Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

June 10, 2016

We’ve Hit Peak Human and an Algorithm Wants Your Job. Now What?

Bank executives know what’s coming. So they’re setting up coder labs and investing in startups, teaming up with digital competitors or buying them outright. JPMorgan Chase, the biggest U.S. lender by assets, is using AI to identify potential equity clients. And it’s marshaling OnDeck Capital’s client-vetting algorithm to speed lending to small businesses. Both Bank of America and Morgan Stanley, which together employ more than 32,000 human financial advisers, are developing automated robo-advisers. More than 40 global banks have joined forces with startup R3 to develop standards to use blockchain, software that allows assets to be managed and recorded through a distributed ledger, to overhaul how assets are tracked and transferred.

IoT in Africa: Still a long way to go

“While machine-to-machine (M2M) opportunities may be limited across the African continent, significant potential for growth exists, particularly in respect to the deployment of M2M energy, utility, and security services,” the IDC report said. “M2M technology is clearly gaining traction in Africa, albeit at a slower rate than seen in the world's more developed markets,” Oluwole Babatope, a telecommunications and networking research analyst at IDC West Africa added in the report. “And while consumer applications for M2M technology undoubtedly exist, enterprises will be the main customers for such services, and thus the main drivers of growth.” The most prolific example of IoT is the ability to deliver and control solar power consumption through the uses of mobile phones like M-Kopa in Kenya. Users acquire solar units and pay for their daily use through mobile money. If payment is not made, the solar unit is automatically disabled.

Google, Facebook, Yahoo, rights groups oppose FBI expansion of surveillance powers

The companies and groups have pointed out in a letter to senators that the new provisions would expand the types of records, known as Electronic Communication Transactional Records (ECTRs), which the FBI can obtain using the NSLs. The ECTRs would include a variety of online information, such as IP addresses, routing and transmission information, session data, a person's browsing history, email metadata, location information, and the exact date and time a person signs in or out of a particular online account. “The new categories of information that could be collected using an NSL and thus without any oversight from a judge would paint an incredibly intimate picture of an individual's life,” according to the letter on Monday. The companies and groups are opposed to two pieces of legislation that are being considered by federal lawmakers.

Data lakes vs data streams: which is better?

Perhaps someone has run an analysis to find anomalies within a subset of the data and has then contributed this analysis back to the data lake as a new source. However, to get the best out of a complex data lake, a data curator is still recommended to create consistency and allow joins across data from different sources. A data stream, on the other hand, is an even newer concept in the general data science world (except for people who use complex event processing engines which work on streaming data). In contrast to deep storage, it’s a result of the increasing requirement to process and perform real-time analysis on streaming data. Highly scalable real-time analysis is a challenge that very few technologies out there can truly deliver on yet. The value of the data stream (versus the lake) is the speed and continuous nature of the analysis, without having to store the data first. Data is analysed ‘in motion’.

Why CTOs have been thinking about intelligence all wrong

It is a difficult question, and many businesses are willing to throw money at the wall just to see what sticks. The truth is, there is a right and wrong way to go about it. Unfortunately, most CTOs are only aware of the wrong way. Here’s where I believe I can help. First, let’s examine the wrong way. Traditionally, companies and CTOs who want to add intelligence to their applications will take a holistic approach, creating what is known as a data lake. This is done because of the need for context surrounding the data gathered from applications — the categorical information about particular points of data. The belief is that by capturing and organizing all data, businesses will be given a full 360-degree view of their users’ preferences, habits, etc. It's a great payoff — in theory.

Welcome to the API Economy

“The API economy is an enabler for turning a business or organization into a platform.” said Kristin R. Moyer, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “Platforms multiply value creation because they enable business ecosystems inside and outside of the enterprise to consummate matches among users and facilitate the creation and/or exchange of goods, services and social currency so that all participants are able to capture value.” Uber, for instance, is an example of a business built on a platform because it leverages Google Maps through an API to enable its entire business model of matching drivers who have a vehicle with passengers who need a ride. Walgreens offers an API for its in-store photo printing services that enables others to offer photo apps on its platform. It moves from being a photo printer to being a photo platform.

