By Christopher Mims | Wall Street Journal
I'm as big a believer in the transformational power of cloud computing as anyone you'll meet. Smartphones, which are constantly seeking and retrieving data, don't make sense without the cloud, and any business that isn't racing to push its data and software into someone else's data center is, in my view, setting itself up for disruption by a competitor who is.
But cloud advocates are fond of declaring that 100% of computing will someday reside in the cloud. And many companies are in business to sell you on that notion.
Here's the reality: Getting data into and out of the cloud is harder than most engineers, or at least their managers, often are willing to admit.
The problem is bandwidth. If you're a company simply seeking to save the cost and headache of storing data yourself, the cloud is great as long as all you need to do is transfer data back and forth via high-speed wiring.
But in the world of mass connectivity - in which people need to get information on an array of mobile devices - bandwidth is pretty slow. Any business that sends data to mobile devices, be it airline reservation systems for consumers or business data for a mobile sales force, grapples with the limitations of wireless networks. Overall, according to the World Economic Forum, the U.S. ranks 35th in the world in terms of bandwidth per user.
That's one reason that mobile apps have become a predominant way to do things on the Internet, at least on smartphones. Some of the data and processing power is handled within your device.
The problem of how to get things done when we're dependent on the cloud is becoming all the more acute as more and more objects become "smart," or able to sense their environments, connect to the Internet, and even receive commands remotely. Everything from jet engines to refrigerators is being pushed onto wireless networks and joining the "Internet of Things."
Modern 3G and 4G cellular networks simply aren't fast enough to transmit data from devices to the cloud at the pace it is generated, and as every mundane object at home and at work gets in on this game, it's only going to get worse.
Luckily there's an obvious solution: Stop focusing on the cloud, and start figuring out how to store and process the torrent of data being generated by the Internet of Things (also known as the industrial Internet) on the things themselves, or on devices that sit between our things and the Internet.
Marketers at Cisco Systems Inc. have already come up with a name for this phenomenon: fog computing.
I like the term. Yes, it makes you want to do a Liz Lemon eye roll. But like cloud computing before it - also a marketing term for a phenomenon that was already under way - it's a good visual metaphor for what's going on.
Whereas the cloud is "up there" in the sky somewhere, distant and remote and deliberately abstracted, the "fog" is close to the ground, right where things are getting done. It consists not of powerful servers, but weaker and more dispersed computers of the sort that are making their way into appliances, factories, cars, street lights and every other piece of our material culture.
Cisco sells routers, which aside from storage has got to be the least sexy business in tech. To make them more appealing, and to sell them to new markets before Chinese competitors disrupt Cisco's existing revenue streams, Cisco wants to turn its routers into hubs for gathering data and making decisions about what to do with it. In Cisco's vision, its smart routers will never talk to the cloud unless they have to - say, to alert operators to an emergency on a sensor-laden rail car on which one of these routers acts as the nerve center.
International Business Machines Corp. has a similar initiative to push computing out "to the edge," an effort to, as IBM executive Paul Brody puts it, turn the traditional, cloud-based Internet "inside out." (When people talk about "edge computing," what they literally mean is the edge of the network, the periphery where the Internet ends and the real world begins. Data centers are in the "center" of the network, personal computers, phones and surveillance cameras are on the edge.)
Just as the cloud physically consists of servers harnessed together, in IBM's research project, the fog consists of all the computers that are already around us, tied together. On one level, asking our smart devices to, for example, send software updates to one another, rather than routing them through the cloud, could make the fog a direct rival to the cloud for some functions.
The bottom line is, we just have too much data. And we're just getting started. Airplanes are a great example of this. In a new Boeing Co. 747, almost every part of the plane is connected to the Internet, recording and, in some cases, sending continuous streams of data about its status. General Electric Co. has said that in a single flight, one of its jet engines generates half a terabyte of data.
Cheap sensors generate lots of "big" data, and it's surprisingly useful. So-called predictive analytics lets companies like GE know which part of a jet engine might need maintenance, even before the plane carrying it has landed.
Why else do you think Google Inc. and Facebook Inc. are talking about alternate means of Internet access, including via balloons and drones? Existing carriers aren't getting the job done. Until the U.S. gets the fast wireless and wired Internet it deserves, computing things as close to the user as possible is going to be critical to making the Internet of Things responsive enough to be usable.
The future of much enterprise computing remains in the cloud, but the really transformative computing of the future? It's going to happen right here, in the objects that surround us - in the fog.
