This year stands to shatter last year's record in terms of the number of successful hacks against businesses and government agencies. It seems that the hackers have a new favored tool: The ransomware attack.
According to statistics gathered by Malwarebytes, attacks against government and business are up by a whopping 365 percent.
There's a mix of good news and bad news concerning the security of smart devices in general, and smart medical devices specifically. As most people are aware, the Internet of Things (IoT) has a serious problem.
The overwhelming majority of such devices have little to no security and are incredibly easy to hack.
This year hasn't been good for users of Open Source software, which at one level or another, includes just about everybody. Unfortunately, a recent grim discovery makes it unlikely that we'll see the number of attacks decline any time soon. Not long ago, two new back doors were discovered in more than a dozen libraries that have been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times by server administrators.
There's great news today in the tech realm for gamers around the world.
Nvidia recently announced a major driver update for its graphics cards that offer a variety of improvements. The 436.02 update promises a framerate improvement of up to 23 percent for World War Z, Strange Brigade, Forza Horizon 4, Battlefield V, and Apex Legends.
Earlier this year, Google, the parent company of YouTube, found itself in hot water for YouTube's violation of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPA). They got in trouble for their data collection practices and the fact that the company allowed third-party ads to run rampant on videos that were more likely to be viewed by children under the age of thirteen.
If you're a G Suite user, you're probably already aware that Google has been making plans to shut down Google Hangouts. In fact, the original plan was to begin phasing it out of the G Suite in October of this year (2019).
If you're a fan of the service and rely on it for interoffice communications, you can breathe a short-lived sigh of relief.
There are changes afoot in Gmail designed to help improve the quality of your writing using new AI features.
These features will auto correct simple spelling errors and offer suggestions to improve your grammar.
As the company notes in a recent blog post on the matter:
"If you're working against deadlines to write a lot of emails daily, correct spelling and grammar probably isn't top of the mind.
When surveying the state of your company's security, it's important to understand what your biggest risks are.
According to the 2019 Application Report published by F5 Labs, the answer is simple.
Fully 71 percent of all web-related data breaches in 2018 specifically targeted customers' financial information.
Recently, an independent researcher named Bob Diachenko worked collaboratively with Comparitech. They discovered an unsecured database containing nearly 700,000 hotel records belonging to Choice Hotels. Unfortunately, although Diachenko reported his finding to the company, hackers had beaten him to the punch and had already downloaded the file.
Google recently released a large-scale password study that will probably give every IT manager in the country heartburn. The results of their study indicate that a disturbing percentage of users continue to use passwords after they've been warned that those passwords have been compromised.