Network Design: How Cloud Apps Can Leave You Holding the Hot Potato

SD-WAN fabric can continuously monitor network conditions of all the underlying physical transports, so nodes can make intelligent decisions for forwarding application traffic in compliance with desired service level agreements (SLA). This completely redefines the notion of “shortest path” as described earlier in the context of hot potato routing. Instead of choosing the shortest path calculated solely by the routing protocols, the best end-to-end path between users and cloud applications is determined using a combination of best application performing paths (likely more than one with active/active approach). Of course the use of BGP is not mandatory and some regional Internet exchange facilities offer other means of exchanging reachability information, but for the sake of our discussion let’s assume a more generic case of using BGP.

Malware: A Complex Threat Calls for Complex Controls

Malware can be challenging to remediate because it comes in an endless number of varieties and a wide range of threats, including low-end scareware, medium-level ransomware, to high-level advanced volatile threats (AVTs) and advanced persistent threats (APTs). Ransomware made the news recently and has become a concern. This sort of infection often starts with a single user and then expands to any drives that user has access to. Once infected, ransomware can end up overwriting very important files, especially if the user has access to a company shared drive. For retail organizations, point of sale malware has also been very common in recent years. We have seen breaches at many major retailers and will likely continue to see breaches in the future.

Datacentre operators warned of public cloud threat to long-term co-location success

Steve Wallage, managing director of datacentre market watcher BroadGroup Consulting, claimed investors are already getting jumpy at how much of a long-term competitive threat AWS and co will pose to the co-location community. "The number one question [we get] from investors is, ‘Will AWS kill that business?’. If not directly, how about on price, because AWS has cut pricing around 40 times in the past five years,” he said. Wallage added that there is already evidence to suggest public cloud giants are weighing up their long-term position on co-location, with some striking multi-year deals that are shorter than they used to be. “They might take much space [now], but for how long and on what terms?” he questioned.

Technologist sees car as one big computer empowering our lives

Imagine driving to work but instead of trying to find a space in the car park, you drive straight into the office and the automated car finds a parking bay itself. Also imagine that the car’s battery powers your entire office. This is the vision that Nissan paints at the FT Future of the Car Summit in London. Electric cars in the future that will power up entire cities with what is known as ‘vehicle-to-grid’ technology – where cars will be able to charge at ‘off-peak’ hours at specific charging points to power homes and other buildings during peak hours. But society and infrastructure in general will slowly be transformed too. Will buses just become ‘big taxis’ in the future? Car Clubs are on the rise with “143,000 car club owners” now in London. These are all changing the way we think about car ownership. Apple just invested $1 billion in a Chinese car-hailing app which some say is a stake in the self-driving future.

Quote for the day:

"The world is made of Circles. And we think in straight Lines." -- Peter M. Senge

June 09, 2016

Why Russia’s CSD Believes Blockchain is a ‘Blue Ocean’ Opportunity

Yakovlev said a cross-discipline working body was soon created to unite NSD’s business leaders and IT specialists into a dedicated blockchain group, a tactic that is becoming increasingly common at major financial firms. From there, he said, five to six proofs-of-concept were proposed, with proxy voting emerging as the choice for the company’s experiments, as it “wasn’t achievable” in a centralized system, Yakovlev said. "The main problem with all e-voting solutions is, first of all, the voter is not able to verify his vote has not been modified before it is processed, or that votes are correctly counted. The transparency of blockchain and its distributed nature allowed us to create a voting process that provides a voter with [the] right tools to address both problems," he continued.

The fintech world beyond Silicon Valley and Europe: Emerging market contenders

Hitherto, most of the investments have occurred in the U.S. and Europe, with a marked exception this year when China’s Ant Financial completed a staggering $4.5 billion raise at a $60 billion valuation, making it one of the highest-valued private companies in the world. This recent raise may draw to emerging markets attention from the world beyond London, New York and Silicon Valley, which importantly house more than 90 percent of the world’s under-30 population. Countries other than the U.S. and U.K. have collectively spawned a range of visibly successful companies in search (Yandex, Baidu), e-commerce (Alibaba,Rocket Internet’s portfolio) and media (Naspers) by mostly applying tried and tested Western strategies to the local know-how. Reviewed below are some of the emerging market contenders across the fintech space.