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Thursday, May 29, 2014
Friday, May 23, 2014
Sophisticated Google Drive Phishing Campaign Persists
Zeljka Zorz | Help Net Security
Symantec researchers are once again warning about a sophisticated and persistent phishing campaign targeting Google users.
The victims are hit with fake emails sporting a subject line that simply says "Documents" and carry a link to the phishing page.
"This scam is more effective than the millions of phishing messages we see every day because the Google Drive phishing page is actually served over SSL from the legitimate Google Drive service itself," they warn.
The corrupted language names in the bottom right drop-down menu are not enough to alert most users to the spoofed nature of the page, as they will most likely believe that it's simply a bug - if they notice the menu at all.
"This script has the same name (performact.php) that we saw in the original Google Docs and Google Drive phishing scam, suggesting that the same group of attackers (or at least the same phishing kit) is involved," the researchers noted.
The danger is even bigger now than before. "Shortly after we published our original blog post, Google reduced prices for Google Drive significantly which surely increased the number of people at risk. Smartphones are now also being sold with premium Google Drive accounts pre-installed, making Google Drive an even more enticing phishing target," they added.
Users who enter their login credentials in this phishing page will not only have them compromised, but will also be redirected to compromised Brazilian website hosting a Trojan, and possibly get infected with malware, too.
Symantec researchers are once again warning about a sophisticated and persistent phishing campaign targeting Google users.
The victims are hit with fake emails sporting a subject line that simply says "Documents" and carry a link to the phishing page.
"This scam is more effective than the millions of phishing messages we see every day because the Google Drive phishing page is actually served over SSL from the legitimate Google Drive service itself," they warn.
The corrupted language names in the bottom right drop-down menu are not enough to alert most users to the spoofed nature of the page, as they will most likely believe that it's simply a bug - if they notice the menu at all.
"This script has the same name (performact.php) that we saw in the original Google Docs and Google Drive phishing scam, suggesting that the same group of attackers (or at least the same phishing kit) is involved," the researchers noted.
The danger is even bigger now than before. "Shortly after we published our original blog post, Google reduced prices for Google Drive significantly which surely increased the number of people at risk. Smartphones are now also being sold with premium Google Drive accounts pre-installed, making Google Drive an even more enticing phishing target," they added.
Users who enter their login credentials in this phishing page will not only have them compromised, but will also be redirected to compromised Brazilian website hosting a Trojan, and possibly get infected with malware, too.
Wednesday, May 14, 2014
Clouds Are Convenient, But Be Paranoid To Protect Personal Data
NPR Transcript | Listen to the Story
MICHEL MARTIN, Host
NICOLE PERLROTH, Technology Report, NY Time, Interviewee
For many of us, data clouds like Google Drive and Dropbox have replaced clunky hard-drives and easy-to-lose USB sticks. But how secure is our data in these clouds?
MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Switching gears now. You're probably seeing a lot of ads for smartphones and other gadgets that a graduate might like. There are a lot out there, and they're changing all the time. And that made us think that technology is not the only thing changing quickly. There are also new ways to store information. We're no longer storing documents and photos on hard drives or USB sticks or even CDs or floppy disks, if you remember those.
Many people today rely on clouds like Google Drive or Dropbox. And these allow us to access important documents anywhere on almost any device. But we wanted to know just how secure are clouds, and what should we know before we use them? Joining us to tell us more is Nicole Perlroth. She is technology reporter for The New York Times, and she's with us now. Nicole, thanks so much for joining us.
NICOLE PERLROTH: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
MARTIN: For people who are not familiar with the term, can you just tell us what a cloud is?
PERLROTH: So the cloud is a really nebulous term - no pun intended - for computing done remotely. So you're using the cloud if you are working off of your Google Drive and you're creating a document in Google Drive, you're working from the cloud. You are using the cloud when you do online banking. You're using the cloud when you store something in a Dropbox account. And you're even using the cloud when you're watching Netflix because Netflix outsources its data storage to Amazon's Web Services, which is a cloud-computing provider.
MARTIN: Do you even have a choice anymore about whether you use the cloud?
PERLROTH: You do have a choice, but it's getting - people are moving to the cloud at a very fast rate. So gone are the days for small companies when most of their data is stored down the hall in a computing room. A lot of small and medium-sized businesses now outsource their data storage and data security to services like Amazon and Google and Rackspace and a number of cloud providers.
