New research published today by security vendor ZoneAlarm, the Facebook Child Safety Report, analysed what 600 kids aged between 10 and 15 and located around the world were up to Facebook. The end result reveals those common behaviours that increase the exposure of children to bullying online, predatory threat and other security problems. The major factor, surprise surprise, that contributes to an increase risk late night usage.
Three activities revealed a positive link with increased risk: adding friends that could well be strangers, playing those Facebook games which require access to account information and, as mentioned, using Facebook late into the night. This latter activity results, according to the research at least, in children experiencing almost twice as many problems as those kids who are offline before midnight.
What's more, these Feral Facebook kids are four times more likely to have large networks of Facebook friends that consist mostly of people they have never actually met. Another of the risk factors identified by the ZoneAlarm report.
The fact that kids active on Facebook late into the night and beyond are exposing themselves to increased risk really comes as no surprise to me, or anyone with a modicum of common sense or understanding of parental responsibility I would have thought, given that such behaviour suggests there is a total lack of parental supervision being exercised. Especially when you consider that the report reveals many of these kids are still using Facebook after 3am. 60% of these …
Over half of the malware detected on Android devices by Kaspersky were, unsurprisingly, SMS Trojans designed to relieve the victim of money by sending SMS text messages to premium rate numbers without the users consent or knowledge. The most popular method of doing this, it would seem, is for malware to disguise itself as the OperaMini browser client such as all the programs that comprise the OpFake malware family which, with a 38.3% share, proved to be the most widespread in the malware market.
The Imperva research analysed the content of a number of online hacker communities, including many lesser known forums in order to get a more accurate snapshot of what those doing the hacking are actually discussing. By looking at a total of more than 400,000 different conversational threads, Imperva was able to determine that SQL injection and DDoS, with a 19% share of the total conversational traffic each, were the most talked about threat topics. That's just over a third of all discussions in the hacker forums being focused on training and tutorials for data theft techniques which are not high on the enterprise security strategy agenda.
According to the latest Freelancer Fast 50 survey, if you are a mobile apps developer than it's pretty good news overall with job offers in both Android and iOS marketplaces on the up. However, Android developers should have the broadest smiles on their faces after the survey showed that job offers for them were up by 16% on the previous quarter. Meanwhile, although I would hardly have used the word 'stagnate' to describe the slower rise in iOS developer job positions as the Freelancer press release chose to, iOS jobs are slowing somewhat: up by a more modest 8%. Still, as I say, it does suggest that app development is a good place to be right now.
It doesn't matter whether the hardware itself is a PC or laptop, removable drive, tablet or smartphone, the ugly truth remains that most people simply assume that if the device is dead then the data has died along with it. Actually, data lost through software corruption or hardware failure is more often than not recoverable - at least partially. The study revealed that 62% of those workers questioned who had lost data during the last year were able to recover it one way or another. This is good news, of course, and data recovery experts have gained some quite remarkable skills in bringing data back to life from scenarios where you just wouldn't think it plausible that any information would survive. I have witnessed laptops that were victims of serious fire, smartphones crushed under truck wheels and hard drives fried by electrical surges all give up their data, or at least much of it, when interrogated in the right way.
The latest version of Windows has changed beyond all recognition, or at least it has from the Microsoft perspective. Truth be told, it's pretty old news for the tablet toting, screen swiping, design desiring, cloud-based trend setters of today. I heard Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO, talking up Windows 8 on the radio earlier today and he spoke excitedly in terms of how this is as big as the first IBM PC for example, and how Microsoft is re-imagining the world from the world up with Windows 8. Certainly it needs to be a success if Microsoft is to get a proper foothold, even at the very bottom of a very tall ladder, on the smartphone and tablet market where Apple with iOS and Google with …
At the very top of the avoid list comes insecurity. Your website doesn't actually have to be insecure to turn the shoppers away, but just give the impression that it might not be secure. This should be engraved in stone and filed under 'well duh!' to be honest, but it seems that too many online retailers still fail to take security seriously enough to ensure that not only is the transactional security and overall data protection implementation watertight, but that investment in security is communicated through the design and site content to potential customers.
The Telegraph newspaper reveals that intelligence sources it approached have stated that the true figure is closer to 1000 cyber attacks each and every hour. Attacks that attempt to either disable some systems or steal secrets from others, with infrastructure and communications disruption a favourite aim. My only surprise at this story is that the number is so low to be honest.