Robots Are Invading Malls (and Sidewalks) Near You

Robots have been mingling with humans in several stores, too, including a Target in San Francisco, where a robot called Tally was used for a trial in which it trundled up and down aisles carrying out inventory checks—a mind-numbing task for humans. Tally detects when products are out of stock or moved so staff know to replace them. According to Tally’s creator, a startup called Simbe Robotics, it can complete an audit of a medium-sized store in around half an hour, with 96 percent accuracy. The same task would take a human 25 hours, and the company contends people are only about 65 percent accurate. Simbe Robotics CEO Brad Bogolea says that in order to make shoppers feel comfortable with robots wandering around the store, it’s important that the robots don’t look threatening.

Security Threats Hiding In Plain Sight

Almost anyone active online for a few years is likely to have received multiple breach notifications. So many businesses get hacked or reveal data through inattention that the details become a blur. The potential threat posed by insiders is well known, even if employees, contractors, and partners don't represent the most significant threat vector. According to Verizon's 2016 Data Breach Investigations Report, 172 data breaches around the world last year were attributable to insiders and privilege misuse out of 2,260 breaches analyzed. Privacy Rights Clearinghouse's database of data breaches suggests a relatively small percentage of breaches happened as a result of insiders: 13 out of 229 listed from 2015. Since the cause of many breaches is not publicly known, insider involvement could be greater.

Q&A: Indiana CIO Uses Data to Solve Big Problems

Dewand Neely spent more than a decade working in Indiana’s information technology department before becoming CIO in October 2015. He continues the state’s long tradition of hiring IT leaders from within, creating an organization built on stability. Now as CIO, Neely plans to advance the state’s groundbreaking Big Data project — an initiative that aims to lower Indiana’s infant mortality rate — to other areas. With its IT house mostly in order, the Indiana state government has shown the power IT has to improve citizen life. Neely recently talked with StateTech magazine about his top IT priorities, the future of data analytics and the importance of relationships.

Hot security startups to watch

This roundup of 13 such companies that we’re keeping an eye on runs the gamut from cloud security services to fraud prevention to protecting supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) and Internet of Things devices. These vendors clearly see the value of assessing the strength of network security architectures. Among them are four startups that simulate attacks against networks in order to test how well their defenses work and to help security staffers get the hang of what it’s like to get hit by a range of exploits and to hone their responses. AttackIQ, Cybric, SafeBreach and Verodin all have variations on this theme but all try to probe networks for vulnerabilities that could be strung together to create successful intrusions.

Silicon fingerprint on chips could make any gadget unhackable

Just as a human fingerprint is only a useful method for identifying someone once you know how to read it, the trick with PUFs has been to harness these production patterns for the purposes of encryption. A signature can be read simply by passing electricity through the chip – and then used to sign a message destined for just one place. But only recently has this technique become accurate and efficient enough to be built into cheap off-the-shelf devices. What’s more, because a chip’s fingerprint is only produced when current is flowing, the system is even more secure than most existing approaches – at least in theory. Securing a device such as a smartphone is usually done using a system based on digital keys stored on a hard drive. But there is a small – yet real – risk of the key being copied, even when the device is turned off. With PUFs, the fingerprint disappears without the current. “When you turn off the power, there is nothing left,” says Kennes.

Your phone may soon sense everything around you

If Tango fulfills its promise, furniture shoppers will be able to download digital models of couches, chairs and coffee tables to see how they would look in their actual living rooms. Kids studying the Mesozoic Era would be able to place a virtual Tyrannosaurus or Velociraptor in their home or classroom — and even take selfies with one. The technology would even know when to display information about an artist or a scene depicted in a painting as you stroll through a museum. Tango will be able to create internal maps of homes and offices on the fly. Google won't need to build a mapping database ahead of time, as it does with existing services like Google Maps and Street View. Nonetheless, Tango could raise fresh concerns about privacy if controls aren't stringent enough to prevent the on-the-fly maps from being shared with unauthorized apps or heisted by hackers.

