Four years after the global WannaCry and NotPetya ransomware attacks, two-thirds of companies still haven’t patched the vulnerabilities that caused them, according to cloud network detection and response company ExtraHop.

The company investigated data from its Reveal(x) security platform in the first quarter of 2021 to determine which protocols its customers were running. It found that 88% of them were still running at least one device using SMBv1, which was a pivotal attack vector for the EternalBlue exploit used in the two ransomware attacks. 

Although a single device could mean a company is maintaining it just for use by an attack team, a more worrying statistic was that 67% of companies are running over 10 SMBv1-enabled devices. Over two-thirds (37%) were running more than 50, and 31% of companies checked had over 100 SMBv1 devices on their networks.

The report also highlighted heavy use of two other protocols in Windows servers. The first, called Local Loop Multicast Name Resolution (LLMNR), is an alternative to DNS for resolving basic names within a private network. It has a similar problem to Windows’ old NetBIOS naming service, in that it communicates with all clients on the network rather than a specific server. 

That enables an attacker to listen for and reply to access requests, creating a race condition to harvest the client’s hashed credentials if it establishes a conversation quickly enough. It can then decrypt those credentials, giving an attacker access to a client’s network account, or use them in a pass-the-hash attack.

The other protocol, New Technology LAN Manager (NTLM) v1, is a decades-old network authentication mechanism that has long been obsolete. Nevertheless, over a third (34%) of companies have over 10 devices using it, ExtraHop said. Almost one in five (19%) had over 100 devices using the protocol, despite Microsoft advising people to stop using it altogether in favor of the more secure Kerberos system.

The report also found that few companies had embraced using TLS encryption over HTTP (HTTPS), which browser vendors have aggressively enforced. It found that 81% of enterprise environments were still using HTTP to send access credentials in plain text.

ExtraHop said it analyzed over four petabytes of traffic each day in its investigation of online protocol usage.

Microsoft’s Azure Blockchain Service is set to be retired on 10 September 2021, with users being asked to migrate their ledger data to an alternative offering.

Although the platform still supports existing deployments, it’s no longer accepting new members or projects.

The decision to sunset Azure Blockchain Service after only two years was confirmed earlier this week, with Microsoft announcing its deprecation on 10 May.

With a deadline for the retirement set for 10 September, users are being requested to opt for an alternative platform.

The tech giant also provided a thorough migration guide which aims to guide customers, including GE, J.P. Morgan, Singapore Airlines, Starbucks, and Xbox, through the process, and recommended that they migrate their data to the ConsenSys Quorum Ethereum service.

“Based on your current development state, you can either opt to use existing ledger data on Azure Blockchain Service or start a new network and use the solution of your choice,” stated Microsoft. “We recommend creating a new consortium based on a solution of your choice in all scenarios where you do not need or intend to use existing ledger data on Azure Blockchain Service.”

Blockchain is a form of distributed ledger technology, made famous because it is the system on which Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are built upon. However, there is more to blockchain than just digital money, with the technology also being used by banks to digitise the transaction records of private placements, or by jewellery companies to help track the origin and ownership of precious gems.

Microsoft first started reselling blockchain as a service (BaaS) in 2015, but only launched the fully-managed consortium network, Azure Blockchain Service, in 2019, allowing users to build, govern, as well as expand blockchain networks at scale.

Microsoft has not provided a succinct reason as to what motivated this decision, although it’s suspected that the platform wasn’t performing as well as its rivals.

The process of the shutdown can also be followed on Twitter through @AzureEndofLife, which was created by Codit Azure architect Tom Kerkhove as a way of monitoring the process.

The news of the sunsetting of Azure Blockchain Service comes months after IBM and R3 announced that they were working together to provide clients with new options to scale blockchain technology while ensuring performance, compliance, and data privacy.

VMware has promoted executive VP and COO Rangarajan «Raghu» Raghuram as its new CEO, with the change taking effect at the beginning of June.

Raghuram replaces current CEO Zane Rowe, who took over as  «interim» CEO while the firm searched for a long term successor for Pat Gelsinger.

A number of analysts predicted a new CEO would come from within the company, with chief operating officer Sanjay Poonen thought to be the most likely candidate. However, Raghuram’s promotion came with the news that Poonen had decided to leave the company after seven years.

