Daily Video: LG Launches Its Latest G4 Flagship Smartphone

Today’s topics include a new smartphone from LG, an addition to Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure, a new extension to Google’s Chrome browser and Arbor Networks reports that distributed denial-of-service attacks are getting larger than ever.

LG unveiled its latest G4 flagship smartphone in a move to take on the Apple iPhone 6, the Samsung Galaxy S6 and others. The new LG phone boasts vastly improved front and rear cameras, an upgraded display and a subtle curve in its design compared with the G3 model that preceded it.

The LG G4 will start its global rollout on April 29 in Korea, and will later be available around the world. Prices and carrier availability have not yet been announced, but Sprint is already touting availability of the G4 sometime in June.

The new smartphone is the first to use LG Display’s new 5.5-inch IPS Quantum display, which offers 20 percent improvement in color reproduction, 25 percent increase in brightness and 50 percent greater contrast than previous displays.

Cisco officials on April 29 at the Interop 2015 show in Las Vegas announced that the company will integrate the FirePower threat protection software with the company’s Application Centric Infrastructure.

ACI is Cisco’s answer to the software-defined networking trend that brings together open and optimized hardware and software that are designed to ensure that workloads get the networking resources they need.

Google launched a new extension for its Chrome browser that is designed to discourage people from using the same password to log in to multiple online accounts.

The open-source extension—called Password Alert—works by alerting users if they type a current Google password into a non-Google site. The idea is to foster better security by deterring users from reusing their Google passwords.

Arbor Networks is reporting the largest distributed denial-of-service attack it has ever observed—a 334G-bps attack against an organization in India.

Overall, the volume of large DDoS attacks continues to grow, according to Arbor’s Q1 2015 global DDoS report, which the company released April 28. Arbor found that 17.7 percent of attacks were over 1G bps in the first quarter of 2015, up from 16 percent in the first quarter of 2014.