And, yes, you can still store documents on your computer or on your hard drive or on a time machine, but a lot of people are now migrating to the cloud because it's cheap. It's easy to access your documents from different devices, which is very convenient. And in a lot of businesses' cases, it's cheaper for them to sort of outsource their data storage and data security to someone like Amazon than to go build out their own warehouses to store their data themselves.
MARTIN: And of course, if you lose that particular device or if it breaks, of course people are just, you know, they're stuck. They're lost. It's almost like losing that old address book. And this way you - it's automatically sort of available somewhere else.
PERLROTH: Right.
MARTIN: But is there a downside? I mean, a lot of people are familiar with those big security breaches at the retailers that became known at the end of last year - right? - after the kind of Christmas or even in the middle of the Christmas shopping season. A lot of people were just terrified that they were suddenly exposed and all their personal data was exposed. Is there something that people should know or be aware of about this?
PERLROTH: Yeah, there are definitely risks. And one of them is, say, your cloud provider goes out of business. Say they're having financial troubles and they go out of business, and they take all your data with them. Say that there is an outage - and this has actually happened several times, usually due to storms. But Amazon has a huge data warehouse in Virginia, and there's been a couple times where it's had an outage. And suddenly you saw all these services they interface with, like Instagram and Pinterest and Netflix, all suddenly have problems because so much of their businesses are dependent on Amazon's - Amazon Web Services.
So, you know, you want to make sure that whoever you're storing your data within the cloud isn't likely to go out of business tomorrow and same for security. You know, all - what we're doing now with the cloud is we're sort of aggregating so much different data from so many different services in one cloud storage provider. And so if that cloud storage provider is not handling their infrastructure correctly or is not devoting enough resources to their security or hiring the right personnel or ensuring that they're not going to go out of business anytime soon or that a storm at one of their facilities doesn't affect all of their data, then you're certainly putting your data at risk.
MARTIN: So what are some of the common sense things that you do to insulate or protect yourself from these negative consequences? We have a about a minute and a half left. Can you just give us some things that people can be doing on a commonsense basis 'cause you surely can't - you can't, you know, go and check their hiring records and say are you sure you got the right people here?
PERLROTH: Right.
MARTIN: What can you do?
PERLROTH: Right. So I am notoriously paranoid because I am a cybersecurity reporter, and we have - ourselves here at the New York Times - dealt with a breach from a foreign nation state. So I'm notoriously paranoid. So I won't put anything very crucial - I won't put any of my sources' information in my Dropbox account, for example, or on Google Drive. But I do use it for things like my photos. I will - you know, I don't just want my photos saved on my phone. I will save them to my computer, and then I'll save them to my Dropbox account so that if I lose my phone or my computer crashes, at least I can access my photos from my Dropbox account.
But for things like my Social Security number or things that, you know, if a cybercriminal got a hold of them or the NSA got a hold of them, I would be in deep trouble, I don't put that stuff in the cloud. And I would say that I'm very much on the paranoid side of the spectrum. But if you want to be very secure, I would be very careful about what you're storing where.
MARTIN: Nicole Perlroth is technology reporter for The New York Times. She covers cybersecurity issues, as she just mentioned. And she was kind enough to join us from New York City. Nicole, thanks so much for joining us.
PERLROTH: Thanks so much for having me.
MICHEL MARTIN, Host
NICOLE PERLROTH, Technology Report, NY Time, Interviewee
For many of us, data clouds like Google Drive and Dropbox have replaced clunky hard-drives and easy-to-lose USB sticks. But how secure is our data in these clouds?
MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Switching gears now. You're probably seeing a lot of ads for smartphones and other gadgets that a graduate might like. There are a lot out there, and they're changing all the time. And that made us think that technology is not the only thing changing quickly. There are also new ways to store information. We're no longer storing documents and photos on hard drives or USB sticks or even CDs or floppy disks, if you remember those.
Many people today rely on clouds like Google Drive or Dropbox. And these allow us to access important documents anywhere on almost any device. But we wanted to know just how secure are clouds, and what should we know before we use them? Joining us to tell us more is Nicole Perlroth. She is technology reporter for The New York Times, and she's with us now. Nicole, thanks so much for joining us.
NICOLE PERLROTH: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
MARTIN: For people who are not familiar with the term, can you just tell us what a cloud is?
