67 percent of used drives for sale contain sensitive data
An analysis of 200 second-hand hard disks and solid state drives purchased from eBay and Craigslist in the first quarter of 2016 reveals that 67 percent of them contained personally identifiable information.
In addition 11 percent held sensitive corporate data, including company emails, CRM records and spreadsheets containing sales projections and product inventories. The study comes from mobile diagnostics and secure erasure specialist Blancco Technology Group.
Almost a third of IT professionals ignore cyber security alerts
Just over 30 percent of IT professionals admit to sometimes ignoring security alerts because of high volumes of false positives.
This is among the findings of a new survey from Skyhigh Networks conducted along with the Cloud Security Alliance which also reveals that 20 percent of companies have more than ten security tools that generate alerts.
Cohesity adds protection for physical servers
As demand for data grows, companies often struggle to stay in control of a range of different secondary storage solutions.
Californian company Cohesity has pioneered hyper-converged secondary storage and today announces new releases of its DataProtect and DataPlatform products that expand data protection to physical servers, enable faster recovery times, and double performance levels.
New cloud platform delivers IT resilience
Economic pressures means IT departments need to provide high levels of service whilst cutting costs and using fewer resources. Legacy infrastructure not only gets in the way of this it limits IT's ability to quickly respond to incidents, outages and security breaches.
Disaster recovery specialist Axcient is launching Fusion, a cloud-converged platform for IT resilience and agility that will allow enterprises to reduce infrastructure overhead and cost, regain valuable IT staff time and deliver a more reliable and high-performing service to their end users.
First impressions matter in email marketing
We all know that first impressions are important and it seems that the same is true when it comes to email marketing.
According to a survey by email marketing company Campaigner 39 percent of marketers say that the first email content new subscribers see from their brand is a thank-you-for-subscribing message. And those messages work, with almost half reporting that 21 percent or more of new subscribers engage with them.
Free performance health check for Hadoop clusters
Hadoop is one of the most popular frameworks for creating distributed processing environments using commodity hardware. This makes it the first choice for many when implementing big data.
However, the nature of this type of system means there are inherent performance limitations. Distributed systems performance specialist Pepperdata is launching Hadoop Health Check, a complimentary, expert assessment that evaluates and diagnoses Hadoop clusters of 100 nodes or more, and provides full visibility into current cluster conditions.
New version of CryptXXX ransomware is harder to decrypt
Researchers at endpoint protection specialist SentinelOne have uncovered a new variant of the CryptXXX ransomware family which is being spread via spam and possibly other means.
The latest version fixes previous flaws in its file encryption methods which prevents use of free decryption tools and makes it impossible to decrypt files without paying the ransom.
New platform offers self-service data preparation
Companies are keen to gain the edge that big data can offer, but collecting and analysing information and getting it to a point where it's useful takes time and resources.
Cloud integration and big data specialist Talend is launching the latest version of its Talend Data Fabric, a platform designed to meet the integration needs of both developers and business users whether their applications are on-premises or in the cloud.
UK tech industry reacts to Brexit
As the UK awoke this morning -- at least those parts of it that hadn't been glued to the poll results through the early hours -- to find that it had voted to leave the European Union, there was plenty of reaction.
While the pound fell and the stockmarket shuddered, technology companies have been quick to add their take on the news.
37 percent of Americans would prefer better automation at work to a better sex life
Whether it says more about their work lives or home lives is unclear, but it seems that more than 1 in 3 working Americans would prefer having a better way to automate all their routine work tasks, such as booking meetings, than have a better sex life. What's also interesting is that 44 percent of those were women and 30 percent were men.
This is among the findings of a survey by automation specialist Built.io carried out in conjunction with Wakefield Research. It also finds that Americans are willing to give up some personal information in exchange for a more automated life.
How mobile device management could be invading your privacy
Many companies now turn to mobile device management (MDM) to control and monitor their employees' mobile use. But a new study from data protection company Bitglass reveals that MDM itself represents a threat to privacy.
Bitglass researchers configured MDM software to route mobile data traffic through a corporate proxy and installed corporate-issued certificates on employee devices to decrypt SSL traffic. This, a common configuration in enterprise MDM deployments for inspecting traffic for malware, enabled researchers to see the contents of employees' personal email inboxes, social networking accounts and even banking information.
Crypto-ransomware attacks increase five fold
Ransomware has become a big problem in recent years, particularly crypto-ransomware, which encrypts data on users' systems. New research by Kaspersky Lab looking at how it’s evolved over the last two years points to just how big.
Among the findings are that the number of users attacked with crypto-ransomware rose 5.5 times, from 131,111 in 2014-2015 to 718,536 in 2015-2016. The total number of users encountering any type of ransomware between April 2015 and March 2016 also increased by 17.7 percent compared to the period April 2014 to March 2015.
Microsoft launches data protection tool for enterprises
As businesses rely more on mobile and cloud systems, greater emphasis is placed on protecting their information while retaining the productivity benefits.
Microsoft is launching a new service to help businesses guard their data as it travels between devices and servers. Azure Information Protection builds on both the existing Microsoft Azure Rights Management (Azure RMS) and the company's acquisition last year of information protection business Secure Islands.
Enterprises struggle to manage big data flows
Enterprises of all sizes are facing challenges on a range of data performance management issues from stopping bad data to keeping their data flows operating effectively.
This is a finding of a survey by data performance management specialist StreamSets which finds that nearly 90 percent of respondents reported flowing bad data into their data stores, while only 12 percent think themselves good at the key aspects of data flow performance management.
Strong DevOps performance pays off for businesses
High-performing DevOps organizations are widening their lead against lower-performing ones according to a new report.
Compared to low performers, high-performing organizations deploy 200 times more frequently, have 2,555 times faster lead times, and recover 24 times faster from failed changes.
Ian's Bio
Ian spent almost 20 years working with computers before he discovered that writing about them was easier than fixing them. Since then he's written for a number of computer magazines and is a former editor of PC Utilities. Follow him on Mastodon
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