Cybercrime has entered a new era where people don’t steal just for the thrill of doing it anymore. They make it their business to carry out illegal cyber activities in small groups or individually to earn business from online criminals, selling offensive services like spyware as a service or commercial cybersecurity.

For instance, a series of new DDoS for Hire are commoditizing the art of hacking and reducing the barrier to launching DDoS attacks.

Who are Hackers-for-Hire?

Hackers-for-hire are secret cyber experts or groups who specialize in infiltrating organizations to acquire intelligence in one way or another. They offer their services to people who encounter problems when trying to break into an organization for various reasons, for example, lack of skills necessary for the operation or simply because they cannot do it by themselves.

• A hacker would like to steal the private email of a person going through a divorce, separation, or child custody case. Why? Because hackers don’t mind breaking the law and getting involved in financial and legal disputes as long as they can benefit financially.
• False information and malicious actions on social media can cause social confusion (not just political).
• A hackers-for-hire group would attempt to access bank accounts to execute data breaches, which they could sell on the black market at a percentage of the account’s current cash balance.

Hackers-for-Hire Emerge as A Threat

Since 2020, Hackers-for-hire has had unprecedented access to computer networks and have posed as hackers and users contracted to perform different kinds of work for them. For example, COVID-19 was seen as a big threat because it gave hackers something that we might see in the future more often– the ability to use computers via clever public communications channels like Twitter and email.

If any of your assets are valuable, and if others have a vested interest in taking these assets away from you, you should expect to be the target of an attack.

How Hack-For-Hire Operations Work

To get a general overview of the whole process, we can break everything down into three phases that make up a surveillance chain. The first phase involves reconnaissance, where hackers will gather as much information about their target’s company or business as they can by using various tools and techniques. This informative phase will then inform phase 2, where hackers will carry out attacks to damage their target.

Let’s try to understand the working as follows:

1. Reconnaissance

In the reconnaissance stage, cyber hackers start as information gatherers and data miners when they start to profile their targets silently. A few examples of how they do this is by gathering information about them from publicly available sources such as blogs, social media, knowledge management platforms like Wikipedia and Wikidata, news media, forums, etc. (this can involve scraping dark websites too).

2. Engagement

During the Engagement phase, an attacker, using the power of social engineering, tries to build trust with you and uses that as a way to gain your confidence and trick you into sharing confidential information. The attacker’s objective is to get you excited about clicking on what they might refer to as a “special link” or downloading a file that they say will give you more details. Social engineering is a form of manipulation that might be directed through tricking, deceiving, or even blackmailing an individual. By talking to the people, you are after information, you can eventually gain access or manipulate them into answering your questions.

3. Exploitation

A hacker’s primary objective during the exploitation stage is to gain access to surveillance for mobile phones or computers.

A hacker can access personal data on a victim’s phone or computer by taking advantage of keyloggers and phishing websites. These elements allow them to steal sensitive information like passwords, cookies, access tokens, photos, videos, messages, and more. They may be able to hack into the microphone on your cell phone or the camera on your computer to activate them even without your knowledge.

Who are Hackers-for-Hire Targets?

Cybercriminals have a soft spot for targeting companies that would have access to sensitive information like social security numbers, credit card details, etc. They target every kind of organization, including financial, Hospitals, cellular equipment vendors, and radio and satellite communication companies in the hope of exposing sensitive details. Sometimes they focus on individuals like CIOs, Human rights activists, workers like journalists, politicians, telecommunications engineers, and medical doctors, etc.

How to Protect Businesses from Hackers-for-Hire?

By far, the most common attack when it comes to hacking is phishing. Many cybercriminals will use this method as a starting point and generally do not go further than the compromise of email accounts and data exfiltration. This means that threat actors don’t necessarily need any malware because basic social engineering tricks can be enough.

But what can we do at our end to safeguard our critical assets from prying eyes? Let’s discuss the top four ways.

Scan your Assets

With a vulnerability assessment service, you’ll be able to identify common security vulnerabilities in your websites and applications and related libraries that are likely a result of weak coding. It can then be passed onto an application developer so they know what holes in the code they might need to patch up.

Pen Testing

Penetration testing is detecting and analyzing potential security vulnerabilities that an attacker could exploit. Penetration testing, also known as ethical hacking, white hat hacking, or security testing, is a type of validation testing used to attack a computer system to find vulnerabilities within the target application, network, or device.

Keep Apps Up-To-Date

If you’re seeking to beef up your application’s security, an important aspect is constant sync testing and patching of web applications, which need to be protected. An organization needs to be able to stay on top of new threats and vulnerability patches as soon as possible, so it’s necessary to update your security suite regularly.

Prepare to Block Attacks

No matter how well you ensure your network is guarded against hackers, there will always be cyber-criminals just waiting for the right opportunity to wreak havoc with attacks like DDoS.

A way to thwart the biggest and most powerful cyber-attack is to ensure that you have an anti-DDoS cyber shield in place. AppTrana WAF, from the Indusface, stops malicious traffic to keep hackers away from the site.

Conclusion

Information security researchers believe that to effectively detect and repair web application security vulnerabilities, individuals/groups should adopt a combination of static and dynamic web application testing methods backed by a web application firewall for instant virtual patching for the detectable defects within your system.

Trusted security partners are like skilled bodyguards. They stay on top of the latest methods to access confidential information and carry out regular monitoring rounds to keep your data safe from any security breaches.

Via: https://thehackernews.com/

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When asked for comment, an Anker spokesperson said:

The AnkerMake Slicer software is currently in beta phase and only available for testing by media and backers. AnkerMake Slicer and firmware use some open-source codes obtained through the General Public License. We respect the work of other brands and the 3D printing community and follow the GNU license terms. We will make the AnkerMake Slicer software and firmware open-source with the release of the official version in mid-November 2022.