How to build a thriving information security function despite the talent shortage

There is some hope on the horizon for resolving the talent shortage, with many colleges and technical schools expanding their programs to include security-specific curriculum. Many college students, recognizing the career potential, are taking advantage of those programs. Sadly, this won’t really help for at least a few years. If you manage information security in an organization faced with this talent shortage, you have likely already discovered that there is no easy button. Fortunately, there are some things you can do ... Don’t throw money at tools As I said above, the expensive tools generally require a good bit of care and feeding. While they may be useful in augmenting your security effort, they will in most cases make your staffing issues more acute. Buy tools when they are really needed, but take into account the related staffing requirements. Consider paying the vendor to perform installation and maintenance.

Securing Your Car From Cyberattacks Is Becoming a Big Business

RAlong with the relatively nascent automotive anti-malware industry, system security is further endangered because vehicle engineers typically do not use the most state-of-the-art hardware. Instead, carmakers opts for processors that may be a generation or two older in order to ensure reliability and robustness. That older hardware, however, may be able to run up-to-date security systems, which can expose latent vulnerabilities in the hardware, according to Navigant. The need for cybersecurity software is so critical that the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers and the Association of Global Automakers set up its own Information Sharing and Analysis Center (ISAC), which enables the sharing of data involving cybersecurity.

Such info-sharing groups exist in most major industries, such as healthcare, financial services and aerospace, but until 2014 the auto industry didn't see the need for a cyber security network.ead more here: http://www.kansas.com/news/business/article82676812.html#storylink=cpy

Quote for the day:

"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp posts... for support rather than for illumination." -- Andrew Lang

June 08, 2016

Google and Amazon are slowly killing the gadget as we know it

The real brilliance of the Chromecast lies in what it isn't, rather than what it is. It doesn't have an interface of its own. You just push a button on your phone and have whatever YouTube video you're watching or Spotify album you're listening to appear on your TV screen. A nice side effect: It's relatively simple to take an existing smartphone app and add Chromecast streaming capabilities, and literally tens of thousands of apps have done that integration. You don't have to think about it or learn a new interface; you just click and go. ... This trend isn't going to kill off the smartphone, or the PC, or the tablet. But it means lower-cost gadgetry that lasts a lot longer. We're only seeing the early stages of this shift now, but it has a lot of potential to shake up how we think about and how we buy our devices.

Blockchain's Hype Exceeds Its Grasp - For Now

Blockchain faces challenges beyond basic business practicality. The lack of universal standards and regulatory governance, a shortage of engineers schooled in working with the software, and questions about blockchain's scalability dampen the technology's adoption. For now, Nichol and other experts says blockchain is caughtin a hype cycle where it’s long on promise, short on practical implementations. "There’s a long way to go before any of the solutions that have been in the headlines in the past 18 months will be ready for enterprise deployment," says Martha Bennett, a Forrester Research analyst who advises clients on blockchain. "Anything that requires a large number of industry players to agree on a common set of processes is likely to be even further into the future; and that’s before we bring regulatory aspects into it."

Humans make mistakes: Is cloud automation the answer?

We want to automate for several purposes. One is scalability but the benefit that most immediately becomes apparent is that humans make mistakes. That's just the way things work. Someone goes in and either through negligence or just mistakenly deploys resources into the wrong region. Something like, they want to set up a test lab, which is no big deal, but they want to set it up in Singapore where it won't conflict or affect any of [their] production or DR workloads which are running in the US. The problem is that now you have resources that are unaccounted for, that are running in another region and are checked out by the governance folks. So we have a scanner that goes and looks for new resources in a region and then we can do something about it.

Security researchers' smart home findings may keep you up at night

To learn what happens when IoT devices are assembled into a smart home system, Fernandes, along with Atul Prakash, also of the University of Michigan, and Jaeyeon Jung of Microsoft Research looked at several smart home platforms. "We looked at what systems existed, and what features they offered," writes Fernandes. "We also looked at what devices they could interact with, whether they supported third-party apps, and how many apps were in their app stores." In addition, the researchers took a good look at the security features of the various platforms, asking the question, "In what ways are emerging, programmable, smart homes vulnerable to attacks, and what do these attacks entail?" To answer the question, the researchers decided to focus on one particular smart home system.

