Working from home during the pandemic has caused an «epidemic of hidden overtime», the Autonomy thinktank has warned. 

The organisation’s latest report proposes drafting legislation that would create a «right to disconnect«, which stipulates employees do not have to take calls or respond to emails related to work during their time off. 

Autonomy is calling for amendments to be made to the Employment Rights Act 1996 to ensure workers have the right to fully switch off from all work communications beyond their scheduled hours and to bring employment tribunals for any breach of that stipulation. 

«Modern workplaces and homes are digital spaces,» the report states. «The fact that we are able to send and receive messages, emails, and online content twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week means that it is increasingly hard to disconnect, enjoy our leisure time and develop a healthy work-life balance. 

«This has created an epidemic of ‘hidden overtime’, where workers never quite ‘switch off’ and continue to do bits of work throughout the evening and weekend. Being ‘switched back on’ by an employer after the working day has finished differs from standard overtime, whereby a worker is usually required to ‘stay on’. Instead, a call from an employer – and the response it requires – expands the working day fragment by fragment, meaning the worker is never quite ‘off’.»

The report suggests that this has been a growing problem for a number of years but it has been «exacerbated» by the pandemic and the mass switch to remote working.

It highlights another study by the National Bureau for Economic Research that claims the number of meetings per person has increased by 12.9% over the last 18-months. The length of those meetings had actually gone down, on average, but overall the working day had consistently been extended by an average of 49 minutes, largely attributed to a greater number of emails being sent after standard business hours. 

The enormous rise in overtime has come with the additional burden of poor mental health; by the end of 2020, the prevalence of mental distress among workers was 49% higher compared to 2017-19 and had increased across all major sectors, the report states.

The issue is particularly concerning for women, who are far more likely to shoulder the additional burden of childcare, housework and care for elderly family members, according to the report. 

The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has simplified its cyber scam-reporting with a new add-in for Outlook on Microsoft 365 which makes it even easier to flag phishing emails to its Suspicious Email Reporting Service (SERS).

Launched in April of last year, SERS allows users to report email scams by forwarding them to report@phishing.gov.uk. Within the last 16 months, it has received over 6.5 million reports from the public resulting in the removal of 97,000 online scams, the NCSC said.

However, the organisation has said that this isn’t enough, with NCSC technical director Dr Ian Levy saying that the new tool will make it easier for businesses to “further help combat cyber crime”.

Designed as a simple button, it allows staff to report a suspicious-looking email with just one click, saving the time that it takes to find the SERS email address and forward the message. The more automated approach aims to make reporting easier and faster, allowing users to protect the security of the business without compromising on time and productivity. 

“As more people report more dodgy stuff to us, the safer everyone gets,” said Levy. “The pandemic has shown the cyber criminals will stop at nothing to attack and defraud citizens and businesses. But our Suspicious Email Reporting Service has also shown that the British public can help us fight back against this scourge.»

SMBs have been especially vulnerable to hackers, with almost a third of cyber attacks now involving a small business. According to Federation of Small Businesses national chair Mike Cherry, innovations such as the simplified reporting tool “are crucial to calling time on business crime”. 

“Small achievable steps will go a long way to protect thousands of small firms from cyber attacks. Every year, there are almost four million cases of cyber attacks against small businesses in the UK, and more than 50 per cent of these come from phishing,” he said, adding that “these systems not only help prevent disruption to small firms today but will become increasingly important to help safeguard small businesses for the future”.

Organisations interested in equipping their staff with the Microsoft 365 tool can go to the Microsoft AppSource portal and search for the Report Phishing add-in, click the “Get it now” button, and follow the instructions to complete the installation. 

IBM and Verizon have expanded facilities at their Industry Solution Lab in Coppell, TX to include an environment for developing and testing 5G-enabled use cases for Industry 4.0 applications.

The new capabilities will enable enterprise customers to develop and test how 5G Ultra-Wideband can combine with hybrid cloud, edge, and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to enhance next-gen use cases like robotics, guided vehicles, manufacturing process automation, visual quality inspection, data analytics, and more.

Verizon has installed 5G ultra-wideband and multi-access edge computing (MEC) to trial use cases, alongside IBM’s hybrid cloud and AI technologies, which run on Red Hat OpenShift.

The lab will offer customers a  pre-commercial, standalone 5G network and all the technical resources needed to test and optimize products. Customers can co-create business-specific use cases and jointly work with IBM Global Business Services and ecosystem partners to leverage these technologies in solving current business challenges and bring new solutions and services to market.