Anker Spokesperson

3D printing is still a small enough market that the goodwill of the community at large is important to a company, especially one trying to promote its first foray in this area. An apparent reluctance to release its software could harm that goodwill. My original hands-on impressions, first published Oct. 24, follow.

When Anker first announced it was making a 3D printer, I was skeptical. I’ve always liked Anker’s products, but there was certainly no guarantee that a company known for making phone accessories and battery packs could make a good 3D printer straight out of the gate. 

But having used the AnkerMake M5 for the past couple of weeks, I can confirm: Not only can Anker produce a 3D printer, it can make a very promising one. 

The AnkerMake M5 was originally launched as a Kickstarter campaign and managed to raise $8 million in funding. Those backers will receive their printers this week. And as of Tuesday, Anker is letting the public buy it, too. 

If you head over to the AnkerMake website you can preorder the M5 for $799 (£749 in the UK) for a Dec. 1 release. If you preorder now, you also get two rolls of AnkerMake filament and a 64GB USB thumb drive at no extra charge.

First impressions of the AnkerMake M5

I’ve been playing around with the AnkerMake for a couple of weeks, and what follows are very much my first impressions (based on about 50 hours of printing) rather than a full review. You’ll also notice a bit of a skull theme on my prints. I have two 20-year-olds in my house who both love skull iconography, and it just happens to be seasonally appropriate, too. Most of them are from Hex3d’s Patreon if you want to find them. 

The first thing you notice about the AnkerMake is how easy it is to put together. A few screws to attach the gantry to the base is really all you need do before you can plug it in and get started. The screen takes you through the setup, including installing the app on your phone, and goes straight into the autoleveling procedure. It’s incredibly easy to get started, even if you have never used a 3D printer before.

Built-in Wi-Fi is something that few 3D printers have, and the ones that do tend to be a bit spotty on how well it works. I’d like to say the AnkerMake bucks that trend, but — in my early experience — it doesn’t. The printer often loses connection, requiring the entire setup to be run again on the app. It’s a pain, but when it does work, it saves a lot of walking back and forth with USB thumb drives.

Is the print quality good on the AnkerMake M5?

As you can see from the OG CNET torture test, which is based on our old logo, the M5 does a great job on quality. The dimensional accuracy is excellent and the overhangs and bridging test printed extremely well. The only part that wasn’t the best was the two pointed towers. These were a little wobbly and had stringing due to the increased speed of the print.

All of the skulls came out looking extremely nice and — depending on the material I used — the layer lines were even and clean across the board. Even when printing some of the smaller skulls, like the Corinthian skull planters, the details were sharp with consistent layer lines throughout. 

As far as quality goes, I would put the M5 at about what you expect for a printer of this price point. But the AnkerMake has an ace up its sleeve that most $800 printers don’t: ludicrous speed.

How fast is the AnkerMake M5, really?

The M5 boasts speeds of 250 millimeters per second with a 2,500mm/s peak acceleration. Compare that to the competition: Most of the best 3D printers out there print at about 50 to 80mm/s out of the box. On paper, the M5 should be about four to five times faster. While it’s not quite that much of a jump, the difference can be considerable.

I put the same model into two different printer slicers using the same parameters — the AnkerMake, and the Prusa Mk3’s PrusaSlicer. PrusaSlicer showed the print would take 27 hours, 13 minutes, which isn’t bad for the size of the print in question. But the AnkerMake software showed it would take just 11 hours, 17 minutes to print the same model — less than half the time.

Camera-ready prints

Anker has made a big deal over the AI-capable camera on the M5. It offers you a side view of your model as it prints that you can access from anywhere. Even while I was out shopping I could check on the progress and see if there were any errors. The AI part is supposed to detect when your print fails and then warn you, even pausing the print if the failure is dire. This kind of works but often gave me a false positive when someone walked by the camera, or if the table wobbled a bit too much. It’s a good idea that I think will get better with firmware updates, but right now it’s a little hit-and-miss.

One nice bonus is that the M5 will record a time-lapse of every print you make and save it to your app, ready to share with the world. It might not be a professional time-lapse, and the angle isn’t always perfect, but it works well enough for TikTok (although I wish there was a portrait option for social media).

Final thoughts (for now)

What’s truly amazing about the AnkerMake is that it can print at the speed it does and still produce the same quality as most printers in its price range; it just does so in half the time. That’s not to say it’s perfect. In addition to the Wi-Fi issues noted above, I found that at full speed, I needed to use more infill. Without it, there would be gaps in some areas that the filament couldn’t fill in fast enough. But new technology requires new thinking, so I’m sure I can tweak it to produce even better results. 

I think the speed alone justifies the AnkerMake M5’s preorder cost, but you can wait for the full review if you want a more in-depth look at this enticing 3D printer. 

Via: https://www.cnet.com/

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The most basic and common examples are copy (Command-C) and paste (Command-V), but these keyboard shortcuts also allow you to do more complicated things like force-close an app (Option-Command-Esc) or quickly take a screenshot (Command-Shift-4).

And the most important modifier key of them all? Command. 

With it, you can copy and paste text, undo typing, select all your items at once, open a new window and so on. And in addition to all the routine shortcuts it’s known for, the Command key is much more powerful than you might think.

Even if you’re a MacOS power user, you may not be acquainted with everything the Command key has to offer, such as the ability to quickly hide windows cluttering up your desktop or search for anything stored on your computer. 

Check out six not so commonly known keyboard shortcuts that use the Command key below.

And if you want to learn more about your Mac, check out the best MacOS Venture features, as well as 10 tips to help you flex your Mac superpowers. 

1. Cycle through all the open windows on your desktop

The keyboard shortcut Command-Tab allows you to quickly step through every app window open on your desktop. As long as the window is open on your desktop and not minimized in your dock, holding down the Command-Tab combination will bring up a window with all your open apps. Continue holding down Command as you tap the Tab key to cycle through the apps and let go when the app you want brought to the front is highlighted.