How to Hire and Retain An Expert Security Staff

Healthcare organizations may not be able to offer competitive salaries to lure top security talent compared to other industries such as banking, finance and insurance. So when hiring a qualified candidate isn’t a viable option and outsourcing isn’t feasible either, then the next best alternative is to develop and train the individuals currently on staff. Quite frankly, this should be happening already but the training budget is usually the first thing on the cutting block, assuming there is a formal training budget at all. Enhancing the security skills and knowledge of the current staff can fulfill multiple objectives and requirements, including compliance with regulations that mandate security training, as well as providing improvements to the information security program through better execution and security decision-making.

Design Patterns in the Real World: Flyweight

A flyweight is an object that minimizes memory use by sharing as much data as possible with other similar objects; it is a way to use objects in large numbers when a simple repeated representation would use an unacceptable amount of memory. Reading carefully the definition above, one can see the obvious similarities with what we call a "cache" in software engineering. As such, two important aspects should be considered: implementations of this design pattern may lead to garbage collection unfriendly solutions, as retained, shared objects may be ineligible for garbage collection; and not stated explicitly, but it makes sense to define those shared objects as stateless/immutable. This way we can overcome some evident problems like data race conditions and objects with illegal state.

Stress at work is costing employers $300 billion a year - here's why

Research suggests that people may be more stressed today than ever before - and it's costing employers (and employees) big time.According to a new infographic created by Eastern Kentucky University's online Bachelor of Science in Occupational Safety program, companies spend about $300 billion annually for health care and missed work days as a result of workplace stress. Meanwhile, employees are feeling less energetic, more agitated, and getting less sleep due to increased demands at work - causing them to experience physical and psychological symptoms, fight with people close to them, and have more accidents on the job, among other things. Check out the infographic below to see how stress in the workplace is "reshaping" America

Everything is “Lock-in”: Focus on Switching Costs

After spending tens of millions of dollars putting an ERP system in place, few companies are willing to drop it and move to a frisky competitor! CFOs want to squeeze out every ounce of benefit from an asset before paying to replace it. Even the cloud isn’t immune from financial lock-in. While we think of cloud as exclusively a pay-as-you-go model, many providers offer discounts if you make monthly or annual commitments. While this creates cost savings, it also creates a disincentive to leave. A major financial commitment to a vendor means that switching providers is going to be painful. There may be early termination fees, or reimbursement of upfront discounts. Any wholesale change from one vendor to another typically means that large projects get spun up, and teams spend time on migration efforts instead of other value-added opportunities.

6 Proven Project Management Team Communication Strategies

Make sure you don’t leave anyone out when you invite people to meetings or send out reports about recent developments. If you’re not sure whether certain people need to be involved in a meeting or kept in the loop about the latest project activities or updates, err on the side of caution and include them. It’s always better to gain more input from more people than limited input from just a few team members who are regarded as key players. ... It’s natural that the opinions and thoughts of higher-level project participants may be given more weight than those of junior team members. But that’s a mistake. Even if they disagree with people who outrank them, all team members should be able to freely communicate their thoughts, opinions and concerns without fear of ridicule or consequence. Great ideas are great ideas, regardless of who they come from.

Can AI predict potential security breaches? Armorway is betting on it

Using AI in the cybersecurity realm has exploded recently with MIT and IBM Watson both joining the fray of seeking to predict internet crimes before they happen. Using predictive technology for physical crime has also begun to gain traction, with the LAPD's PredPol software gaining national acclaim as a means for predicting crime. However, it has also raised some concerns about the ethical concerns the technology presents. In the post-Snowden age, questions about privacy and surveillance are paramount, and some people may not be comfortable with algorithms predicting who might commit a crime.

Quote for the day:

"I'm not afraid of storms, for I'm learning how to sail my ship." -- Louisa May

June 07, 2016

Understanding Aggregation Services for Banking

An aggregation services team at a trusted technology partner can help banks and credit unions assess their technology needs, identify appropriate products and services and connect institutions with domestic and global vendors. An aggregation team can also assist financial institutions with contract negotiation, implementation, project management and other processes, freeing up bank and credit union IT staffers to focus on more customer-oriented projects. Some decisions regarding technology solutions aren’t complicated. For example, if a financial institution needs a piece of hardware or software to fulfill a specific function, and only a handful of products will meet the company’s needs, a buying decision can be straightforward. After reviewing product features and pricing, an internal IT manager can quickly make a decision and place an order.

Here's the huge question facing fintech startups - can they make any money?

