Category: Computer Related – Basic

In the first nine months of 2019, at least 621 government entities, healthcare service providers and school districts, colleges and universities were affected by ransomware. The attacks have caused massive disruption: municipal and emergency services have been interrupted, medical practices have permanently closed, ER patients have been diverted, property transactions halted, the collection of property taxes and water bills delayed, medical procedures canceled, schools closed and data lost.

Email and attachments and RDP continue to be the attack vectors of choice. The latter is vulnerable to ransomware via exploitation on unpatched systems, misconfigured security settings and brute force attacks on weak login credentials.

“There is no reason to believe that attacks will become less frequent in the near future,” said Fabian Wosar, CTO at Emsisoft. “Organizations have a very simple choice to make: prepare now or pay later.”

I was sent a Glossary of SEO Terms that I thought you might find useful:

http://netvantagemarketing.com/blog/seo-glossary

Is Overpersonalisation Killing the Variety and Interest of Your User Experience?

One user even noted that because the content was boring she continued to scroll looking for something that was interesting, “I don’t find anything interesting on Facebook tonight but what’s funny is that I will keep scrolling until I do; it’s addicting.” This behavior is related to the Vortex phenomenon, which refers to people feeling sucked into the online world almost against their will through sticky design techniques (like continuous content feeds). Users seek the emotional payoff they get from a good piece of content. In these cases, the phone turns into a mini slot machine: they keep pulling the lever coming across dozens of losers in hopes of finally getting a winner.

A file naming decision harkening back to the earliest days of personal computing is still very much alive in Microsoft’s Windows 10 and its Azure Functions serverless cloud code execution tool, much to the merriment of geeks old enough to remember the reasons for it.

https://www.itnews.com.au/news/how-a-1974-bug-still-bites-win10-and-azure-users-515102

Summary: Usability testing finds that both voice-only and screen-based intelligent assistants work well only for very limited, simple queries that have fairly simple, short answers. Users have difficulty with anything else.
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/intelligent-assistant-usability/

The security of pretty much every computer on the planet has just gotten a lot worse, and the only real solution — which of course is not a solution — is to throw them all away and buy new ones.
On January 3, researchers announced a series of major security vulnerabilities in the microprocessors at the heart of the world’s computers for the past 15-20 years. They’ve been named Spectre and Meltdown, and they have to do with manipulating different ways processors optimize performance by rearranging the order of instructions or performing different instructions in parallel. An attacker who controls one process on a system can use the vulnerabilities to steal secrets elsewhere on the computer.
This means that a malicious app on your phone could steal data from your other apps. Or a malicious program on your computer — maybe one running in a browser window from that sketchy site you’re visiting, or as a result of a phishing attack — can steal data elsewhere on your machine. Cloud services, which often share machines amongst several customers, are especially vulnerable. This affects corporate applications running on cloud infrastructure, and end-user cloud applications like Google Drive. Someone can run a process in the cloud and steal data from every other user on the same hardware.
I am sure people thought me weird and old fashioned because I would not subscribe to the Cloud philosophy. This is exactly one reason why. – Tom)
Information about these flaws has been secretly circulating amongst the major IT companies for months as they researched the ramifications and coordinated updates. The details were supposed to be released next week, but the story broke early and everyone is scrambling. By now all the major cloud vendors have patched their systems against the vulnerabilities that can be patched against.
https://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram/archives/2018/0115.html