All those who have a habit of losing their credit cards, only to end up somewhere without a means to pay, rejoice!

Barclaycard has announced a new service, UK’s first, which allows for the instant replacement of a lost credit card -- first virtually, followed by a real card replacement.

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There are many ways a data breach can occur, with via internet being just one of them. However, companies don’t really pay that much attention to their physical security, a new research suggests.

According to a research by access control and smart card specialists Digital ID, 59 percent of SMEs in the UK mostly go for locks and security lights and nothing more. Even then, nearly two thirds said the security was not operational during working hours.

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Over the past few years we have seen everyday items such as refrigerators, lighting and heating systems and even kettles all of a sudden becoming "smart". In fact there are now more smart items on the planet than smart humans, or in fact any type of humans, with an estimated 13.4 billion devices currently connected to the Internet. This is not necessarily a problem -- until, of course, hackers start exploiting these devices to gain access to your home or work networks.

Most people would never even suspect that their television set could be hacked, yet this is happening, in research labs at least, with greater frequency. In one recent example, security company Avast demonstrated a hack of a Vizio Smart TV enabling root access to the TV’s underlying Linux operating system. Last year I also found that this flaw involving a maliciously crafted SSID value could be exploited with a USB device. After exploiting this flaw, the attacker has access to everything connected to the home network of their victim. Avast also demonstrated what a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacker (such as an intrusive government or ISP) could learn by monitoring network traffic from the TV set.

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Qualcomm has entered an agreement with the Chinese province of Guizhou to enter into a joint venture to develop chips for server systems.

This is the latest bold step by Qualcomm, which is keen to expand from relying on manufacturing chips for the smartphone and communications market. Though this could be seen as a risky strategy as Intel dominates the server chip domain with over 90 percent of the market, and with addition worries regarding both the Chinese economy and the global drop in technology demand, Qualcomm is pressing ahead with a $280 million dollar commitment for a 45 percent stake.

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We all know that the Internet of Things is growing, and more and more firms are using the new technology to take their businesses to the next level, but just how big is IoT now, and how much will it grow?

Gartner has given a few interesting predictions, including one which says that more than half of all new business processes and systems will use some form of IoT by 2020.

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The news that Facebook at Work is due to be rolled out in the first part of this year will be welcomed by many businesses, especially those keen to see more effective use of technology in the workplace and to see greater employee engagement through increased levels of connectivity. For employees used to managing their personal lives via social media and technology, the arrival may seem long overdue.

The work place version of Facebook will replicate many of the features of the well-known social version, giving employees and co-workers a range of ways in which to communicate, collaborate and interact. The increasing globalization of business and reliance on remote and flexible ways of working mean that keeping employees meaningfully connected is critical to driving business success. As an added side benefit, the introduction of more effective communication methods often leads to a reduction in the use of internal email systems. This in turn can help businesses manage IT capacity and reduce the need for employees to monitor unnecessary email traffic.

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Today’s youth has a positive view about the future and their role in it. However, many young people believe that traditional education doesn’t do enough to prepare them for their professional life.

These are the results of a recent poll commissioned by consulting firm Infosys.

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Big Data, and its infrastructure is expected to grow significantly in the next four years, a new study by the International Data Corporation (IDC) shows.

IDC has done an in-depth market sizing of the Big Data infrastructure in Europe, Middle East and Africa, including servers and storage, as well as cloud resources, and here are the results:

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Back in 2010, Steve Jobs revealed Apple’s new mobile advertising platform iAd. The goal of this new venture into advertising was to make the mobile ads that appeared in iPhone and iPad apps interactive and more stylish.

Apple users would also be able to remain within the current app they were using without being forced out of the app and into their browser. The iAd platform was able to achieve this but it came at a high cost and required advertisers to relinquish power to Apple, which had final say over which ads were approved. The company was also reluctant to share the marketing data it acquired through iAd.

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The United States government has revealed that it has detected a rise in cyber criminal attacks on industrial control systems.

The concern is that with leading manufactures and grid power producers’ early adoption of the industrial internet of things -- and Industry 4.0 which are commercial and industry versions of the Internet of Things -- sufficient safeguards have not been put in place to protect them from the internet.

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Microsoft has introduced a new flagship event for business leaders, called Microsoft Envision, which will take place in New Orleans between April 4 and April 6, and registration is open now.

Microsoft Envision is designed to replace Microsoft Convergence as the premier event for business leaders such as CxOs and their senior department and functional leaders.

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Seagate is looking to increase its presence in the data center market as it unveils a new hard disk drive.

The Seagate Enterprise 3.5 Capacity HDD offers 10 TB of storage and, according to the company’s press release following the announcement, the disk is quiet and energy-efficient.

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This year has been another brutal one for breaches and data loss, with 400 new threats emerging every minute by some reports. Most security administrators and architects have been shoring up defenses inside networks in order to better detect places of compromise and attacker movement. Many organizations recognize that one of the fastest ways to beef up detection capabilities is to add context-based network analytics like those provided by Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems and NetFlow security analyzers.

Adoption has been brisk, the SIEM market is one of the strongest with a forecasted growth of 12 percent annually reaching $4.54 billion by 2019. And recently, Cisco further highlighted the importance of network telemetry to security with the acquisition of NetFlow analysis veteran Lancope for $453 million.

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It seems as nobody wants to work, and that’s a real bummer. Everyone wants to retire early, but that’s a particularly important problem in the tech industry, as it is already lacking staff, and people leaving early will only cause even more trouble.

According to a new report by Randstad Technologies, almost half (49 percent) of all tech workers want to retire before state pension age. In other industries, that percentage is at 35.

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It’s been a busy year for security firms everywhere -- cyber-attacks, malware, ransomware and other malicious online behavior reached new heights in 2015.

Those are the results of a report by Bromium, a company which deals in threat isolation in service of data breach prevention. Its report, entitled Endpoint Exploitation Trends 2015 analyzed the security risks of popular websites and software.

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