The standard reply from the industry is that these businesses are investing in growth and could recalibrate to make a profit if they wanted to. Instead, what they want to do is grow as big as possible first, then squeeze money out of all the customers they've captured. But critics say many of the business models are unsustainable and simply being supported by the financial teat of venture capital money. The likes of TransferWise and Revolut can only afford to offer such cheap services because of a plentiful supply of free and easy cash from investors that subsidises prices, so the argument goes, not because of any real technical innovation. Most fintech startups still run on the traditional infrastructure of mainstream banking. They may not have a big staff and branch network to maintain, but things like transfers and direct debits cost them the same as your Barclays or HSBCs.

Global regulators attuned to blockchain risks

Fragmentation is the risk of different systems and protocols developing that are not able to talk to each other. Should one system become dominant and not able to connect to other blockchains, regulators would be concerned about the potential for monopolistic behaviour that would potentially counter to the interest of the consumer, he said. Global banks are currently working with various blockchain developers, including R3 CEV, Ripple, Digital Asset Holdings and IBM's Hyperledger. "Interoperability is going to be very important in this," Mr Medcraft said from ASIC's Sydney headquarters. "You want to be able to use different suppliers: as long as they can talk to one another, that works. Fragmentation is one of our big concerns. But if you put your customers first, interoperability makes a hell of a lot of sense."

Widespread exploits evade protections enforced by Microsoft EMET

While EMET is often recommended as a defense layer for zero-day exploits -- exploits for previously unknown vulnerabilities -- it also gives companies some leeway when it comes to how fast they patch known flaws. In corporate environments, the deployment of patching does not happen automatically. Patches for the OS or stand-alone programs need to be prioritized, tested and only then pushed to computers, a process that can substantially delay their installation. With widespread exploits now able to evade EMET mitigations, the tool should no longer be relied on to protect old versions of applications like Flash Player, Adobe Reader, Silverlight or Java until a company can update them. Unfortunately, organizations are sometimes forced to keep old versions of browser plug-ins and other applications installed on endpoint computers in order to maintain compatibility with custom-made internal Web applications that haven't been rewritten in years.

6 ways to destroy your project management career

Proper planning may slow things down initially, but it will save substantial amounts of time, energy, and resources, not to mention unnecessary rework later throughout the other project phases. This will also significantly increase the likelihood of meeting stakeholder expectations as well as overall project success in the end. Stakeholders are unlikely to re-hire or refer a PM who demonstrates he or she consistently fails to sufficiently plan. ... With each new project, a PM brings with them experience from all other projects that can either help or hinder the current project. It's important to recognize each new project, company, industry, product, or service, and culture can possibly negate some of those previous experiences. If a PM is unwilling to recognize that this is a possibility, they are in danger of appearing like a know-it-all, and not likely to be well received.

Enterprise Architects “Know Nothing”: A Conversation with Ron Tolido

Tolido says it’s time for enterprise architectures to stop trying to make predictions as to what architectures should look like and instead provide the business a digital platform that will allow for a new style of architecting, one that drives continuous transformation rather than requirements-driven, step-by-step change. To do this, Tolido says Enterprise Architects must enable “the art of the possible” within organizations, providing their clients with a catalog of possibilities—a listing of potential things they could be doing to help companies continually transform themselves. This is a huge shift for most IT departments, Tolido says, which are still stuck in the mindset that the business is different from IT and that business requirements must drive IT initiatives, with architecture sitting somewhere between the two. No longer can architects be content to place architectures somewhere in the middle between the business and IT,

To put rivals at a major disadvantage IBM & Cisco combine with Watson IoT platform

“This powerful IoT technology from Cisco and IBM, combined with Bell’s world leading network technology, enables customers to tap into innovative real-time analytics options to maximize performance across their operations, no matter where they are,” said Stephen Howe, Bell’s chief technology officer. “Many of our largest customers operate remote systems, requiring continuous availability and access to data to monitor critical performance factors and avoid downtime. Deploying the unmatched analytics capabilities of IBM Watson Internet of Things and Cisco networking intelligence with streaming edge analytics will help to further accelerate Bell’s leadership in Canadian IoT.” Businesses including Port of Cartagena and SilverHook Powerboats are turning to Cisco and IBM to help address their most complex IT and IoT challenges.