The lab will focus on three priority areas that take advantage of 5G networks. 

The first area is asset monitoring and optimization. IBM and Verizon said major shipping companies with ground and package-handling facilities could use the IBM Maximo Application Suite and IBM Acoustic Insights to trial how they can use ultrasonic technology to anticipate and prevent their package handling machinery from malfunctioning.

The second area is in field worker productivity and safety. By using Maximo Mobile on devices on the Verizon 5G Network, a utility company could trial scenarios where it uses AI, remote human assistance, and real-time data to “improve the on-the-job safety and enhance the quality and efficiency of fieldwork with guided workflows, reducing multiple repeat inspections and repairs of the same equipment.”

The third area is visual inspection. IBM said industrial product manufacturers could leverage IBM’s suite of visual inspection products, including IBM Maximo Visual Inspection.

“Mobile devices running the suite could be mounted on assembly lines, robotic arms, or even held or worn by the user to inspect components and finished goods for defects using near real-time insights to improve manufacturing processes,” said Steve Canepa, global GM & managing director at IBM’s Communications Sector.

He added that the joint 5G test bed with Verizon “serves as a signal of IBM’s ongoing investment in capabilities that include, among others, centers of excellence and labs around the world.”

Only 15% of workers in central London have returned to the office, according to new figures from the Centre for Cities think tank. 

The figures for the last week of July show that London had the lowest number of workers returning to the office out of all the towns and cities in the UK. 

The research is based on footfall traffic in the week after ‘Freedom Day’ (19 July) when the government lifted all remaining COVID restrictions. It doesn’t specifically state numbers for those returning to offices, but it suggests a rise or fall based on daytime footfall to shops and restaurants in city centres. 

Across the UK, less than one in five (18%) people have returned to their place of work, with day time footfall traffic falling 1% in the last week of July, compared to stats compiled before Freedom Day. People in Brighton were the most likely to have returned, according to the report, but worker footfall there was at 49% of pre-COVID levels and still far from normal.

Just two places have recovered to their pre-pandemic levels of footfall: Blackpool and Bournemouth. However, their popularity with tourists means that visitor numbers are likely to fall once summer ends and offers no indication of appetite to return to the office.  

«It’s a mixed picture as the country takes its next steps back to normality – both for different types of businesses, and for different places,» said Paul Swinney, Centre for Cities director of policy.

«People’s eagerness, particularly in cities in the North and Midlands, to go out and socialise has been a lifeline for many businesses in the night-time economy. But a reluctance to head back to the office in our largest and most economically important cities means that people in the so-called ‘sandwich economy’ that caters to city centre office workers are facing an uncertain future as we get ever closer to the end of the furlough scheme in September.»

The low numbers for London could be perceived as a blow to chancellor Rishi Sunak and his plans to boost the economy by encouraging more people back into the workplace. Sunak recently suggested that platforms like Microsoft Teams and Zoom were no help to people at the start of their careers. 

Salesforce is launching a streaming business TV service called Salesforce+ that will roll out as part of its Dreamforce conference in September. 

The company is designing the service on the digital content models used by companies like Netflix and Peloton but aimed at a business audience. The content will initially be created entirely using its internal team, under the brand name Salesforce Studios. Over time, though, it hopes to encourage more community content.

«The people watching Disney+, the people watching ESPN+, are the same people watching Salesforce content in a business setting, so why wouldn’t we follow that sort of direction? That’s really the genesis of this idea,» explained the company’s senior VP of brand marketing Colin Fleming in an interview about the new service. 

The initial Salesforce+ content features new shows and content the company has already produced and distributes through its YouTube channel. One example is its 70-episode-strong Leading Through Change series, which launched in March 2020. 

Other content on the service will include Connections, which features innovations with marketing executives from different companies, and a career advice series called Boss Talks. Another show, Simply Put, will be a short form program featuring simple explainer videos for complex business topics. 

The initiative will be the conduit for the company’s Dreamforce event next month, which moved online last year due to the pandemic. The event will be mainly online this year, with in-person attendance by invitation only.

Salesforce+ Dreamforce coverage will feature four broadcast channels with a combined 100 hours of initial content: Prime Time, Trailblazer, Customer 360, and Industries. 

Prime Time will feature news announcements and customer case studies. Trailblazer will feature interviews with industry leaders and previews of Salesforce products. The Customer 360 and Industries channels will feature more case studies and innovation stories. 

