Στο διάγραμμα που δημοσιοποιήθηκε από ανεξάρτητη εταιρεία ερευνών, και περιλαμβάνει τους Δείκτες Υπόσχεσης και Εκπλήρωσης, μπορείτε να δείτε και να συγκρίνετε την αποτελεσματικότητα ορισμένων από τις σπουδαιότερες εταιρείες της βιομηχανίας των υπολογιστών στο marketing αλλά και στην εκτέλεση.

Ένας κατασκευαστής, που βρίσκεται στο πάνω δεξί τεταρτημόριο του διαγράμματος, έχει βαθμολογηθεί με υψηλή βαθμολογία τόσο στο τομέα της υπόσχεσης όσο και στο τομέα της εκπλήρωσης αυτής της υπόσχεσης. Με βάση τα ίδια κριτήρια, μία εταιρεία στο κάτω αριστερό τεταρτημόριο, δεν τα καταφέρνει ούτε στο επίπεδο της υπόσχεσης, ούτε στο επίπεδο εκτέλεσης.

O “Δείκτης Εταιρικής Υπόσχεσης” (Vendor Promise Index) σχεδιάστηκε κατά τέτοιο τρόπο ώστε να μετράει την αποτελεσματικότητα του marketing. Χρησιμοποιεί τέσσερα από τα δεκατέσσερα σημεία αξιολόγησης πελατών (Θέση ανταγωνιστικότητας, Τεχνολογική Καινοτομία, το Στρατηγικό Όραμα του management της εταιρείας καθώς και η Μάρκα/ Φήμη) που σχετίζονται με ιδέες και concepts που μεταφέρονται σε πιθανούς πελάτες σε παγκόσμιο επίπεδο πριν το πραγματικό προϊόν ή κάποια υπηρεσία παραδοθεί προς χρήση.

Ο “Δείκτης Εταιρικής Ικανοποίησης” (Vendor Fulfillment Index) σχεδιάστηκε ως μέτρο για την εκτελεστική αποτελεσματικότητα. Χρησιμοποιούνται και σε αυτή τη περίπτωση τέσσερα από τα δεκατέσσερα κριτήρια  βαθμολόγησης πελατών  (Απόδοση/ Τιμή, Ποιότητα προϊόντος, Παράδοση σύμφωνα με την Υπόσχεση και Ποιότητα τεχνικής υποστήριξης) τα οποία σχετίζονται με το φυσικό προϊόν και την υπηρεσία που έχει παραδοθεί και την εμπειρία που είχε ο πελάτης από τη χρήση του συγκεκριμένου προϊόντος ή της υπηρεσίας.

Το μέγεθος του κύκλου που βλέπετε στο διάγραμμα επίσης δείχνει τη σχετικότητα μεταξύ των βαθμολογιών που έλαβε κάποια εταιρεία. Οι γραμμές που τέμνονται δείχνουν το μέσο όρο βαθμολογίας που έλαβε κάθε εταιρεία, συμπεριλαμβανομένων και εταιρειών που δεν βρίσκονται στο διάγραμμα. Όπως μπορείτε να δείτε, η Sophos έχει αποσπάσει εξαιρετική βαθμολογία, τόσο στο τομέα του marketing, όσο και στο τομέα του να κάνει πραγματικότητα όλα όσα υπόσχεται για τους πελάτες της.

The authentication system, based on a new material for the home button and a metal sensor ring around it, has been the subject of numerous rumours and leaked photos and specs already. Speculation about Apple’s interest in fingerprints goes back at least as far as 2009, resurfaces each time a new version of the iPhone is launched, and has grown steadily ever since Apple’s pricey acquisiton of fingerprint tech firm AuthenTec last summer. Today’s confirmation at the iPhone 5s/5c launch ceremony makes it all official at last. According to Apple’s promotional material, the sensor:
“uses advanced capacative touch to take, in essence, a high-resolution image of your fingerprint from the sub-epidermal layers of your skin. It then intelligently analyses this information with a remarkable degree of detail and precision“.

