Articles about COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic has seen large numbers of people adapting to new working patterns and ways of interacting.

AI-based transcription platform Otter.ai has seen a fivefold increase in demand in recent months and has transcribed 750 million minutes from over 25 million meetings. We spoke to Otter's founder Sam Liang to find out more about how it's helping to shape the future of work and education.

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Surveyed during the lockdown period, 67 percent of security professionals report that they have caught employees engaging in unsafe or unproductive activity on the web.

The study of 300 cyber security professionals from cloud security company Censornet finds the most common bad behaviour is employees using streaming services at work such as Netflix or Amazon Prime (35 percent).

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Attempted account takeovers grew by 282 percent over the last year, while ATO rates for physical eCommerce businesses -- those that sell physical goods online -- have jumped 378 percent since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Q3 2020 Digital Trust and Safety Index released today by Sift finds that between Q2 2019 and Q2 2020, ATO attacks happened in discrete waves about a week apart, indicating that fraudsters are turning to bots and automation in order to overwhelm security.

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Cybercriminals have launched a record number attacks on online platforms and services this year, with more than 929,000 DDoS attacks occurring in May, the single largest number of attacks ever seen in a month.

The latest threat intelligence report from NETSCOUT also reveals that 4.83 million DDoS attacks occurred in the first half of 2020, a 15 percent increase, and attack frequency jumped 25 percent during the peak pandemic lockdown months of March through June.

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Companies are planning to increase their spending on AI/ML as a result of the pandemic, and many have realized that those initiatives should have been a higher priority for their organizations all along.

A new survey of enterprise IT leaders from Algorithmia, a provider of ML operations and management solutions, shows that 91 percent of respondents were spending at least $1,000,000 annually on AI/ML prior to the pandemic, and 50 percent say they are planning to spend more than that going forward.

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Many countries are in the process of rolling out "track and trace" mobile apps to make it easier for people to determine whether they have been in contact with anyone who has contracted coronavirus. Now Google has added a new layer to Google Maps that shows local information about COVID-19.

The optional layer shows a seven-day average of new COVID-19 cases for whatever area of the map you are looking at, and Google says that the aim of the new feature is to enable people to "make more informed decisions about where to go and what to do".

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While the pandemic has driven a shift to remote working, a new report from cyber security vendor Netwrix shows that that 85 percent of CISOs admit they've sacrificed cybersecurity to enable it to happen.

One in four organizations feels that they are exposed to more risks than before the pandemic. Of these, 63 percent report an increase in the frequency of cyberattacks and 60 percent have found new security gaps as a result of the transition to remote work.

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Starting in March and continuing through most of the spring, there has been a significant increase in malicious emails utilizing various COVID-19 issues as a lure to manipulate users into exposing themselves to various email attacks and scams.

The latest Attack Landscape report from F-Secure shows COVID-related emails range from attempting to trick users into ordering face masks from phony websites to infecting themselves with malware by opening malicious attachments.

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For many enterprise organizations the COVID-19 pandemic is a crisis to be managed. But could it actually be a catalyst to deliver a lasting legacy of technical innovation?

James Harvey, EMEA CTO at Cisco AppDynamics thinks it can be. We spoke to him to find out more.

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A new study reveals that calendars for security and compliance audits are largely unchanged despite COVID-19, yet the pandemic is straining teams as they work remotely.

The survey from automated audit preparation company Shujinko shows that CISOs are tasked with preparing for more than three audits on average in the next 6-12 months, but are struggling with inadequate tools, limited budgets and personnel, and inefficient manual processes.

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Most US consumers believe in the effectiveness of contact tracing apps to curb the spread of COVID-19, but a new report shows almost half would refuse to download them over data privacy concerns.

A study sponsored by SecureAge Technology has surveyed more than 580 consumers and over 300 IT professionals to find out their perceptions on the use of contact tracing apps.

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The fastest-growing eCommerce companies share a number of key characteristics, among them being able to keep up with technology change, shipping orders in a timely manner, and providing real-time insights on the status of an order.

This is among the findings of a new report from API transformation company Jitterbit, which also shows that as the number of applications requiring integration and the number of integration challenges rises, so does businesses' reliance on integration vendors.

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With all due respect to Donald Fagan -- front man for beloved jazz-rock duo Steely Dan -- I don’t think we have to wait until "California tumbles into the sea" before we all agree that the idea of a traditional university education is now anachronistic. With COVID-19 disrupting and, in some cases cancelling, in-person learning at leading institutions, many higher-ed students are realizing they can get the skills and knowledge they need without ever stepping foot on campus. In fact, some are discovering that life in "Virtual-U" is better -- easier, more productive, less stressful -- than the real thing.

Case in point: My daughter, who was attending an Ivy League women’s college until the Coronavirus sent her and her classmates packing in the middle of their Spring semester. Since then, her school has cancelled on-campus classes for the Fall, forcing their nearly 3,000 students online. And while time zone differences (Mauritius is 9 hours ahead of the U.S. East Coast) make for some odd virtual classroom hours, she is definitely enjoying the freedom from stress and worry that were part of her traditional, campus-based education experience: Finding food she can eat/tolerate in the cafeterias; fighting for shared bathroom space in her dorm; and dealing with catty, College-aged girls and all the drama that that entails.

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The COVID-19 pandemic has seen a spike in scams, phishing and malware across all platforms and attack vectors. The latest mid-year threat landscape report from Bitdefender shows that in May and June, an average of 60 percent of all received emails were fraudulent.

In addition there’s been a five-fold increase in the number of coronavirus-themed attacks and a 46 percent increase in attacks aimed at home IoT devices.

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More than half of respondents to a new survey are either accelerating their cloud adoption timeline or moving forward as planned during the COVID-19 pandemic, and this number goes up to 59 percent among respondents considering VMware Cloud on AWS.

The study from multi-cloud data service provider Faction finds that among those organizations where COVID-19 has paused or canceled cloud adoption, the top factors cited are budget pressures (75 percent) along with staffing shortages and macro-economic uncertainty (each named by 41 percent of respondents).

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