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Today’s topics include the debut of the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 Phablet, HPE’s reorganization of its cloud unit, a security researcher’s Black Hat presentation on a flaw affecting Windows that allows cyber-threats to evade antivirus scanners, and IBM’s launch of its new lab-on-a-chip that’s designed to fight cancer.
Samsung unveiled its latest Galaxy Note 7 large-screen smartphone at a special “Galaxy Unpacked” event in New York City on Aug. 2, featuring all-new iris scanning capabilities, a much-improved integrated S Pen stylus, a first-ever “Secure Folder” feature and other updates aimed at making users more productive.
The new Note 7 is slimmer and more rounded compared with the previous version, the Note 5, which debuted in August 2015. The device takes many of its features from the company’s latest S7 and S7 Edge smartphones, which were released in March.
The new phone is available for preorder starting Aug. 3 and will be available in the United States on August 19 through AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, U.S. Cellular and Verizon Wireless.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise continues to restructure its core businesses and remake its executive team as officials look to streamline the giant tech vendor.
Just over a month after announcing that longtime HPE veteran Martin Fink—who at the time was the company’s CTO and head of HP Labs—was retiring at the end of the year, HPE officials are reorganizing the company’s cloud unit and naming a new executive to run it.
Bill Hilf, senior vice president and general manager of the company’s cloud business, is leaving the company as officials create a new cloud unit that will include HPE’s Helion OpenStack and Helion CloudSystem efforts.
The new business unit, Software-Defined and Cloud Group, will be led by Ric Lewis, who had been senior vice president and general manager of HPE’s converged data center infrastructure unit. Mark Interrante will replace Hilf as the company’s top cloud executive, reporting to Lewis.
Most antivirus security technologies at one level or another require some manner of system hook to work on a Microsoft Windows operating system.
According to research set to be presented on Aug. 3 at the Black Hat USA conference in Las Vegas, some of those hooking mechanisms were flawed in a way that could have enabled an attacker to bypass any AV technology in use.
“About a year ago, we found a security issue in AVG antivirus that enabled an attacker to bypass exploit mitigation controls,” Udi Yavo, co-founder and CTO of enSilo, told eWEEK. “A short time later, we found the same issue with McAfee’s antivirus, which was the trigger for us to extend the research to find out what was really going on and if other vendors are at risk.”
The root issue is in how security vendors hook into Windows, and enSilo’s researchers were able to find widespread risk. Some vendors make use of third-party hooking engines to get the functionality they need.
One such popular hooking engine is Microsoft’s Detours software package. “All the vendors that use a vulnerable hooking engine are also vulnerable to the bypass risk,” Yavo said.
IBM’s research scientists have developed a new lab-on-a-chip technology that can separate biological particles at the nanoscale to enable doctors to detect diseases such as cancer, even before symptoms appear.
IBM is working with the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York to perfect the technology and to test it on prostate cancer, which is the most common cancer in men in the United States.
The collaboration uses a technology developed at IBM called nanoscale deterministic lateral displacement, or nano-DLD, to separate the biological particles at nanoscale. The IBM lab-on-a-chip would work like a home pregnancy test.