23 Business attitudes to IT Security

You are a businessman or an expert responsible for critical decisions related to IT security, but you have a tough schedule. You are hunting for any piece of information that will illuminate the latest trends and facilitate obtaining more expertise in this field, but do not have?have time for visiting profile events or learning new technologies.

50% of companies agree that cyber-threats are the second business risk and it is only inferior to economic instability (image: file)

Still you have to be aware about the actual situation around cyber security. Kaspersky Lab research might help you ? it reflects what other IT specialists and business leaders, probably your colleagues or partners, thought about the IT security situation in 2012.

This serves as a good source for analyses to take some expert protection steps in future, especially considering? these two proven facts ? in 2012 35% of companies lost data because of malware attacks and 25% business data due to un-patched software vulnerabilities.

Top business risks:

????????? 50% of companies agree that cyber-threats are the second business risk and it is only inferior to economic instability (55%)

????????? 37% of companies seriously care about damage to brand and reputation that may be caused by cyber-security problems

????????? 31% of companies are afraid of intellectual property theft

????????? 26% of companies think that fraud can be a serious risk for businesses

External Threats:

????????? 61% of companies experienced malware attacks in 2012 and 35% of them did lose data because of malware attacks

????????? 56% of companies were disturbed by spam

????????? 35% of companies confirmed that phishing was a problem

????????? 23% of companies consider network intrusion to be one more external threat

????????? 20% of companies registered mobile device theft that could lead to corporate data loss

Internal Threats:

????????? 40% of companies experienced situations when vulnerable software could make damage and 25% of respondents did lose business data due to unpatched software vulnerabilities

????????? 31% of companies experienced accidental staff-caused data leaks

????????? 29% of companies suffered an internal threat ? employees losing mobile devices

????????? 25% of companies experienced loss of other equipment

????????? 21% of companies were victims of intentional data leaks

Top Concerns of IT Staff:

????????? 31% of IT professionals were concerned about preventing IT security breaches

????????? 27% of IT professionals cared about data protection

????????? 23% of IT professionals worried about return on investment made for IT security

????????? 23% of IT professionals were thinking about importance of understanding new technologies

????????? 22% of IT professionals cared about future investments in IT Security

Top IT Security Measures:

????????? 67% of companies not only used anti-malware protection but also named it top security measure

????????? 62% of companies implemented patch management and consider this to be very important for protection

????????? 45% of companies consider implementing access levels as one of their priorities

????????? 45% of companies would prefer to separate critical infrastructure

????????? 44% of companies applied encryption of sensitive data

The survey involved over 3,300 IT specialists in 22 countries worldwide and was conducted in conjunction with Kaspersky Lab. The participants represented all business sizes: small, medium and enterprise. The full version of the report of the results of the survey by B2B International in July 2012 is available at http://www.kaspersky.com/downloads/pdf/kaspersky_global_it-security-risks-survey_report_eng_final.pdf

Staff writer

Source: http://www.itnewsafrica.com/2013/01/23-business-attitudes-to-it-security/

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Samsung estimates $8.3 billion in profits for Q4, brags about phone sales

What's the lion's share look like in sales numbers? About 500 handsets a minute, according to Samsung. The Korean hardware giant flaunted the sales estimate in its Q4 investors guidance, where it says it expects to see $8.3 billion in profits when the official earnings report drops later this month. That's just shy of double what it reported over the same period in 2011. Sammy contributes the growth to a plentiful supply of regional variants of handsets like the Galaxy S III and Note II, as well as high demand for its display technology. The streak may not keep forever though, according to Reuters, analysts are predicting a first quarter slump without a new Galaxy S phone for the spring. We'll have to wait for the full earnings release to see how things pan out, but it doesn't look like the firm will be hurting for cash any time soon.

Filed under: Cellphones, Samsung

Comments

Source: Reuters

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/01/07/samsung-estimates-8-3-billion-in-profits-for-q4-brags-about-ph/

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Mortgage Debt Relief Renewal Supports Recovering Housing Market

Although economists predicted that 2013 would bring prosperity to the housing market, ending the Mortgage Debt Relief Act would have dampened those optimistic forecasts.

Amid the short sale/foreclosure housing crisis in 2007, the Mortgage Debt Relief Act provided a tax break on taxable income for loan balances of up to $2 million ($1 million for someone who is married but filing a separate return).

For years the Act helped to save Americans thousands of dollars, becoming one of the many tools used to prop up a failing economy. Forbes Magazine financial writer, Morgan Brennan provided a real life example of how the Mortgage Debt Relief Act has been beneficial for so many troubled homeowners.

