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    20Jul, 2022
    Tech News – Why is wireless technology important?

    Wireless technology has steadily become a bigger presence in most people’s everyday lives. Whether it’s at work, home, a stadium or even in cars, people rely on wireless technology for information, entertainment to communicate and more. It’s almost hard to imagine how so much got accomplished prior to wireless technology becoming a critical entity in so many different industries and places.

    Wireless is practically a given in everything we do now, but that does not make it any less important than it was during its early beginnings. In fact, wireless technology might be more important today than ever before. It does so much, from providing speed, flexibility and network efficiency to transferring information and enhancing productivity. As time goes on, dependency on wireless will only get stronger.

    Keep reading to get a better idea of why wireless technology is so important.

    What is wireless technology?

    Wireless technology is tech that allows people to communicate or data to be transferred from one point to another without using cables or wires. A lot of the communication is done with radio frequency and infrared waves.

    The importance of wireless tech

    As more people embrace a more flexible lifestyle, including working from home, wireless technology becomes that much more critical. Tech-savvy employees can share information instantly, allowing productivity levels to stay up, regardless of if workers are in the same office or not. All they need in an internet connection.

    Enhancing employees’ ability to work remotely is just one item on a very long list of the benefits of wireless, however. There’s also the cost factor—wireless networks are typically less expensive to install and maintain compared to other network options, according to AMS Technologies. Data moves faster over wireless networks, which can be accessed from any location at any time.

    There’s also the matter of safety. Medical professionals who work in remote areas can contact other medical centers through wireless without any issues. Plus, emergency situations can be addressed faster with wireless communication.

    Benefits of wireless technology

    No technological advancement is without its flaws, but wireless technology offers a number of plusses that outweigh the minuses. For starters, it makes users a lot more mobile. People can access whatever information or data they need in real time, courtesy of a wireless network. Wireless also makes for easier installation and a cleaner set up. There is very little, if any, cabling preventing safety hazards.

    Meanwhile, in-building wireless networks offer employees, tenants, and visitors connectivity throughout the entire property—as long as the network is reliable. Plus, many wireless networks today are “future proof”, meaning they can be easily updated to accommodate new technology as it becomes available.
    Deploying or upgrading an in-building wireless network might feel expensive initially, but it is worth having in the long run because the cost to maintain it over time will decrease. Meanwhile, networks can be tailored to a building owner or company’s specific needs.

    Why wireless technology is important to businesses

    It’s becoming harder for businesses to remain competitive if they don’t embrace technology, that includes a reliable, wireless network. In an office environment, wireless lets employees move around the building without losing connection to the company network. Meanwhile, everyone can access the same important data and applications across the network from any device.

    Wireless tech also allows businesses to remain nimble, according to internet provider Arvig. When a new employee starts, they can be added to the company network at no cost, and user requirements can be updated without much trouble. Without the hindrance of wires, employees can move from desk to desk with a laptop rather than unplug and set up a desktop computer all over again.

    As a business grows whether in personnel numbers, scale, or both, it will benefit from having a flexible wireless network where network services, applications, and bandwidth can be added easily.

    How wireless helps manufacturing

    There’s been somewhat of a domino effect within the manufacturing industry recently. People shop online more than ever before, which has led to an increased demand for industrial and warehouse commercial real estate space. As manufacturers gained access to these industrial spaces, it became critical that properties were equipped with a reliable, in-building wireless network.

    It would be very difficult to operate a warehouse without wireless connectivity today. Partly because consumer demand is so high, warehouses need to automate a lot of production to help get items out of the facility and on the way to customers as quickly as possible.

    “The global enterprise business in first-, second- and third-party logistics has a unique opportunity to deploy private wireless networks for seamless indoor and outdoor low-latency connectivity by leveraging all available spectrum assets,” Nokia Enterprise Campaign Strategist for Logistics David McKinley wrote last year. “This will help with automated storage and retrieval systems, industrial IoT sensors, robotic process automation, drone industrial inspection, and autonomous equipment or vehicles.”

    The warehouse tech McKinley mentioned is only as good as the wireless network it’s running on. Robots, automated warehouse transportation vehicles and devices that send reporting data all help make processes smoother in industrial spaces, but they can’t do their job without wireless. Additionally, wireless networks don’t just speed up production, they help keep workers safe. Warehouses often have a lot of internet-connected machines and sensors that can detect when equipment is broken or about to break and send a warning before someone uses it and gets hurt.