PERLROTH: So the cloud is a really nebulous term - no pun intended - for computing done remotely. So you're using the cloud if you are working off of your Google Drive and you're creating a document in Google Drive, you're working from the cloud. You are using the cloud when you do online banking. You're using the cloud when you store something in a Dropbox account. And you're even using the cloud when you're watching Netflix because Netflix outsources its data storage to Amazon's Web Services, which is a cloud-computing provider.
MARTIN: Do you even have a choice anymore about whether you use the cloud?
PERLROTH: You do have a choice, but it's getting - people are moving to the cloud at a very fast rate. So gone are the days for small companies when most of their data is stored down the hall in a computing room. A lot of small and medium-sized businesses now outsource their data storage and data security to services like Amazon and Google and Rackspace and a number of cloud providers.
And, yes, you can still store documents on your computer or on your hard drive or on a time machine, but a lot of people are now migrating to the cloud because it's cheap. It's easy to access your documents from different devices, which is very convenient. And in a lot of businesses' cases, it's cheaper for them to sort of outsource their data storage and data security to someone like Amazon than to go build out their own warehouses to store their data themselves.
MARTIN: And of course, if you lose that particular device or if it breaks, of course people are just, you know, they're stuck. They're lost. It's almost like losing that old address book. And this way you - it's automatically sort of available somewhere else.
PERLROTH: Right.
MARTIN: But is there a downside? I mean, a lot of people are familiar with those big security breaches at the retailers that became known at the end of last year - right? - after the kind of Christmas or even in the middle of the Christmas shopping season. A lot of people were just terrified that they were suddenly exposed and all their personal data was exposed. Is there something that people should know or be aware of about this?
PERLROTH: Yeah, there are definitely risks. And one of them is, say, your cloud provider goes out of business. Say they're having financial troubles and they go out of business, and they take all your data with them. Say that there is an outage - and this has actually happened several times, usually due to storms. But Amazon has a huge data warehouse in Virginia, and there's been a couple times where it's had an outage. And suddenly you saw all these services they interface with, like Instagram and Pinterest and Netflix, all suddenly have problems because so much of their businesses are dependent on Amazon's - Amazon Web Services.
So, you know, you want to make sure that whoever you're storing your data within the cloud isn't likely to go out of business tomorrow and same for security. You know, all - what we're doing now with the cloud is we're sort of aggregating so much different data from so many different services in one cloud storage provider. And so if that cloud storage provider is not handling their infrastructure correctly or is not devoting enough resources to their security or hiring the right personnel or ensuring that they're not going to go out of business anytime soon or that a storm at one of their facilities doesn't affect all of their data, then you're certainly putting your data at risk.
MARTIN: So what are some of the common sense things that you do to insulate or protect yourself from these negative consequences? We have a about a minute and a half left. Can you just give us some things that people can be doing on a commonsense basis 'cause you surely can't - you can't, you know, go and check their hiring records and say are you sure you got the right people here?
PERLROTH: Right.
MARTIN: What can you do?
PERLROTH: Right. So I am notoriously paranoid because I am a cybersecurity reporter, and we have - ourselves here at the New York Times - dealt with a breach from a foreign nation state. So I'm notoriously paranoid. So I won't put anything very crucial - I won't put any of my sources' information in my Dropbox account, for example, or on Google Drive. But I do use it for things like my photos. I will - you know, I don't just want my photos saved on my phone. I will save them to my computer, and then I'll save them to my Dropbox account so that if I lose my phone or my computer crashes, at least I can access my photos from my Dropbox account.
But for things like my Social Security number or things that, you know, if a cybercriminal got a hold of them or the NSA got a hold of them, I would be in deep trouble, I don't put that stuff in the cloud. And I would say that I'm very much on the paranoid side of the spectrum. But if you want to be very secure, I would be very careful about what you're storing where.
MARTIN: Nicole Perlroth is technology reporter for The New York Times. She covers cybersecurity issues, as she just mentioned. And she was kind enough to join us from New York City. Nicole, thanks so much for joining us.
PERLROTH: Thanks so much for having me.
Friday, May 9, 2014
Meet The Man Who Invented The Browser Tab
Joseph Bernstein | BuzzFeed
Adam Stiles recalls 'the first tab' and how he came to create the atomic unit of internet navigation.
In the summer of 1997, a 25-year-old Pasadena software developer named Adam Stiles started working on a new web browser in his spare time. On January 4 of the following year, when Stiles published SimulBrowse, the first users would have noticed a peculiar feature at the bottom of the browser window: small grey boxes, each corresponding to a different webpage, which could be toggled between by clicking.