Raghuram is an 18-year veteran of VMware and is currently in charge of its products and cloud services. He was part of the team that helped to develop its core virtualisation business and since 2003 and is said to have played a «pivotal» role in the company’s mergers and acquisitions strategy and a key driver of its partnerships with Dell Technologies.

«Congratulations to my good friend @RaghuRaghuram on your well-deserved promotion to CEO. With his tenure of 18 years at VMware, Raghu is practically a founder. I know he will take the company to new heights in the years to come, I am cheering on,» Poonen posted on Twitter.

As CEO, Raghuram will be tasked with leading VMware as it is spun off from Dell Technologies. The latter has an 81% stake in the cloud company but plans to separate in order to generate more revenue and ultimately reduce its debts.

«I am thrilled to have Raghu step into the role of CEO at VMware,» Micheal Dell, chairman of the VMware Board of Directors, said. «Throughout his career, he has led with integrity and conviction, playing an instrumental role in the success of VMware. Raghu is now in position to architect VMware’s future, helping customers and partners accelerate their digital businesses in this multi-cloud world.»

The UK government has unveiled a new policy and funding programme which aims to ensure that all adults have equal opportunities to learn new skills such as coding.

Announced as part of the Queen’s Speech on Tuesday, the legislation is aimed at supporting the UK’s post-pandemic recovery by providing people with the chance to upskill and retrain regardless of their age. This includes facilitating access to student loans, providing employers with a statutory role in planning publicly-funded training programmes, as well as granting the Secretary of State for Education increased influence in monitoring whether colleges meet local needs.

The new policies are part of the recently unveiled ‘Lifetime Skills Guarantee’, which last month launched 400 free qualifications ranging from engineering and digital skills to social care.

Available to any adult who has not already achieved a qualification at Level 3, the digital qualifications offer digital skills boot camps in computer science, software deployment, systems infrastructure, cyber security, and coding. The courses have already managed to train 3,000 people, with another 14,000 signed up to attend later this year.

According to the government, the ‘Lifetime Skills Guarantee’ will allow adults to “change careers, upskill regularly, and stay up to date with changing knowledge and technologies”.

BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT described it as “a significant step in the right direction to address the digital skills gap”.

BCS head of Apprenticeships, Annette Allmark, said that the government’s plans “will allow more people to access the training in digital skills they need for their careers – and to develop the skills the economy needs to flourish and ‘build back better’ after the pandemic”.

“Hopefully, this funding will also increase the diversity of people learning digital skills now and in the future. It’s important that the government continues to build on the many excellent training opportunities already available, such as the wide range of popular digital apprenticeships,” she added.

Allmark also stated that “there’s never been such a significant demand for digital skills – not just for an increasing number of digital occupations, but across all occupations as a result of businesses having to digitally transform during COVID”.

According to a recent study, the majority of surveyed HR decision-makers in the UK said they believed reliance on advanced digital skills was going to increase over the next five years. Despite this, participation in A-Level and further education IT courses has declined, with the number of students taking IT subjects at GCSE level falling by 40% since 2015.

However, there is always time to retrain: the new legislative measures aim to assist adults in gaining the competencies required for better-paid employment, which often require candidates to prove that they have the necessary skills. These jobs were found to be notoriously understaffed, with employers unable to fill a quarter of their vacancies due to a lack of employees with the right skills even prior to the pandemic, according to the government.

Allmark said that the areas dealing with “significant shortages of skilled people” are “vital sectors” including artificial intelligence, cyber security, and software development. 

“In addition, the digital transformation in the NHS has accelerated during the pandemic with technology being widely used across the service,” she added.

IBM unveiled a suite of new artificial intelligence (AI) services on Monday ahead of its virtual IBM Think 2021 conference. 

The new features include software that teaches AI how to translate code, a cloud migration service, and more functions for the firm’s Watson Assistant. 

The most interesting of the announcements was a Rosetta Stone-like service for programming code called ‘CodeNet‘, which is an expansive dataset designed to teach AI and machine learning systems how to translate code. It comprises some 14 million snippets and 500 million lines of code spread across more than 55 legacy and active languages, such as Cobol, Java, C++, and Python. The dataset is constructed in a way that allows for bidirectional translation, enabling Cobol legacy code to be translated into Java, for example. 