    “5G networks offer manufacturers and telecom operators the chance to build smart factories and truly take advantage of technologies such as automation, artificial intelligence, augmented reality for troubleshooting, and IoT,” Ericsson said in a report. “With 5G, operators can create new revenue streams. Alongside energy and utility, manufacturing represents one of the most significant sectors for new revenue potential for operators addressing industry digitalization with 5G technologies.”

    Why wireless is important to healthcare

    Wireless technology will always be critical to the healthcare industry, but its importance was front and center during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Patients still needed to see their physicians, but office visits became difficult to accommodate during the shutdown. Thanks to wireless technology, doctors could perform tele health visits, which many patients welcomed. The amount of tele health visits increased by 50% during the first quarter of 2020, compared to the same timeframe in 2019, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

    Tele health visits are just the beginning of what wireless tech means to the healthcare industry, however. With wireless, physicians can leverage technology like smart sensors that can detect certain medical conditions and send that information to a receiving device and on to a central data base. Meanwhile, wearable technology remains one of the most significant advancements we have today. Sleep, heart rate, exercise steps taken and more can be tracked on these devices.

    Since wearables can be connected to smartphones, all of that information can be stored in a convenient location. Doctors can access that information to help them make more informed decisions about their patients’ care and treatment options.

    Wireless technology also allows patients with certain medical conditions to be monitored with implants that are connected to smartphone apps. For example, a patient with diabetes could have a smart sensor implanted in their skin to monitor their glucose level. The app can detect any changes to the baseline specifications a physician sets and send an alert if there’s an emergency. Additionally, wireless medical equipment allows patient information to be transferred quickly, accurately and in real time.

    What wireless technology means to CRE

    It’s been documented how important it is for commercial real estate owners to have a reliable, in-building wireless connectivity within their properties. These days, it’s almost impossible to retain or attract tenants without it. After location, a building’s connectivity is the next biggest factor a potential tenant will consider when deciding whether or not to lease space there. That’s how much importance tenants put on wireless technology. They want to know that they’ll be able to make calls on their cell phone without it dropping due to a bad connection and not have difficulty hosting a video conference because the network isn’t strong enough.

    Reliable wireless connectivity for CRE isn’t just about the ability to use mobile devices without issue, however. Wireless can also play a part in tenants’ health. For example, following the COVID-19 pandemic, indoor air quality has become a higher priority as workers return to their offices. CRE owners have turned to devices that can measure their building’s indoor air quality and deliver results in real time. Most of these devices are Internet of Things (IoT)-based and need a strong wireless connection to be effective.

    “For less than the price of a health-club membership, an IoT-based wireless IAQ node can deliver real-time IAQ measurements that assure occupants of levels of carbon dioxide, PM, VOCs, Formaldehyde, Ozone, Carbon Monoxide, and more,” the software company Sense ware said. “Ignorance is a thing of the past. IAQ monitoring will provide objective data to ensure that HVAC systems within the built environment provide healthy conditions for building occupants.

    Having a quality wireless network can also be the difference between life and death. It’s critical that CRE owners connectivity is reliable in the event of an emergency. Tenants must be able to make calls for help on their cell phones and first responders might be counting on the building’s network to communicate with one another. There are a lot of reasons why wireless technology is important, but ensuring the safety of tenants might be the biggest reason of them all.

    Recourse : http://connectedremag.com/das-in-building-wireless/wireless/why-is-wireless- technology

    19Jul, 2022
    Now offering cryptocurrency, ATMs targeted for crypto-fraud

    Automated teller machines have been a part of banking and financial services for more than half a century. But, until recently, they served mostly as a vehicle for receiving cash, depositing checks or reviewing balances.

    However, the addition of cryptocurrency to ATMs in recent years has added a new wrinkle to the basic card skimmers and over-the-shoulder, old-school PIN-snatchers. More and more cybercriminals are seeing the reliable, traditional ATM as a prime focal point for their cryptocurrency scams. Indeed, the ATM Industry Association (ATMIA) last month announced that it was launching a national program to educate “law enforcement and consumers … addressing cryptocurrency fraud schemes.”