Those boxes were the first browser tabs, the now-standard unit of internet navigation.
SimulBrowse - which Stiles would soon change to NetCaptor and run until 2005 - was the first tabbed web browser in the contemporary sense. And it wasn't an evolutionary hiccup; it was directly responsible for the incorporation of the tabbed browsing standard into Mozilla in 2002; after that, the time of the tab was nigh.
The tab has had a profound influence on the way we experience the web. Its creation has directly contributed to the internet's collective attention problem and obsession with multi-tasking. Not only has the tab changed the way humans experience and organize the internet, it has changed the vernacular. The tab has rendered the term "webpage" quaint and, in some circles, has acquired its own loaded meaning (not to mention its own newsletter) as a unit of thoroughly dispensable and or aggravating content. BuzzFeed asked Stiles, now the CTO of the mobile commerce startup Tap Theory, about his role as the Father of the Tab.
Did you have an "aha!" moment, when you realized that tabbed browsing would be a good thing to put in NetCaptor?
Adam Stiles: NetCaptor (originally SimulBrowse) was built from the beginning to be a tabbed browser. The HTML editor I was using at the time (HomeSite) had tabs, so I was used to flipping between a bunch of HTML documents. I wanted the same thing in my browser, so I built it. At first it was just an experiment to see if I could do it.
Were there any major technical challenges inherent to adding tab functionality? Can you, in layman's terms, explain the process of adding tabs to a web browser?
Technically I didn't add tabs to a web browser - I built a web browser with tabs that embedded the Microsoft HTML rendering engine on each tab. There's no way a single developer could do this part-time if Microsoft hadn’t made it easy to embed the rendering engine from their browser in other applications. I focused most of my time on the user experience and "chrome" like toolbars, menus, tabs, and didn’t have to think much about how to render HTML. Things only got really complicated when I was implementing ad blocking, popup blocking, phishing detection, etc.
Do you remember what the first two tabs were?
I have no idea which the first two tabs would have been, though I was a big Slashdot.org fan, so I wouldn't be surprised if that was one of them.
Did you have any inkling when you made the tabbed browser that the feature would become so ubiquitous?
I don't think I did. I also didn't have any idea that it would become my full-time job from 1999 to 2004, and that it would fund my next startup.
Did you have a moment when you realized that the feature you invented was in fact becoming a standard?
I don't remember a specific moment, because it took many years (1997 through 2005 or so). There were IE-shells like NetCaptor, then Mozilla/Firefox, followed by Opera, Safari and IE.
Do you see any downsides to tabbed browsing, particularly the way we use it today? Other than the obvious, how do you think tabbed browsing has changed the way we use the internet?
I think tabbed browsing gets out of control when users don't have good bookmarking systems. I have friends who end up with 50 tabs open at a time. They want to return to a given page at some later date, but don't have a good method of saving those for later or remembering to return. On mobile, that's solved reasonably well with apps like Instapaper and Pocket. But on desktop, that problem doesn't seem to be solved. Bookmarking systems can feel to heavy or permanent. And if you have been around a while, you know bookmarking apps tend to come and go (ie Delicious and Kippt).
I wonder if you feel any sense of responsibility or ownership, good or bad, about the culture of tab proliferation that you described? Do you have any personal feelings about it?
I feel entirely neutral about it. Tabbed browsers are just tools. You can use them well, or you can use them poorly. Chrome is now my favorite browser, and I have a reasonable number of tabs open. I don’t have a personal problem with tab proliferation. If I did, maybe I'd try to solve that too.
Are you aware of the use of 'tab' as a slang for a disposable unit of internet content? Like, an annoying article or piece of grist for the discussion mill?
I've never heard it used that way - but I guess it makes sense. But the idea of disposable content makes sense - people want to keep tabs open so they can remember to visit or take action later, but not to go so far as to bookmark a site. And so for many, tabs are used as ephemeral containers of pages they may need later.
Do you wish you'd gotten more credit for the creation of tabbed browsing?
If you'd asked me ten years ago, I probably would have been sad that I didn't get more credit for it, or that I didn’t make more money off the idea. But now, so many years later, I realize that if I hadn't done it, someone else would have built a tabbed browser, probably around the same time. So "tabbed browsing" is a fun part of my story, but I have no regrets.