As well as unlocking the phone, the sensor will be able to approve purchases at the Apple store. Fingerprint authentication has been a common sight in laptops for some time, with major vendors including Dell, Lenovo and Toshiba pushing their own built-in variations, usually available as an option alongside more traditional login methods. There are also a range of other implementations available, including many smartphone apps and external readers supported by the Windows Biometric Framework and some leading password managers.

Fingerprints thus probably rank a little above facial recognition as the most widely-deployed biometric authentication technique at the moment. In the past, however, they have proven rather unreliable, plagued with security worries, although suspected flaws are not always proven. Nevertheless, many fingerprint scanners seem to be open to spoofing. Fingerprints are not secret: we leave copies of them wherever we go, even if we’re trying hard not to, as cop show afficionados will be well aware. Once someone devious has got hold of a copy, purely visual sensors can be fooled by photographs, while more sophisticated techniques which measure textures, temperatures and even pulses are still open to cheating using flesh-like materials, or even gelatin snacks. Just how hard it will be to defeat Apple’s recognition system remains to be seen, but as crypto guru Bruce Schneier has pointed out, there’s a big danger in using fingerprints to access online services: the temptation to store the fingerprint info in a central database. Unlike passwords, of course, if your fingerprint data is lifted from a hacked database, you can’t simply change it, short of getting mediaeval on your hands with acid, sandpaper or some other hardened-gangster technique.

So, as expected, Apple has opted to keep all information local to the iPhone – indeed, it is apparently kept in a “secure enclave” on the new A7 chip and can only be accessed by the print sensor itself. Expect this storage area and the connections to it to become the subject of frenzied investigations by hackers of all persuasions. Of course, Apple is not alone in looking into fingerprints, with arch-rivals Samsung also rumoured to be making moves in that direction. (Samsung was a major customer of AuthenTec before it was acquired.) In the long term, how similar their approaches are may be a significant issue for all of us, whatever our smartphone affiliation and whether or not we worry much about privacy, and not just thanks to the inevitable legal rumpus. There are two basic approaches to security: either the way things work is kept proprietary and secret, as far as possible, or it’s made open for general consumption, and more importantly for verification. A cross-vertical group, the FIDO Alliance, was set up earlier this year to develop open specifications for biometric authentication standards, with members including Google, PayPal, hardware makers like Lenovo and LG, and a raft of biometrics and authentication specialists. Beleaguered phonemaker BlackBerry is the latest big-name inductee. The alliance’s aim, to create a universal approach to implementing biometrics in combination with existing passwords and two-factor dongles, is a noble goal. Sadly, given Apple’s history of playing well with others, it’s pretty likely that, as with their connector cables and DRM systems, their fingerprint setup will remain aloof from any attempts to build a truly universal consensus.

Even if a two-culture system prevails, widespread deployment in mass-market handhelds may well be a gamechanger for the adoption of biometric authentication. Touch ID and its inevitable followers could be a major part of all our futures.

You can read the original article, here.

Our poll offered readers the chance to vote for one of the six most popular web browsers – Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, Safari and Chromium – and asked which you trusted the most. Mozilla’s Firefox, the linear descendant of both Netscape Navigator and the original ‘graphical web browser’ the NCSA Mosaic, was a runaway winner. Firefox accrued almost double the number of votes of its nearest rival, Google Chrome, and more than six times the votes awarded to perennial rival and fellow ‘browser wars’ veteran Internet Explorer.

The results are even more emphatic when you consider how many people actually use each browser. Below is a table that compares the number of votes each browser received in the poll against the number of unique article pageviews from each of those browsers over the same period.

Results are ranked in order of conversion rate – the rate at which page views by a given browser correlate with votes for that browser (Chrome and Chromium identify themselves in the same way and we can’t separate their unique page views so their results are combined in this table).

Top of the table is Opera which was the only browser that scored more votes for trustworthiness than it had users, although it did so with much smaller totals than its competitors. You could probably sum up the entire history of the Opera browser with the phrase “small but loyal following” and despite the regard in which its users hold it Opera seems destined to remain the perennial bridesmaid of the browser world. The poor showing of Internet Explorer is notable but perhaps not surprising given that it is often imposed on users as a matter of corporate policy. What stands out at me is the difference between the Mozilla and Google products. Both browsers are well established and well known open source projects, they both run on Windows, Mac and Linux and unlike Explorer or Safari neither come bundled with an operating system.