    “Although the vast majority [about 99%] of cryptocurrency transactions represent legitimate activity, some consumers are falling victim to clever scam artists,” according to the ATMIA’s release. “People who would never hand over a blank check or their credit card to a stranger, are tricked into completing a cryptocurrency transaction for one. And these tend to be the type of romance, investment, and merchandise scams that have been around for decades. “

    In fact, the ATMIA created its own “ATM Cryptocurrency Deplorer’s Advocacy Group” in 2021, when leaders noted that “membership of crypto ATM deplorer’s really surged last year,” according to David N. Tente, executive director for U.S., Canada, and the Americas for ATMIA.

    Cryptocurrency new to ATMs, but old scams are still reliable for fraudsters.

    While the incidence of cryptocurrency scams per teller machine has not necessarily increased that much in recent months, “the problem has been growing as the number of crypto ATMs and kiosks has grown rapidly over the past couple of years,” Tented said.

    According to the ATMIA, there are more than 30,000 ATMs and kiosks worldwide that offer cryptocurrency services — mostly in the United States. While that’s less than 10% of the 500,000 traditional ATMs in operation today, the heightened interest in and usage of cryptocurrency (even in light of the recent crypto-crash) means that many of these conventional teller machines may be converted to accept cryptocurrency, according to Tente.

    As is common with financial fraud, many of the scams perpetrated on crypto-ATMs, issuers and users resemble the same “scams that have been around for decades,” Tente added. “These schemes always have some element of urgency attached. The payment has to be made now. “

    Tente pointed out that for many cyber thieves, “cryptocurrency is a more attractive payment method than a wire or mailed check,” because of its lack of audit trail and anonymity. “Criminals are simply changing how victims pay, using the same scheme,” Tente said, adding that oftentimes fraudsters will target elderly, isolated or naïve crypto-users, believing they are the least likely to push back.

    “People need to be suspicious about anyone they don’t know asking for money for any reason,” Tente said. “If any request for money is made of them, [they] should get a second opinion from someone they know and trust.”

    In its June release, ATMIA outlined six types of fraud schemes that it has seen emerge at teller machines in recent months, as cryptocurrency-enabled ATMs and related scams have risen, as well as recommendations to law enforcement on how to handle these suspected schemes.

    “The co-existence between cash, crypto, digital currencies, and ATMs has already been established,” said ATMIA CEO Mike Lee, in the June release. “But as an industry body, it is incumbent upon us to self-regulate at all times and do everything we can to ensure transactions are safe and legitimate, working with law enforcement to tackle all types of criminal attacks.

    Even without the influx of cryptocurrency, more than one-third of the $28 billion in worldwide credit card fraud losses in 2020 was lost by ATM acquirers and merchant acquirers [more than $10 billion].

    “Acquirers and payment processing companies have long relied on rules-based technology to prevent merchant fraud,” according to Amyn Dhala, chief product officer at Brighterion, a MasterCard company that focuses on technology and security. “The challenge? Legacy, rules- based systems don’t adapt as quickly as criminals.”

    Resources : https://www.scmagazine.com/analysis/cybercrime/now-offering-cryptocurrency- atm-machines-targeted-for-crypto-fraud

    18Jul, 2022
    Info Security News – Password recovery tool infects industrial systems with Salty malware

    Password Recovery Tool infects industrial systems with Salty malware.

    A threat actor is infecting industrial control systems (ICS) to create a botnet through password “cracking” software for programmable logic controllers (PLCs).

    Advertised on various social media platforms, the password recovery tools promise to unlock PLC and HMI (human-machine interface) terminals from Automation Direct, Omron, Siemens, Fuji Electric, Mitsubishi, LG, Vigor, Pro-Face, Allen Bradley, Weintek, ABB, and Panasonic.

    Security researchers at industrial cybersecurity company Dragos analyzed one incident impacting DirectLogic PLCs from Automation Direct and discovered that the “cracking” software was exploiting a known vulnerability in the device to extract the password.

    But behind the scenes the tool also dropped Sality, a piece of malware that creates a peer-to-peer botnet for various tasks that require the power of distributed computing to complete faster (e.g. password cracking, cryptocurrency mining).

    Dragos researchers found that the exploit used by the malicious program was limited to serial-only communications. However, they also found a way to recreate it over Ethernet, which increases the severity.

    After examining the Sality-laced software, Dragos informed Automation Direct of the vulnerability and the vendor released appropriate mitigations. The threat actor’s campaign is ongoing, though, and administrators of PLC from other vendors should be aware of the risk of using password cracking software in ICS environments.