«Given its wealth of programmes written in a multitude of languages, we believe Project CodeNet can serve as a benchmark dataset for source-to-source translation and do for AI and code what the ImageNet dataset did years ago for computer vision,» the firm said. 

AI featured heavily in the updates, with new features for Cloud Pak for Data, an SaaS integration platform called ‘Watson Orchestrate’, and a Watson Assistant collaboration with healthcare providers handling increased workloads due to the pandemic. The tech giant also revealed ‘Maximo Mobile’, a mobile platform based on IBM’s Maximo asset management service. 

The updates also included a new cloud migration service called ‘Mono2Micro’ that also uses AI to analyse large enterprise applications and provide recommendations on how to best adapt them for the move to the cloud. IBM said it can simplify and speed up an error-prone process, which can reduce costs and maximise returns on investment.

Beyond artificial intelligence, the announcements included a hybrid cloud-based financial services platform, built with Red Hat OpenShift. There was also a $1 billion investment to support IBM’s partner ecosystem which includes skills training, and a streamlined service for quantum computing called Qiskit Runtime.

NHS Digital has been accused of a potential conflict of interest over contracts given to IT service Accenture, where two of its board members previously worked. 

David Rowland, the director of the Centre for Health and Public Interest (CHPI) told The Financial Times that the close links between the two firms were «concerning».

The digital body, which provides data and IT systems for the NHS, handed over 15% of its yearly budget to Accenture, with contracts worth around £33 million out of its total £218 million operating expenditure, according to its own 2018-2019 accounts. 

What’s more, the family of another non-executive, Deborah Oakley, is also listed as owning shares in Accenture, according to a ‘Declarations and Conflicts of Interest Register’ that was published on 30 June last year. Oakley has said the shares were held by her husband and she herself has never worked at the consultancy. However, the large sums of public money that have been exchanged has caught the attention of the CHPI think tank. 

Rowland told the FT that it is «concerning that there are a number of close links between the two organisations which give rise to potential conflicts of interest and opportunities for undue influence». 

In a statement given to IT Pro, Accenture said its contracts with NHS Digital «were awarded following a competitive public tender process.

«We are proud of our work supporting major NHS projects including the delivery of Microsoft Teams during Covid and significant improvements to NHS Mail, Office 365 and cyber security services for all NHS users,» it added.

Accenture is already facing criticism for charging high fees for its services during the pandemic, including its work on the government’s £37 billion test and trace programme. The consultancy firms received 18 contracts related to the UK’s pandemic response, according to the research firm Trussell.

Since the start of 2016, it has also won a total of 94 contracts from public authorities worth around £480m. 

Oracle has won a contract with Premier League to provide it with technology to power new in-match statistics that aim to give a deeper understanding of live action on the pitch.

Starting with the 2021/22 season, “Match Insights – Powered by Oracle Cloud” will present advanced player performance data and statistics during global broadcast coverage, and across the Premier League’s social channels.

This includes the tracking of player positions, a live win probability scale, and a momentum tracker that measures the likelihood of the team in possession scoring a goal in the next 10 seconds.

Machine learning models are also set to be developed to generate immediate results based on live data streams, real-time tracking data, and facts collected on each of the League’s players and from thousands of previous matches.

“We are always looking at new ways to bring the Premier League to life and enhance the analysis of the competition,” said Premier League chief executive, Richard Masters. “Oracle is a global brand with a great track record of driving innovation, and we look forward to working together to bring new levels of engagement to fans around the world.”

Oracle’s deal follows similar efforts by tech companies to offer technical expertise to the footballing world, including AWS’s partnership with the Bundesliga last year. Germany’s top football league signed up to a range of machine learning, analytical, and storage services to build a statistical platform that provides viewers with real-time data on player statistics, game outcomes, and predictions on future play.

Meanwhile, the sports industry was urged to reform its cyber security last year after the managing director of a Premier League football club narrowly avoided losing out £1 million to a phishing scam. According to a report from the National Cyber Security Centre, the managing director entered his credentials into a fake Office 365 page operated by hackers.

Dell has unveiled more details surrounding its Apex services platform as part of the first day of its annual Dell Technologies World event.

First announced by the company in October of last year, the Apex Project aims to consolidate Dell’s ‘as a service’ cloud products as well as facilitate the process of acquiring, managing, maintaining, and servicing physical IT infrastructure by its customers.

