Independent – Page 181 – Computer Security Articles

Credit to Author: Mike Elgan| Date: Sat, 21 Jul 2018 03:00:00 -0700

Half a trillion dollars.

That’s the rough amount of money that counterfeiters displaced last year by selling phony products. Some 2.5% of all trade is for fake goods.

The United States is hit hardest by the scourge of counterfeit products — U.S. brands accounted in 2013 for 20% of the world’s infringed intellectual property.

When most people think about counterfeiting, they think of knock-off Louis Vuitton handbags sold on the sidewalk. But fake products also include business and enterprise products, as well as everyday consumer goods.

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ComputerWorld Independent

July 20, 2018 admin

Microsoft dives down a bizarre non-cumulative rabbit hole with July patches

Credit to Author: Woody Leonhard| Date: Fri, 20 Jul 2018 09:02:00 -0700

If you’re trying to apply this month’s patches — an exercise in futility that I continue to discourage — you may have found that this month’s patches and their documentation read like a da Vinci script, mirrored upside down and backwards.

Take this astounding bit of bafflegab, from the official Microsoft Exchange blog:

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ComputerWorld Independent

July 20, 2018 admin

It was a JOKE, OK?

Credit to Author: Sharky| Date: Fri, 20 Jul 2018 03:00:00 -0700

Pilot fish’s workplace is upgrading to use smart cards, but he’s not thinking about that when he sees a pop-up about an update — one that strikes fish as a little, um, fishy.

“I thought, if something like that was to occur and need user intervention, IT would have sent a notice out about it,” says fish.

“So a screen shot and email went off to IT security. They responded much faster than I expected, and in person: There was something wrong and they needed my laptop hard drives ASAP.”

Fish turns over his machine, and the next day he receives replacement hard drives. But it turns out his backup wasn’t configured for all the folders and file types he stores data in — and now he’s missing about a terabyte of data.

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Independent Krebs

July 19, 2018 admin

Human Resources Firm ComplyRight Breached

Credit to Author: BrianKrebs| Date: Thu, 19 Jul 2018 21:08:43 +0000

Cloud-based human resources company ComplyRight said this week that a security breach of its Web site may have jeopardized sensitive consumer information — including names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses and Social Security numbers — from tax forms submitted by the company’s thousands of clients on behalf of employees. Cloud-based human resources company ComplyRight said this week that a security breach of its Web site may have jeopardized sensitive consumer information — including names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses and Social Security numbers — from tax forms submitted by the company’s clients on behalf of employees. Pompano Beach, Fla-based ComplyRight began mailing breach notification letters to affected consumers late last week, but the form letters are extremely vague about the scope and cause of the breach. Indeed, many readers who received these letters wrote to KrebsOnSecurity asking for more information, as the company hadn’t yet published any details about the breach on its Web site. Also, most of those folks said they’d never heard of ComplyRight and could not remember ever doing business with a company by that name.

ComputerWorld Independent

July 19, 2018 admin

Is mobile sensor-based authentication ready for the enterprise? Some big players think it might be.

Credit to Author: Evan Schuman| Date: Thu, 19 Jul 2018 11:18:00 -0700

An Arizona security company is working on an interesting approach to mobile authentication, one that leverages the exact angle a user holds the phone as a means of making replay attacks a lot more difficult. Aetna has been testing the method internally (according to the security company’s CEO) and the company — Trusona — has announced about $18 million in funding, from Microsoft Ventures ($10 million) and Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers ($8 million).

The Microsoft Ventures funding is interesting because one of the more popular mobile authentication methods today is Microsoft’s Authenticator app. Is Redmond covering its bases, or does it see the Trusona effort as threatening to displace Authenticator, at least in the enterprise IT world?

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ComputerWorld Independent

July 18, 2018 admin

Mingis on Tech: The blockchain evolution moves from services…to smartphones?

Credit to Author: Ken Mingis| Date: Wed, 18 Jul 2018 11:30:00 -0700

If 2017 was the year many tech firms suddenly looked around and realized they needed to be part of the blockchain craze, this is the year companies in a variety of industries have begun actively experimenting with the distributed ledger technology.

Helping to make that possible – especially for firms with no experience in building out blockchain systems themselves – are IT vendors like IBM, Microsoft, HPE and Amazon Web Services. They now offer blockchain-as-a-service.

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ComputerWorld Independent

July 18, 2018 admin

Mingis on Tech: The blockchain evolution, from services…to smartphones

Oracle joins other major tech vendors by rolling out its blockchain-as-a-service offering, and two smartphone makers plan to include the technology in new devices this year. Get the latest on the blockchain craze.

ComputerWorld Independent

July 17, 2018 admin

Stung by a festering pile of bugs on Patch Tuesday, MS releases 27 more patches

Credit to Author: Woody Leonhard| Date: Tue, 17 Jul 2018 09:21:00 -0700

In what is becoming a common occurrence, Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday brought along so many bugs that they necessitated a remediation round. This month, unusually, it took only six days to get the exterminators out.

Since these fixes are aimed at four specific bugs introduced on Patch Tuesday, they don’t include the massive patches normally appearing on the second Patch Whateverday of the month. My guess is we’ll see at least one more big set of Windows patches before the month is out. Oh, boy.

Windows July patches, version 2

Yesterday, Monday, July 16, Microsoft released 27 new security patches for Windows, bringing the total number of patches so far this month up to 156. The new patches fall into six separate groups:

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