    Regardless of how legitimate the reason for using them is, operational technology engineers should avoid password cracking tools, especially if their source is unknown.

    For scenarios where there is a need to recover a password (because you forgot it, or the individual that had it is no longer your colleague), Dragos recommends contacting them or the device vendor for instructions and guidance.

    Sality P2P botnet

    Sality is an old piece of malware that continues to evolve with features that allows it to terminate processes, open connections to remote sites, download additional payloads, or steal data from the host.

    The malware can also inject itself into running processes and abuse the Windows auto-run function to copy itself onto network shares, external drives, and removable storage devices that could carry it to other systems.

    The specific sample analyzed by Dragons appears to be focused on stealing cryptocurrency. The researchers say that the malware added a payload that hijacked the contents in the clipboard to divert cryptocurrency transactions.

    However, a more advanced attacker could use this point of entry to create more serious damage by disrupting operations.

    In this particular case, the victim grew suspicious after running the malicious software because the CPU usage level grew to 100% and Windows Defender issued multiple threat alerts.

    Recourse : https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/password-recovery-tool- infects-industrial-systems-with-sality-malware/

    18Jul, 2022
    Info Security News – Lithuanian ad website hit by cyberattack, warns of possible customer data leak

    Data of thousands of customers might have been leaked after the Lithuanian ad website alio. lt was hit by a cyber attack on Thursday.

    “It looks like it might have been yet another Russian attack against Lithuania’s online space, a kind of attack, which the majority of business entities appear unable to resist,” Kristi Jonas Šiaulys, head of IT at alio. lt, said in a press release.

    “We are making considerable efforts to protect our users and contain the data security breach and are already implementing the entire legal action plan,” he added.

    Hackers tried to extract data of 345,000 users from the database of the website during the attack.

    “It is not yet possible to specify the precise quantity of data that has been extracted. We have notified the State Data Protection Inspectorate, the Computer Emergency Response Team, and the police about the incident. Investigations will follow,” Šaulys said.

    The portal stressed it did not store particularly sensitive information, such as bank account and payment card details, personal ID codes, and home addresses in its database.

    Alio. lt is owned by Estonia’s Ekspress Grupp, which also owns delfi. lt news website.

    Recourse : https://www.lrt.lt/en/news-in-english/19/1739037/lithuanian-ad-website- hit-by-cyberattack-warns-of-possible-customer-data-leak

    13Jul, 2022
    Tech News – How to manage Google Nest Hub alarms through the Home app

    Have you ever set an alarm only to have something change and suddenly that alarm is no longer needed? On top of that, you may have completely forgotten that you ever set an alarm. That’s enough to ruin your day. To avoid this, you can manage and delete the alarms you set on your Nest Hub in the Google Home app. Here’s how.

    Setting alarms on your Nest Hub

    An important thing to note is that in order to create alarms in the first place, you need to do it on the Nest Hub itself. Unfortunately, the Google Home app doesn’t allow you to create alarms on your devices.

    To create an alarm, just activate Google Assistant by saying “Hey, Google” and ask it to set an alarm for a certain time. Once you do that, you’ll be able to see the alarm and delete it if necessary through the Google Home app.

    Managing your Nest Hub alarms in the Google Home app

    Finding your Nest Hub alarms can be a little tricky if you don’t know where to look. There is no “Alarms” section in the Google Home app, though that would be a welcome addition. Here’s how to find and manage your Nest Hub alarms in Google Home:

    1. On your device, open the Google Home app.
    2. Find your Nest Hub and tap it.
    3. Hit the setting cog at the top.
    4. Tap Audio.
    5. Find and tap Alarms & timers.

    From here, you can view the timers and alarms you have set on your Nest Hub. To delete an alarm, simply hit the X next to the alarm itself.

    While you can’t make adjustments to the tone or any of the other features available on the Nest Hub for alarms, you can delete them from here. This comes in handy if you need to quickly check what time you set that alarm for before it’s too late and you wake up at the wrong time.

    Recourse : https://9to5google.com/2022/07/12/manage-nest-hub-alarms-google-home/

    12Jul, 2022
    Tech News – See the universe in stunning detail in first James Webb image

    After years of planning and months in space, the James Webb Space Telescope has inaugurated a new era in astronomy. NASA today released the first science image from the world’s most powerful space telescope, showing the infrared universe in a depth never seen before.

