still an excellent methodology to drive the consistency and predictability that we need. A good example of that comes with large releases. We may develop changes or features in a very agile way, but as we move towards making large changes to the business that impact large business functions, we need to roll those changes out in a very controlled, scripted way. So, we take a little bit different look at Bimodal than some companies do. Your other question was on Shadow IT. One of the things that we have challenged a lot over the last year or so is this concept the role of the IT organization relative to the rest of the enterprise.

The API Economy: A Big Ball of CRUD

Services and APIs are only loosely-coupled in conceptual architecture, but not in the real-world where people still have to manually discover and integrate them at the Application and Process layers. This is the reason why Service Orientation has yet to have delivered “Business Agility”. From that high-level Enterprise Architecture perspective (as opposed to the bottom up IT view) it’s not useful or scalable to be stuck manually considering individual APIs. It would be better to have an abstraction, a model for looking at all of these endpoints as objects that expose functionality, but hide their complexity and automate management of the end-to-end API contract lifecycle in order to advance the Service Orientation architectures.

Key Differences Between A Poiny-To-Point Vs. Enterprise-Wide Data Integrity Solution

Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) systems commonly integrate data from multiple applications and systems and are typically developed and supported by different vendors or hosted on separate computer hardware. The disparate systems containing the original data are frequently managed and operated by different employees as well. It is likely you have found some point-to-point tools in your tool kit to help with this enormous data corralling challenge, but what about maintaining the integrity of the data as it moves away from your original system downstream? An even more elusive question to answer is do you need enterprise visibility into the overall integrity of your key business data?

How artificial intelligence is changing the way illness is diagnosed and treated

The industry's interest in AI, Rajan says, has been driven both by rising costs and increasing volumes of data. "There isn't necessarily the capacity to capture and process and understand all of it. I think AI, particularly a lot of early solutions, are targeting those issues -- being able to take large volumes of data, put it through levels of processing that can allow some level of relevancy to crop up to support decision making and influence the course of care." The aim is for AI systems to do what doctors can't always: keep up on every detail of every patient's visit to every specialist or hospital, as well as each pertinent new piece of research, disease outbreak, and public health recommendation. The system must not only digest all that information, but also factor in the patient's symptoms and then recommend a diagnosis or course of treatment that takes all those elements into account.

Big Data & Logistics: 7 Current Trends to Watch

“Hey ‘Big Data’ is just a big fuzzy word for me” quoted a Vice President of an Innovation Center at a big logistic company back in early 2015. Just one year later, he not only has to admit that ‘Big Data’ is the next big revolution, but has already applied big data technology to dramatic effect significantly growing the business and reducing costs. In fact, he’s been so successful that he’s been given the funding for a new Machine Learning department! UPS’ 1 billion investment in big data more broadly blows the whistle for all logistics companies all around the globe to get very serious about becoming data-driven or otherwise be in fear of being wiped out. The delta being created by those who have been quick to embrace big data is growing rapidly.

Phil Zimmermann speaks out on encryption, privacy, and avoiding a surveillance state

Talking of Snowden, Zimmermann notes with a certain amount of pride: "Snowden got his hands on some documents that showed some products that [the NSA] had broken the crypto [on]—and none of my stuff was on the list." Silent Circle's Blackphone device runs a security-toughened version of Android it calls PrivatOS. Calls are encrypted end-to-end which means even the company itself can't hand over the details to anyone. "We have no access to it. None. We can't disclose what we don't have access to," the company says. Since the V&A exhibition opened, the Blackphone has been added to the collection of a second museum—the International Spy Museum in Washington DC. Its 'Weapons of Mass Disruption' gallery explores the challenges facing the intelligence community in the twenty first century.

Reflecting software architecture evolution in your stack

While the disconnect between the conception of "business processes" as being "business process flows" and event architecture -- or microservices architecture -- seems obvious, it's not being adequately reflected in most enterprise architecture methodologies. The business process output of EA is often prestructured into business process flows and leans toward workflow thinking when translating EA requirements to IT requirements. It is possible to "retroject" an understanding of modern software architecture evolution and design approaches based on the cloud and microservices into today's EA methodologies, but this is difficult to do in a consistent and organized way.

