A quarter of European companies are completely unprepared for the event of a cyberattack and would be extremely exposed if it happened, a new report by global law firm DLA Piper claims.

The paper also says that almost half of all companies (44 percent) view cyberattacks as a significant risk to their business, which means that a significant portion is aware of the problem yet does nothing. Among companies in Western Europe the number rises to almost a third (31 percent). The Benelux region is by far the worst, with 75 percent of companies being exposed.

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Microsoft has provided more details as to how it will be integrating Office 365 Groups into its enterprise-focused social network Yammer. On January 1, 2017, the Yammer Enterprise service tier will be discontinued, but the social network will remain available and will be integrated with Office 365 services in a number of ways.

Within Yammer itself, it will be possible for users to create Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents through Office Online. Users will also be able to move their work from Yammer to a shared OneNote notebook or to the Microsoft Planner Project Management tool.

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SAP has officially announced that it has acquired the startup Altiscale, which offers cloud based versions of the Hadoop and Spark open source software for storing, processing and analyzing many different kinds of data.

Rumors of the acquisition began to circulate a month ago when it was believed that SAP intended to purchase the company for over $125 million. Neither company though would confirm or deny the rumors, but during the course of the next few weeks, SAP executives began to comment on the deal.

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Last week it came to light that Salesforce was considering a takeover of Twitter. Now it appears though that Walt Disney is also interested in placing a bid on the social network which could be used to help deliver its content to even more consumers.

So far it seems that Disney is interested in Twitter's ability to distribute video streaming to a large global audience. If the deal were to go through, it would give the company a new channel to distribute its content, as well as content from both ABC and ESPN which it owns. Now that consumers are watching less television, Twitter could be the perfect means for Disney to provide sports, news and entertainment to its customers.

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Just over half of enterprises (51 percent), which decide to deploy a cloud solution, opt for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), over Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) or Software-as-a-Service (Saas).

This is according to a new report by Intel DCM, based on a survey of 204 US-based IT managers, directors, software engineers and DevOps responsible for overseeing their enterprise cloud strategy. The report also states that DevOps teams spend most of their time monitoring complex environments in their organization.

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Germany has decided to ban WhatsApp and Facebook from sharing user data with one another as consumers did not agree to the data sharing deal between the two companies.

Last month, it was announced that WhatsApp would begin sharing the data it collected from its users to Facebook. The social network would then use that data to help it better serve ads and generate more information from the people using the popular messaging app.

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If your business gets hacked, expect to lose a significant portion of your customers -- for good. This is according to a new report released by Alertsec, the cloud-based encryption company. Its Brand Perception Study, based on a poll of 1,200 Americans, says 17 percent of women and 11 percent of men would permanently lose trust in a hacked company.

Almost a third (29 percent) would need months to return while a further 22 percent would need only one. Men are also more likely (16 percent) to switch brands after a hack than women (6 percent). For more than a third (35 percent), a hack means the company was sloppy. Another third (32 percent) says it is the result of a lack of professionalism, while 26 percent say the company would become a great target for lawsuits.

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Salesforce is reportedly considering purchasing Twitter in a move that would give the software company access to the huge amount of data generated by the social network and could help fuel its push to develop artificial intelligence.

Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce.com, has grown his 17-year-old company to compete against Microsoft, Oracle and other big players in the field. Lately, the company has acquired a number of startups working in e-commerce and artificial intelligence. Talks between Twitter and Salesforce are said to be at an early stage but an acquisition could end up helping both companies.

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At the Microsoft Ignite event, the Redmond, Wash.-based software giant announced a new cloud partnership with none other than Adobe.  This one works both ways. On one side, Microsoft "will make Adobe Marketing Cloud its preferred marketing service for Dynamics 365 Enterprise edition", and, on the other side, Adobe will "make Microsoft Azure its preferred cloud platform for the Adobe Marketing Cloud, Adobe Creative Cloud and Adobe Document Cloud".

Interestingly enough, Adobe has so far used Amazon Web Services, but it was left unclear if this means Amazon is getting the boot or not.

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The first thing you should do after getting your home or apartment robbed is, obviously, change the lock. Yahoo doesn’t seem to think so, as the same practices that were in place when it got breached are still being used according to a new report by Venafi.

What’s more, its practices have for years been known as unsecure. Venafi puts it simply: if you’re a Yahoo user, you should be worried about this. Here’s what it did (or, didn’t do): most importantly, 27 percent of certificates on external Yahoo sites haven’t been changed since January 2015.

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Sharing for the sake of it won't suffice among millennials, a new study has shown. But if there are certain benefits to be had, well, that is now a completely different story. Business intelligence company SAS, together with research agency Future Foundation, came to these conclusions after extensive research.

It says millennials, which it also calls "Data Generation" (16 - 34 year-olds), expect a "hyper-personalized service from brands". They are willing to use their personal information as bargaining chips to get a better experience from businesses.

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Just 21 percent of Internet users feel threatened by anything online, including malware, viruses, fraud, etc. At the same time, 29 percent have actually fallen victim to cybercriminal schemes, out of whom eight percent have had an account hijacked, and 22 percent have had malware on their devices.

On top of it all, a total of 60 percent of all people online use protection, in form of a cybersecurity solution for all devices accessing the internet. These figures were unveiled by Kaspersky Lab which has, together with B2B International, released a report on the current level of cyberthreats faced by internet users, called Kaspersky Cybersecurity Index 21 – 29 – 60.

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Every business is aware that cloud computing has become a globally dominating market. Some estimates have the cloud worth $75 billion, perhaps even more. It is expected to continue growing well beyond that. Still, the growing cloud market faces several challenges in staying competitive.

With exponential growth comes a plethora of challenges. Cloud computing organizations must be able to keep up, as companies, governments, and even business-minded individuals from all over the world represent current and potential customers. Cloud consumers are relying heavily on infrastructure services. According to Gartner, the forecast in 2016 for IaaS alone represented over $22 billion in cash flow. The growing demands and customers’ expectations are in a tight juggling act with the forces that promise to challenge cloud service providers.

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A group of hackers speaking Russian and using Russian servers are out hunting for American companies' user credentials, an exclusive story published on The Epoch Times claims.

This group, allegedly not tied to any government and basically operating on its own, is targeting "at least" 85 companies, including Amazon, American Airlines, AT&T, Best Buy, Wells Fargo, DropBox, Dunking Donuts, Ebay, GoDaddy, Uber, Match.com, McDonald’s, Office Depot, PayPal, Pizza Hut, Steam, and Apple Pay.

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According to security researcher Daniel Cid, at least 15,769 WordPress websites have been compromised this year by cyber-attackers who were able to evade Google's Safe Browsing checks.

WordPress is the most popular content management system in the world, used by consumers and businesses to create and publish blogs. To conduct the research needed for the second 2016 Sucuri report on compromised web properties, 21,821 sites were studied with the majority of them using WordPress to manage and publish their content. The report also found that 3099 Joomla! sites were hacked during that time as well.

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