Less than three months after launching a private cloud platform, Apex Cloud Services now also includes hybrid cloud and deployment, the latter of which was found to be up to 86% faster than a do-it-yourself hybrid cloud model, according to a recent Storage Review report, commissioned by Dell.

Apart from the addition to its Cloud Services, Dell has also unveiled Apex Data Storage Services, Apex Custom Solutions, as well as the Apex Console.

Apex Data Storage Services offers three performance tiers of block and file enterprise storage, with capacity starting as low as 50 terabytes. Available as one or three-year subscriptions, the new offering lets businesses “focus on data, not drives”, according to Dell CMO Allison Dew.

Apex Custom Solutions, described as “the industry’s broadest infrastructure portfolio to customers as-a-Service”, is comprised of Apex Flex On Demand and Apex Data Center Utility, which allow enterprises to customise their aaS experience based on their “specific technology needs, operational model, and consumption habits,” said Dew. While Flex On Demand provides Dell Technologies servers, storage, data protection, and hyperconverged infrastructure as-a-Service, the Data Center Utility suite supplies custom metering and managed services applied across customers’ data centres.

“You can pick any infrastructure from Dell Technologies, and any level of management you would like. We then deliver it to you on an aaS basis. From storage or server racks, all the way to a complete data centre, APEX custom solutions can help you turn your IT infrastructure into a custom solution to meet your individual needs,” said Dew.

Lastly, Dell unveiled the Apex Console, which lets customers monitor and manage Apex services using actionable insights and predictive analytics. Described by Dew as a “real-time access to system health and performance of your services”, the console provides usage and spending reports which help businesses adjust their Dell services to their needs and budget.

According to the CMO, staying on top of current tech trends and advancements can make managing digital transformation “a complex undertaking” for businesses.

“Enter Dell Technologies Apex, a breakthrough portfolio of aaS offerings that help simplify your digital transformation by increasing IT agility and control,” she said, adding that the new offerings are available starting 5 May.

Speaking at an introductory panel of Dell Technologies EMEA executives, SVP Claire Vyvyan highlighted the differences between Apex and the public cloud.

“It’s very different because we can bring it at scale, we can bring it to the edge of your infrastructure, we can bring it to your data centre, (…) we can work with your preferred service providers rather than in big global data centres,” she told Dell Technologies World attendees. “And I think that’s going to be really important in the future, when the proliferation of data is at the edge.”

Much like accountants themselves, accountancy firms often have an unfair reputation for being stuffy, risk-averse and a little behind the times. The finance sector generally isn’t the first to adopt emerging technologies, often preferring to play it safe and wait until products have proven themselves before cautiously dipping a toe in. Sometimes, however, you have to jump in with both feet, and the COVID-19 pandemic has forced many organisations to jump-start their digital transformation efforts.

For London-based accountancy firm Kreston Reeves, the onset of remote working wasn’t a radical departure from the norm. The company runs eight offices throughout the UK, and has been using Citrix’s virtual desktop and application products for the best part of a decade, delivered on top of Nutanix’s hyper-converged infrastructure. This, combined with cloud services like Microsoft 365, gave the company a strong existing foundation to build on when COVID forced staff out of their offices.

“Prior to the pandemic, we were quite relaxed about people working from home,” says Kreston Reeves IT and operations director, Chris Madden, “although on a realistic day, you may have perhaps 40 people working from home and the rest would be in an office or client meetings – so you’ve probably got about a 500 versus 40 split, which is probably typical for our industry. We were moving towards an agile working model, but hadn’t quite got there. And then obviously, the pandemic struck, at which point everybody worked from home, whether they wanted to or not!”

Face time

While the company’s existing Citrix deployment meant that staff were already able to access all their usual applications while working remotely, collaboration was taken care of by a rapid rollout of Microsoft Teams, which Madden says has been invaluable for collaboration both inside and outside the business. 

“We went into the pandemic, got everybody set up, and then immediately started pushing out Microsoft Teams, particularly video conferencing, within our Citrix environment,” he explains. “That meant that people were able to carry on face to face communication, but more importantly with our clients, because [they] have an accountant they want to get advice from, and it’s a lot nicer if they can still see their accountant, even if they can’t get in the same room.”