?So if, say, a homeowner facing foreclosure offloads his underwater home with a $295,000 mortgage attached in a short sale for $200,000, he would not have to pay federal taxes on that $95,000 forgiven principal amount that neither he nor the lender will ever see again,? she wrote last month.

The Mortgage Debt Relief Act was in jeopardy of falling off the fiscal cliff as it was set to expire at midnight on December 31, 2012. Fortunately, lawmakers understood the importance of extending the Act for another year.

?That homeowner who has been forgiven $95,000 in mortgage principal could owe as much as $33,000 in taxes,? Brennan adds. ?That?s tens of thousands in taxes on so-called ?earned income? that no longer exists anywhere but in the loss column of a bank?s balance sheet.?

San Diego, California housing analyst Alan Nevin says that extending the Mortgage Debt Relief Act saves the homeowner from taking a total loss on a property. "If it was not extended, there would've been a number of people who also would have just let their homes go back to the lender," he told The San Diego Union-Tribune.

The Credit Union National Association (CUNA) was among the many national and local groups pushing for the Mortgage Debt Relief Act extension.

In December CUNA, along with the National Association of Realtors and other financial industry groups penned a letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), urging them to "ensure renewal of the Act before the end of this year in order to help as many underwater homeowners as possible."

The credit union industry has been diligently keeping members up to date on why the Act is important and that homeowners can avoid foreclosure due to this piece of legislation.

For example, many credit unions like HFS Federal Credit Union ($433.5 million, Hilo, HI) and Lansing Postal Community Credit Union ($22 million, Lansing, MI) have a ?Mortgage Debt Forgiveness: 10 Key Points? FAQ referral list on its website, aimed at helping members cut through the short sale red tape.

In addition to being able to exclude up to $2 million of debt forgiven on your principal residence (and the limit is $1 million for a married person filing a separate return, important reminders on the list include:

• You may exclude debt reduced through mortgage restructuring, as well as mortgage debt forgiven in a foreclosure.
• To qualify, the debt must have been used to buy, build or substantially improve your principal residence and be secured by that residence.
• Refinanced debt proceeds used for the purpose of substantially improving your principal residence also qualify for the exclusion.
• Proceeds of refinanced debt used for other purposes (for example, to pay off credit card debt) do not qualify for the exclusion.
• If you qualify, claim the special exclusion by filling out Form 982, Reduction of Tax Attributes Due to Discharge of Indebtedness, and attach it to your federal income tax return for the tax year in which the qualified debt was forgiven.
• Debt forgiven on second homes, rental property, business property, credit cards or car loans does not qualify for the tax relief provision. In some cases, other tax relief provisions, such as insolvency, may be applicable. IRS Form 982 provides more details about these provisions.
• If your debt is reduced or eliminated you normally will receive a year-end statement, Form 1099-C, Cancellation of Debt, from your lender. By law, this form must show the amount of debt forgiven and the fair market value of any property foreclosed.
• Examine Form 1099-C carefully. Notify the lender immediately if any of the information shown is incorrect. You should pay particular attention to the amount of debt forgiven in Box 2 as well as the value listed for your home in Box 7.

Learn more about the Mortgage Debt Relief Act by contacting a credit union near you.

?

Resources:

Source: http://www.creditunionsonline.com/news/2013/mortgage-debt-relief-renewal-supports-recovering-housing-market.html

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Appitude: Decluttering your mobile phone is a good way to start the New Year

By Virginia Heffernan

The New Year is not the time to get a new app. Your iPhone is bloated; it can barely load the apps you already have. It is groaning under the weight of all those "productivity" gimcracks you stuffed onto it in 2012. Nothing can update. The battery is a sieve. The phone is in a stupor. You don't need apps. You need a svelte, swift and actually smart smartphone--the kind that only an elimination diet can achieve.

First: turn off push notifications and location services. These give the battery migraines by constantly recruiting juice for their chronic silliness. Some child put an app called Dragon Story on my phone. Now I get pressing bulletins telling me my loyal subjects miss me and need my attention. A dram of actual guilt in me is activated by this appeal to my sense of lordly responsibility. But more than that the battery has had to bestir itself to serve me this non-news. No wonder I'm down to 85 percent before the sun's up.

Location services work the same way. When that tracker's on, your phone is always trying to find you, like the mother of a teen. It also wants to let your friends find you, lest someone on Snapchat or Twitter lose track of, say, your trip to Chipotle or the eyebrow-waxing salon. Noble as this surveillance minutia may be, and as vital to the preservation of the digital republic, it's OK to go off the grid.