2. Hide the window that’s currently open on your desktop

Instead of minimizing your window with the yellow minus button up in the top left corner, you can quickly hide any window that’s open on your desktop with the Command-H shortcut. Unlike minimizing, the hide keyboard shortcut hides the window from both your desktop and dock, without closing it completely. To open the window back up, simply click the app icon in either your dock or elsewhere. And if you want to hide all app windows except for the one in front, you can use Option-Command-H.

3. Bring up Spotlight to search for files and apps on your computer

Spotlight search is one of the Mac’s most powerful features. Bring up the search bar and type whatever you want to search for, such as text messages, emails, documents, applications, notes, music, settings, movies or locations. You can use the magnifying glass in the menu bar to bring up Spotlight search, but this keyboard shortcut is at your fingertips: Command-spacebar.

4. Highlight the URL in your web browser to quickly share it

Usually, if you’re sharing a web address you double-click in the search bar and then copy the selected text to your clipboard. However, there’s a faster way to do this: use Command-L. This will immediately highlight whatever is in the address bar in Safari, Chrome or another web browser, whether it’s something you typed or the URL of the website you’re on. You can then hit Command-C to copy it so you can paste it elsewhere.

5. Reopen any closed tabs in the Safari web browser

You may be familiar with Command-T in Safari, which opens a new tab, but there’s also a shortcut that can reopen an accidentally closed tab. Simply hit Command-Shift-T and you’ll recover whatever tab you most recently closed. And if you’ve closed several tabs and want to recover all of them, you can continue pressing the Command-Shift-T shortcut to open multiple closed tabs.

6. Open something new in various native Apple applications

The Command-N keyboard shortcut is not nearly used enough. While it’s almost universally known for opening up a new window in many popular applications, on your Mac the Command-N shortcut can open a new email in Mail, a text message in iMessage, a window in Safari, a note in Notes, an event in Calendar and more. Try it out in your favorite apps and see what Command-N can open for you.

Via: https://www.cnet.com/

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Endpoint security protects your enterprise resources by safeguarding these end-user devices from breach or physical theft. But many organizations are asking how cloud computing fits into the equation. In this brief interview, Pluralsight instructor Terumi Laskowsky (TL) walks through the considerations and responds to frequently asked questions.

How has endpoint security changed in the era of cloud?

TL: A decade ago, organizations typically limited the type of end-user devices that could connect to the corporate network, which gave IT professionals significant control over device security.

In contrast, cloud involves broad network access, and the possible devices that can access the cloud are growing exponentially and more geographically distributed.

Gone are the days where equipment lived primarily on a corporate campus, accessed through highly secure VPN connections. Today’s devices often access the corporate network via the cloud, without this enhanced scrutiny in place.

Many enterprises utilize a hybrid deployment model where the cloud is an extension of on-premises infrastructure. This requires security professionals to consider an ever-growing assortment of endpoint devices, which all represent potential attack vectors and require risk management strategies to protect corporate resources and data.

How do you protect endpoints?

TL: First, it’s important to recognize that a device can be an attacker or a victim. So, you have to plan for both scenarios. How do you protect a device from a cyber attack? And how do you protect your corporate resources against a compromised device?

You can install an endpoint security solution in a device and control its behavior using an organizational security policy. For example, to protect data leakage from these devices, the security policy could prohibit using USB sticks. Here’s another example: You could enforce whole-disk encryption in case someone loses their end-user devices. This is easier to do if your organization owns and manages the devices.

However, many employers allow personally owned devices to connect to the corporate infrastructure, especially from the cloud. This complicates the matter. If you allow your company to install an agent on your phone, who has control over your phone? How about your private data on the phone? Is your privacy protected? Organizations need to think through and resolve these questions.

What should an endpoint protection strategy include?

TL: Organizations need to catalog all devices that access corporate resources—from computers and smartphones to IoT devices such as fire alarms, thermostats, the sensors where employees swipe their badges to gain access to your building, and an ever-growing assortment of smart technology.

Anything that connects to your corporate resources can be a point of entry for a cyberattacker. This means you need a process for constantly updating your inventory of endpoint devices and managing each via an endpoint security corporate policy.

Your strategy also needs to identify who owns the responsibility for maintaining the security of each endpoint device. In some cases, the answer is IT. In other cases, you’ll need a formal shared responsibility agreement. For example, your facilities team maintains your thermostats. What aspects of security will they be responsible for? And what will IT handle?

This can’t just be an exercise on paper—a document that sits on a shelf and collects dust. When there’s shared responsibility, both parties need to formally acknowledge they understand their role. And you need an oversight process that periodically audits security for each of the endpoint devices.

When organizations don’t plan for shared responsibility, security can fall through the cracks.

Actor Henry Winkler said, “Assumptions are the termites of relationships.” In my opinion, they also are the termites of cybersecurity. A good endpoint security policy clearly articulates who is responsible for the security of each device so there are no assumptions or oversights.

T. Laskowsky

How does the cloud deployment model affect endpoint security?

TL: Here’s a rule of thumb to consider when planning your cloud strategy:
Complexity increases overall security risk and complicates endpoint security planning.

If 100% of your corporate resources live in a private cloud (single tenant = you), your endpoint security planning is easier than with a multi-tenant public cloud.

When you have part of your corporate resources in one spot—say, an on-prem data center—and the rest with a public cloud provider (a hybrid cloud approach), you need security planning for both sets of resources. The complexity of connecting the two increases the risk of security vulnerabilities. Same with multicloud, where you’re utilizing two or more public cloud providers.

Each of these models requires a different level of effort to manage security risk.

What are endpoint security best practices when the cloud is involved?

TL: Applying security controls to the endpoint is just one step. Organizations must also apply security controls to the critical resources, such as network, database, email systems, to detect and neutralize insider threats.