International IT trade group urges firms to prepare for GDPR

“There are challenges ahead. A lot of companies will have their work cut out for them to be compliant in time,” said Bridget Treacy, partner at Hunton & Williams. “All organisations that have not done so already, really have to start thinking in very pragmatic terms about what the GDPR means for the business and how they are going to handle their data assets, because two years is not much time,” she said. The final alarm bell has been sounded, said Stewart Room, cyber security and data protection partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). “There are no more alarm bells after this. There is no more pretending. All organisations that have not started preparing now need to start taking this seriously,” he said.

IT guru Batya Friedman talks tenets of value-sensitive design

There's nothing in value-sensitive design that's about a specific technology. It's about how do we foreground what's important to people in the tools and technologies and infrastructure we build. Most of my work has focused on information technology, but other people have applied it to wind turbines, to designing processes for customs in major ports, for transportation systems. ... When you're designing a system, who do you focus on? The language in the field is to talk about users and user-sensitive design. So when people design, they think about who is going to use the technology. We have methodologies for doing usertesting, but we know that others are stakeholders, too. So one of the key changes is to bring other stakeholders in to make sure they're considered along with the users.

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Quote for the day:

"Just because something doesn't do what you planned it to do doesn't mean it's useless." -- Thomas A. Edison

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April 29, 2016

Cyber security in Belgium will gain prominence after terror attacks

There is some good news for the country’s cyber security. Belgium is one of the countries least affected by online banking trojans.  And there is a very good reason for that, according to Eddy Willems, security evangelist at Gdata Software. “Most Belgian banks use advanced authentication system, which makes it more difficult for cyber criminals to obtain the required authentication details to get entrance to the victim’s bank account,” he said. ... Not such good news for Belgium is that it and the other Benelux countries, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, have seen a dramatic increase in the number of ransomware incidents. More incidents have been reported in February 2016 alone than in the last six months of 2015, according to research by security supplier Trend Micro.

In the digital enterprise, everyone is a security newb

In the digital enterprise, protecting critical data has changed. Communication is the missing ingredient because security teams don't have the information they need for the other business leaders who are focused on different objectives, like sales goals or the customer experience. "Those department heads are so concerned about keeping their own systems up so that they can continue bringing in revenue, that they overlook security. For example, the managers of a POS system do not want to have their IT guy take the system offline for an hour to fix a patch during Black Friday," Stolte said. In order to best defend against the threats of malicious actors, leaders across all departments need to become more security savvy. "Line of business and application owners, those who manage assets that contain valuable information, must first recognize that the information they manage is of high value and they must communicate with the security team," Stolte said.

IT performance management pegged for increase of virtualization tools

"There are [fewer] IT organizations using cloud services than everybody expects," said Edward Haletky, CEO and principal analyst for The Virtualization Practice LLC. There has been a large increase in shadow IT, wherein cloud services are purchased ad hoc by workers, but since IT pros are not involved with these unknown services, they aren't factored into decisions about what management tools to buy. Many companies have just started to branch out into the cloud. MetLife Insurance, for example, started with development platforms and has moved to putting new and some existing apps in the cloud, but most of its IT operations are still in owned and hosted data centers, according to Tony Granata, assistant vice president of capacity performance & monitoring engineering at the New York-based insurer.

Rip up the script when assembling a modern security team

Hiring analysts who’ve worked at the same companies or attended the same schools means you may end up with a team that approaches security issues in a similar manner. If they all think alike, they’ll probably miss the same security blind spots. ... look for people who have worked in different companies and industries and have experience fighting a variety of threat vectors. Ideally, your team will include someone with either a military or government background. They’ll have a completely different way of looking at security, forcing your company out of its comfort zone. Military personnel are often familiar with nation-state attacks and malicious intent and understand how complex offensive operations work. And with hackers launching advanced attacks against companies, people who have experience dealing with these threats can apply their knowledge to defend a business.

