Last week, the Federal Trade Commission hit Facebook with a $5 billion fine for mishandling user data. The fine comes after the FTC’s investigation following the Cambridge Analytica scandal. On this episode of TECH(feed), Juliet discusses the implications of this fine — and how Facebook may (or may not) change its practices.
Credit to Author: Woody Leonhard| Date: Thu, 11 Jul 2019 03:16:00 -0700
Back in October 2016, Microsoft divided the Win7 and 8.1 patching worlds into two parts.
Those who got their patches through Windows Update received so-called Monthly Rollups, which included security patches, bug fixes – and we frankly don’t know what else – rolled out in a cumulative stream.
The folks who were willing to download and manually install patches were also given the option of installing “security-only” patches, not cumulative; these were meant to address just the security holes.
This new add-on will let you set up alerts about suspicious sign-on activity for Office 365 and other cloud apps.
Credit to Author: Lucas Mearian| Date: Mon, 08 Jul 2019 03:00:00 -0700
While blockchain holds tremendous potential for creating new financial, supply chain and digital identity systems, it’s often erroneously seen as a panacea for business problems.
The myriad of pilots and proofs of concept by large corporations and government agencies are showing real promise, but those projects don’t always lead to obvious business cases that justify doing something differently. Sometimes a tried and true technology like a relational database can perform the task much more efficiently than a distributed ledger based on peer-to-peer technology that will require complex governance and rules.
(Insider Story)
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Credit to Author: Jonny Evans| Date: Tue, 09 Jul 2019 07:06:00 -0700
Apple quite evidently plans many interesting improvements in its iCloud service this year. So, what’s going on?
Apple at WWDC made several announcements that will be reliant on iCloud – these include obvious things like new services and support for new functions, and less evident topics around sync, data, and artificial intelligence (AI).
Most recently, the company began beta-testing Touch ID and Face ID access to iCloud.com online, meaning that if you happen to be using an Apple device (Mac, iPad, iPhone), you can access your online iCloud services with the touch of a finger or a quick eye scan.
Credit to Author: Gregg Keizer| Date: Tue, 09 Jul 2019 11:42:00 -0700
Microsoft on Monday made good on a March pledge by announcing that its most sophisticated endpoint security service is now available for Macs.
Microsoft Defender ATP (Advanced Threat Protection) for Mac shifted to what the company calls “general availability” on June 28, wrote Helen Allas, a principal program manager on the enterprise security team, in a July 8 post to a company blog. Core components of Defender ATP, including the latest – “Threat & Vulnerability Management,” which made it to general availability a week ago – now serve Macs.
Credit to Author: Evan Schuman| Date: Mon, 01 Jul 2019 05:47:00 -0700
Ready for the mobile security news that IT doesn’t want to hear about but needs to? When security firm Positive Technologies started pen-testing various mobile apps, security holes were rampant.
We’ll plunge into the details momentarily, but here’s the upshot: “High-risk vulnerabilities were found in 38 percent of mobile applications for iOS and in 43 percent of Android applications” and “most cases are caused by weaknesses in security mechanisms — 74 percent and 57 percent for iOS and Android apps, respectively, and 42 percent for server-side components — because such vulnerabilities creep in during the design stage, fixing them requires significant changes to code.”
Credit to Author: Sharky| Date: Thu, 04 Jul 2019 03:00:00 -0700
This IT security pilot fish knows something about audits — and knows what he expects of auditors.
“I have more than 15 years of audit experience in IT,” fish says. “I have written and implemented policy and procedure, and developed incident response plans. I spent the better part of last year making sure that the external auditors could not find any inconsistencies in our control standards.”
Then the internal audit director decides to perform an audit of fish’s group — and sends a young auditor who thinks he knows everything IT.
After three weeks of research and testing, young auditor presents his results in a meeting with his boss the audit director and fish.
Credit to Author: Gregg Keizer| Date: Thu, 27 Jun 2019 04:28:00 -0700
Mozilla this week touted Firefox’s anti-ad tracking talents by urging users of other browsers to load 100 tabs to trick those trackers into offering goods and services suitable for someone in the 1%, an end-times devotee and other archetypes.
Tagged as “Track THIS,” the only-semi-tongue-in-cheek project lets users select from four personas – including “hypebeast,” “filthy rich,” “doomsday prepper,” and “influencer” – for illustrative purposes. Track THIS then opens 100 tabs “to fool trackers into thinking you’re someone else.”