Second, corporations must beef up their detection of malicious behavior patterns in their infrastructure. This will help them respond to threats faster and isolate the internal threat agent quickly. This response can also update the security policy to enhance the security of all endpoint devices—features normally part of endpoint detection and response (EDR) solutions.

Third, have strong ingress (protection from incoming attacks from endpoints on the Internet) and egress (protection from exfiltration of data from the corporate network) filters. The best move: pair egress filtering, also known as DLP (data loss prevention) solutions, with endpoint security.

Fourth, apply attribute-based access control so that if an end user is connecting using an approved device with endpoint protection implemented from an approved location (i.e., attributes), they’re given greater access compared to those accessing the Internet using non-standard devices.

And finally, continue to use traditional protection of the endpoint itself if possible. We’re talking solutions such as strong encryption, anti-malware detection, host-based firewall, host-based intrusion detection and prevention, and remote-wiping capability.

How do cloud providers help with endpoint security?

TL: Your stakeholders entrust you to protect their data. So, you need to own your security plan. While major cloud providers offer various endpoint security solutions, it’s vital to think of cloud security as a shared responsibility managed by you. Your organization’s reputation is on the line. You have bottom-line responsibility for security.

Via: https://www.pluralsight.com/

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When you deploy Oracle Database on Oracle Linux, you can have the confidence that you are deploying on an operating system backed by development teams that work closely together to optimize performance, security, mission-critical reliability, availability, and serviceability. Because Oracle’s applications, middleware, and database products are developed on Oracle Linux, you’ll be deploying on an extensively tested solution, whether it be on-premises or in Oracle Cloud.

For Oracle Database workloads, advantages are afforded by the operating system’s deep integration with the solution stack, optimizations resulting from Oracle’s upstream Linux kernel work and industry collaborations, and enhancements delivered in the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (UEK) for Oracle Linux. In this paper, you will discover how Oracle Linux provides performance, scalability, and resource management optimizations for Oracle Database deployments. You’ll learn about the innovative solution, Oracle Database Smart Flash Cache that runs on OL and helps accelerate I/O operations for database workloads. 

With Oracle Linux Support, your software environment is backed by the expertise of Oracle’s global 24×7 support organization, regardless of whether you deploy on Oracle servers, Oracle Engineered Systems, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), certified partner hardware, or other public clouds. You also receive management and high availability solutions at no additional charge, which helps reduce the TCO of your database infrastructure. Additionally, when you deploy Oracle Database on OCI, all the benefits of Oracle Linux Support and more are provided at no additional cost.

To find out more about these and other Oracle Linux advantages for Oracle Database, download a copy of the technical brief: Why Oracle Database Runs Best on Oracle Linux today.

Via: https://blogs.oracle.com/

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What do you get when you establish a single source of truth for all your data? Having all that data in one place creates a cascading effect of benefits, starting with simplifying IT infrastructure and processes and rippling outward to workflows with end users and analysts. Streamlined and efficient, a single data lake basket makes everything from analysis to reporting faster and easier.

There’s just one issue: all of your proverbial digital eggs are in one “data lake” basket.

For all of the benefits of consolidation, a data lake also comes with the inherent risk of a single point of failure. Of course, in today’s IT world, it’s rare for IT departments to set anything up with a true single point of failure—backups, redundancies, and other standard failsafe techniques tend to protect enterprise data from true catastrophic failure. This is doubly so when enterprise data lives in the cloud, such as with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, as data entrusted in the cloud rather than locally has the added benefit of trusted vendors building their entire business around keeping your data safe.

Does that mean that your data lake comes protected from all threats out of the box? Not necessarily; as with any technology, a true assessment of security risks requires a 360-degree view of the situation. Before you jump into a data lake, consider the following six ways to secure your configuration and safeguard your data.

Establish Governance: A data lake is built for all data. As a repository for raw and unstructured data, it can ingest just about anything from any source. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that it should. The sources you select for your data lake should be vetted for how that data will be managed, processed, and consumed. The perils of a data swamp are very real, and avoiding them depends on the quality of several things: the sources, the data from the sources, and the rules for treating that data when it is ingested. By establishing governance, it’s possible to identify things such as ownership, security rules for sensitive data, data history, source history, and more.

Access: One of the biggest security risks involved with data lakes is related to data quality. Rather than a macro-scale problem such as an entire dataset coming from a single source, a risk can stem from individual files within the dataset, either during ingestion or after due to hacker infiltration. For example, malware can hide within a seemingly benign raw file, waiting to execute. Another possible vulnerability stems from user access—if sensitive data is not properly protected, it’s possible for unscrupulous users to access those records, possibly even modify them. These examples demonstrate the importance of establishing various levels of user access across the entire data lake. By creating strategic and strict rules for role-based access, it’s possible to minimize the risks to data, particularly sensitive data or raw data that has yet to be vetted and processed. In general, the widest access should be for data that has been confirmed to be clean, accurate, and ready for use, thus limiting the possibility of accessing a potentially damaging file or gaining inappropriate access to sensitive data.

Use Machine Learning:Some data lake platforms come with built-in machine learning (ML) capabilities. The use of ML can significantly minimize security risks by accelerating raw data processing and categorization, particularly if used in conjunction with a data cataloging tool. By implementing this level of automation, large amounts of data can be processed for general use while also identifying red flags in raw data for further security investigation.

Partitions and Hierarchy: When data gets ingested into a data lake, it’s important to store it in a proper partition. The general consensus is that data lakes require several standard zones to house data based on how trusted it is and how ready-to-use it is. These zones are:

• Temporal: Where ephemeral data such as copies and streaming spools live prior to deletion.
• Raw: Where raw data lives prior to processing. Data in this zone may also be further encrypted if it contains sensitive material.
• Trusted: Where data that has been validated as trustworthy lives for easy access by data scientists, analysts, and other end users.
• Refined: Where enriched and manipulated data lives, often as final outputs from tools.