Thursday, May 8, 2014
Will Investors Regret Target's CEO Ouster? Compare to Sears, JCP
Forbes | Adam Hartung
There was much press this week about Target's CEO and Chairman, Gregg Steinhafel, being forced out. Blame reached the top job after the successful cyber attack on Target last year. But investors, and customers, may regret this somewhat Board level over-reaction to a mounting global problem. Cyber security is a problem for every company.
Richard Clark is probably the USA's foremost authority on cyber attacks. He was on America's National Security Council, and headed the counter-terrorism section. Since leaving government he has increasingly focused on cyber attacks, and advised corporations.
In early 2013 I met Mr. Clark after hearing him speak at a National Association of Corporate Directors meeting. He was surprisingly candid in his comments at the meeting, and after. He pointed out that EVERY company in America was being randomly targeted by cyber criminals, and that EVERY company would have an intrusion. He said it was impossible to do business without working on-line, and simultaneously it was impossible to think any company - of any size - could stop an attack from successfully getting into the company. The only questions one should focus on answering were "How fast can you discover the attack? How well can you contain it? What can you learn to at least stop that from happening again?"
Target was a crime victim, as can happen to any company. So, while the Target attack was large, and not discovered as early as anyone would like, to think that Target is in some way wildly poor at security or protecting its customers is simply naive. Several other large retailers have also had attacks, include Nieman Marcus and Michael's, and it was probably bad luck that Target was the first to have such a big problem happen, and at such a bad time, than anything particularly weak about Target.
We now know that all retailers are trying to learn from this, and every corporation is raising its awareness and actions to improve cyber security. But some company will be next. Target wasn't the first, and won't be the last. Companies everywhere, working with law enforcement, are all reacting to this new form of crime. So firing the CEO, 2 months after firing the CIO (Chief Information Officer), makes for good press, but it is more symbolic than meaningful. It won’t stop the hackers.
Investors and customers have a lot to lose given Target's competitive performance. Where this decision does have great importance is to shareholders and customers. Target has been a decent company for its constituents under this CEO, and done far better than some of its competitors. The share price has doubled in the last 5 years, and Target has proven a capable competitor to Wal-Mart while other retailers have been going out of business (Filene’s Basement, Circuit City, Linens & Things, Dots, etc.) or losing all relevancy (like Abercrombie and Fitch and Best Buy.) And Target has been at least holding its own while some chains have been closing stores like crazy (Radio Shack 1,100 stores, Family Dollar 370 stores, Office Depot 400 stores, etc.)
Just compare Target's performance to JCPenney, who's CEO was fired after screwing up the business far worse than the cyber attack hurt Target. And he was a former hero running Apple's retail stores.
Or, look at Sears Holdings. CEO Ed Lampert was heralded as a hero 6 years ago, but since then the company he leads has had 28 straight quarters of declining sales, and closed 305 stores since 2010. The Kmart division has become a complete non-competitor in discounting, and Sears has lost all relevancy as a chain as it has been outflanked on all sides. CEO Lampert has constantly whittled away at the company's value, and just this week told shareholders that they can simply plan on more store closings in the future.
And vaunted Wal-Mart is undergoing a federal investigation for bribing government officials in Mexico to prop up its business. Wal-Mart is constantly under attack by its employees for shady business practices, and this year lost a National Labor Relations Board case regarding its hours and pay practices. And Wal-Mart remains a lightning rod for controversy as it fights with big cities like Chicago and Washington, DC about its ability to open stores, while Target has flourished in communities large and small with work practices considered acceptable.
Finding a good replacement for Steinhafel will not be easy. CEO's and Boards of Directors, across the nation have been seriously addressing cyber security for the last couple of years. Awareness and protective measures, are up considerable. But there will be future attacks, and some will succeed. It is unclear blaming the CEO for these problems makes any sense - unless there is egregious incompetence.
Now finding a CEO that can grow a business like Target, in a tough retail market, is not easy.
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There was much press this week about Target's CEO and Chairman, Gregg Steinhafel, being forced out. Blame reached the top job after the successful cyber attack on Target last year. But investors, and customers, may regret this somewhat Board level over-reaction to a mounting global problem. Cyber security is a problem for every company.
Richard Clark is probably the USA's foremost authority on cyber attacks. He was on America's National Security Council, and headed the counter-terrorism section. Since leaving government he has increasingly focused on cyber attacks, and advised corporations.