    “From the beginning of history, humans have looked up to the night sky with wonder,” Vice President Kamala Harris said in a briefing. “Now, we enter a new phase of scientific discovery. Building on the legacy of Hubble, the James Webb Space Telescope allows us to see deeper into space than ever before and in stunning clarity.” Harris also acknowledged the contributions of international partners in the building of Webb, which included NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Canadian Space Agency: “This telescope is one of humanity’s great engineering achievements,” she said.

    The image shows galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 and is the deepest infrared image of the distant universe to date. It shows the cluster as it would have been 4.6 billion years ago, and because the mass of the cluster is so great, it bends space-time and allows us to see even more distant galaxies behind it. As they are so distant, the light is very faint, and these thousands of galaxies are among the faintest objects ever observed in infrared — captured thanks to Webb’s NIRCam instrument in a composite of observations taken over 12.5 hours to pick up this level of detail.

    Unlike telescopes like Hubble which look primarily in the visible light range, equivalent to what would be seen by the human eye, Webb’s instruments operate in the infrared. This enables the telescope to look through opaque targets like clouds of dust to see what lies beneath, and it will be used to study nebulae, stars, black holes, and more.

    Webb’s instruments are so sensitive that they can observe extremely distant targets, which — because of the time it takes for light to travel from these great distances to Earth — is like looking back in time. Webb will search out some of the earliest galaxies in the universe, helping to elucidate a period called the Epoch of Reionization when the earliest stars spread light through the universe for the first time.

    Deep field images like the one shown above help in the quest to find the earliest galaxies by identifying extremely distant galaxies in dim patches of the sky. Similar images will be produced by deep and wide surveys made using Webb, such as the upcoming  COSMOS-Webb program.

    The image released today is just a teaser of all that is to come from Webb. More images will be released tomorrow, including images of nebulae and a galaxy group, as well as a spectrum showing the composition of the atmosphere of an exoplanet. And there will be plenty more topics that Webb will study in its first year as well, giving astronomers glimpses into topics as wide-ranging as how stars are formed, the composition of comets in our solar system, and how the first black holes formed.

    Recourse : https://www.digitaltrends.com/space/james-webb-first-image-released/

    11Jul, 2022
    Tech News – Swiss ‘Water Battery’ Now Online After 14 Years

    Swiss ‘Water Battery’ Now Online After 14 Years

    A “water battery” hidden deep in the Swiss Alps is finally ready to begin storing 400,000 electric vehicles’ worth of energy. 

    The facility, also known as a pumped storage power plant, is a form of hydroelectric energy storage. This one will both generate and store energy for power grids throughout Switzerland. Integral to its design are two large pools of water, which sit at different heights. Pumping water from the lower pool up into the higher pool “charges” the facility’s battery. Reversing the water’s passage rotates a turbine that generates hydroelectric power when energy is in short supply. 

    Switzerland has been working on the water battery since at least 2008, when it was decided that the facility would be built between two reservoirs in the Canton of Valais. To bring materials to the battery’s site, however, engineers had to dig tunnels totaling 18 kilometers through the Swiss Alps. The team also had the height of the Vieux Emission dam increased by 20 meters between 2012 and 2016, allowing the reservoirs to store more water and, as a result, generate even more energy. 

    A pumped water storage plant (AKA “water battery”) in Kyiv. (Photo: uhe.gov.ua/Wikimedia Commons)

    Fourteen years and €2 billion later, Switzerland’s massive water battery is finally operational. The completed facility has a storage capacity of 20 million kilowatt hours. Its six turbines can generate up to 900 MW of power. This means that at its peak, the water battery can power up to 900,000 homes at once—all from 600 meters underground.

    The concept of using a pumped storage power plant to both generate and store energy isn’t new, even to Switzerland. A similar facility also exists in the Alps, near the tiny town of Linthal. This facility has four GE-made turbines that, when running simultaneously, can power up to one million homes. But as desperation for renewable energy grows, Switzerland and its neighbors need all the help they can get. Switzerland’s newest addition to the power grid will help safeguard the country (as well as other parts of Europe) against power shortages and help supplement wind power, another one of Switzerland’s domestic sources of renewable energy.

