By: Wedge Greene
Crime Spree One Friday on a dark and stormy morning, the young woman entered the clinic procedure room and took the seat that the lab tech directed. She wasn’t overtly nervous, but did have a
background level of concern. Not so much about her health, but about the inconvenience if an issue was found in her patch micro insulin pump. Not that she expected a problem; yet while the
filler cartridges were easy to self-service (she switched hers every Wednesday morning), the bi-annual maintenance was not routine…
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By: Rob Marson
Back to the Future I recently read an article online entitled: “Virtualization is Going Mainstream”. The dateline was January 1, 2006. It’s a good reminder that while the service provider
industry working on deploying virtualized networks, the concepts and technologies themselves are not new. Cybersecurity, specifically securing access to physical and virtual networks and
resources, is another key area. A recently released study by Kasperksky Labs concludes that when a security incident involves virtual machines, the recovery costs double compared to that of a
traditional environment…
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By: Tim Young
We know. It’s a big scary world. According to PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Global State of Information Security Survey 2016, 38% more security incidents were detected in 2015 than in 2014. The theft
of intellectual property increased 56% in that same time period, according to the report, which relies on survey responses from more than 10,000 C-suite executives, VPs, and directors of IT and
security practices hailing from 127 countries. At the same time, the survey shows that firms are taking steps to address these threats…
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By: Dan Baker
The global village has fallen in love with the versatility that telecom industry progress has brought us. Unfortunately, there’s a trade-off because communications advances bring with them new
fraud and security risks. Take the business PBX. Its ability to redirect phone calls is wonderful for business people. But that feature opens the door for PBXs to be exploited through International
Revenue Share Fraud (IRSF), a fraud which costs telecoms $4 billion a year according to the CFCA.GSM is another example…
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By: Nick Biasini, Craig Williams
The threat landscape is ever evolving, as our adversaries discover new ways of compromising systems. The monetization of hacking has had a drastic impact on the threat landscape. Today it is
easier than ever for an adversary to monetize their nefarious activities. A couple of clear examples exist in Angler Exploit Kit and one of its favorite payloads, ransomware. While threats like
ransomware are steadily increasing due to increased profit and stealth, more traditional threats still exist for threat actors that fear no repercussions…
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By: Colin Ayer, Ph.D
Protecting Your PBX and Your Profit Margins Your telecom costs were already too big for your burgeoning business, but being slapped with a $20,000 bill because you weren’t paying attention to
abuse of your own telecom infrastructure hurts your profit margins even more. How did they do that and how do you stop it? As the world increasingly moves toward IP communications and hosted PBXs,
VoIP services have become a fertile hunting ground for fraudsters who attack your business, steal your telecom services, and rack up bills you’d rather not pay…
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By: Roark Pollock
Enterprises are investing more than ever in security technology as a result of increased awareness of vulnerabilities, media coverage of attacks with financial impact, hacktivism, and the
consumerization of IT. Most companies have made significant investments in network security technologies and tools over the past decade. It’s an executive-level topic. According to the Identity
Theft Resource Center, breaches have grown almost 28% from 2013 to 2014, with further increases expected in 2015. So, what is the confidence level in your current network security? Whether you know
it or not, your network is probably exposed…
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By: Andy Huckridge
It’s no secret that the telecommunications market is in the midst of a significant transformation. The number of mobile devices and users has skyrocketed in recent years; according to research
by GSMA, there were 3.6 billion unique mobile subscribers at the end of 2014. Half of the world’s population now has a mobile subscription—up from just one in five just 10 years ago—and an
additional one billion subscribers are predicted by 2020, taking the global penetration rate to approximately 60%…
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By: Chris Piedmonte
Ask the vast majority of information technology professionals today if it is possible to completely secure a computing system against cybercrime and the answer you will get is a resounding
“no.” Through a series of events too long and convoluted to address in this article, we have established a global computing infrastructure that is fundamentally incapable of protecting
itself, creating both a playground and a candy store for cybercriminals. Our current global computing infrastructure is based on technology first conceived almost forty years ago, long before the
global network of billions of computers was created to manage our banking, communications, defense, entertainment … even the everyday mundane facts of our lives, like the Instagram of the yogurt
parfait we had for breakfast…
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By: Yaniv Sulkes
In an age when communication service providers (CSPs) are faced with increasingly cut-throat competition, ballooning network data usage and declining revenues, mobile operators are being forced
to find new avenues and strategies that can be leveraged to “up the ante.” When it comes to delivering a differentiated experience to business and individual consumers, one of the most important
things a CSP can do to monetize their networks and create loyal and satisfied customers, is to increase touch-point interactions – or points of engagement - with consumers, says recent data…
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By: Tim Young
“It must be, I thought, one of the race's most persistent and comforting hallucinations to trust that ‘it can't happen here’ -- that one's own time and place is beyond cataclysm.”
The Day of the TriffidsJohn Wyndham For those of you unfamiliar with Wyndham’s 1951 sci-fi classic, the cataclysm in question is the relentless worldwide proliferation of menacing, venomous, mobile
plants with a taste for human flesh. (What else could it be, right?) On a more figurative level, Wyndham was warning the West to look out for the lumbering menace crouched behind the Iron Curtain,
waiting to swallow up the world’s capitalist democracies at any time…
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By: Scott St. John, Pipeline
Mobile Innovations In mobile innovation news, LG announced the LG Watch Urbane 2nd Edition LTE, the first Android Wear smartwatch to feature cellular connectivity, will begin rolling out
to customers worldwide starting this month in the United States and Korea. The watch is available in the U.S. online via AT&T and Verizon for pre-orders; and key markets in Europe,
Asia, and the Commonwealth of Independent States is planned in the months ahead. In related news, a new study from Juniper finds shows that tech brands dominate the coolest wearable brands,
according to a recent survey with 75% preferring Apple or Samsung…
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