Then it's time to declutter. Interesting that my iPad doesn't recognize the word "declutter" and prefers "deck utter." Is that because our Cupertino overlords don't want their loyal subjects to know about app clutter and how to purge it?

Well, here's the truth: ditch all "productivity" apps -- the insidious ones with checklists like "Things" that graciously allow you to, um, make lists of all the things you have to do. These apps slow your iPhone down, drive you batty with their fussy interfaces and keep your from doing anything on your list. All you can do is make lists. And slowly. These apps are to slow-phone people what heaps of organizing files and hangers and boxes are to hoarders. They are part of the problem. The most depressing part.

Now ditch all vanity apps. I oohed over The Elements and Alice when they first appeared. I've downloaded every pretty, praised astronomy app in the history of the firmament, hoping somehow I'd become one those dreamy science girls who knows what the Pleides is. I did not. I never looked at The Elements again either except to show it off. Goodbye, form and reference. I need function and sharing.

Finally with ecommerce apps like the ones from FreshDirect and Amazon, delete them when you're done with them and reinstall them when you need them. The reinstall is quick and free but there's no use having apps you use weekly or less sitting around jamming up the works. Sign in and all your data is right there; you're not going to lose old orders and saved credit cards when you delete the app; that's all in the cloud.

Clear out one corner, one drawer, one room at a time, as they do on "Hoarders." and be gentle with yourself. For many there's fear attached to riddance. But you know what to do. Declutter, enjoy your refreshed phone, and then download some new cool game featuring field mice and mangoes and start all over again.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/appitude--decluttering-your-mobile-phone-is-a-good-way-to-start-the-new-year-220331862.html

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Extreme Reality's Extreme Motion uses 2D webcams for 3D motion games (hands-on)

Extreme Reality's technology revolves around gestures, and its latest effort is to bring that movement to the masses: its Extreme Motion developer kit turns just about any off-the-shelf webcam or built-in camera on common platforms, including Android, iOS and Windows, into an almost Kinect-like system capable of tracking 3D motion. Despite missing depth cameras or other additional sensors, it's theoretically quite accurate -- the software tracks joints across the body in every frame, although it's not quite so sensitive as to track fingers.

This author had the chance to make a fool of himself in front of a laptop's camera to see how well Extreme Motion works. In short, reasonably well: while it wasn't in perfect sync, it recognized with less-than-elegant moves in a Dance Central-style demo title and flagged whether a shimmy was right on target or evidence of two left feet. Of course, this experiment was conducted in a brightly-lit hotel ballroom, where body detection is ideal, so take the experiment with a grain of salt. It's still adept enough that the developers who will have access to the (currently free) toolkit can produce motion games we'd be sincerely interested in playing.

Michael Gorman contributed to this report.

Filed under: Gaming, Software

Comments

Source: Extreme Reality

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/01/08/extreme-reality-extreme-motion/

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Chuck Hagel Iraq Opposition Encourages Generals Who Revolted

President Barack Obama's nomination of Chuck Hagel to be secretary of defense elevates a man who made his reputation as an unabashed critic of the war in Iraq.

To some, Monday's nomination of Hagel, a combat-wounded Vietnam veteran and former Republican senator from Nebraska, is a provocative move that threatens to further alienate Republicans in Congress. But for members of one group, the pick is a welcome signal of the Obama administration's embrace of a worldview they once put their careers on the line to advocate.

They were the generals who revolted: a half-dozen retired senior military officers who risked relationships with their colleagues, and their own sense of propriety, to speak out against the war in Iraq, and to call for the resignation of then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

"I am driven to action now by the missteps and misjudgments of the White House and the Pentagon, and by my many painful visits to our military hospitals," wrote one of the officers, retired Maj. Gen. Gregory Newbold, in an April 2006 op-ed in Time magazine that called the war "a mistake."

"The cost of flawed leadership continues to be paid in blood," Newbold wrote. "The willingness of our forces to shoulder such a load should make it a sacred obligation for civilian and military leaders to get our defense policy right. They must be absolutely sure that the commitment is for a cause as honorable as the sacrifice."

In 2002, Newbold was a top official on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Today, he is a partner at Torch Hill Investments in Washington. The nomination of Hagel, Newbold told The Huffington Post in an interview Monday, is a sign of the triumph of a more thoughtful approach to American military force than the one argued by the Iraq war's early proponents.

