The future of payments in Europe is contactless, a new survey suggests. According to the report by digital security firm Gemalto, 90 percent of business leaders in Europe have already invested in a contactless project. The other 10 percent are planning to do so.

Gemalto also says that in the next three years, 10 percent of all transactions in Europe will be made through contactless payment systems. Things will not be as straightforward, though, as there are multiple contactless payment systems, all battling for dominance.

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Data loss is one of the bigger reasons why mergers and acquisitions fail, losing companies millions of pounds each year. Those are the results of a new survey conducted by dedicated virtual data room provider for merger and acquisition deals, ansarada.

According to ansarada's report, 71 percent of UK executives involved in mergers and acquisitions have confirmed that their deals have been delayed due to loss of critical data.

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OfficeGenie.co.uk has conducted a research to see how much time people are wasting being distracted at the office, and it’s not good news. Those silly cat videos you watch on Facebook every day at work are costing the country billions of pounds. Yes, you read that correctly.

On average, British workers spend more than three quarters of an hour (more than 45 minutes every day) being distracted online. When you combine how much that costs, and how many workers there are in the UK, you come to a figure of £88 billion each year.

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Your CCTV camera might make you feel physically safer, but after reading this article, it will sure make you feel virtually vulnerable. New research from cloud-based video surveillance company Cloudview suggests that the majority of CCTV systems can be hacked, providing an open door to cyber attackers.

The report, entitled Is your CCTV system secure from cyber attack?, says there are "major vulnerabilities" in both traditional DVR-based CCTV systems, as well as cloud-based video systems. Hackers can "easily" hijack connections to the device’s IP address, putting a lot of people, their properties and data at risk.

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LTE networks are growing in popularity, a new report by 4G-Reports suggests. Not only has the number of users surpassed one billion, but the number of networks also seems to be growing, while prices are declining, quite rapidly.

According to the Global LTE Pricing Tariff Tracker for Q4 2015, total number of users reached 1.05 billion. Unsurprisingly China, the US and Japan account for almost two-thirds of all subscribers.

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You could, quite easily, pull off a McGyver on a Samsung Galaxy S6 or a Huawei Honor 7 phone. Security researchers have discovered a way to trick these two phones and unlock them through the fingerprint scanner, using an inkjet printer, a few drops of conductive ink and special paper usually used for printing electronic circuits.

Here’s what they did: they took scans of a couple of fingers, and just printed them, in two dimensions, on paper using conducive ink, which conducts a charge. They printed it on special paper used for printing electronic circuits and other charge-carrying systems. Pressing the prints against the fingerprint scanner managed to unlock the two phones.

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The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has announced that it has found Verizon Wireless to have deliberately violated the privacy of its users.

Verizon Wireless is the largest US carrier with over 100m subscribers, but failed to disclose the practice of using supercookies in order to violate their users privacy from late 2012 until 2014, violating a 2010 FCC regulation on Internet transparency.

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Flash storage has a bright future ahead, IT decision makers from the UK, US and France agree. According to a new research by Kaminario and Vanson Bourne, the adoption of flash storage, such as solid-state drives, will increase as the performance of these devices improves, and the prices drop.

The research also shows that currently, less than 50 percent of storage media is flash, suggesting that there is a lot of space for growth.

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According to a new study from global cyber security and risk mitigation firm NCC Group, over half of consumers (52 percent, up three percent from last year) do not feel comfortable visiting websites ending in new domains.

In fact, just two per cent of the 10,000 consumers surveyed in the Trust in the Internet Study 2016 said they feel extremely comfortable visiting the new generic top-level domains (gTLDs).

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At the end of last month, Apple released a letter to its customers protesting about a US court order that could force the company to give the FBI a back door entry to individual iPhones. The case has brought the debate about government access to personal data and the protection of civil liberties to the fore once again. It has also made society and industry look more closely at the mechanics of data encryption and ask what makes the technology effective.

At its most basic, encryption provides a layer of protection for data at every stage of its journey from sender to recipient. If anyone tries to intercept or access the data without permission, they find themselves with a screen full of unintelligible gobbledygook. But encryption is only strong if there are no weak links in the chain. Apple argues that the FBI’s court order requesting a back door into its OS (Operating System) would force the company to create such a weak link in its encryption. This would undoubtedly speed up investigations of high profile crimes, but would come at high cost to the millions of law abiding iPhone users.

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In theory, the scrum methodology is an excellent way to make the product development cycle more efficient. Scrum is better able to incorporate customer feedback by delivering the product in small iterations in close collaboration with the customer. Dividing one long marathon into a series of "sprints" creates a customer-centric, agile mentality that significantly improves upon an inflexible waterfall approach.

But in reality, scrum is just a piece of the puzzle, a good first step on a longer journey. Scrum only works as it’s intended when it’s functioning within a fully agile environment -- otherwise, any efficiency gained from scrum is lost when it inevitably encounters other departments using more traditional productivity methods. Agile can’t just be a process a company executes: it’s something a company must become.

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The Government wants backdoor access to our devices so that it can protect us from terrorists and defend matters of national security. Even if its intentions are good, there are people out there that would abuse such a feature, security professionals attending the RSA conference agree.

Endpoint protection and response, security and compliance solutions company Tripwire surveyed 198 security professionals at the RSA Conference 2016 in San Francisco. Out of those surveyed, 81 percent said it was certain (or at least very likely) that cyber-criminals would abuse the government’s access to encrypted data via a backdoor.

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A lot of people like sharing their passwords with others, even though such actions put their data at risk -- and they know it. Those are the results of a new survey commissioned by password management firm LastPass, and conducted by RedShift Research.

According to the survey, more than half (55 percent) of UK’s consumers share passwords with others, jeopardizing their financial information in the process. They know that’s risky -- three quarters (75 percent) have confirmed it -- but still, 96 percent have admitted sharing up to six passwords with others.

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Behavioral biometrics, user authentication and malware detection company BioCatch has announced that it has been granted a patent for a new authentication technology through which devices would actually recognize their users by the way they use them.

The patent has been granted by the US Patent Office. It is called Device, system, and method for detecting user identity based on motor control loop model.

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Email is falling behind social media channels when it comes to customer support, a new survey by Eptica suggests. The multichannel customer interaction management software provider trialled 100 "leading" UK companies, mimicking the behavior of ordinary customers by asking 10 routine questions.

It wanted to see how long it took the companies, and which channels they mostly used, to answer their customers to any questions they might be asking.

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