​The National Portrait Gallery was targeted by 347,602 emails containing spam, phishing and malware attacks in the last quarter of 2019, a freedom of information (FOI) request has revealed.

Over half of the emails, 194,620, were identified as being directory harvest attacks (DHA), a technique used to harvest valid email addresses belonging to employees and associates of the gallery, according to data collected by think tank Parliament Street.

The gallery also blocked 61,710 emails from senders flagged as belonging to a “threat intelligence blacklist”. A further 85,793 emails were intercepted as they were believed to have contained spam content – which is anything from unsolicited marketing to serious phishing and malware. According to the figures, 418 of the emails contained a virus of some kind.

“These figures paint a worrying picture of the volume of malicious email attacks designed to trick unsuspecting staffers into handing over confidential data such as passwords and log-in credentials,” said Andy Heather, VP of security firm Centrify.

“The National Portrait Gallery is an incredibly popular destination for tourists, attracting millions of visitors and members every year, which unfortunately makes it a top target for hackers and cyber criminals seeking to use legitimate, often stolen, credentials to gain access fear of detection.”

Stolen employee credentials are a global problem for all businesses. Last year, figures from Google’s Password Checkup report suggested that 1.5% of all sign-in attempts were being made using details compromised during a data breach.

“Addressing this threat means ensuring a zero-trust approach to employee communication, ensuring suspicious emails are spotted and full checks are made so that managers can be sure all staffers are who they say they are,” Heather added.

In 2017, London art dealers were defrauded out of hundreds of thousands of pounds after hackers successfully breached company email accounts to monitor correspondence between clients. The incident resulted in fresh cyber security guidance being issued by the Society of London Art Dealers, as well as tips for avoiding email fraud.

Businesses will be able to customise their own text-to-speech voice for Alexa, Amazon has announced.

KFC is one of the first to work with the company on the feature, developing a voice for Colonel Sanders that replies to customers instead of the default Alexa voice.

This is part of a new capability within Amazon Polly called ‘Brand Voice’. Polly is a department of AWS that comprises linguists and AI research scientists who build neural text-to-speech (NTTS) technology that can match the speaking styles of a person.

It uses deep learning models that can interpret intonation patterns from natural speech data and reproduce the acquired voice in a similar style or tone. The service has already been used by National Bank Australia, as well as KFC.

“The Colonel was passionate about his fried chicken and this new skill makes re-ordering your favourite KFC menu items easier than ever but in a fun and memorable way,” said Jason Cassidy, marketing director for KFC Canada.

AWS debuted a similar feature in September that allows users to set their Alexa device’s voice to that of Samual L Jackson. The American actor didn’t have to record hours of dialogue, though, as the NTTS models are able to translate audio recordings of his voice into natural-sounding responses.

For a more serious business perspective, Laurent De Segur, the general manager of digital at National Australia Bank, said that it would help improve the experience customers have when they contact its call centres.

“For that reason, it was also important that the voice we created using Amazon Polly Brand Voice felt both uniquely NAB and consistent with our position and what our customers expect when they call us,” he said.

Alexa has become a popular household feature via Amazon’s Echo smart speaker and the tech giant has also opened the service to businesses, with Alexa for Business‘ and a number of partnerships with large organisations, such as the NHS.

HPE is building on its edge to cloud security strategy by snapping up Scytale, an open-source security platform that runs across on-premise, cloud and container-based infrastructure.

Scytale is a San Francisco-based startup that looks at application-to-application identity and access management.

The company was founded in 2017 by Sunil James, Emiliano Berenbaum, and Andrew Jessup. The three co-founders have built up a workforce hailing from cloud-native enterprises like AWS, Duo Security, Google, Okta, PagerDuty and Splunk.

Scytale is also recognised as the founding contributor of the Secure Production Identity Framework for Everyone (SPIFFE) and SPIFFE Runtime Environment, along with other open-source projects under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

Announcing the purchase on Monday, David Husak, GM of HPE’s Cloudless Initiative, said that security will continue to play a fundamental role as the company progresses into its edge to cloud platform as a service strategy. Financial details of the acquisition have not been disclosed.

“We recognise that every organisation that operates in a hybrid, multi-cloud environment requires 100% secure, zero trust systems, that can dynamically identify and authenticate data and applications in real-time,” Husak said in a blog post.