"Those that have great clarity on very complex issues of national security are worth wondering about," Newbold said. "I would put Senator Hagel in the category of those who have richly experienced the broad spectrum of consequences of conflict, and that causes him to think very carefully before we commit forces."

Not everyone associated with the generals' revolt was as eager to embrace Hagel. Two, Gen. Anthony Zinni and Maj. Gen. Charles H. Swannack Jr., declined to comment on the nomination when contacted by HuffPost. A third, Maj. Gen. John Riggs, said that while he hadn't studied Hagel's career closely, and "certainly would not question his patriotism," he worried about any tendency to "cut and run" before a mission is finished. (Riggs had criticized Rumsfeld for failing to put enough troops into Iraq.)

But others were wholly supportive of the nomination. Paul Eaton, a retired general who served in Iraq and is now a senior advisor at the liberal National Security Network, described Hagel as "a warrior who is reluctant to embark on war."

Another of the dissenting officers, Maj. Gen. John Batiste, said he supports Hagel's nomination because he's "a decorated veteran who 'gets it.'"

"When I challenged the Bush Administration in 2006 and 2007 on the flawed strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan, I was supported by a number of senior leaders," Batiste, now president and CEO of Klein Steel, said in an email. "One such leader was Senator Hagel. I appreciated his support then and am confident that he understands what prerequisites must be met before our troops are committed into battle."

Batiste suggested that Hagel's experience will help prevent a war without first fully debating and considering the exhaustive costs.

Hagel "will work to ensure that all elements of our national power are exhausted before we go to war," Batiste said. "If war is required, he well understands the importance of a real strategy with the ends, ways and means in balance."

On this, Eaton and Newbold agreed.

"A good example is Iran," Newbold said. "I think almost all of us think that given the right circumstances, that the military option should be considered. But Senator Hagel's view is that we ought to be very, very circumspect and first explore a combination of international power and international alliances to accomplish our objectives, before we take the 20-year-olds and make them pay the costs of intervention."

Earlier on HuffPost:

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Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/07/chuck-hagel-iraq_n_2427986.html

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The Kraken wakes: first images of giant squid filmed in deep ocean

TOKYO (Reuters) - A Japanese-led team of scientists has captured on film the world's first live images of a giant squid, journeying to the depths of the ocean in search of the mysterious creature thought to have inspired the myth of the "kraken", a tentacled monster.

The images of the silvery, three-metre (10 feet) long cephalopod, looming out of the darkness nearly 1 km below the surface, were taken last July near the Ogasawara islands, 1,000 km (620 miles) south of Tokyo.

Though the beast was small by giant squid standards - the largest ever caught stretched 18 metres long, tentacles and all - filming it secretly in its natural habitat was a key step towards understanding the animal, researchers said.

"Many people have tried to capture an image of a giant squid alive in its natural habitat, whether researchers or film crews. But they all failed," said Tsunemi Kubodera, a zoologist at Japan's National Museum of Nature and Science, who led the team.

"These are the first ever images of a real live giant squid," Kubodera said of the footage, shot by Japanese national broadcaster NHK and the Discovery Channel.

The key to their success, said Kubodera, was a small submersible rigged with lights invisible to both human and cephalopod eyes.

He, a cameraman and the submersible's pilot drifted silently down to 630 metres and released a one-metre-long squid as bait. In all, they descended around 100 times.

"If you try and approach making a load of noise, using a bright white light, then the squid won't come anywhere near you. That was our basic thinking," Kubodera said.

"So we sat there in the pitch black, using a near-infrared light invisible even to the human eye, waiting for the giant squid to approach."

As the squid neared they began to film, following it into the depths to around 900 metres.

"I've seen a lot of giant squid specimens in my time, but mainly those hauled out of the ocean. This was the first time for me to see with my own eyes a giant squid swimming," he said. "It was stunning, I couldn't have dreamt that it would be so beautiful. It was such a wonderful creature."

Until recently, little was known about the creature believed to be the real face of the mythical kraken, a sea-monster blamed by sailors for sinking ships off Norway in the 18th century.

But for Kubodera, the animal held no such terror.

"A giant squid essentially lives a solitary existence, swimming about all alone in the deep sea. It doesn't live in a group," he said. "So when I saw it, well, it looked to me like it was rather lonely."

(Reporting by Ruairidh Villar; Writing by Elaine Lies; Editing by Daniel Magnowski)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/kraken-wakes-first-images-giant-squid-filmed-deep-050944910.html

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