Philips Hue light bulbs could be vulnerable to a cyber attack, according to researchers who have developed a proof-of-concept worm capable of spreading from bulb to bulb with the power to turn the lights on and off.

The researchers efforts at gaining access to the connected light bulbs was detailed in their paper titled IoT Goes Nuclear a ZigBee Chain Reaction. The worm they created was able to gain access to the Philips Hue devices by exploiting hard-coded symmetric encryption keys that are used to control devices over Zigbee wireless networks.

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Unless you’ve been hiding away from the world of computing for the last few years, you’ll have come across Hadoop.

Apache Hadoop, to give it its full name, is an open source framework designed to handle the storage and processing of large amounts of data using low-cost commodity hardware. Since its initial release in 2011, it has become one of the most popular platforms for handling big data.

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It's been a while since remote working became a reality, but this latest survey into the matter showed that it is now becoming the norm. As a matter of fact, employees would rather have flexible hours and the possibility of mobile working than a company car, according to BT.

A total of 1,500 workers in the UK, Germany, France and Spain were polled for the report, and 67 percent confirm the claim regarding the car. For 76 percent, flexible working is one of the top three priorities in their company. But mobile working is far from perfect -- current technology sometimes makes it hard to get a hold of people, which delays crucial decisions. Also, sometimes it's hard to access documents and files.

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Black Friday and Cyber Monday are fast approaching, but you don’t have to wait for those big shopping days to pick up a bargain.

Courtesy of our partners at TechBargains, we have a selection of great deals to share with you right now, including a massive saving on a Dell Inspiron 17 5000 series laptop, a Dell PowerEdge T130 desktop, and a 55" Vizio M-Series 4K UltraHD LED Smart HDTV with HDR and a $250 Dell Gift Card. Plus we’ve great deals on games consoles, top games, and Amazon devices too.

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Google has decided to rework the way it classifies dangerous and harmful sites in an effort to better protect users from being infected by malware.

The search engine has tried to protect its users for a number of years by displaying a warning when a link appears that could lead them to an unsafe site trying to infect their systems with malware or trying to obtain their personal information through phishing.

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Today, the majority of enterprises rely on employee authorization by means of keycards or passcodes. While this form of security is convenient, these methods don’t truly authenticate nor verify the identity of the person at the time and place of an access request. We’ve all seen how usernames and passwords can be easily stolen. When this inevitably occurs within an organization, that factor becomes useless and will allow an attacker to gain access to everything the employee was authorized for.

Employee authorization based on a single paradigm is highly flawed because it could easily be lost, stolen or duplicated. If you are relying on only one vector for authentication, then there will only need to be one point of failure. Outside of the increased risk of becoming victimized by a data breach, enterprises that rely on these single paradigm authorizations are opening themselves up to the potential of fraud, lawsuits and damaged reputation and relationships with both internal and external stakeholders.

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Have you ever imaged your refrigerator or coffee maker being a threat to you? Probably not. That’s a problem of sci-fi and the future, right?

With the Internet of Things (IoT), the future is becoming the present. More and more IoT devices are coming into everyday life. We pay attention to how convenient it is for our thermostat to know when we’re coming home and therefore turn on the air or heating, and how our jackets can tell us about our health. We often don’t pay attention to how it transmits that information to an outside source. The IoT is a huge advantage for the modern world, but it has some dangers as well. Here are five that you should be on the lookout for.

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The bring your own access (BYOA) movement has presented a number of challenges and opportunities to IT leaders in recent years. Since the dawn of the smartphone, the consumerization of IT has left CIOs fighting to keep up with the latest trends in productivity, communication and creativity apps.

Driven by simple user interfaces and the promise of fast synchronization across devices, business users have flocked away from the typical corporate IT stacks and begun to pick and choose their own tools, often without the consent of IT.

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Automation means many different things, in the context of business it usually involves streamlining processes in order to reduce costs. Applied across the whole organization it means restructuring resources and integrating the applications used across the enterprise to save time and money.

Business process automation (BPA) automation is aimed at those tasks that involve a series of processes which follow a predictable pattern with a series of repeated operations. As research specialist Gartner puts it, "It focuses on 'run the business' as opposed to 'count the business' types of automation efforts and often deals with event-driven, mission-critical, core processes. BPA usually supports an enterprise’s knowledge workers in satisfying the needs of its many constituencies".

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Employees are often a company’s largest expense, but they can also be their most important asset. After all, without talented and dedicated staff at every level of the business, organizations will fall behind in terms of productivity, leadership and creativity. Although human resources has traditionally been tasked with handling all matters people-related, as this facet of business management has become increasingly complex and dynamic it has largely gone by another name.

Human capital management (HCM) is often broken down into three categories (workforce acquisition, workforce management and workforce optimisation) and incorporates a vast array of business processes, ranging from the administrative to the strategic. Increasingly, businesses are looking to human capital management to ensure they get the most from their employees,

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Information technology infrastructure is made up of many components, servers, storage, networking hardware, systems management software, and more. This can lead to a complex system being built up of components from several different suppliers.

What converged infrastructure does is to bring together all of these things into a single, integrated package. For businesses this means that they can centralize the management of all their IT resources with a view to increasing use and cutting costs. Converged infrastructure is often associated with the cloud and outsourcing, but it can work just as well applied internally within large organizations too.

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Microsoft has kept its promise and delivered a vulnerability patch for its Windows operating system, for a flaw, revealed by Google, which allowed attackers to gain full control of a targeted system.

Releasing the details in a security bulletin, Microsoft says the flaw in the Windows kernel "could allow elevation of privilege if an attack logs onto an affected system and runs a specially crafted application that could exploit the vulnerabilities".

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The world is still reeling from the outcome of the US elections, where Donald Trump came out on top against Hillary Clinton to become the 45th President of America.

Financial markets around the world have been affected by the shocking and unexpected news and the notoriously unpredictable digital currency Bitcoin is no exception, with prices close to hitting a 35-month high against the pound amidst investor uncertainty.

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Connectivity is vital for all businesses. Whether you need to communicate with customers, clients or employees, or simply rely on it to deliver your service, the importance of connectivity cannot be overstated.

What’s more, this importance is clearly growing. In the always-on, cloud-based, mobile-first digital world that we inhabit, enterprise connectivity is not merely desirable -- it is expected at all times.

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Providing an open source platform for cloud computing, OpenStack allows the use of multi-vendor commodity hardware in a data center to process and store data, and deliver networking resources. It’s managed through a dashboard or an API and is used by many major companies around the world to manage their IT infrastructure.

OpenStack grew out of a joint project between NASA and Rackspace Hosting and launched in 2010. It’s currently managed by the not-for-profit OpenStack Foundation created in 2012. More than 500 companies are now members of the OpenStack project. OpenStack has a six-month release cycle with each release planned at a design summit. The software is modular with components focusing on different services.

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