The benefits of the cloud have been proven for businesses of all sizes – every small business owner can save time and money while increasing their employees’ productivity by leveraging cloud technologies. Cloud technologies are faster to deploy, require minimal technical know how to manage, and cost less than on-premise technologies. These benefits let the…
Read MoreWith the launch announcements of various Google Chrome OS netbooks, the focus of the press and security companies alike is beginning to take a closer look at the security promises made and also at some of the more ’media friendly‘ statements such as, “…users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates”.
In a recent eWeek interview, Citrix CTO Simon Crosby described Conficker malware as “the world’s largest cloud.” He’s right. Cybercriminals use Conficker to create massive clouds of remotely-controlled PCs capable of carrying out a variety of cyber-attacks, including DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks on a scale larger than any centralized cloud provider could. We…
Read MoreJava, and other languages, gave us platform independence long ago. Application writers could ignore the underlying operating system (to a large extent) and focus on the work at hand. While this reduced the need for OS and architecture-specific code, the underlying operating system still required a lot of care and feeding. Recently, Platform as a…
Read MoreRecently I have been asked by many CISO’s, CSO’s and IT administrators–who have become very tired of the constant system patch battle and constant security software updates–whether new operating systems like Google Chrome could loosen Microsoft’s stronghold on the desktop OS and just maybe whether we could be safer 5 years from now. Actually this…
Read MoreThe public cloud holds tremendous possibilities for goodness in lowering computing costs and increasing flexibility, but the dark side of the world is always ready to take advantage of cloud delivery models like Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). Arbor Networks recently spotted a Google AppEngine Platform-as-a-Service application being used for Command and Control (CnC) for a botnet (here…
Read MoreEvery day brings more headlines about social networking, cloud computing and Software as a Service (SaaS). Each of these fast growth areas shares an important element in common – they rely on a movement of data from private computers into the public cloud. The theory goes that this data is protected by the service provider…
Read MoreThe US Federal Government recently announced its apps.gov portal for applications. This CNet News article provides a summary of what was announced by Federal CIO Vivek Kundra. apps.gov is a nice storefront featuring productivity applications to be used on non-sensitive data, and as such this announcement did not make big waves in the security community. …
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