How your servers might support a DDoS attack

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The largest scale of internet attacks enlist thousands or tens of thousands of previously hacked computers to simultaneously attack and overwhelm the websites and e-commerce services of selected victims.

Whilst there is often media coverage of the victim organizations affected, and sometimes discussion about the motivation of the attackers, there is rarely any awareness by those computer owners that are participating in attacks and facilitating online crime.

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Bull's Bullion S server sets performance record

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Bullion, high-end servers from Atos' technology brand Bull, has set a new global record in performance, the company has announced.

The record was set in accordance with the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation.

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IT security professionals are looking for a challenge

Business mobile devices

The notion that IT security professionals are mercenaries when it comes to work and would most likely move if given an opportunity to earn more is, by a large margin, incorrect.

That’s basically what a new report by AlienVault says. The report, entitled Blood on HR's floor -- The Challenge of Retaining IT Security Skills, has a couple of interesting points.

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Lenovo fixes SHAREit security flaw

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Lenovo has issued updates to address a hard-coded password flaw and other security issues with its file sharing utility SHAREit.

Lenovo has addressed a serious flaw in its PC and Android versions of SHAREit, which enabled anyone on a LAN or wireless hotspot to potentially view and copy files from another computer or device running the SHAREit application. Though that was always the intention of the application -- to make file sharing painless -- it was probably not intended to be so open to anyone.

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How to ensure paper records comply with EU's new data protection regulation

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At the end of last year, the European Parliament and Council reached an agreement on the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) proposed by the European Commission.

The new rules, which will come into force in early 2018, represent the greatest change to data protection legislation since the dawn of the Internet. They will affect any organization across the world that handles data of European origin.

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Is your business wasting the software budget?

Streaming video service Hang w/ shares its profits with users -- others take note!

No matter how much money your company spends on software, it’s likely to spend less if your boss reads this article.

A new survey by American software company Flexera Software suggests that most companies are wasting their software budget, and the software they buy is often either underused or overused.

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What's wrong with Apple?

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To industry pundits and casual observers, it came as a shock this week when Apple projected that growth for its iPhone sales would hit the slowest pace since 2007, the year of the iconic phone’s release. At the same time came the first forecasted decline in Apple’s revenue in the last 13 years. Currency fluctuation and the cooling of China’s economy notwithstanding, Apple’s predicament is a reflection of tough times across the board in the mobile phone industry.

Back in 2011, a Beijing startup mobile phone maker named Xiaomi, developed a social media platform to engage millions of Chinese, turning young consumers into casual programmers to enhance its mobile phone’s operating system. In less than four years, Xiaomi saw its revenues soar, surpassing Samsung and Apple’s market share in China; it became the country’s largest mobile phone maker, and the world’s third.

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Tablet shipments see double digit drop in 2015

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The demise of the tablet seems inevitable, as shipments percentage dropped in double digits for the first time ever. Market intelligence provider TrendForce reported that in 2015 a total of 168.5 million units were shipped, representing a 12.2 percent drop year-over-year.

Notebook analyst for TrendForce, Anita Wang, confirmed what we all already knew -- smartphones, phablets and two-in-one devices were interfering too much with the tablet market, and with the devices having a somewhat longer lifespan, the results are a decrease in new shipments.

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What you need to know about mobile device management

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The way in which we work has changed significantly in recent times. It was not that long ago that your standard office job meant being tethered to your desk from nine to five, glued to your PC screen. The rise of smartphones and web apps, however, have disrupted these traditional ways of working, granting employees more freedom than ever before. But this new mobile workforce also poses challenges for the modern business, particularly regarding security.

Of course, organizations cannot afford to restrict workplace mobility, as this would see them overtaken by a more flexible and innovative competitor. Therefore, businesses are tasked with enabling mobility without introducing vulnerabilities into the workplace -- which is where mobile device management comes in.

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Google Glass now only targets the enterprise market

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When Sergey Brin first wore Google Glass on stage in April of 2012, it seemed like the future was upon us. Excitement and hype continued to build for its consumer release when early versions of the product were distributed to the lucky few who were accepted into the Google Glass Explorer program in 2014.

Sadly though after two years of #throughGlass posts, the social media accounts of Google Glass including its Google+, Twitter, Instagram and others were all shut down this week. However, Google Glass is not dead. Instead Google has shifted the products’ focus from consumers to enterprise.

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One in three home routers will double as a public hotspot by 2017

Marriott hotels back down on plans to block guests' Wi-Fi hotspots

Would you be willing to share your Wi-Fi router so that everyone around you could use it as a public hotspot? Your Internet connection would stay secured behind a firewall.

This is actually not a rhetorical question, but an inevitability, according to a recent Juniper Research report. According to the market analysts, by 2017, one in three home routers will be used as a public Wi-Fi hotspot, and by 2020 there will be a total of 366 million of these units worldwide.

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Public cloud services will be a $204bn market in 2016

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The public cloud services market will rise in 2016 and is expected to grow its worth to $204 billion (£142bn), up from $175bn (£122bn) in 2015, Gartner has reported.

Gartner research director Sif Nag said that the 16.5 percent increase underscores the huge demand for outsourced cloud services in businesses across all verticals as they convert legacy IT services to cloud-based services "due to the increased trend of organizations pursuing a digital business strategy".

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Millennials make purchases based on social media recommendations

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Recommendations that millennials see on social media are their primary shopping driver, a new survey by Demandware says.

The enterprise cloud commerce solutions provider released a global research of 7,000 consumers aged 18-34, with 1,000 being from the UK. The results say that 77 per cent of respondents have bought something after seeing it favorited or shared on some of the social media.

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Virtualization may be up, but data centers remain important

Servers and Storage

As cloud services continue to evolve and form a large part of UK IT spending, it comes as no surprise that virtualization is set to enjoy a successful 2016.

A recent study by the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF) found that four in five UK organizations formally adopted at least one cloud service in 2015, whilst seeing a year-on-year rise in the uptake in cloud services from 48 percent in 2010 to 84 percent in 2015. These figures show the ability for virtual servers to address two key factors in IT strategy: reducing carbon footprint and providing high power solutions. Both these factors are fueling the migration towards virtual services for organizations. In light of these moves there have been concerns that this could lead to data centers becoming redundant. This is simply not the case.

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What is Dark Data and how you can manage it?

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It seems today that Big Data analytics is everywhere -- from Starbucks, which uses location-based services to (yes, purposely) place its coffee shops just blocks away from each other; to Free People, which uses customer analytics to design the following season’s collection; to Orange Telecom, which uses network statistics to improve overall customer experience.

And, these are just a few of the thousands and thousands of major corporations and small businesses that are harnessing Big Data, meaning in this day and age, we are amassing and storing more data than ever before. But what is dark data?

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