Massive DDOS Attacks Reach Record Levels

DDoS reflection and amplification techniques continue to be used extensively. These involve abusing misconfigured servers on the Internet that respond to spoofed requests over various UDP-based protocols. Around one-in-four of all DDoS attacks seen during the first three months of 2016 contained UDP (User Datagram Protocol) fragments. This fragmentation can indicate the use of DDoS amplification techniques, which results in large payloads. The four next most common DDoS attack vectors were all protocols that are abused for DDoS reflection: DNS (18 percent), NTP (12 percent), CHARGEN (11 percent) and SSDP (7 percent). Another worrying trend is that an increasing number of attacks now use two or more vectors at the same time. Almost 60 percent of all DDoS attacks observed during the first quarter were multivector attacks: 42 percent used two vectors and 17 percent used three or more.

Internet of Things: Five truths you need to know to succeed

Given a large enough deployment of sensors, the accuracy of the data they collect will drift over time, as the hardware degrades, he said. In harsh environments, for instance oil field sensors measuring temperature in a hot desert environment, this degradation can happen quite rapidly. These compromised sensors can't easily be replaced "because while the sensors themselves are so cheap they're almost free, the cost of the lost production incurred in replacing them most definitely is not". One way to counter the increasing unreliability of sensor data over time is to corroborate each sensor's data with that of its neighbours, said Wilcox, who suggested creating a "virtual sensor from a neural network of adjacent sensor readings".

Machine Learning Is Becoming A Growth Catalyst In The Enterprise

Machine learning is proving to be effective at handling predictive tasks including defining which behaviors have the highest propensity to drive desired outcomes, which companies like Apttus use to drive business decisions like discounting or automated approvals. Enterprises eager to compete and win more customers are the applying machine learning to sales and marketing challenges first.... Machine learning's ability to scale across the broad spectrum of contract management, customer service, finance, legal, sales, quote-to-cash, quality, pricing and production challenges enterprises face is attributable to its ability to continually learn and improve. Every time a miscalculation is made, machine learning algorithms correct the error and begin another iteration of the data analysis. These calculations happen in milliseconds which makes machine learning exceptionally efficient at optimizing decisions and predicting outcomes.

Quote for the day:

"Sandwich every bit of criticism between two thick layers of praise." -- Mary Kay Ash

June 06, 2016

Organizations Need Industry Vision for Digital Business Success

"Enterprises can transform by exploiting business moments or by using digital capabilities to enter or create new markets as Airbnb and Uber have done," said Jorge Lopez, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. "However, many enterprises will find it easier to start by creating a vision for digital business for their particular industry. This approach enables the enterprise to tilt the fundamentals of competition in its favor without limiting digital business to narrow sequences of events and committing to a vast building project. Once the enterprise has established its vision, it can more easily tackle business moments or leverage its digital capabilities in new markets." Lopez offers the example of an organization envisioning changes within its industry if the Internet of Things or smart machines were used to full potential.

5 Signs You Misunderstand Big Data

The enhancing technology that seemed to quickly permit you to collect as well as analyze high quantities of data than prior gave birth to the word “big data.” Humans gained the ability of analyzing new types of data – especially unstructured data which played a big role in naming the data as big data. Initially, the only useful data was the perfect fit into rows and columns of a database. Today, the situation is completely different as the analysis of large text blocks including the books and journals, photos, videos audio, health records and much more is possible. This proves that big data isn’t just about the data volume but it balances the variety of data which is accessible now.

It’s time for ‘small data.

The problem is that education policymakers around the world are now reforming their education systems through correlations based on big data from their own national student assessments systems and international education data bases without adequately understanding the details that make a difference in schools. A doctoral thesis in the University of Cambridge, for example, recently concluded that most OECD countries that take part in the PISA survey have made changes in their education policies based primarily on PISA data in order to improve their performance in future PISA tests. But are changes based on big data really well suited for improving teaching and learning in schools and classrooms?

How Risky Is Bleeding Edge Tech?

