Windows 10 is far and away the fastest growing version of the OS in the company's history. It recently hit an installation base of a staggering 700 million devices after about three years on the market. Note that these installation figures include installs not just on PCs, but also on Surface Hubs, Xbox, HoloLenses and smartphones. Unfortunately, as impressive as that number is, it falls well short of Microsoft's original estimate of a billion installs in three years. The smaller than … Read more
Google’s Emergency Location Service Improves 911 Response
Google is making a small but pivotal change as it relates to calls placed to 911 operators. Having recently finalized a complex partnership with RapidSOS and West (two emergency technology companies) and T-Mobile, Google will now send location data from its "Emergency Location Service" when an Android user places a 911 call. If the caller is a T-Mobile customer, the information will be passed along via the carrier. Where 911 call centers use RapidSOS, Google will send the location data via … Read more
G-Suite Users Can View Employee Productivity With Work Insights
Google has recently made some changes and improvements to its G-Suite. It introduces new tools designed to allow managers and admins greater visibility into how the people in their organizations use the G-Suite. Currently, the "Work Insight" tool is available in beta and displays information on how G-Suite is deployed at the team level. While this will be a boon to all organizations, it will be especially valuable for organizations moving from legacy tools to the G-Suite. It will also … Read more
Android May Be Coming To More New Cars Soon
Google scored a major coup in the auto industry. They just inked a deal that will put the Android OS in every car made by the global auto alliance Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi. It sold a staggering 10.6 million vehicles around the world last year. The tech giant has struggled to get its foot in the door, primarily because auto makers have been hesitating on handing over the keys to their Infotainment and other computerized systems, in fear of being shut out of the data collected by those … Read more
Data Breach Notifications May Get Standardized
A new piece of legislation is making its way through the halls of Congress that could standardize and streamline the data security and breach notification process for financial institutions. This is something that most people in the industry tout as an improvement over the current situation. The Consumer Information Notification Requirement Act (H. R. 6743) legislation was approved by committee not long after Congress received a letter cosigned by members from the American Bankers … Read more
An Exploited Website Can Cause Apple Products To Crash
Users of Apple tech have a new reason to worry. A security researcher named Sabri Haddouche, who works for an instant messaging app called "Wire," has published a proof of concept web page. It contains a fatal exploit that can crash and restart iPhones, iPads and any Mac. Essentially then, the entire Apple ecosystem is vulnerable. Worse, the security flaw can be exploited using nothing more than CSS and HTML code. The flaw resides in Apple's WebKit, which is its web rendering engine used … Read more
Popular NAS Device May Easily Be Compromised
Western Digital has a big problem, and if you use the company's "My Cloud" network-attached storage (NAS) storage devices, you've got one too. The WD My Cloud service is enormously popular because it's so convenient, allowing both business owners and individuals to store their files, perform periodic backups, and of course, access their data from anywhere in the world. Recently, security researchers have discovered an authentication bypass vulnerability that could allow an attacker to gain … Read more
Malware Reports Continue To Rise
We've known for some time now that the next big crisis the internet will have to come to grips with is the dramatic rise of the Internet of Things (IOT). The problem isn't with the devices themselves, which are enormously helpful and rapidly growing in their popularity. Rather, it lies in the fact that the overwhelming majority of IoT manufacturers have been notoriously lax when it comes to building even basic security protocols into the goods they make and sell. The lack of security and … Read more
New Google Chrome Feature Created For Better Password Security
Google is taking yet another important step to help save us from ourselves. The company is releasing a complete redesign of their Chrome browser, which is exciting. There's one feature in particular, however, that bears taking a special look at. Perhaps the most significant change to the browser is the addition of a new password manager, which will offer to generate a random password when you sign into a website for the first time. The randomly generated password will be securely tucked away … Read more
SmartHome Users Aren’t Keeping Up With Security Updates
The Internet on devices continues to be a major problem when it comes to security. Unfortunately, a big part of the reason why comes down to end users. Recently, Bitdefender released a new report entitled "The IoT Threat Landscape And Top Smart Home Vulnerabilities in 2018," and it paints a grim picture indeed. The average home now contains twenty smart devices, and most of them contain security vulnerabilities. 95 percent of those vulnerabilities reside in the firmware. While the majority … Read more