The biggest surprise, he says, is how quickly the company has adapted to home working. If the business and its employees hadn’t been forced to change their behaviours and mindsets, he speculates that it would still be talking about how to roll remote working out.

“The only issues that we had, really, were getting everybody set up on the remote access apps to get the security codes for the two-factor authentication, and also any other apps they needed. So there was a rush to the help desk and the IT team to say ‘I need all this set up immediately’ from about 500 people, but in terms of the technology stack, it was there, it was working, and it did what it was supposed to do, which was quite a relief.”

From a hardware perspective, the shift to home working required additional investment in peripherals like headsets, webcams, docking stations and external screens, but it also gave Madden and his team the opportunity to replace the Dell Wyse thin-client devices used by many employees with laptops. The Citrix add-on for Microsoft Teams didn’t play nicely with the thin OS the company’s Wyse terminals ran on, he says, so rather than upgrading all of its thin-client devices, the company chose to pivot to laptops for all. This approach also gives the benefit of a single, consistent user experience for all its staff whether they’re at home or in the office.

Accelerated agility

This feeds into the firm’s plans for post-pandemic transformation; once things open back up, Kreston Reeves is going fully agile. The company implemented a desk-booking system earlier in the pandemic to help with risk management and social distancing for staff who had to be in the office, and plans to use that once lockdowns lift to support a hot-desking environment. 

“Hopefully, that will enable better collaboration,” says Madden; “you’ll get to know your colleagues a lot better. By giving everybody laptops and having the desks set up the same, it means you can just plug in at any old desk that you happen to be using. And so hopefully it should mean that we’re making more productive use of the space.”

Madden anticipates that this new model will involve staff working from home for roughly half the week and says that this flexibility has been a hit with staff, as it allows them to save time and money on their commute. As part of this process, Kreston Reeves has also reevaluated its use of office space, and plans to downsize its London premises.

“I think what it’s allowed us to do is look at our property footprint, what we’re using offices for, and why people want to go into an office. That’s feeding into our review of our office space and what we’re going to need for the future; so we’re looking to move our London office, and if this was done a few years ago, we’d have probably carried on with a desk per person,” he says. “Now we’re going into a location where there will be about 30% fewer desks than people.”

Another major change that COVID has enabled is the use of remote collaboration with clients. In addition to video conferencing with clients, recent regulatory changes have allowed Kreston Reeves to audit customers’ accounts remotely, rather than sending a battalion of auditors with laptops to their premises. This, Madden says, will save staff a lot of time that would previously be spent travelling up and down the country.

“I think it will bring a lot of changes, and I think it will probably mean people are more productive, probably get more out of their day. But that also means they probably get a better work-life balance, because it’s not all about working ever more hours, and because you haven’t got a commute, it’s an extra hour of work. It’s about giving that hour back and saying, well actually, we can get everything we need you to do in that time scale, and you’ve now saved yourself several hours of travel time a day, and that’s back for you.”

Looking to the future, the company has started experimenting with AI and robotic process automation technology to improve its operational efficiency, and is planning to invest more heavily in cloud services for back-office tasks. Madden explains that although the accountancy industry is still reliant on niche on-premise software products, many supporting services can be transitioned to cloud-based equivalents to take advantage of cost and availability benefits.

“I think the sector as a whole is a cautious sector, which is one of its strengths and one of its weaknesses, depending on your point of view. I do think it’s accelerated, and talking to some of my peers, there’s very much a sense that the pace of change is quicker.”

“The key thing for businesses is, how do you capture that willingness during the pandemic to move at pace and be willing to change, when you’re now back in the offices? And that’s going to be the biggest challenge for businesses, I think.”

Welcome to issue 16 of IT Pro 20/20.

This time we look at our strained, confusing, and often contentious relationship with artificial intelligence, and how that is shaping development.

We’ve addressed some of the more concerning issues surrounding the eager rollout of the technology, including whether AI has the potential to make us lazy, and whether it will make spying on employees a simple matter of flicking a switch.

It’s not all artificial intelligence, though. As a special bonus, we’ve also spoken to some of the leading figures behind Lithuania’s campaign to become Europe’s fintech capital – ousting the UK in the process.

The next IT Pro 20/20 will be available on 31 May – previous issues can be found here. If you would like to receive each issue in your inbox as they release, you can subscribe to our mailing list here.