Howard Schmidt advised both President Brack Obama and George W. Bush on cybersecurity. He was a CSO at Microsoft and a CISO at eBay. He led several industry groups, and wrote books on cybersecurity. But when security professionals remember him, it is not so much for his technical accomplishments as for the impact he had…
Java Platform SE (Standard Edition) 9, a planned modularized upgrade, remains on target for release in July, an Oracle official said this week. Java Development Kit (JDK) 9 is set for release on July 27. It will include a long list of capabilities, including modularization, a read-eval-print loop, ahead-of-time compilation, and a memory-saving improvement for…
U.S. Vice President Mike Pence reportedly used a private email account to transact state business when he was governor of Indiana, and his AOL account was hacked once, according to a news report. Emails released to the Indianapolis Star following a public records request are said to show that Pence used his personal AOL account…
Walgreens has promoted Steve Turner to CIO, effective April 1. The company veteran oversaw the pharmacy retailer’s foray into Hadoop data analytics. Turner will work with outgoing CIO Abhi Dhar during the transition. “Steve’s experience and his deep knowledge of our systems position him well to move into this new role,” a Walgreens spokesman told…
BARCELONA — Venerable smartphone brands Motorola, Nokia and BlackBerry got new life at Mobile World Congress 2017, but that was primarily due to the influence of Chinese and Finnish manufacturers that have licensed the names. One new Android smartphone, the BlackBerry KEYone, was launched by TCL Communication, based in Huizhou, China. The phone has both…
Everyone makes mistakes. But working at Amazon Web Services means an incorrectly entered input can lead to a massive outage that cripples popular websites and services. That’s apparently what happened earlier this week, when the AWS Simple Storage Service (S3) in the provider’s Northern Virginia region experienced an 11-hour system failure. Other Amazon services in…
Amazon Web Services said today its outage earlier this week that affected major websites and apps was caused by human error. Sites including Netflix, Reddit and the Associated Press struggled for hours on Tuesday — all because of a simple typo. “While we are proud of our long track record of availability with Amazon S3,…
One bug in Slack, the popular work chat application, was enough for a security researcher to design a hack that could trick users into handing over access to their accounts. Bug bounty hunter Frans Rosen noticed he could steal Slack access tokens to user accounts due to a flaw in the way the application communicates…
Computer users who have been affected by the Dharma ransomware and have held onto their encrypted files can now restore them for free. Researchers have created decryption tools for this ransomware strain after someone recently leaked the decryption keys. Dharma first appeared in November and is based on an older ransomware program known as Crysis.…
Microsoft yesterday started selling extended support for its Windows Server software, letting corporate customers add up to six years to the lifespan of Windows Server 2008 and later, and SQL Server 2008 and later. The company had announced this “Premium Assurance” in December, saying then that the extended support would be available for purchase this…