Using zones like these creates a hierarchy that, when coupled with role-based access, can help minimize the possibility of the wrong people accessing potentially sensitive or malicious data. 

Data Lifecycle Management:Which data is constantly used by your organization? Which data hasn’t been touched in years? Data lifecycle management is the process of identifying and phasing out stale data. In a data lake environment, older stale data can be moved to a specific tier designed for efficient storage, ensuring that it is still available should it ever be needed but not taking up needed resources. A data lake powered by ML can even use automation to identify and process stale data to maximize overall efficiency. While this may not touch directly on security concerns, an efficient and well managed data lake allows it to function like a well-oiled machine rather than collapsing under the weight of its own data.

Data Encryption:The idea of encryption being vital to data security is nothing new, and most data lake platforms come with their own methodology for data encryption. How your organization executes, of course, is critical. Regardless of which platform you use or what you decide between on premises vs, cloud, a sound data encryption strategy that works with your existing infrastructure is absolutely vital to protecting all of your data whether in motion or at rest—in particular, your sensitive data.

Create Your Secure Data Lake

What’s the best way to create a secure data lake? With Oracle’s family of products, a powerful data lake is just steps away. Built upon the foundation of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Oracle Big Data Service delivers cutting-edge data lake capabilities while integrating into premiere analytics tools and one-touch Hadoop security functions. Learn more about Oracle Big Data Service to see how easy it is to deploy a powerful cloud-based data lake in your organization—and don’t forget to subscribe to the Oracle Big Data blog to get the latest posts sent to your inbox.

Via: https://blogs.oracle.com/

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The majority of people are accessing their money digitally, and the use of smart devices—be it phone, tablet, laptop, or even web-connected appliances with purchase capabilities—is growing exponentially.  And the volume of transactions happening per second feels countless, and perhaps what’s even more daunting is the amount of security required to handle such a thing.

If you consider that every device in the world, be it a phone or a smart TV, is a potential access point for hackers, the need for reliable security suddenly gets put into perspective.

Fortunately, the financial services industry is already on top of this. Many of the world’s biggest providers are leading the charge by combining big data with machine learning (ML). Not only does ML make your money safer, it delivers a better customer experience. Let’s take a look at four specific ways the financial services sector is integrating big data into everyday operations.

Fraud Detection

The digital age has transformed the way fraud works—not just from people unscrupulously trying to steal, but also the security teams attempting to protect customer money. Today’s economy is run via online transactions and transfers, which means that for fraudsters, gaining access (usually by stealing someone’s identity or credentials) is the goal. They attempt this in a number of ways, from skimmers on PIN pads to malware transmitted online to brute-force hacks of accounts. On a macro scale, that data can tell a lot about the different parties involved; patterns can create expected profiles and, more importantly, identify when potentially fraudulent activity occurs outside of those expectations. While the finance industry can’t protect everyone at every transaction, they can at as both a safety net and firewall against these types of bad actors thanks to big data.

Challenges

To properly process this volume of data, various transaction datasets—with additional information such as interaction events and customer behavior—must be consolidated. That means storing data in an appropriate repository, such as a data lake, and applying ML to efficiently crunch the data while identifying patterns.

Financial Regulatory and Compliance Analytics

Regulatory compliance has been an issue for financial institutions since their inception. But in the digital world, regulations have rapidly changed. In addition to working within a digital landscape, regulations have quickly evolved to get a handle on new issues such as an increasing amount of cross-border transactions and the rise of cryptocurrencies.

Because of evolving regulatory rules, big data benefits financial services by offering large-scale processing of data sets as well as the ability to enact wholesale rule tweaks that quickly enable process updates for compliance. The collection of big data is the foundation for compliance, as it provides real-time proof of adherence to regulations (or identification of issues). This will never change the need for a compliance department to oversee and steer such things, but it will streamline and consolidate involved workflows, as well as minimize human error on records. A prime example of this comes from Caixa Bank, which saved 60,000 work hours overseeing Spain’s direct debits process.

Challenges

Similar to fraud detection, regulatory compliance requires bringing together multiple sources. On top of that, compliance also utilizes advanced risk models, and these must be generated quickly without creating any impact on other projects.

Improve Customer Service Through Big Data

Any organization’s operations can achieve valuable improvements with big data, and the financial services industry is no different. Consider the steps along any workflow; externally, banks and organizations are looking at customer retention and activity on loans, special offers, balance transfers, and other types of financial offerings. Internally, these same organizations are looking for any sort of process improvement, whether it’s in HR, IT, marketing, sales, or any other organization.

Big data provides insights that lead to innovation. Let’s take the example of maximizing customer engagement. Big data can look at a customer transactional data and account history to identify purchase patterns, geographic locations, and other potential engagement triggers. With ML, models can be built to identify the customer needs based on this data and extend appropriate offers that maximize potential for engagement. For example, if the ML model determines that a customer is doing a bit of remodeling work by shopping at hardware stores and related businesses, it could trigger an offer for a home equity line of credit.

Challenges 

To get the most accurate view of a customer, as many sources need to be used, including licensed third-party data regarding outside factors such as demographic and geographic data. Data scientists will also need to build and constantly refine customer models while also looking at big-picture economic factors such as interest rates.

Anti-Money Laundering Strategies

As a subset to both fraud detection and compliance, financial services firms are facing increasing pressure from governments specifically regarding anti-money laundering laws (AML). Money laundering is a different issue from purely fraudulent transactions, and laws and regulations targeting this sort of thing have a much wider scope, including tax evasion, public fund corruption, and market manipulation. Other elements involve concealing these crimes and any money derived from these actions.

For AML compliance, data must be ingested from extremely diverse sources (sanctions lists, legal data, transactions, application logs). Also, ML models need to look at known money-laundering methods across timing and context in order to flag items for further investigation. Merely working within established rules (such as a transaction threshold) creates black-and-white thinking to an issue with a lot of gray-area manipulation by criminals. This is where ML can truly add value thanks to models that evolve over time as criminal schemes become more nuanced and sophisticated.

