Today’s topics include Android overtaking Windows as the top operating system on the internet, IBM Security’s warning of a spike in tax scams, a new family of servers released by Oracle and Fujitsu and McAfee’s return to the IT security market as an independent company.
Windows is no longer the top OS on the internet. That distinction now belongs to Android. StatCounter reported that Android nudged out Microsoft’s Windows with a share of 37.93 percent compared to Microsoft’s 37.91 percent.
It marked the first time since the 1980s that Microsoft has not held the leadership position in the operating system market worldwide.
This achievement represents a major breakthrough for Android which held just a 2.4 percent of global Internet usage share only five years ago,” StatCounter CEO Aodhan Cullen said.
Much of Android’s growth has come from the proliferating use of mobile phones around the world and a coinciding decline in desktop use in recent years.
As Tax day grows near IBM Tax is reporting a spike in tax-related spam email and similar fraud scams that aim to exploit unsuspecting tax filers.
The company’s new report, called “Cybercrime Riding Tax Season Tides: Trending Spam and Dark Web Findings,” indicates that attackers are ramping up their efforts ahead of April 18.
IBM X-Force security researchers have tracked a 6,000 percent increase in tax-related spam emails from December 2016 to February 2017.
IBM’s research this year has found that beyond the usual consumer fraud, cyber-criminals are now also going after businesses to rob IRS W-2 form data for substantial batches of employees at once.
Oracle and Fujitsu are unveiling a new family of high-end enterprise servers under the Fujitsu brand and powered by the latest version of the Japanese tech vendor’s SPARC64 processors.
Officials from both companies introduced Fujitsu’s SPARC M12 lineup on April 4. The lineup will initially consist of two systems that are aimed at a broad array of database workloads and other enterprise applications.
Primary examples would be business intelligence and enterprise resource planning, both for on-premises environments as well as for data processing in the cloud.
Security software company McAfee has returned to the IT industry as an independent company after six years as a part of computer chip giant Intel.
McAfee was acquired by Intel in 2011 for $7.68 billion. To spin off McAfee, Intel sold a 51 percent stake in the company to private-equity firm TPG for $3.1 billion in cash.
The newly independent McAfee looks to focus on the challenge of delivering software products that can cope with rapidly evolving cyber-threats in an increasingly crowded and competitive IT security Market.