In early 2013 I met Mr. Clark after hearing him speak at a National Association of Corporate Directors meeting. He was surprisingly candid in his comments at the meeting, and after. He pointed out that EVERY company in America was being randomly targeted by cyber criminals, and that EVERY company would have an intrusion. He said it was impossible to do business without working on-line, and simultaneously it was impossible to think any company - of any size - could stop an attack from successfully getting into the company. The only questions one should focus on answering were "How fast can you discover the attack? How well can you contain it? What can you learn to at least stop that from happening again?"
Target was a crime victim, as can happen to any company. So, while the Target attack was large, and not discovered as early as anyone would like, to think that Target is in some way wildly poor at security or protecting its customers is simply naive. Several other large retailers have also had attacks, include Nieman Marcus and Michael's, and it was probably bad luck that Target was the first to have such a big problem happen, and at such a bad time, than anything particularly weak about Target.
We now know that all retailers are trying to learn from this, and every corporation is raising its awareness and actions to improve cyber security. But some company will be next. Target wasn't the first, and won't be the last. Companies everywhere, working with law enforcement, are all reacting to this new form of crime. So firing the CEO, 2 months after firing the CIO (Chief Information Officer), makes for good press, but it is more symbolic than meaningful. It won’t stop the hackers.
Investors and customers have a lot to lose given Target's competitive performance. Where this decision does have great importance is to shareholders and customers. Target has been a decent company for its constituents under this CEO, and done far better than some of its competitors. The share price has doubled in the last 5 years, and Target has proven a capable competitor to Wal-Mart while other retailers have been going out of business (Filene’s Basement, Circuit City, Linens & Things, Dots, etc.) or losing all relevancy (like Abercrombie and Fitch and Best Buy.) And Target has been at least holding its own while some chains have been closing stores like crazy (Radio Shack 1,100 stores, Family Dollar 370 stores, Office Depot 400 stores, etc.)
Just compare Target's performance to JCPenney, who's CEO was fired after screwing up the business far worse than the cyber attack hurt Target. And he was a former hero running Apple's retail stores.
Or, look at Sears Holdings. CEO Ed Lampert was heralded as a hero 6 years ago, but since then the company he leads has had 28 straight quarters of declining sales, and closed 305 stores since 2010. The Kmart division has become a complete non-competitor in discounting, and Sears has lost all relevancy as a chain as it has been outflanked on all sides. CEO Lampert has constantly whittled away at the company's value, and just this week told shareholders that they can simply plan on more store closings in the future.
And vaunted Wal-Mart is undergoing a federal investigation for bribing government officials in Mexico to prop up its business. Wal-Mart is constantly under attack by its employees for shady business practices, and this year lost a National Labor Relations Board case regarding its hours and pay practices. And Wal-Mart remains a lightning rod for controversy as it fights with big cities like Chicago and Washington, DC about its ability to open stores, while Target has flourished in communities large and small with work practices considered acceptable.
Finding a good replacement for Steinhafel will not be easy. CEO's and Boards of Directors, across the nation have been seriously addressing cyber security for the last couple of years. Awareness and protective measures, are up considerable. But there will be future attacks, and some will succeed. It is unclear blaming the CEO for these problems makes any sense - unless there is egregious incompetence.
Now finding a CEO that can grow a business like Target, in a tough retail market, is not easy.
The TNS Group
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Tuesday, May 6, 2014
What To Do About Windows XP And The IE Browser Flaw
By Roger Kay | forbes.com
Last week, I noted that the timing of the discovery of a major flaw in Microsoft Internet Explorer coming, as it did, three weeks after the company formally withdrew support for Windows XP (XP), the 13-year-old operating system (OS) that still runs on an estimated 300 million PCs worldwide - would likely drive a wave of upgrades.
Today, I am laying out the choice landscape for Windows users and recommending various alternatives based on different scenarios.
For those people stuck with XP - for economic, corporate policy, or other reasons - the best thing to do is switch to another browser, either Google Chrome or Mozilla's Firefox. I personally use Chrome.
Microsoft did issue an XP patch for the flaw, primarily because it is major (conferring admin rights on enterprising hackers), its effect is widespread (affecting the approximately 55% of the browser market that uses IE on all platforms), and exploits have occurred in the wild, notably the mysteriously named Operation Clandestine Fox, which seems to be targeting defense and financial organizations to gather "broad-spectrum" intelligence.
However, no one expects Microsoft to continue nursing Windows XP for much longer. Using stupid math, 55% of 300 million (XP users who browse with IE) represents 165 million highly vulnerable systems. So, the real choice for XP/IE users is get off IE or get off XP, with the former being a free, quick fix and the latter being a better long-term solution that costs money, potentially an entirely new system.
