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Today’s topics include the official opening of IBM’s new security services headquarters in Massachusetts, security experts’ warnings that the cyber threats to the Internet of Things will only increase, Google and Facebook’s plan to block advertising traffic to fake news sites and Microsoft’s announcement that it is now a Platinum member of the Linux Foundation.
IBM is officially opening its new global security headquarters in Cambridge, MA, providing a new base of operations for the company’s $2 billion a year security business.
Along with the new headquarters, IBM is opening what it calls the industry’s first “commercial Cyber Range,” which is a cyber-threat simulator to train clients who need to learn how to deal with cyber-attacks. IBM is also launching a new Incident Response and Intelligence Services team.
After massive Distributed Denial of Service attacks in October, security experts are warning that the relative lack of security of the Internet of Things will continue to make connected devices favored targets of attackers looking to create botnets to drive DDoS traffic to new unprecedented scales.
On Nov 16 security experts testified before two subcommittees in the U.S. House of Representatives, warning Congress that a lack of focus on security has made the Internet of Things a playground for hackers.
The hearing follows the October attacks against Internet-infrastructure provider Dyn, which struggled for more than 11 hours to mitigate a flood of data that caused its domain services to become unreachable and resulted in intermittent service outages for its clients, including Twitter, Netflix, Etsy, Paypal and Spotify.
Google this week joined Facebook in announcing that it would restrict revenue-generating advertisements from being placed on websites purveying fake news.
The move appears to be in response to the criticism that both companies have received in recent days for allowing some websites to distribute fake news pertaining to the recent U.S. presidential election.
Some believe that the false reports, a majority of them unfavorable to presidential contender Hillary Clinton, played a role in President-Elect Donald Trump’s victory.
Going forward, Google will also restrict ad service on pages that misrepresent, misstate or conceal information about the publisher, the primary purpose of the website or the publisher’s content.
In a move that would have been unthinkable a decade ago, Microsoft today announced it is becoming a Platinum member of the Linux Foundation. As a Platinum member, Microsoft will provide $500,000 a year to the Linux Foundation and pledges to support the group’s open-source and Linux efforts.
Microsoft has been moving incrementally toward embracing Linux and open source over the past eight years, though the interaction with the Linux community initially was somewhat hostile.
Now, however, Microsoft’s $500,000 yearly Platinum membership dues will help the Linux Foundation in its many efforts to advance Linux and open-source technology.