“We also recognise that the open-source community, which every day advances an endless array of projects designed for an open, multi-cloud, micro-services driven world, are at the forefront of writing code that delivers true zero trusts, highly secure systems.”

Scytale founder Sunil James said that he met with Antonio Neri before he became HPE’s CEO and that a discussion between the two left him with a stronger understanding of the company’s deep roots in helping customers bridge complex enterprise IT infrastructure.

“This understanding was reinforced last year when I met Dave Husak and Dave Larson (I call them ‘the Daves’), two leaders within Hewlett Packard Labs,” James wrote.

“Scytale’s DNA is security, distributed systems, and open-source. Under HPE, Scytale will continue to help steward SPIFFE. Our ever-growing and vocal community will lead us. We’ll toil to maintain this transparent and vendor-neutral project, which will be fundamental in HPE’s plans to deliver a dynamic, open, and secure edge-to-cloud platform.”

IBM has promoted Arvind Krishna to CEO after Ginni Rometty announced she was stepping down from the role and will retire at the end of the year. 

The change marks the end of a 39-year career for Rometty, eight of which were at the top as its CEO. She will stay on as executive chairman of the board until the end of the year before retiring. Red Hat’s Jim Whitehurst will replace Rometty as the company’s president.

In a statement, Rometty said that Krishna and Whitehurst were a “proven technical and business-savvy leadership team”.

“Arvind has grown IBM’s Cloud and Cognitive Software business and led the largest acquisition in the company’s history,” Rometty said. “He is well-positioned to lead IBM and its clients into the cloud and cognitive era.”

“Jim is also a seasoned leader who has positioned Red Hat as the world’s leading provider of open source enterprise IT software solutions and services, and has been quickly expanding the reach and benefit of that technology to an even wider audience as part of IBM.”

Virginia ‘Ginni’ Rometty’s career at IBM started in 1981 as a systems analyst. She spent her first ten years working in many technical positions and went on to led the integration of PricewaterhouseCoopers Consulting. She spent the 1990’s working in sales before taking on a number of leadership roles in the next decade.

On New Year’s Day 2012, Rometty became IBM’s ninth CEO as well as its first female chief executive. During her time at the helm, the company set up a number of partnerships with the likes of Apple, SAP and Box, reportedly taking it into higher-growth areas such as cloud and AI.

“Ginni has provided outstanding leadership for IBM, substantially transforming the company and ushering in a new cloud and cognitive era,” said Michael Eskew, lead director of IBM’s Board. “She has taken bold strategic actions to reposition IBM for the future, shedding businesses and growing new units organically and through acquisition, all while achieving record diversity and employee engagement and setting the industry standard for responsible technology ethics and data stewardship.”

She steps down as CEO with the company recently reporting its first-quarter growth since 2018, fueled largely by its cloud division.

Google is reportedly gearing up to take on Slack and Microsoft Teams with its own business communications app.

The app will combine its raft of G Suite services, including Gmail, Google Drive, Hangouts Meet and Hangouts Chat, into a single mobile entity, according to The Information, which cites two people who have used it.

A prototype of the app is currently being tested internally at Google, with the CEO of its cloud division, Thomas Kurian, reportedly sharing details about the project with cloud salespeople and business partners.

The tech giant announced a range of AI and communication-based features at its Cloud Next conference in November, including voice assistant capabilities for parts of G Suite, smart compose functions for Google Docs and a new video chat feature on Gmail.

More recently, it demonstrated a real-time translation feature for Android that will allow users to hear one language and read it in another. 

If the reports are true, the new comms app could see Google in the middle of Slack and Microsoft’s on-going battle for business communications.

Microsoft Teams is currently the more popular service with 13 million active users, according to figures released in July 2019. However, the numbers are boosted by companies using Office 365, of which teams is an integral part. It’s worth noting that Google’s rumoured new app is said to be part of its G Suite service and so could fulfil a similar role.

Slack is also hugely popular, particularly with startups, where it has 10 million daily users according to the latest figures. Despite falling behind Microsoft Teams, the company has called out the tech giant on a few occasions.

In November, Slack tweeted a video suggesting a Teams advert had copied one of its own and captioned the tweet “ok boomer”. The company’s CEO Stewart Butterfield has also criticised Microsoft for its “surprisingly unsportsmanlike” behaviour bundling Teams into Office 365.