Perhaps Chrome users are more cynical or more realistic about where they place their trust. Or perhaps people who choose Chrome are also people who don’t vote in internet polls. We don’t know but I suspect, as the comments on our poll seem to suggest, that the reason for Chrome’s poor showing is that Google’s claim to Do No Evil is simply no longer convincing. The untrustworthiness of Google is a consistent theme across the most highly rated comments on the poll:

    “frankly I trust Google the least, as they have too many data points for comparison.

    I don’t trust Google as far as I could throw ’em. As a company, it’s entirely uninterested in my security or privacy, especially if it can make money by selling my personal information.

    Trusting any software completely is a bit foolish, but anyone who actively trusts Chrome is a good subject for psychological study.”

You get the idea. Of course this is only an online poll and and not a scientific experiment so my conclusions should be taken with a liberal pinch of salt.

You can read the original article, here.

Where are business most likely to be vulnerable and how this can be fixed with Sophos products?

SMB Businesses have a limit of both personnel and financial resources. Security therefore must be simple to setup, configure and administer. Many SMB customers don’t have a security team. So we offer MSP and other methods of delivering simple security to customers at a reasonable cost.

What is the philosophy and the goals to which you aspire?

Sophos believes in keeping things and hence security simple. This starts with our UTM and Endpoint Security Products, making the administration and configuration simple. When security solutions are easy to use, our customers have a higher level of security. This is the vision that drives us as a company: Security made simple. We also don’t believe in scaring our customers, they are smart enough to understand the need for security.

Sophos delivers the vision through dedicated employees that have experience in the global security space and a dedicated channel that is continuously updated via technical and sales staff interested in its success. Our dedicated staff, channel, partners and customers are the key to our success. We are all ultimately on the same team!

How do you know that you have spent enough to make your business secure?

Good and tough question, there is no definitive answer here besides implementing as much as we can in a set budget. The more interesting question is, how do we create the security budget. This is where ISO27001/2 come in, creating a risk process that also looks at assessing what data and informational assets we have.

When a company knows what its assets are, then we can begin to assess the risk, vulnerability, exploits and also damages that could result. After this process, we then start to understand how and with which budget we can mitigate those risks.

What we can expect from Sophos cloud in the near future?

We are driven to adding, new and existing functionality into the Sophos cloud, adding features slowly to make sure we follow our vision of simple security. Every new step and verison brings more of the award winning in premise technology into a new delivery system (the cloud).

This doesn’t mean we will stop selling on premises based solutions. We are really excited about where the cloud is going, with great reports and an overall easy and simple administration console that has all the features a customer or partner could need based on our on-premise know-how.

How do you approach the partner landscape in Greece?

We’ve made it simple to partner with us—with a flexible and generous partner program, delivered by dedicated channel relationship managers. And of course in cooperation with motivated distribution partners like NSS in Greece. Even though we work with more than 12,000 partners you’ll feel supported every step of the way. Because we work hard to get to know you and your organization.

When you partner with us, we help you identify opportunities to retain and grow your customer base and increase profits. You’ll be rewarded with deal registration protection, attractive margins, and joint lead generation programs. We also support you with up-to-date training and certification, so your sales and technical teams are fully qualified in our latest solutions. Our approach is unique—we are 100% channel focused. We continuously invest in our partner relationships. And it’s our mission to help your organization flourish.

Once these are exceeded interSeptor will provide an alert. For other sensors (security, water, power, smoke and dry contact), interSeptor will provide an alert as soon as the sensor switches to an alarm condition.
There are currently five different optional sensors : smoke, water leak, power, security and dry contact sensors.

The interSeptor water detector uses a specially designed cable to detect the presence of moisture at any point along the length of the cable. The water detection unit will sound an audible alarm upon detection and also sends a signal to the interSeptor to start the alarm process. Want an example? You arrive at work on Monday to discover an inch of water across a critical floor space. Of course you are able to quickly install a leak detection system to protect against future instances of this, but what if a system had been in place already? Could you have saved time and money? Could critical equipment be saved? Could staff have spent more time on more important matters?