The company added that viewers would be able to customize their content into collections focusing on different topics, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and financial services. They will also be able to ask questions via the platform and get live answers from presenters during the Dreamforce event.

The National Security Agency (NSA) has awarded Amazon a cloud computing contract codenamed ‘WildandStormy’ worth up to $10 billion, prompting an appeal from Microsoft.

Although the specific details of the contract are hidden, the NSA is reportedly looking to move away from its on-premise environment as it looks to bring in commercial cloud computing technology, according to Washington Technology. The security agency is reportedly pursuing a “Hybrid Compute Initiative” to see what data can be stored in a commercial cloud infrastructure.

Following the decision, Microsoft filed a protest with the Government Accountability Office (GAO) on 21 July, claiming that the NSA did not conduct a proper evaluation. The decision is expected back by 29 October.

«NSA recently awarded a contract for cloud computing services to support the Agency. The unsuccessful offerer has filed a protest with the Government Accountability Office. The Agency will respond to the protest in accordance with appropriate federal regulations,» an NSA spokesperson told IT Pro.

A Microsoft spokesperson told Nextgov that the company was filing an administrative protest via the GAO. “We are exercising our legal rights and will do so carefully and responsibly,» said the spokesperson.

IT Pro contacted Amazon for comment, which has referred any questions to the NSA.

Last July, the Department of Defense (DoD) cancelled a $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) project and scrapped its Trump-backed contract with Microsoft. The deal had been challenged by Microsoft’s rival AWS, which alleged that former president Donald Trump had influenced DoD decisions during the bidding process in order to sabotage their chances.

As a replacement for the JEDI project, the DoD announced the Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability (JWCC), which is set to be “a multi-cloud/multi-vendor Indefinite Delivery-Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract” that will consider both AWS and Microsoft. Although there isn’t an estimated value of how much the project would cost, it’s expected the first set of contracts would be awarded by April 2022.

Security researchers have found a major breach that exposed the details of over three million US seniors.

According to WizCase, the data breach affected SeniorAdvisor, “one of the largest consumer ratings and reviews websites for senior care and services across the US and Canada.” Among the exposed details were users’ names, surnames, phone numbers, and more.

Researchers at WizCase discovered a misconfigured Amazon S3 bucket belonging to the website containing over 1 million files and 182GB of data. Contact dates from the files suggest they are from 2002 to 2013, though the files had a 2017 timestamp.

“The majority of data exposed was in the form of leads, a list of potential customers whose details were collected by SeniorAdvisor presumably via their email or phone call campaigns,” said researchers.

Researchers also unearthed  2,000 “scrubbed” reviews. These are reviews where the user’s sensitive information has been wiped or redacted.

“However, this scrubbing process is useless if you have the corresponding information. The scrubbed reviews had a lead id which could be used to trace the review back to who originally wrote it,” researchers said. As both lead data and these scrubbed reviews were in the same database, supposedly anonymous reviewers could have their identity revealed with a simple search operation.

WizCase researchers said since the breach contained data from a section of the public more vulnerable to scams, the risks were higher. In a 2018-2019 report, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) noted that people who filed a fraud complaint between 60 and 69 years old lost $600 per scam on average. The amount rose in older groups, culminating in $1700 on average per scam for people between 80 and 89.

“In particular, the report found senior citizens were more likely to fall for digital scams such as tech support scams, prize/sweepstakes scams, online shopping scams, and especially phone scams,” said researchers. “As shown, senior citizens are at greater risk for online fraud than the rest of the population, and therefore should be even more careful in their online behavior.”

Researchers urged people using such services to input the bare minimum of information when making a purchase or setting up an online account.

“The less information hackers have to work with, the less vulnerable you are,” warned researchers. Researchers have since contacted the company, and the bucket has since been secured.

Microsoft has released a new ransomware detection feature for Azure that uses machine learning to spot potential attacks.

‘Fusion Detection for Ransomware’ will send an alert to customers when it observes actions that are «potentially associated with ransomware activities».

The alerts will inform users of what was detected, and on which device, with the system correlating data from other Azure services, such as Azure Defender, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, Microsoft Defender for Identity, Microsoft Cloud App Security, and Azure Sentinel scheduled analytics rules.