The Six Nations rugby tournament is expanding its partnership with AWS to add live in-game analytics during this season’s broadcast of the competition.

Fans will be placed “at the tactics board”, according to AWS, with five new statistical features that analyse key segments of the game.

This follows on from the 2019 Championships, where AWS technology provided fans with insights into scrummages, play patterns, try origins and team trends with statistics generated by data gathered during the games. This is streamed and analysed by AWS platforms like SageMaker and then delivered as insights back to the live TV broadcasts.

“The introduction of the advanced statistics – powered by AWS – in the 2019 Guinness Six Nations Championship was just the start of how we are planning to change the game of rugby through advanced in-game analytics,” said Ben Morel, CEO of Six Nations Rugby.

“This year will see the introduction of even more engaging and informative stats that bring fans even closer to the action. With these innovations, together with AWS, we are seeking to significantly enhance the viewing experience for all rugby fans by providing them with unique data-led insights.”

These have been developed in partnership with data analytics firm Stats Perform and the Amazon Machine Learning Solutions Lab (as well as SageMaker). One of the first new features will be a heatmap of the pitch that illustrates where most of the action is taking place. This will also “visualise” where a team is turning over possession, according to AWS.

Tackling will also be analysed with machine learning models that will map out the location of success and highlight areas that should be exploited. Fans will also be able to “visit the 22” with insights into how successful a team is at entering the oppositions 22-metre area. This will be calculated for every phase of play, with the aim of gaining deeper insight into how long a team stays in the attacking area, how many opportunities it creates and how many it converts.

When it comes to conversions, kicks from the side of the pitch are extremely difficult and with AWS Kick predictor, machine learning will inform fans just how difficult they are. According to AWS, the calculation happens in real-time, during a break in play while the kicker sets himself up. It takes into account a number of real-time, in-game factors, such as the location of the kick, the period of the game it’s being taken, the current score and if the kicking team is playing home or away.

Additionally, it analyses other historical data, for example, the average success rate of the kicking player in the given field zone, during the Championship and during the player’s entire career.

This is very similar to the NFL Next Gen stats platform that predicts the likely success of passes from a quarterback. It also further expands AWS’ portfolio of sports partnership after its recent deal with the German Bundesliga and its deep ties with Formula 1.

German airline Lufthansa will use Google Cloud services to minimise disruptions caused by flight delays and other irregularities.

The two companies will build an AI-based platform that will suggest scenarios to return to a stable flight plan should adverse weather or flight delays impact customers.

The company will be migrating data from various parts of its business that are relevant to flight schedules, such as aircraft replacements and its crews work patterns.

In the future, it will be possible to offer faster rebooking possibilities across all Lufthansa services, the airline said.

A joint team of operations experts, developers and engineers from the Lufthansa and software engineers from Google Cloud will be developing and testing the appropriate platform, with a test launch set to take place in Zurich with SWISS.

“Through this collaboration, we have a significant opportunity to revolutionise the future of airline operations,” said Thomas Kurian, CEO for Google Cloud. “We’re bringing the best of Lufthansa Group and Google Cloud together to solve airlines biggest challenges and positively impact the travel experience of the more than 145 million passengers that fly annually with them.”

A number of companies have already begun the AI revolution of airlines, such as British Airways and its AI-powered robots that aim to help reduce congestion and help customers with queries at Heathrow Airport’s Terminal 5.

The two bots will take part in a trial, which is part of a wider, five-year plan to improve customer experience. This is backed by a £6.5 billion investment, which has also seen BA roll out 3D printing, driverless baggage vehicles, and other innovations such as automated check-in desks and more.

At Heathrow, traffic controllers are trialling AI technology that could see the proposed third runway built without the need for a new control tower.

The airport has said that a 2.5 million “digital tower laboratory“, with a suite of ultra-high definition cameras and AI technology, has been built at the base of Heathrow’s existing tower.

Google’s parent company Alphabet has become the fourth US tech company to reach a market value of $1 trillion (£765 billion), ending trading at $1,451.70 per share on Thursday.

It will hold a quarterly conference to discuss Q4 and 2019 financial results on 3 February but Wall Street Analysts are expecting it to report revenue of $46.9 billion – up 20% year-on-year.

Alphabet is now part of a US tech elite with Apple, Amazon and Microsoft all having reached the $1 trillion market cap over the past two years. The iPhone maker was the first to surpass the mark in August 2018 with Amazon hitting it a month later. Microsoft was the third company, doing so in April 2019.