    Recourse: https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/337739-swiss-water-battery-now -online-after-14-years

    9Jul, 2022
    Information Technology – Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2022

    Your quick guide to the technologies that will drive digital business and innovation over the next three to five years

    Today’s CEOs want three things: growth, digitalization and efficiency.

    As an IT leader, the responsibility for supporting the technical end of digital business rests squarely on your shoulders. You have an opportunity to deliver force-multiplying innovations to accelerate growth and strategically drive your organization forward.

    The Gartner Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2022 are selected to help you to meet your CEO’s priorities to scale, adapt and grow. These innovations will deliver:

    • Trusted digital connections for your people and devices everywhere
    • Solutions to rapidly scale digital creativity anywhere
    • Innovative capabilities to accelerate business growth beyond today

    Recourse : https://www.gartner.com/en/information-technology/insights/top- technology-trends/top-technology-trends-ebook

    9Jul, 2022
    Internet of Things (IoT) – Why Industry 4.0 must think more like Apple

    Why Industry 4.0 must think more like Apple

    Perhaps industries making use of connected solutions should take a leaf out of Apple’s book and lock down a little more.

    For industrial applications, the Internet of Things risks becoming the Internet of Thieves. Perhaps industries making use of connected solutions should take a leaf out the Apple book and lock down their infrastructure.

    What the ethical hackers say

    As digital processes become deeply embedded across every industry, it makes sense that industrial control systems were tested at this year’s Pwn2Own contest. Hackers were asked to seek out vulnerabilities in industrial software and systems.

    Contest winners Daan Keuper and Thijs Alkemade found that once they managed to break into the IT networks used at these companies, it was “relatively easy” to then cause havoc with systems and equipment.

    In part, this is because at this stage of the transformation, much of the equipment used in manufacturing wasn’t originally designed to be connected to the internet or has weak or outdated security.

    IT understands this, of course, which is why industrial IoT deployments tend to secure the IT networks they use, but this also means that if those networks are penetrated, much of the deployed equipment lacks additional protection. And it means that numerous potential attack surfaces exist.

    This is never good, but at present the threat to critical infrastructure is growing.

    When things go wrong

    In the event that security is broken, attackers may take over machinery, modify processes, or simply choose to shutter production. This can have huge consequences — on the company, its customers and partners, and across already creaking supply chains.

    Louis Priem, consultant at ICT Group, said, “Systems in factory environments typically run 24/7, so there is very little opportunity to patch vulnerabilities. In addition, there is a lot of legacy, as machines are purchased for the long term, and there is usually no opportunity to install antivirus applications. All these make the industrial sector vulnerable to malicious parties.”

    Speaking to MIT Technology Review, the Pwn2Own winners warned that security in industrial control systems is lagging behind badly. Think of how a successful attack against Target a few years ago made use of an insecure HVAC system to penetrate the corporate network, which shows the need to protect every available endpoint.

    These days more than ever, security lives at the edge.

    The writing was on the wall

    It’s not as if we couldn’t see problems like this coming.

    The evolution of industrial IoT has seen the creation of a myriad of different standards with differing security levels. This has driven many in the space (including Apple) to  develop joint standards for connected devices.

    Matter, the consumer IoT standard that is the first fruit of that effort, should arrive this year, while the more industrial Thread standard is already seeing deployment. (I’m expecting more news regarding Matter pretty soon, potentially at WWDC.)

     “Thread is based on the universally deployed Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) standard, making it extremely robust. A Thread network does not rely on a central hub, such as a bridge, so there’s no single point of failure. And Thread has the ability to self-heal – if one node (or accessory in your Thread network) becomes unavailable, the data packets will select an alternate route automatically and the network simply continues to work,” Eve Systems  has explained.

    The Apple way

    To some extent, one way to protect any device is to follow Apple’s core mission, which is to ensure systems do as much as possible with as little information as possible.

    While the effort has arguably slowed the company’s progress in AI development in comparison with more cloud-based competitors, Apple’s focus on placing intelligence at the edge is increasingly seen as appropriate.

    Mimic Technology and Business & Decision, for example, seem to be developing industrial IoT systems that follow a model in which intelligence sits at the edge.

    When combined with other emerging network technologies, such as SD-WAN or private 5G networks, placing intelligence at the edge helps secure industrial networks by helping cordon off individual endpoints.

