Internet of Things this, Internet of Things that -- it’s all anyone can talk about these days. And rightfully so, when you consider the development and adoption of IoT products are driven by multiple factors, including an increase in broadband penetration worldwide, the development of wireless communication technologies, advances in 'smart' device capabilities and an increased demand for personalized, omnichannel customer experiences.

But transitioning to an IoT-dominated world is a delicate balancing act. On the one hand, you have businesses benefiting in many ways. For instance, connected devices allow them to better understand their customers’ needs and preferences by analyzing their behavioral patterns. For consumers, on the other hand, it’s all about personalization, personalization, personalization -- getting from point A to point B faster than ever before -- in a more relevant and personal way. Furthermore, most conversations around data protection solely focus on elaborate 'hacks', when in reality, the most immediate and grave security threats aren’t always sophisticated or complicated. It’s time that we flip the IoT conversation on its head to focus on the increasingly common data vulnerabilities and less complicated security threats -- of which, consumers are lacking awareness.

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There is roughly 685TB of private data from MongoDB instances sitting online, without any protection, researchers have uncovered.

Following the recent discovery by security researcher Chris Vickery, who saw the data of more than 13 million MacKeeper users exposed, another researcher ventured even deeper and found even more unprotected data.

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With the growth of mobile usage reaching 1.5 billion of users globally, consumers today have easy access to content about a brand, its products and services, as well as tools to quickly create and share opinions, photos and videos, across a variety of social media channels. However, out of all this content, we have recently seen numerous instances of brands fighting fraudulent forms of it. Amazon, for example, announced its plans to sue 1,114 fake reviewers, claiming that the brand reputation is being damaged by "false, misleading and inauthentic" reviews paid for by sellers seeking to improve the appeal of their product. This is the second suit by the online retailer this year, clearly showing that the proliferation of fraudulent online reviews is becoming a critical issue for businesses to address.

Yet consumers have not lost faith in online reviews -- in fact, a survey reveals online reviews impact 67.7 percent of respondents' purchasing decisions. More than half of the respondents (54.7 percent) also admitted that online reviews are fairly, very, or absolutely an important part of their decision-making process, showcasing how much consumers today value authentic peer to peer recommendations. Brands therefore need to take actions to ensure consumers can still rely on and have access to only authentic consumer-generated content (CGC), such as reviews.

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Apple and IBM today announced that they have reached the 100-app milestone in their mobile partnership, covering 60 professional roles across 14 different industries including government, transportation, healthcare and telecommunications.

Maribel Lopez, principal at Lopez Research said: "I think [Apple] brings the concept of simplicity (direct to task) and beauty to enterprise apps. IBM on the other hand understands business workflow, what generates productivity and back-end integration".

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The business communication tool Slack is trying to end the year on a high note, and looking at what the company announced yesterday, it seems to be on the right track.

The team-communication app, which now has two million daily users and 570,000 paying customers has announced three things -- an app store which will offer other productivity tools (like Trello, for example) to integrate with Slack, an $80 million fund to help developers create more apps for the store, and a new framework called Botkit which should simplify the process of creating apps.

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More than 80 percent of Android devices are running an outdated version of the operating system. Those are the results of an inquiry among users of G DATA security solutions for Android.

G DATA believes the lag in the adoption of new versions lies in the long delays before manufacturers roll out updates to their devices, as well as the fact that some devices simply don’t support the latest version of Android.

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Salesforce and Box have announced a partnership that aims to enable closer business collaboration and greater productivity.

The two companies have announced Salesforce Files Connect for Box to help businesses access files securely and Box SDK for Salesforce to assist the software development cycle.

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The anti-virus software for Apple’s OS X, MacKeeper, kept the user data of more than 13 million of its customers online without much protection, and someone eventually stumbled upon it.

Yes, stumbled is the perfect word in this instance, as the data was accessed through an IP address, no username or password required.

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According to a recent report by Morgan Stanley, iPhone sales are set to drop for the first time ever in 2016.

An analyst at the firm named Katy Huberty, who worked on the report, is responsible for this prediction. She said that Morgan Stanley thinks that unit sales of the iPhone will decline by six percent during this fiscal year.

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VMware, the US cloud software company, said it will not participate in the joint venture cloud services Virtustream with its parent company EMC.

The announcement was made in a recent regulatory filling, which you can read here.

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For almost a decade, each year has been dubbed "the year of the cloud". As the cloud continues to mature and more enterprises further their cloud adoption plans, it seems only natural that 2016 will indeed be (another) "year of the cloud".

But as our understanding of the cloud matures, so does the complexity of the conversation. Here are several predictions for how the cloud conversation will evolve in 2016:

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Microsoft has announced the release of a preview and testing version of its new lightweight project management application -- Planner.

The application -- originally codenamed Highlander -- was released for initial evaluation to those customers who have one of the following Microsoft licenses:

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Sitting down, so medical professionals tell us, is bad for you. As a species we’re designed to stand up and move about rather than sit in front of a screen. The trouble is, modern office-based work doesn’t really lend itself to this hunter/gatherer lifestyle.

The answer for some people is to have a standing desk so that you can bash away at your keyboard from a vertical position. It may not match the thrill of the hunt, but at least it gets you off your backside. The trouble is, purpose built standing desks can be eye-wateringly expensive, especially some of the sophisticated motorized models, and you have the problem of where to accommodate an extra piece of furniture.

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10Fold recently evaluated the seven largest breaches this year and found that hackers had absconded with more than 193.4 million personal records. To get to this figure, the agency reviewed 720 data breaches that occurred throughout the year. To narrow the list to a more manageable size, the team made five million the barrier to entry.

10Fold selected these data breaches based on independent research and review of third-party resources such as ID Theft Resource Center and Information is Beautiful.

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The European Space Agency (ESA) has been hacked by Anonymous, and the names and login credentials of some of its employees have been posted online, the media reported on Monday.

The data released into the wild includes full names, email contact details, clear text passwords, office addresses, phone and fax contact details of those registered on the ESA database. The information contains 52 names, email addresses and passwords of 52 internal ESA users.

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