Like Amazon and Microsoft, revenues from its cloud ventures are believed to have heavily contributed to Alphabet’s overall growth, with the Google Cloud Platform doubling it’s revenue run rate to £2 billion per quarter between February 2018 and July 2019, according to CNBC.

Cloud, Google’s Play app store and Google’s hardware division have all been key drivers for the company, according to its earnings report. In Q3 of 2019, revenue from these segments of the business increase 39% year-on-year.

Sundar Pichai’s recent promotion to CEO of Alphabet has also helped to increase optimism among stockholders, according to Pivotal Research Group analyst Michael Levine.

“We are incrementally more constructive about what we perceive as multiple ways to get paid under the recently appointed Pichai regime,” Levine wrote, as reported by Markets Insider. His evaluation is reportedly based on an estimate of Alphabet’s 2021 EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization).

Pichai took over as CEO of both Alphabet and Google after co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin stepped down in December. The change of leadership offers “the most optionality for multiple expansion for the stock we have seen in years,” according to Levine, who also sighted Thomas Kurian‘s helm of Google’s cloud business as a positive sign.

​Every day, more and more blockchain stories find their way into news feeds as the technology is implemented into the industry in some form or another.

It’s a distributed database that can be used to store ordered records in real-real time, called blocks, which are linked and secured using cryptography, which is the ‘chain’ part.

The technology has long been associated with Bitcoin, which is one of the world’s most popular cryptocurrencies and is the original use for blockchain. The first blockchain was conceptualised by the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008 who implemented it into Bitcoin.

In recent years, more applications and use-cases have arisen due to the technologies fundamental secure by design and decentralised architecture Because of this, it has grown as an effective way to store important, timely data such as names, identities, medical records, and, of course, financial transactions.

Despite the obvious benefits and clear evolution of the technology, it’s still in the early stages and has yet to have won the world over. But, there are many who believe it could have the capacity to completely transform business.

Wide business applications

A common presumption around blockchain is that its only application is cryptocurrency. But this is far from the reality, with businesses and organisations constantly exploring new avenues of how this technology can help streamline operations and processes, especially with regards to organising critical information.

Blockchain is changing the cards for storing, distributing and transacting data, according to WhiteHat Security’s security manager Ruchika Mishra. She expects blockchain to transform the financial sector particularly in the next few years; used to ensure institutions conduct transactions more efficiently.

“Despite blockchain technology underpinning cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, the concept of a de-centralised and cryptographically secured ledger has multiple business applications. Any ‘asset’ that can be stored, distributed or transacted property titles, music, insurance and even personal data could make use of blockchain technology,” she says.

“The technology shows great promise for improving the financial industry’s efficiency. For example, the three-day wait on ‘pending’ transactions could be eliminated if a distributed ledger were implemented. This is because a public registry, such as blockchain, would remove the need for a central authority to verify the identities of all parties in the transaction. Settlement could then be instantaneous, since the transaction and settlement would happen simultaneously once the ledger is updated,” she adds.

Mishra can also see blockchain having a positive impact on identity management, providing companies with a way to control who has access to valuable information and ensuring it’s protected from cyber criminals. This is something that’s crucial for firms, especially as the number of cyber attacks carried out each year is constantly increasing.

“An alternative business application is to use blockchain technology for identity management. As we go through our lives, each snippet of our digital identity is being collected to form a publicly-obtainable digital profile of us. Blockchain technology could help us take control back over our virtual data: who has access to it and how much they can obtain. This could be a great leap forward for privacy protection,” she says.

High-growth industry

Blockchain is an emerging technology and one that’s advancing rapidly, with people quickly realising the potential it offers. Sam Davies, lead technologist at UK tech industry growth organisation Digital Catapult, says blockchain will grow immensely over the next decade. In the 2020s, it’ll be an industry generating billions, many predict.

“The impact Blockchain will have on business over the next 10 years will be transformational. This distributed ledger technology will completely reimagine the way data and transactions are recorded and processed,” he tells IT Pro.

“Well-known for its applications in fintech, this disruptive technology is growing at an unprecedented rate with potential reaching far beyond finance. Gartner predicts that by 2022 a blockchain-based business will be worth $10 billion, and the technology itself will be established as the next revolution in transaction recording.”