For those who can afford it, upgrading from XP to Windows 7 (Win7) or Windows 8 (Win8) is the right move, particularly if the user wants to keep using IE. Win7 is familiar, looking and acting a lot like XP. Win8 is better for systems with touchscreens. In general, Win7 is the right choice for commercial users, while Win8 may be better for consumers.
Whatever else they decide to do, people who use IE should download the patch, which is simple enough. Use Windows Update, which can be invoked from the Control Panel if it is not set to download and install patches automatically. By now, most users should have received a notification that the new bits are available. Once in Update, check everything that says Internet Explorer on it and follow the instructions.
Some users might want to take this moment to move from XP to an entirely different platform. Doing a zero-based assessment could yield a non-Microsoft recommendation. After all, if the upgrade involves buying new hardware, it's worth looking at the entire field. For example, if an individual or company can do all right with Google Docs, a switch to a Chromebook might be a good move. Chrome OS users store their data and do most of their computing in the cloud. Alternatively, Apple's ecosystem holds appeal for many, particularly consumers. Mac OS is robust, and Safari has not been plagued by the level of intrusion visited upon IE.
At this point, it is worth noting that all browsers are vulnerable, and that the main reason IE has been targeted more often is that most of the valuable data moving around the Internet is still coming from Windows systems with IE. That having been said, developers who work in all environments have noted that IE is more complex and brittle than other browsers, creating plenty of opportunities for exploiters.
To summarize, then, first off, install the patch; second, get off XP if possible; if not, get off IE; finally, while contemplating an upgrade, look at all the alternatives.
Last week, I noted that the timing of the discovery of a major flaw in Microsoft Internet Explorer coming, as it did, three weeks after the company formally withdrew support for Windows XP (XP), the 13-year-old operating system (OS) that still runs on an estimated 300 million PCs worldwide - would likely drive a wave of upgrades.
Today, I am laying out the choice landscape for Windows users and recommending various alternatives based on different scenarios.
For those people stuck with XP - for economic, corporate policy, or other reasons - the best thing to do is switch to another browser, either Google Chrome or Mozilla's Firefox. I personally use Chrome.
Microsoft did issue an XP patch for the flaw, primarily because it is major (conferring admin rights on enterprising hackers), its effect is widespread (affecting the approximately 55% of the browser market that uses IE on all platforms), and exploits have occurred in the wild, notably the mysteriously named Operation Clandestine Fox, which seems to be targeting defense and financial organizations to gather "broad-spectrum" intelligence.
However, no one expects Microsoft to continue nursing Windows XP for much longer. Using stupid math, 55% of 300 million (XP users who browse with IE) represents 165 million highly vulnerable systems. So, the real choice for XP/IE users is get off IE or get off XP, with the former being a free, quick fix and the latter being a better long-term solution that costs money, potentially an entirely new system.
For those who can afford it, upgrading from XP to Windows 7 (Win7) or Windows 8 (Win8) is the right move, particularly if the user wants to keep using IE. Win7 is familiar, looking and acting a lot like XP. Win8 is better for systems with touchscreens. In general, Win7 is the right choice for commercial users, while Win8 may be better for consumers.
Whatever else they decide to do, people who use IE should download the patch, which is simple enough. Use Windows Update, which can be invoked from the Control Panel if it is not set to download and install patches automatically. By now, most users should have received a notification that the new bits are available. Once in Update, check everything that says Internet Explorer on it and follow the instructions.
Some users might want to take this moment to move from XP to an entirely different platform. Doing a zero-based assessment could yield a non-Microsoft recommendation. After all, if the upgrade involves buying new hardware, it's worth looking at the entire field. For example, if an individual or company can do all right with Google Docs, a switch to a Chromebook might be a good move. Chrome OS users store their data and do most of their computing in the cloud. Alternatively, Apple's ecosystem holds appeal for many, particularly consumers. Mac OS is robust, and Safari has not been plagued by the level of intrusion visited upon IE.
At this point, it is worth noting that all browsers are vulnerable, and that the main reason IE has been targeted more often is that most of the valuable data moving around the Internet is still coming from Windows systems with IE. That having been said, developers who work in all environments have noted that IE is more complex and brittle than other browsers, creating plenty of opportunities for exploiters.
To summarize, then, first off, install the patch; second, get off XP if possible; if not, get off IE; finally, while contemplating an upgrade, look at all the alternatives.
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