Spring and summer mean sports. This year is no different. If you want college sports, you can check out the Becker College varsity esports program. Watch them run roughshod over the other schools in New England. Pros? Activision announced that the Call of Duty League resumes today. If you were busy fragging your authority figures during practice sessions, here are some of the newsbits you missed.
Veeam and AWS news. Happy 10th birthday to the Veeam Cloud & Service Provider (VCSP) program. The present goes to users, however, in the release of the new Veeam Service Provider Console v4 (charted at right). Free to VCSP partners, the upgrade eases remote management and monitoring of Veeam environments.
If virtual desktops weren’t your thing before, they might be your thing now. To help, AWS announced general availability of the Migrations Acceleration Program for Windows. Assess your readiness, mobilize your resources, and migrate or modernize your workloads.
Local or remote, workers create, search for, and lose files regularly. One option to better manage same is the support by Amazon’s Elastic Container Service (ECS) for its sibling the Amazon Elastic File Systems. Works on containers running on ECS and AWS Fargate.
Coronavirus news. Cyber protector Acronis extends #CyberFit Financing to that protection. Provides access to financial aid for small businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic. #CyberFit Financing works with Lendio to streamline access to loans available through the U.S. CARES Act. Focus is on the Paycheck Protection Program to help channel pros keep employees on staff.
It’s one thing when some employees work remotely but another when all employees do. LogMeIn just launched the Bold360 Rapid Response FAQ Web Widget to help manage customer and employee questions related to the pandemic. Includes a knowledge base of answers and articles with a pre-populated list of suggestions.
Security news. Unfortunately, hackers have not closed up shop. Check out the new ConnectWise Certify cybersecurity education and training program. Offers a dual track certification for business owners and sales pros as well as engineers.
Since browsers are attack vectors, more security should help. Hello to the new Avast Secure Browser’s Android version. An extension of Avast’s Windows and Mac desktop versions, it includes VPN, unique PIN codes, anti-tracking tech, Adblock integration, and an encrypted media vault.
Box stores millions and millions of files for clients, making it a big target. Good that the new Box Shield advanced security solution identifies malware, alerts the user, restricts downloads, and notifies IT and security teams. General availability by the end of April.
Encryption too often means key management headaches. To help, StorMagic acquired KeyNexus, a designer of encryption key management tools, and released SvKMS, a virtualized key management software product. Handles encryption in any location, be it edge, cloud, or datacenter.
Other product news. Have clients in a bandwidth desert served poorly by expensive but slow DSL, monopoly-lazy cable, and lousy satellite? Check out the new Ooma Connect tandem of business phone service plus fixed wireless Internet. The Ooma LTE 460 Adapter works over a nationwide LTE-Advanced network.
If your customers hate buying printers but still want ink on paper, check out the new Brother Mobile Solutions Shift & Print Subscription Service. Turns desktop and mobile printer ownership into a hardware-as-a-service model to shift expenses to OpEx.
If you hear, “”give me a hand”” and think biometric security tools, you’re in luck. The IGEL OS now supports Fujitsu’s PalmSecure technology. The innovative palm vein recognition tech provides fewer false acceptances and rejections than fingerprint and other biometric scanners.
ViewSonic just made available myViewBoard Clips as part of its myViewBoard ecosystem. Makes content creation easier for educators who can now access more than two million licensed educational videos.
OpenText announced delivery of OpenText Cloud Editions 20.2. Includes flexible cloud-deployment options with managed service expertise, core SaaS applications and services, and much more. Run the software anywhere, whether cloud, data center, or hybrid system.
Speaking of clouds, the Nintex Workflow Cloud now includes the Nintex Gateway, which offers two-way, drag-and-drop ineractions with robotic process automation (RPA) bots.
Sometimes nice network equipment must hang out in rough, dirty places. If your network switches need to live in a bad neighborhood, try the new TRENDnet Industrial Gigabit PoE+ Wall-Mounted Front Access Switches. Hardened metal housings help them handle extreme temperature ranges.
Or skip the wires with the new Cradlepoint NetCloud, E300 Seriees LTE Router to bring wireless service to the edge. Fully managed and controlled by the Cradlepoint NetCloud Service. 5G ready in case you are.