Davies believes that as blockchain technology improves, it will become an integral part of the business world and Internet of Things (IoT) industry. “As the underlying blockchain infrastructure matures, businesses are presented with a great opportunity to implement increasingly automated and intelligent smart contracts,” he says.

“This, for example, offers the potential to redefine what the IoT can deliver. By taking away the need for a centralised broker, the distributed, decentralised nature of IoT devices can be reflected in any underlying access, management or marketplace systems,” he adds.

Streamlining government and banking

Jason Ward, senior director of enterprise UK&I at Dell EMC, says blockchain can streamline clearing processes and internal operations for banks. There’s also huge potential for governments right around the world, such as civil servants using blockchain to combat fraud, error and the cost of paper-based systems.

“Blockchain offers the promise of addressing some of the key challenges faced by the financial sector and offers a way of improving central clearing, back office operations and cross-border payments. If banks started sharing data using a tailor-made version of Blockchain, they could essentially remove the need for a lot of manual processing, and speed up transactions,” Ward explains.

Governments are also starting to explore the possibilities of blockchain, he says, as exemplified by a recently-published report from the Office for Science, which recommended the UK government begins work to exploit distributed ledger technology in the public sector.

“The report highlighted how distributed ledger technology could provide governments with new tools to reduce fraud, error and the cost of paper intensive processes,” explains Ward. “Of course, there is a need for more education if we are to ensure policy makers understand how it works and its potential applications, independently from bitcoin.”

“Blockchain has the potential to help drive unprecedented opportunities for innovation, as well as new and better ways to interact with citizens and businesses, and more efficient regulatory initiatives.”

Challenges ahead

James Lowry, EMEA head of state at Street Global Exchange, is also a believer in blockchain technology. He says it’ll transform the global financial system, but there are still some challenges the biggest of which is cyber security.

“Blockchain is one of the more compelling vehicles in terms of technological disruption and opportunity because it could create a single source of truth for transactions and other types of shared data. We believe that this could have far-reaching consequences for the global financial system,” Lowry says.

“There are some challenges,” he adds. “One is that blockchain must show that it has the wherewithal to withstand a major cyber attack. Its cryptography does provide a strong element of security but it is unlikely to be infallible against all cyber threats. Secondly, numerous firms are creating their own private blockchains, which is somewhat contrary to the idea of a public, shared blockchain.”

But, in the end, the technology will evolve and even more benefits will be realised.

“While the industry is still far from realising the full impact of blockchain and other emerging technologies within financial services, if we can make blockchain the internet of financial services, we all benefit particularly if it allows for real-time settlement across different geographies and currencies,” concludes Lowry.

Spain’s Banco Sabadell has agreed on a €1 billion (£852.5 million) digital transformation deal with IBM to overhaul its IT systems over the next ten years.

The bank will migrate to a hybrid cloud infrastructure, developed by IBM’s Red Hat unit, which it acquired in 2019.

The deal is an extension of an existing partnership between the two companies that will see IBM transform Sabadell’s technological infrastructure into an advanced platform, able to integrate all its data and applications and facilitate a centralised single customer view.

Sabadell is aiming to upgrade its computer systems to be more efficient as it handles more data and transactions from customers. The bank has also prioritised security and a readiness to adapt to regulatory changes as digitisation sweeps through the industry.

“As the financial sector develops its digitalisation process in a highly regulated environment, banks need to combine a huge capacity for customer-focused innovation with a technological environment that offers maximum levels of solidity, resilience and security,” said Marta Martinez, president of IBM Spain, Portugal, Greece and Israel.

“An open hybrid cloud platform, created and managed with in-depth knowledge of the financial sector, is the best possible foundation for confronting these challenges.”

According to Sabadell’s CEO, Jamie Guardiola Romojaro, the deal will not only increase its resilience, security and scalability but also help the bank adopt key elements of the new technologies and processes such as cloud, intensive use of data and artificial intelligence.

In November, IBM announced a deal with Bank of America to develop “the world’s first financial services-ready public cloud”. Like the Sabadell deal, the public cloud platform was said to be built using services acquired through its Red Hat deal.

The deal also extends to UK bank TSB, which is a subsidiary of Banco Sabadell and has previously worked with IBM during its 2018 meltdown nightmare. A report from IBM suggested that the bank didn’t carry out rigorous enough testing of its new systems.