Most seasoned information security experts know that when a new technology starts taking off like wildfire, chances are pretty good that someone's going to get burned. The curve of innovation for decades has generally traversed a path where engineers think of features, bells and whistles first, security last. As a new crop of exciting technology like smart medical devices, drones and driverless cars jockeys for position in the mainstream, the question is how much risk they'll bring to the table. A panel of experts with the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute recently took a look at some of the hottest tech making its way to the forefront to answer this very question. Here are some of the highlights from the report, 2016 Emerging Technology Domains Risk Survey.

The case for IT Governance

Even the best of breed systems and tools are not designed to govern themselves. Vendors genuinely do their best job, but verification is always needed. Quite simply, IT Governance didn’t happen. In a similar situation, a lot of companies would blame the IT staff or go after the vendor. ... In conclusion, IT Governance does not have to be a mysterious or out of reach function in your organization. Let RSM help you build an IT strategy that includes proper IT Governance and limits the amount of surprises you may encounter as you continue to grow your business! The Rapid Assessment process will help align the people, process and technologies present in your business for the maximum amount of return on your investment. Contact us if we can help you with this or any technology issue you may be facing.

Insights On IT Governance

In today’s business situation with its complexity, required to be responsive, the costs to an organization can be important to stay competitive and meet business initiatives and challenges. An organization might face challenges and business problems like Global competition, product development costs, regulatory compliance, new business opportunity, and lack of skilled staff. While addressing any of these issues, the organization must be sure that the value of the business internally and the value provided to its customers is maintained or improved. This influences the executives to focus on how they can grow, sustain, change, and manage the organization to meet these challenges pertaining to corporate policies, processes, and IT infrastructure and systems that are required.

Knock, Knock. Who’s There? Your Boss

In one of the more surprising results, the authors found that constructive humor from leaders often fell flat, and they speculate that employees view self-enhancing jokes, in particular, as a sign their boss is trying a little too hard to shrug off any pressure and is reluctant to meet a problem head-on. Drilling further down, the study argues that contingent reward leaders, who base much of their management style on incentivizing employees, should generally avoid spending too much time joking around with subordinates because it tends to undermine their authority as managers. For example, these types of leaders got no benefit from using self-defeating humor; the respondents indicated that they felt it eroded the supervisor’s perceived ability to reward or admonish them.

Fed Cyber Security Focuses on Major Threats in a High-Risk World

“If there was a breach that could drain the funds out of a major central bank, that’s a major issue,” said Ted Truman, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute in Washington and a former director of Division of International Finance at the Fed Board. “At a minimum, it would be very damaging to the reputation of the bank.” Such a scenario seems increasingly less far-fetched. News broke in March that hackers stole $81 million from the Bangladesh central bank’s account at the New York Fed, the biggest known cyber-heist in history. The regional Fed has said that the instructions to make the payments were authenticated by the Swift message system, which is widely used by financial institutions.

Ethics should be at the core of cybersecurity

Reflecting on his time in defence, the major general said organised cybercrime is not only global, but also a lucrative industry. Governments and businesses alike need to play catch-up, as Day said many cybercriminals worked out long before most that data is a commodity from which you can make money. "Some of these criminals have very close links to the intelligence and security services of their countries; sometimes we found it difficult to determine if an attack had been prosecuted by a criminal gang or by a nation state," he said "Some of these criminals work for their intelligence or security services by day, and at night to make money on the side, use their learned tradecraft." According to Day, cyber incidents are now reasonably foreseeable, which he said is very important when a business finds itself in court.

Intel's Next Monster 24 Core Chip Is Made For High Performance Computers

Intel's biggest focus for Xeon E7 v4 is in-memory processing, used for applications like databases. SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft, which sell analytics and database software, are placing more emphasis on in-memory processing because it's faster than continuously shuffling data between the CPU, memory, and storage. The chips support DDR4 memory. The Xeon E7-8800 v4 family plays into Intel's other areas of focus -- the Internet of Things, memory, and silicon photonics -- because powerful chips could help advance those technologies. Servers could be toolboxes where data collected from IoT clients could be analyzed, Buddenbaum said. Intel is putting emphasis on FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays), but Buddenbaum said E7 v4 chips aren't designed for use with them. FPGAs are a better match for the company's Xeon E5 v4 servers, which have between one to four sockets.

Quote for the day:

"Failure makes success so much sweeter, and allows you to thumb your nose at the crowds." --

Wilbur Smith