Once ransomware activities are detected and correlated by the Fusion’s machine learning model, a high severity incident with the label «Multiple alerts possibly related to Ransomware activity detected» will be triggered in the customer’s Azure Sentinel workspace (shown in the image below).

After an alert has been sent, Microsoft recommends users check the device/host in question to see if its behaviour is «unexpected». If so, the user should treat the machine as «potentially compromised» and take immediate actions, such as isolating the machine from the network, running full anti-virus scans, and investigating the rest of the network for similar signs.

Ransomware has become a lucrative occupation, according to a recent report from Unit 42, with average payouts almost doubling over the past year. Since 2020, payouts for successful ransomware attacks have increased 82% to a record $570,000 in the first half of 2021. The increase followed the previous year’s 171% jump to more than $312,000.

«Preventing such attacks in the first place would be the ideal solution but with the new trend of ‘ransomware as a service’ and human operated ransomware, the scope and the sophistication of attacks are increasing – attackers are using slow and stealth techniques to compromise network, which makes it harder to detect them in the first place,» Microsoft security researcher Sylvie Liu wrote in a blog post.

Charlie Bell, one of Amazon’s top executives in its cloud business, is leaving the company after 23 years.

AWS senior vice president Peter DeSantis, who worked on global infrastructure, is set to become the new leader for utility computing which Bell was managing, according to CNBC. Prasad Kalyanaraman, a vice president at the company, will assume responsibility for infrastructure and network services.

Bell’s departure is the latest in a string of high-level personnel moves at AWS. Bell was reportedly considered a candidate to replace AWS CEO Andy Jassy when he became Amazon CEO last month, but Tableau CEO and former Amazon employee Adam Selipsky was chosen instead.

Bell has been with the company since 1998 when his business, Server Technologies Group, was acquired by the company, according to his LinkedIn. Before that, he was a manager at Oracle between 1989 and 1996, and a space shuttle flight interface engineer at Boeing between 1979 and 1989.

In a video posted by Amazon Science, he revealed he started at the company when it was “just selling books”. Bell initially led infrastructure before moving to the AWS business in 2006 as it began developing core EC2 and S3 computing and storage services.

In February, the head of AWS Andy Jassy was announced as the successor to Jeff Bezos – seen as a logical next step given Jassy joined Amazon in 1997 and would go on to found AWS in 2002.

Following this, in March, Salesforce executive Adam Selipsky was appointed AWS CEO. This saw Selipsky return to AWS after leaving the company in 2016 to become the CEO of Tableau. He spent the previous 11 years as AWS vice president of sales, marketing and support.

Selipsky’s time at Tableau saw the company’s value quadruple as he led its move from licenses to subscriptions. It was eventually acquired by Salesforce in 2019, where Selipsky became a member of its executive leadership board in addition to his role as Tableau CEO.

Salesforce has expanded Health Cloud, its cloud-based service for health care organisations, with several new features targeting remote patient management and data protection. 

The company has added four enhancements to Health Cloud. The first addition, remote patient exception monitoring, harvests data from connected health care devices and presents it in a single dashboard interface targeting care coordinators. 

​Metrics displayable in the dashboard include heart rate and blood glucose levels. This will enable health care workers to better understand patient conditions without needing physical visits, Salesforce said. 

Salesforce’s new appointment management feature suggests remote and in-person appointment times for patients. Users can select available appointment types and times via any device, and the system can also offer pre-appointment questionnaires to help gather the necessary data ahead of the appointment. 

The cloud service provider says this will reduce no-shows and administrative costs incurred through manual back and forth with human schedulers. 

The third new feature, medication management, tackles the management of medication lists. Many clinics still use manual, paper-based systems to track patient medication, making it difficult to monitor medication adherence, Salesforce said. 

Targeting pharmacies, small clinics, and retail outlets, medication management will reduce the administrative overhead of tracking patient medication lists. The service will also integrate with RXNorm, a system that standardises naming conventions for generic and brand name drugs in the US. 

The final enhancement focuses on regulatory compliance and helps in-home patient care companies protect patients’ health information. Salesforce is certifying Salesforce Maps, B2C Commerce, and Order Management services as compliant with the US government’s HIPAA health care privacy regulations. 

This certification gives mobile health care workers access to sensitive patient data on the move via Salesforce Maps while staying compliant with regulations, the company said. It also enables companies, including retail health locations and pharmacies, to set up e-commerce stores dealing with sensitive patient orders via HIPAA support in Salesforce B2C Commerce and Salesforce Order Management.