The answer to these questions is, of course, YES! There is an easy-to -install, leak detection system with:

• Up to 30m leak detection cable
• Hassle-free installation
• Remote Web Access
• Free technical assistance via phone and email
• 60-day money-back guarantee
• 2-year swap out warranty

Spammers versus spam senders

There’s a big difference, because spammers generally don’t send their own spam in bulk any more. That hasn’t worked for a decade or so, because if you send 10,000,000 unwanted emails as fast as you can from the same server, or even the same data centre, you make an easily-identified target. So 1,000,000 of the messages might get loose before either the data centre (if it cares, and reputable ones most definitely do) or the majority of your recipients, or both, say, “No more!” Not only are you blocked from sending the remaining 9,000,000 emails from your truncated campaign, you probably can’t use those same servers again for days, weeks, months, perhaps ever.

How spam is delivered

Enter the botnet, or robot network. That’s an unwitting collection of surreptitously co-operating zombie computers – in homes, at offices, in coffee shops, at the mall, by the beach – that regularly call home for instructions to servers that the criminals control. The crooks can send each bot in the network a list of email addresses, and then command the entire botnet to start a giant spam campaign. Using bots, those 10,000,000 spams can be sent, say, in 10,000 batches of 1000 emails at a time, presenting a much less obvious pattern to those who defend against spam. (And sticking those 10,000 bot-infected users with the cost of the bandwidth, if you don’t mind.)

Why spam matters

I used the words “unwitting” and “surreptitious” above because, although some users may knowingly participate, the majority of botnet spam senders don’t even realise they’re doing it. That’s why we publish the SPAMPIONSHIP tables: not to lay wholesale accusations of cybercriminality against entire countries, but to raise awareness of something we’ve said a number of times recently, since it’s Cyber Security Awareness Month:

If you don’t make an effort to clean up malware from your own computer, you aren’t part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.

We’re not pointing fingers here at anyone who ever made a mistake and ended up infected by malware, but we do want you to be mindful of the consequences of inaction. For as long as you fail to do anything about spambot malware on your computer, you’re actually helping the crooks to make money, and putting the rest of us, no matter how modestly, in harm’s way.

The SPAMPIONSHIP tables

And with those firm-but-fair words behind us, here are the latest figures showing spam by volume on a country-by-country basis:

As you can see, the top of the table is surprisingly consistent, with the countries in the first five places having all been in the Dirty Dozen throughout the year. Of course, you probably expected to see India and China in the list: they each have populations exceeding 1 billion people, so it would be surprising not to see them near the top. Nor is is surprising that the USA is in the Number One spot yet again, this time sending nearly three times as much spam as second-placed Belarus. After all, the US has 30 times the population of Belarus, and internet access is much more strongly established, so you would expect a higher proportion of Americans to have their own computers and to use the internet regularly. It’s when we turn the SPAMPIONSHIP into a per capita comparison that things get interesting:

Here, the numbers next to each country denotes the average spamminess per person compared to the USA. In other words, we divided each country’s spam total by its population, then divided every country’s spam-per-person value by the figure for America. Obviously, that makes US = 1.00, and tells us that the average computer in Belarus was eleven times more likely to send spam than if it were in the USA. Israelis, whose propensity for sending spam sneaks the Middle Eastern country into twelfth place on chart for the first time this year, were 1.8 times as likely as Americans to be spam senders. The per capita chart doesn’t do any favours to small countries, which tend to hide near the bottom of volume-only lists, even if their computers are awash with zombie malware. US neighbour The Bahamas, for example, made it to eighth spot, with double the likelihood of its computers spamming compared to the US. Luxembourg got up to fourth spot, with a spammishness 2.7 times than of the US, up from sixth in Q2 and seventh in Q3.

You can read the original article, here.

The October 2013 CPU covers fixes for: Oracle Database Server, Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control, Oracle Supply Chain Products Suite, Oracle Siebel CRM, Oracle Industry Applications, Oracle Primavera Products Suite, Oracle and Sun Systems Products Suite, Oracle MySQL, Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle PeopleSoft Products, Oracle iLearning, Oracle Financial Services Software, Oracle Java SE and Oracle Virtualization. All of these updates are important, but arguably Java is the most important of all of them.

