Today’s topics include Google’s legal victory in a “right to be forgotten” case in Japan, HPE’s acquisition of security analytics vendor Niara, the RiskIQ study that found that malvertising increased by 132 percent in 2016 and Microsoft’s addition of a real-time internet of things dashboard to Power BI feature.
In a legal victory for Google in a “right to be forgotten case,” Japan’s Supreme Court this week decided against an individual in the country who wanted search results about him removed from Google search.
The ruling is important for Google, which is embroiled in similar right to be forgotten disputes in the European Union and elsewhere around the world. The case in Japan involves a man who was arrested in 2011 on charges related to child prostitution and fined 500,000 yen for the offense.
According to a description of the dispute on Japan’s Asahi Shimbun’s website, in 2015, the individual asked the District Court in Japan’s Saitama District to get Google to remove details of his arrest record from its search results because it was hindering his attempts to rehabilitate himself.
Google refused to comply and instead appealed the ruling to the Tokyo High Court, which overthrew the district court’s decision on the grounds that it was not in the public interest to expunge the man’s criminal record.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced on Feb. 1 that it is acquiring privately-held security vendor Niara Inc. Financial terms of the deal were not publicly disclosed.
Niara is a security analytics vendor with a specific focus on market segment known as User and Entity Behavior Analytics. The company first emerged from stealth in June 2015, with the promise of using big data security analytics to help organization improve security.
As a private company, Niara had raised a total of $29.4 million in venture funding from several investors including, Venrock, New Enterprise Associates and Index Ventures.
In RiskIQ’s 2016 Recap report, the company found that malvertising increased in eight of nine categories tracked by the firm, with an overall increase of 132 percent compared to the previous year.
Of the nearly 2 billion pages, the company found 7.6 million fraudulent or malicious advertisements. “Every indication that we have is that malvertising is increasing on all fronts,” Ian Cowger, a security researcher at RiskIQ, told eWEEK.
“It is a problem that affects every step in the advertising chain and each one of them shares the responsibility.” Malicious online advertisements represent an effective way for cyber-criminals to infect victims’ systems, because the distribution medium allows the attackers to reach millions of people using advertisements as a stealthy vector of infection.
Microsoft has taken a major step in preparing Power BI, the software maker’s cloud-based business intelligence and data analytics product, for the internet of things.
Power BI’s real-time streaming datasets feature is now generally available, along with the ability to output data from Azure Stream Analytics to Power BI streaming datasets, announced Microsoft Power BI program manager Sirui Sun.
Azure Stream Analytics is Microsoft’s event data processing service that enables real-time analytics on data collected from IoT devices, sensors and applications.