Challenges 

A wide range of sources is required for AML compliance, including taking on datasets that have many combinations of structured, unstructured, and multi-structured data. Models have to be built to meet the latest regulations, along with constant updating to maintain compliance. Other elements include using tools such as graph analytics to reveal hidden relationships.

Other Big Data Use Cases

This post featured an up-close look at big data in the financial services industry, but big data and ML can provide the same types of benefits for just about any industry. To learn more, take a look at Oracle’s Top 22 Use Cases for Big Data. Covering manufacturing, retail, healthcare, and more, this ebook provides insights into the power of big data across multiple industries.

And for more about how you can benefit from Oracle Big Data, visit Oracle’s Big Data page—and don’t forget to subscribe to the Oracle Big Data blog to get the latest posts sent to your inbox.

Via: https://blogs.oracle.com/

The post Four ways financial services companies use big data appeared first on Palazon Technology.

While a cybersecurity breach may feel inevitable, in reality there are steps that can be taken to greatly reduce threats. The first part of cybersecurity is understanding the many possible vectors of attack a hacker can take.

In this post, we will discuss three different security breaches. We’ll walk through what they are and best practices that can be implemented to prevent them. Let’s start with the most common and least technological threat: social engineering.

What is Social Engineering?

Social engineering is a wide net that can be used to describe numerous different scams and hacks. The basic premise though is manipulating members of an organization to steal confidential data and gain unauthorized access. One of the most common social engineering methods is phishing. Another example is impersonation, where a hacker will claim to be an employee to obtain information. Let’s first take a look at phishing.

What is Phishing?

Phishing is when a hacker sends an email that appears legitimate, but is not. The email is the bait, the hacker is the fisherman, and you are the fish. The purpose of a phishing attack is to obtain data by claiming to be a person or organization of authority. Phishing emails appeal to the user’s sense of urgency, or some other psychological aspect that would get someone to click the link. Let’s look at a quick example.

Let’s say you received an email from the “Human Resources Department”. In the email, it says that your badge is going to expire tomorrow, and you must click the link in the email to reserve a badge replacement time. If you do not reserve a spot, your badge will expire and you will no longer be able to come to work.

This email appeals to our sense of urgency. We don’t want to not be able to access our workplace. It also appeals to our sense of authority — i.e our HR department is a legitimate source. Assuming you unfortunately click the link, you will be forwarded to a fake website that would ask you to put in your email and password to reserve a badge replacement time. Now the hacker has your username and password and can do unprecedented amounts of damage to you and your organization.

How to Prevent a Phishing Attack

The best way to prevent a phishing attack is to look for red flags. Make sure all emails that are coming from outside your organization are sequestered into a separate email folder.

Next, advise your IT staff to set up phishing emails to send to employees so they can practice what to look for when it comes to phishing attempts. Oftentimes, phishing emails will have misspelled words or strange wording, as if the person who wrote it doesn’t speak English.

Phishing attempts will always appeal to the employee’s sense of urgency to get them to click the link. E.G, it will say something along the lines of, “you will no longer be able to work here if you don’t update your address on this link.” Remember: Stop and think before clicking that link.

What is Impersonation?

The next form of social engineering is impersonation. A hacker will claim to be an employee of the organization and try to get their password reset. The hacker will often trawl logs that leak onto the website. They can use this to obtain information they wouldn’t otherwise have. Then they call the IT department and give information that will seem credible such as employee numbers, date of birth, and other information.

How can Impersonation Attacks be Prevented?

Impersonation attacks can be prevented by well-trained employees who vigorously follow procedural compliance. For example, check the phone number that the number is coming from. If it is not a recognized number, that is a red flag. Ask the “employee” who their manager is and who their co-workers are. Ask them a little bit about their job. If they fumble, then that is a bad sign.

When talking to people, it is human nature to be as helpful and assistive as possible; this is a crucial mistake when dealing with IT security. If you are suspicious, ask followup questions or simply hang up the phone and inform your manager of a potential cybersecurity attack.

Impersonation is one of the more insidious aspects of cybersecurity, because it is so personal. Next, let’s talk about how ransomware can cripple your organization, and what steps can be taken to prevent it.

What is Ransomware?

Ransomware is a type of virus that threatens to publish private data or withhold critical data until a certain demand is met. Typically the demand is monetary compensation in the form of cryptocurrency.

It is a sad reality that ransomware attacks are becoming commonplace. In 2021 alone, there have been dozens of ransomware attacks, ranging from the Buffalo Public School System to Colonial Pipeline Systems. More often than not, the organizations have to pay the criminals the ransom to get their data back.

Protecting against a ransomware attack after it has already occurred is sort of like locking the barn door after the horses ran away. Once the hackers have your data, they have your data. However, there are numerous steps that can be taken to harden your security infrastructure to prevent these travesties from occurring

Endpoint Hardening Can Prevent Against Ransomware

One of the best ways to prevent ransomware is to ensure your software engineers are taking a proactive approach to security when designing a system. This is called Security by Design.

One such method of preventing ransomware is to harden your endpoints. Think of an endpoint as an access point to your application. Whether it is via a login screen, or a URL for a REST endpoint. Make sure that all data is sanitized so that hackers cannot send malicious data to the endpoints. This is often referred to as SQL injection or Cross-Site request Forgery.

Another good way to harden your endpoint is to disable Cross-origin Resource Sharing (CORS). This will ensure that only your app is only communicating with an authenticated server. Please note, though, there are some instances we want CORS enabled. For example, Google Fonts require CORS.

Lastly, two-factor authentication should be enabled on all devices. This will make it much more difficult for a hacker to steal somebody’s device and crack the password.

Keeping Software Up to Date is Crucial

Another important strategy to prevent ransomware is to keep all software and frameworks up to date. For example, if your team uses Spring Boot for their Java framework, make sure it is on the latest version. That goes for all other frameworks such as React and Angular.