51 security vulnerabilities are addressed in Java this quarter, and 50 of them affect Java Applets or Java WebStart, the plugin that runs Java in your web browser. Worse yet, all but one are remotely exploitable without authentication. Some versions of Java update themselves, some rely on the operating system vendor and others are too old to support an auto-update mechanism. This does not make things easy.

Our advice?

1) Determine whether you have Java installed and enabled in your web browser. Visit java.com/en/download/installed.jsp and click “Verify Java version“. If your browser prompts you to install Java, close the tab; you’re Java-free. If it loads the applet, check your version. Be sure you are running Java 7 update 45 (1.7.0_45), Java 6 update 65 (1.6.0_65) or Java 1.5.0_55.
If you must have Java installed you ought to be running Java 7 (1.7). All previous versions are not officially supported and present a greater security risk.

2) If Java is installed and out of date, be sure to update it. Windows users can open the Java Control Panel, select the Update tab and choose Update now. Mac users can check for updates using the integrated Apple updater. Linux users should follow normal procedures for system updates provided by their distribution.

3) Most importantly, if you don’t need Java, get rid of it. Java can be useful for applications (Minecraft, payroll, mortgage calculators) and server-side applications (JBoss and more), but it doesn’t belong in your browser. If you’re not sure, I recommend disabling it. If you run across things that require Java, your browser will alert you with instructions.

You can read the original article, here.

Imagine a system that can alert you when it starts to rain, not only warning to get out your umbrella, but also putting more trains on the Metro to cope with the extra passengers, monitoring the cafes to ensure there is sufficient coffee, or alerting when a vending machine needs restocking. A tool that gives you a sharp overview of vast and complex infrastructure, combined with the intelligence to review and comprehend what is happening – well, that’s not merely SIEM. That’s LogPoint.

SIEM – or Security Information and Event Management. Quite a mouthful. So what does it mean?
Metaphorically speaking, SIEM is the Information Technology version of Closed Circuit Television (CCTV). In short: a surveillance system of all data within an entire IT landscape in order to catch intrusions, provide insight into operations and report on functioning.

The First CCTV
Originally developed in the 1930’s to monitor rocket launches, CCTV began to be used to remotely monitor people and equipment in the 1970’s. A very basic instrument at the time, it could not record, replay, keep or store images.
Unless you were watching it live, the event would be missed.

Log Files
IT Systems create log files for every activity, be it purely informational, or failures, or even successes. Log Files can also trace who performed the activity, when was it done, etc. However, log files are stored locally on each system, and unless someone can review each and every system, it is almost impossible to find everything. Just like the first CCTV, unless you are watching these logs in real time, the event will be missed.

CCTV Evolves
CCTV evolved throughout the 80’s and 90’s, gaining the ability to record and replay videos of people and activity – and this could then be used for investigation and criminal prosecution within the courts. Slowly, CCTV cameras began to appear everywhere. Today, there are 207,431 CCTV cameras covering a large percentage of the city of London – a similar story for most European cities.

Log Management
This is the basis for the Log Management software from which SIEM has evolved – software that enables log collection from an entire infrastructure, storing them centrally, and time-stamping them for analysis. This offers better insight into how “the crime” happened and took place, who was involved, and how can it be prevented in the future. But this still isn’t SIEM as we know it today.

Modern CCTV
CCTV has developed at an amazing speed since the turn of the century. Not only can it now record and store data from hundreds of thousands of cameras, it can also recognize auto registrations and even faces – enabling real-time alerts that can:
• Be sent to emergency operators.
• Dispatch police – e.g., when specific people enters a city or area where they have been banned.
• Track and alert suspicious behavior and movements, such as with crowd control, loitering in street theft hot spots, or troublemakers entering a bar.

SIEM
Like the modern CCTV, LogPoint is the most advanced form of SIEM – capable of monitoring millions of log files every second, from every device in an infrastructure, detecting log patterns as they evolve.
LogPoint can:
• Regularly report on general activities.
• Identify bottlenecks and monitor the health of your IT infrastructure.
• Replay events to identify when, what and who was involved – providing evidence in criminal prosecution.
• Reveal how to prevent incidents from happening again.
• Alert administrators to security threats and system failures – before they even happen.

LogPoint, is the best SIEM, ever.