    The problem, of course, is that not every connected system is smart enough to be so protected, while the different priorities of IT and operational intelligence mean attackers enjoy a luxury of potential vulnerabilities for attacks.

    And that’s even before dumb, short-sighted governments force sideloading and inherently insecure device security back doors onto the mobile systems and platforms we increasingly rely on to keep our connected infrastructure secure.

    Perhaps enterprise IoT needs to borrow a page from the Apple book and design systems that are inherently more secure than anyone thinks they need? Because it’s only a matter of time before they find that anything less won’t do.

    Recourse: https://www.computerworld.com/article/3662131/why-industry-40-must- think-more-like-apple.html

    8Jul, 2022
    Info Security News – Stealthy malware shows why you shouldn’t open unknown E-mails

    A new kind of malware was recently discovered that managed to slip past 56 separate antivirus products before finally getting caught.

    The malware, when executed, can cause some serious damage to your device — and it seems to be so well made that it might be the product of nation-state actors. Opening an email attachment is all it takes to grant it enough entry to wreak havoc.

    Unit 42, a threat intelligence team from Palo Alto, has just published a report on a piece of malware that managed to avoid detection from a massive 56 antivirus products. According to the team, the way the malware was built, packaged, and deployed is very similar to various techniques used by the APT29 threat group, also known under the names of Iron Ritual and Cozy Bear. This group has been attributed to Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), which indicates that the malware in question could be a nation-state affair.

    According to Unit 42, the malware was first spotted in May 2022, and it was found hidden within a pretty strange file type — ISO, which is a disk image file used to carry the entire contents of an optical disc. The file comes with a malicious payload that Unit 42 believes was created using a tool called Brute Ratel (BRC4). BRC4 prides itself on being hard to detect, citing the fact that the tool’s authors reverse-engineered antivirus software in order to make the tool even stealthier. Brute Ratel is particularly popular with APT29, adding further weight to the claim that this malware could be linked to the Russia-based Cozy Bear group.

    The ISO file pretends to be the curriculum vitae (resume) of someone named Roshan Bandara. Upon arrival in the recipient’s email mailbox, it doesn’t do anything, but when clicked, it mounts as a Windows drive and displays a file called “Roshan-Bandara_CV_Dialog”. At that point, it’s easy to get fooled — the file appears to be a typical Microsoft Word file, but if you click it, it executes cmd.exe and proceeds to install BRC4.

    When that’s done, any number of things could happen to your PC — it all depends on the attacker’s intentions.

    Unit 42 notes that finding this malware is worrying for a number of reasons. For one, there is a high probability that it is linked to APT29. Aside from the reasons listed above, the ISO file was created on the same day as when a new version of BRC4 was made public. This suggests that state-backed cyber attack actors could be timing their attacks to deploy them at the most opportune times. APT29 has also used malicious ISOs in the past, so everything seems to fall in line.

    The near-undetectability is worrying in itself. For malware to be that stealthy takes a lot of work, and it suggests that such attacks could pose a real threat when used by the wrong team of people.

    How can you stay safe?

    Amidst frequent reports that cyber attacks have been on a massive rise in recent years, one can hope that many users are now more conscious of the dangers of trusting random people and their files all too much. However, sometimes these attacks come from unexpected sources and in various forms. Enormous distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks happen all the time, but these are more of a problem for enterprise users. Sometimes, software that we know and trust can be used as a decoy to fool us into trusting the download. How to stay safe when danger seems to be lurking around every corner?

    First of all, it’s important to realize that a lot of these large-scale cyberattacks are made to target organizations — it’s unlikely that individuals would be targetted. However, in this particular case where the malware is hidden within an ISO file that poses as a resume, it could plausibly be opened by people in various HR settings, including those in smaller organizations. Bigger businesses often have more robust IT departments that wouldn’t allow the opening of an unexpected ISO file — but you never know when something might slip through the cracks.

    With the above in mind, it’s never a bad idea to follow a very simple rule that many of us still forget at times — never open attachments from unknown recipients. This can be difficult for an HR department that’s actively collecting resumes, but you, as an individual, can implement that rule into your daily life and not miss out on anything. It’s also not a bad idea to pick up one of the best antivirus software options available. However, the greatest security can be gained by simply browsing mindfully and not visiting websites that might not seem too legit as well as being cautious about your emails.

    Resource: https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/new-malware-is-undetected -by-56-antivirus-programs/