Inside the Hacker’s Head: Why They Wreak Havoc and How to Thwart Them

Successful hacks can paralyze websites, enable corporate or personal data to fall into the wrong hands and potentially damage the image, reputation and sales pipeline of the organization under attack. For many, this begs the question ‘Why us?’ To find out, let’s delve into the psyche of the hacker and consider ways that organizations can defend themselves against cyber-attacks.
Hacking isn’t always about causing damage, destruction or for financial gain. The objective of many hackers, especially “hacktivists,” is purely to raise awareness, influence or to send a political message. For instance, the hacker group Anonymous was able to create a massive amount of publicity for itself in the run-up to the World Cup in Brazil by attacking the servers of global sponsors such as Adidas, Emirates and Coca-Cola. Ultimately, the actual damage caused was limited and did not affect the running of the tournament. Nevertheless, the hackers took advantage of worldwide interest in the event to draw attention to their particular goals and beliefs.

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Cloud-Based Channel Data Management By @Dan_Blacharski | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]

Large technology manufacturers that focus on channel sales through distributors and resellers have traditionally operated with informal processes, using tools like spreadsheets and information driven by anecdotal stories from channel partners, unstructured data, and the “gut instinct” of channel sales managers. Too often, the result is an unacceptable level of inaccurate payouts and leaky incentivizing, stock-outs due to lack of insight into inventory, and missed revenue opportunities.

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The Management Gap with Business Cloud Apps By @Exoprise | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]

SaaS and cloud computing continue to gain real traction in the enterprise – and that trend is sure to continue for a long time to come. But the reality is that, to date, those gaining real benefit from cloud at the enterprise level have been limited largely to isolated pockets; e.g., software development and operations teams leveraging Infrastructure and Platform as a Service (IaaS and PaaS) to slash costs and improve agility; sales teams licensing their own SaaS CRM systems; or lines of business “going rogue” and sidestepping IT by using apps like Dropbox to facilitate easier file sharing inside and outside the company.

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How We Came Up with jKool, for Big Data Analytics

jKool LLC, a new company, spinning-off from Nastel Technologies is a highly scalable, SaaS solution for streaming analytics of Big Data. The jKool API is used to add real-time analytics to applications which will now be able to stream data … Continue reading

The post How we came up with jKool, a SaaS solution for Streaming Analytics appeared first on Middleware-centric APM.

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Huge Valuations – Only For a Category King!

Only couple of weeks ago, Uber got $1.2B funding on a valuation of $41B! Earlier this year, Facebook paid over $19B to acquire WhatsApp. Dropbox is valued at $10B. All these three companies are less than five years old. What is going on? Is it a tech bubble seen earlier? No, it’s a start-up wealth gap as per Newsweek article by Kevin Maney.

Here is an interesting finding! A new study, which analyzed valuation data on thousands of tech startups, found that winning companies born since 2009 get to super-high valuations three times faster than companies started in the early 2000s. Looked at another way, this says that if a company is going to reach a $1 billion value, it will do so in one-third the time that climb typically took just a decade ago. Of the 80 companies that hit $1 billion, half are what the study calls Category Kings—companies that define and dominate a new category of business. Uber is a good example of a Category King: It helped create a new kind of business, took the lead in defining it and became the dominant player. A Category King typically takes 70 percent of the total market value of its category. All the rest of the entrants split the remaining 30 percent. Examples of category kings are: Facebook, Google (new page ranking search algorithm), Linked-In, Twitter, Airbnb, Snapchat, Cloudera, Dropbox, Pinterest, etc.

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GreenPages Bloggers: 2014 Holiday Wish List

With the holiday season upon us, we decided to speak with some of our bloggers here at GreenPages to see what they wanted this year!

 

greenpagesChris Ward, CTO: Full on Nest System to control my house

Dan Allen, Solutions Architect: Drone with a GoPro

John Dixon, Director, Cloud Services: DJI Inspire 1 with 4k video. 4,500 meter maximum altitude. No FAA license required!

Nick Phelps, Practice Manager, Network & Security: DJI Phantom 2 Vision+. Full HD with a Gimbal for under $1,400

David Barter, Practice Manager, Microsoft Technologies: EFI and Holley EFI/EUC Performance Monitoring with iPad interface built into the dash to the 600HP 472 that is my 69 Deville Street Rod

Geoff Smith, Senior Manager, Managed Services Business Development: My wish would be for something that is not actually available yet in the market but might be the single coolest idea I’ve heard in years – wireless electricity. Imagine that you could power your mobile devices, home electronics and even your electric car without having to run physical wiring or dealing with charging cords and stations. Recently, a pioneer in this space, WiTricity, announced that they are working with Intel to bring their patented wireless power transfer technology to the consumer market. You could be charging your laptop or mobile devices the moment you walk in the door without tying yourself to within 5 feet of an electrical outlet!

Irvin Metaj, Level III Managed Services Engineer: A 4 TB hard drive to back up my data (dealing with a cryptowall issue where files are corrupt/encrypted right now.

 

What’s on your holiday wish list?

Increase MSP Margins: Develop New Remote Services with GSX Solutions

We created GSX Monitor & Analyzer to help IT administrators ensure that they are utilizing resources and delivering the best end-user experience possible in these complex environments.
As experienced email and messaging systems administrators, we found that there was a profound lack of proactive server monitoring tools on the market. What was out there only provided a birds-eye view of the environment, not an in-depth diagnoses of performance issues from an end-user perspective. Moreover, in the last 10 years, servers have become increasingly virtualized, allowing administrators to dedicate critical applications to a single virtual server. However, those virtual servers and the application workloads running on them still rely heavily on the underlying physical servers. CPU and RAM availability are critical for application performance, and IT administrators need to plan for available capacity and try to predict potential resource bottlenecks before they happen.

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Announcing @IDenticard to Exhibit at @CloudExpo New York [#IoT]

SYS-CON Events announced today that IDenticard will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 16th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
IDenticard™ is the security division of Brady Corp (NYSE: BRC), a $1.5 billion manufacturer of identification products. We have small-company values with the strength and stability of a major corporation.
IDenticard offers local sales, support and service to our customers across the United States and Canada. Our partner network encompasses some 300 of the world’s leading systems integrators and security systems installation specialists.

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Enabling Consistent Architecture Communication

This article argues the validity of why consistent communication is essential for effective architecture. A two-phase process highlights the need of standardisation and collaboration as steps to a maturing architecture description process.
It then introduces Infrastructure Modelling Language, an Archimate extension specifically for use of the Infrastructure Architecture community.

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How Resilient are FedRAMP Clouds Anyway? By @Kevin_Jackson | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]

One of the questions I’ve been asked from the beginning of the Federal Cloud First initiative, is, “If my data is in The answer is not as clear-cut as the question. In theory, most cloud services offer extremely resilient platforms and a modicum of disaster recovery is built in. In fact, those cloud service provider (CSP) systems that have received an ATO through the FedRAMP program do have fairly sophisticated contingency plans in place, with Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) clearly articulated- and plenty of alternate processing sites, policies, and procedures in place in the event of a contingency. So, it’s in there right?

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