The organizations responsible for maintaining these frameworks are constantly finding security vulnerabilities in their code and updating them accordingly. If you do not update the code, it is only a matter of time before a hacker exploits it.

While many hackers utilize proactive approaches such as social engineering and ransomware, often all they have to do is wait for a vulnerable security misconfiguration. Let’s walk through that, because it is becoming such a serious issue.

Beware of Cloud Security Misconfiguration

In every case of a cloud hack, it has been traced back to a misconfiguration. Google, AWS, and Microsoft go through great length to ensure their data storage tools are uncompromisable. In the cloud world, however, there is a shared responsibility model that determines what is the duty of the cloud provider and what is the responsibility of the user. Each cloud provider has some version of the model, but the AWS version looks like this:

Notice that the customer is responsible for a wide swath of duties, ranging from their data, to access and management, all the way to firewall configuration. These are where hacks most often occur. Let’s talk specifically about S3 buckets, AWS’s flagship data storage model.

What is an S3 bucket?

For the uninitiated, think of an S3 bucket as a scalable document-based database. Any data imaginable can be stored in these buckets, and it is completely scalable to meet your needs. It’s accessible via endpoints or a user interface on the AWS console.

Why are S3 Buckets Cybersecurity Threats?

In June of 2017, a hacker revealed 198 million voter records from a misconfigured S3 bucket. Suffice to say, that is not good. It can be traced back to an S3 bucket being misconfigured to public accessibility. If that is not a wakeup call to cybersecurity experts, I don’t know what is!

S3 buckets are created secure by default. In other words, they do not have access to the internet. However, configuring S3 endpoints and determining which ones should have access to the internet can be challenging. It is a process rife with misconfiguration, and often, AWS engineers will accidentally give an S3 bucket access to the internet.

Once an S3 bucket has this access, any hacker can hit that endpoint and retrieve huge amounts of data. For example, Grayhat Warfare can be used to find public S3 buckets. Then, they can ransom it back to the organization, sell it to a third party or blackmail somebody.

How to Prevent Misconfiguration

The easiest way to eliminate this threat is to be very careful when configuring the S3 buckets. Have more than one person verify the configurations before putting it out into the wild. Only allow users who are certified in the technology access to the cloud console. Test engineers can also create integration tests that ping the bucket to verify it does not have access to the internet. If it does, the test fails and the software engineering department is notified.

This is not exclusive to Amazon buckets. Azure and Google buckets can potentially be misconfigured in the same way.

Final Thoughts

In this post, we talked about three major vectors of attack: social engineering, ransomware, and cloud security misconfiguration. Each one of these are very different and diverse. Also, each involves different employees in the organization. Social engineering works by tricking people, ransomware is exploiting security bugs, and cloud security hacks exploit configuration errors.

It is important to remember that Cybersecurity is not relegated to one particular team. It is everyone’s responsibility. Everyone, from the CEO down, should have some level of cybersecurity awareness training.

Via: https://www.cbtnuggets.com/

The post Top 3 cybersecurity threats and how to prevent them appeared first on Palazon Technology.

For example, the Operations Manager role includes several tasks related to the datastores attached to hosts. If an administrator creates a datastore and then assigns it to a host, he automatically becomes the owner of the datastore. However, the Operations Manager role does not include access to manage datastores. 

Therefore, the Operations Manager user would not have access to the datastore’s Advanced Settings window and could not assign it to another user. Moreover, any datastore attached to a host that has been created by the Operations Manager user would be automatically assigned to the Operations Manager user and cannot be reassigned to any other user. 

This article will discuss the basic structure of authorization in VMware vSphere, managing permissions, and different objects, and assigning roles in VMware vCenter.

Need VMware Training?

If you are new to virtualization or VMware, the right training can help you get up to speed. And you can’t go wrong with learning how to use VMware effectively because it’s the industry leader when it comes to virtualization. 

Find the VMware training you need at CBT Nuggets. We offer a variety of online VMware training geared at different levels and roles, from admins to engineers. Start a 7-day free trial today to start learning VMware!

Understanding Authorization in VMware vSphere

For establishing if a user is authorized to execute a task, vSphere offers many models where the vSphere admin can accomplish a task depending on group membership in a vCenter Single Sign-On group. Whether you are permitted to carry out other actions depends on your role on an item or your global permission.

In vSphere, privileged users can grant access to other users so they can carry out tasks. To grant access to other users for specific vCenter Server instances, you can either utilize global permissions or local vCenter Server permissions.

How are Permissions Managed in VMware vCenter Server?

vCenter Server’s permissions and roles give users precise control over authorization where vSphere admin can designate which person or group has access to an object by permitting it to a specific object. Roles, which are collections of privileges, are used to specify the privileges.

Initially, the vCenter Server system allows only the vCenter Single Sign-On domain administrator user to log in. Administrator@vsphere.local is the default administrator, and the default domain is vsphere.local. When installing vSphere, the default domain can be changed.

The administrator user can carry out these actions:

• Add a user and group definition source for identities to vCenter Single Sign-On.
• Grant a user or group access to specific resources in vCenter inventory by selecting an object, e.g. a VM or a vCenter Server system, and assign the user or group a role on that object.

What are the 5 vCenter Server Objects?

Five different objects that we can have in a vCenter Server are listed below:

Roles: You can grant authorization to an object by using a role. Predefined roles include Administrator and Resource Pool Administrator. Most established roles can be duplicated or modified except Administrator.

Privileges: Privileges control the resource access and are grouped into roles—mapped to specific users or groups.

Users and groups: Some rights can only be granted to users who have used Single Sign-On (SSO) to authenticate. Users must either be defined within the SSO or come from outside identity sources like Microsoft AD or other LDAP.

Permissions: The vCenter hierarchy contains a set of related permissions for each object. Each permission details the rights that a group or person has access to an object.