Don't overlook these two hidden risks to your corporate data

The data your SMB partners have in hand may seem minimal, but it's still critical corporate data. Contact information and services rendered may be valuable to an individual who hacks the SMB's network. As an InfoSec professional, you know what measures you have in place—but what about the SMB? The extent of its security depends upon available resources and what's affordable for it to implement. ... When it comes to internal colleagues exposing sensitive corporate data, it's all about timing and pulling the emotional strings. Along with having the technical skill set to spoof a business's email address, the attacker executed the data breach beautifully by understanding the time of year and knowing who to target at a busy time. The accountant's inbox was potentially flooded with deadline notifications and requests, which created a stressful environment. This makes for an easy target.

The Holistic Approach: Preventing Software Disasters

Understanding each kind of source code and scripts, interpreting the configuration files, evaluating the value of variables throughout the execution cycle for finally piecing all these findings together and reverse-engineering the system blueprint gives CIOs an “X-Ray view” into the inner workings of their organization’s software systems and empowers the CIO to make data-informed decisions to fortify overall software quality. ... But looking at the unit-level source code is not everything, it’s just the beginning - specifically with modern architectures where loose coupling between the different layers is a must. Hence CIOs must also X-Ray the “glue” between software layers and components, which is sometimes defined in configuration, property files or annotations stored directly inside the source code files

10 Free Tools For API Design, Development And Testing

The rise of RESTful APIs has been met by a rise in tools for creating, testing, and managing them. Whether you’re an API newbie or an expert on an intractable deadline, you have a gamut of services to help you get your API up and running quick, and many of them won’t cost you a dime. Following is a sampling of free services for working with APIs: load testers, API designers, metrics collectors, and much more. Some are quick and dirty applications to ease the job of assembling an API. Others are entry-level tiers for full-blown professional API services, allowing you to get started on a trial basis and later graduate to a more professional level of (paid) service if and when you need it.

Is There a Need to Redesign Cyber Insurance?

As insurers increasingly focus on operational risk — that is, failure due to systems, processes, people and external events — as a key element of managing their capital adequacy and solvency, how will the regulators and insurance commissioners view the potential increase in the risk of someone infiltrating an insurer’s own site through some form of remote device? Overall, there seems to be agreement that prevention is better than cure, but where cyber crime happens, it is critical that companies carry appropriate insurance cover. Cyber insurance cover has been around for a decade or so, but as cyber crime has developed, then doesn’t insurance cover also need to mature? With policies provided by some major insurers giving cover to $100m, isn’t it time to think about whether this is enough?

You'll soon be using GPU as a Service

As an example of this new wave, AMD and AP are collaborating to bring immersive experience to news and storytelling. This can significantly enhance the ability to get information to content viewers, while also providing a more concise way to impart information, including the ability to see multiple perspectives, exhibit full dimensional accuracy, get a better sense of time, etc. Although still a niche market, this will help accelerate the adoption of VR clients. In addition to VR clients, the need to process immersive information means that there will be a significant need for high performance graphics processors -- not only at the individual server level, but available as an on-demand service based in the cloud. GPUs as a Service will expand greatly over the next 2-3 years, and will eclipse the PC GPU market in sheer numbers of units.

Production Like Performance Tests of Web-Services

Tests should always keep the end user view in mind to ensure that the software meets with acceptance on the part of the users. But how to test web services which are not directly customer-facing, and in particular, how to performance test them in a meaningful way? This article outlines performance test approaches that we have developed and proven to be effective in the company HERE, which is a leading location cloud company.  ... Tests should be created with knowledge regarding the end user so that they are effective and risk-based. Because of this factor, as well as release techniques such as canary releases and feature toggles, the line between tests run prior to the release and of the released software on production becomes blurred.

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Quote for the day:

"Fear causes hesitation and hesitation will cause your worst fears to come true." -- Patrick Swayze

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