And speaking of wireless, the Vertiv Avocent ACS 8000 advanced console server with cellular capabilities is available now. Easy to provision new equipment and troubleshoot issues with or without functioning Ethernet connections.
When bad packets hide among the good ones, finding them can be tough. Perhaps the latest version of the LiveAction LiveCapture 3100 v13.1 can help. It includes a forensic packet capture rate up to 40 Gbps, making it hard for those bad packets to hide any longer.
Non-product news. MigrationWiz developer BitTitan just added Kevin Serpanchy (pictured) as sales director of the North and South American regions (sounds like pretty much all the Americas, right?)
DLT Solutions (a Tech Data government technology subsidiary), promoted Chris Wilkinson to president.
Industrial cybersecurity player Claroty rolled out two red carpets for Udi Bar Sela and Grant Geyer. They’re now chief financial officer and chief product officer, respectively.
Cynet (security) recently appointed Mr. Avi Mileguir as vice president of sales. Doubling down, it opened a North American sales operations office in Boston.
CoreDial, big in cloud communications, announced that CEO Alan Rihm has been appointed to the Cloud Communication Alliance’s board of directors.
Cloud security vendor Zscaler signed the papers to acquire Cloudneeti, a Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) company. Terms were not disclosed.
Navisite just acquired clckwrk, an Advanced Consulting Partner in the AWS Partner Network. The company also achieved the AWS Well-Architected Partner status.
This week’s stats ticker:
SANS Institute, the cyber security training and certification people, released its “”Security Working from Home”” Deployment Kit last month. Good timing, since its network monitoring found a 30% increase in attacker interest in Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) servers during March. Developed by Microsoft, RDP clients run software to connect to RDP servers. Unfortunately, the Shodan search engine shows a significant increase in exposed RDP servers as organizations scramble to move workers out to home offices. While an average of 2,600 IP addresses were used to scan for RDP before, that jumped to around 3,540 each day in March. Not really architected to work securely on the open Internet, RDP server breaches can open the door to a company’s entire network. SANS suggestions include running only over VPNs and using unique, long, and random passwords.
Check Point Software Technologies commissioned a survey from Dimensional Research on the coronavirus pandemic’s impact on enterprise security. Surprise! Not good. Over 400 IT and security professionals globally reported that coronavirus-related attacks are up, according to 71% of respondents. Phishing was up the most according to 55%, followed by malicious websites hooking users with pandemic information. General malware was up, say 28%, as was ransomware (19%). 95% of those helping remote users report additional IT security challenges. The near term looks fairly bleak as well. 61% worry about security risks in make rapid changes to support remote workers. 55% worried that remote access security needs improving, and 49% felt the same about endpoint security.
Webroot’s Cybersecurity Hygiene Risk Index found overconfidence to be a big problem among consumers and families. For instance, 78% said they were familiar with malware and 68% with phishing scams, but far fewer were confident they could define the terms. The older users get, and the more they go through, the more secure they become. But it’s not enough to give users in any U.S. state a passing score, since those in head-of-the-class Nebraska got a D on Webroot’s report card. But the average person was worse, scoring a 58% success rate on the index. One serious problem? Almost half (49%) of Americans admit to using the same password across multiple sites. If that’s what they admit, you can be sure the real number is higher. Very Small Businesses (VSBs) often share passwords and use personal devices for work. Even after being attacked, 19% make no changes to their online behavior.
No mercy for the first lady of Alton. Earlier this week, the police in Alton, Illinois, raided a downtown bar (Hiram’s Tavern) that continued to operate after a state ban on such activity. A number of citations for reckless conduct, which is a class A misdemeanor, were issued.
The Friday before, the Mayor of Alton, Brant Walker, had doubled down on the state mandate and ordered the police to “”strictly enforce”” the statewide stay at home order. The raid on Hiram’s Tavern happened early the next Sunday morning at about 1 a.m.
Notice that timing: Sunday at 1 a.m., after the Mayor’s order on Friday afternoon. Why is that important? One of the Hiram Tavern revelers rounded up on Sunday morning was the wife of Mayor Brant Walker.
On Monday, Hizzoner released a statement that included, “”My wife is an adult capable of making her own decisions, and in this instance, she exhibited a stunning lack of judgement.”” He has instructed the police chief to treat his wife no differently than all the others cited.
We wonder if the Divorce Court episode will be titled, “”A Stunning Lack of Judgement.””