Global Permissions: Global privileges are specific permissions. The global root object, which encompasses various solutions, is where they are applied. Consider installing vCenter Server and vRealize Orchestrator side by side. These two items are capable of using global permissions. The vsphere.local domain replicates global permissions. Services run by vsphere.local groups require authorization, which is not provided by global permissions.

How to Assign Roles and Permissions in VMware vSphere

You can assign roles to objects in your VMware vSphere inventory using the vSphere Client, which allows you to establish roles with tailored sets of rights to suit the access control requirements of your environment. Log in to the vSphere Client > Administration > Roles.

From the Roles provider drop-down menu, choose a vCenter Server domain. Here, we’re using vsphere.local, the default, and select New.

Enter a role name and description. Select datacenter > Select all operations to assign to a role, and then we click the CREATE button to move on.

The list includes the new job. Now that you’ve chosen an object in your VMware vSphere inventory, you may provide rights by designating a user or group as the role holder for that object.

Select a Hosts or Clusters object from the vSphere Client Object Navigator, click on Permissions, and then the ADD button.

Choose the domain for the user or group from the Domain drop-down menu. Here, we’re using vsphere.local, the default. Type a user or group name into the search field and then choose the entry. Select a specific role from the drop-down menu. By using the “Propagate to children” checkbox, you can decide whether to propagate permissions to child objects. Input OK.

The Permissions tab shows the permissions you added.

You can also set global permissions in addition to granting access to specific objects in VMware vCenter objects. In a vSphere environment, you can grant a user or group privileges for all items in all inventory hierarchies by using global permissions.

Wrapping Up

One of the most crucial elements of maintaining a VMware vCenter Server installation is permissions. Local permissions enable administrators to govern access to objects and settings within specific vCenter Server systems, whereas global permissions handle the security of all objects in a vCenter Server hierarchy.

Understanding both the global and local permissions hierarchies is necessary for managing permissions in the vCenter Server. To determine if a user has the right to carry out an activity, VMware vSphere provides several models. Your participation in a group for vCenter Single Sign-On controls what you can do. You can execute different activities based on your role on an object or your global authorization.

Via: https://www.cbtnuggets.com/

The post How are permissions managed in VMware server? appeared first on Palazon Technology.

Yes, you can legitimately buy two blue checks for your Tumblr blog. For the low, low price of $7.99. As Tumblr wrote in an official post, “That’s cheaper than some other places, when you consider that you get not one but TWO checkmarks for your blog.”

If you keep paying Tumblr, you can get even more blue checks. Want 10 blue checks? That’ll be about $40.

Tumblr has struggled to monetize for its entire existence. Tumblr was acquired by Yahoo (TechCrunch’s parent company) for $1 billion in 2013, but when it sold again to Verizon (TechCrunch’s former parent company) in 2019, it was worth just $3 million.

Tumblr’s success as a social media platform has been in even more jeopardy since it banned porn in 2018 to protect its presence on the App Store. In the last year alone, Automattic has tried to get Tumblr to make money through paid ad-free browsing, a subscription product and a tip jar, marking some of the first paid creator features on the longstanding blogging site. Yet despite growing nostalgia for Tumblr, the platform has failed to grow its user base significantly since the porn ban, when it lost 30% of web traffic.

Tumblr’s initial rollout of its Post+ subscription rollout was a mess, as users worried how the harsh reality of capitalism would change their fandom paradise. But Tumblr users have proven to be extremely willing to pay money for two things: ad-free browsing and shitposting. 

According to data from SensorTower, Tumblr’s mobile app has seen approximately $507,000 in consumer spending since April. That was the month when Tumblr announced Blaze, a feature that lets users promote their own posts. Not coincidentally, Blaze debuted on 4/20 with price points ending in $4.20.

On a platform like Facebook, promoted posts are usually for businesses. On Tumblr, Blazed posts are commonly used to make other people bear witness to your cursed content.

Since the launch of Blaze, Tumblr’s top five in-app purchases have been ad-free browsing (monthly and annual), two price points for Blaze and … crabs. Yes, crabs. In July, Tumblr added a feature that allows you to send someone crabs that dance around their dashboard for a day, and now, crabs have generated more in-app purchases than Post+.

Tumblr’s paid jab at Twitter verification has only just launched, so we can’t say yet how profitable it will be. But if Tumblr’s history is any indication, this should be a financial slam dunk, since Tumblr users seem to just really want to buy things that are useless.

According to analytics firm Similarweb, Tumblr did not experience a significant uptick in monthly visits worldwide on mobile and desktop after it launched creator monetization features in summer 2021. However, Tumblr is generating some more interest now that we live in a world in which Elon Musk owns Twitter. Other alternative social networks have seen an influx of new users too — Mastodon nearly doubled its user base so far this month.

Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic (the company that owns Tumblr), tweeted that Tumblr app downloads are up about 58% in the last week. This could be because Twitter now seems like more of a hellsite than Tumblr under Musk’s ownership, or because Tumblr just changed its community guidelines. Now, Tumblr allows nudity, but not “visual depictions of sexually explicit acts.” Some internet denizens took this policy change to mean that porn is back, but the last time we checked, porn generally falls into the category of “visual depictions of sexually explicit acts.”

If you’re looking to jump ship from Twitter as Elon Musk gets settled in as its new owner, I hate to break it to you: Tumblr may not be your saving grace (unless if you’re a former “Superwholock” fan whose new favorite book is “Gideon the Ninth,” in which case, you’re probably still on Tumblr anyway). But to be fair, it’s likely that none of the Twitter alternatives that are floating around — no, not even Mastodon — will become the new Twitter.

Regardless, Tumblr now has something that Twitter doesn’t: two blue checkmarks.

Via: https://techcrunch.com/

The post Tumblr’s only viable business model is shitposting appeared first on Palazon Technology.