Archive for July 28, 2020

Zoho Touts 15 Million Users On Its Enterprise Collaboration Platform

Posted in Commentary with tags on July 28, 2020 by itnerd

Zoho Corporation today shared the latest adoption numbers on Zoho Workplace, its enterprise collaboration platform.  In the last quarter, Zoho Workplace has seen a dramatic increase in adoption and now supports 15 million users globally. The company explained this unprecedented growth as a consequence of the pandemic as well as high demand from business users seeking better business application integration. More than 25 percent of new Zoho Workplace customers have made the decision to switch over from G Suite and Microsoft. 

Business users are increasingly seeking a convergence of collaboration, productivity, business, and communications tools as indicated by a recent study by Beagle Research. According to the study, 67.2 percent of respondents across North America felt that their work is chaotic due to non-integrated systems. Zoho Workplace uniquely fills this gap as competitors such as Zoom, Dropbox, and Slack fail to provide a seamless experience from start to finish. In addition, platform-centric competitors such as Microsoft and Google do not easily support contextual work environments where collaboration needs to happen within business applications. 

Zoho Workplace provides a unified platform including email, chat, audio and video conferencing, shared file storage, and online office suite that enhance the productivity of employees, anywhere. It is an online workspace that allows users to intuitively and securely work together, meet, collaborate and accomplish goals in a contextual setting. The platform includes:

  • Zoho Mail: Custom domain-based, secure business email with Calendar,  Tasks, Notes and Bookmarks.
  • Zoho Cliq: Secure instant messaging with audio and video call capabilities. Zoho Cliq has seen a 225 percent increase in messages sent and 1200 percent increase in calls made per day since March.
  • Zoho Meeting: Online meeting and conferencing application. Zoho Meeting has seen a 772 percent increase in meeting sessions since March.
  • Zoho ShowTime: Online training and virtual classroom solution.  Usage has increased 1100 percent since March.
  • Zoho Connect: Intranet for organization and organization specific social-media platform for employees.
  • Zoho Office Suite: Online office suite with enhanced co-creating, reviewing and collaboration features. Suite includes Zoho Writer, Zoho Sheet, and Zoho Show. 
  • Zoho WorkDrive: Cloud storage for the entire organization with ability to share files securely. Usage has increased 300 percent since March.

Zoho Workplace enables single sign-on across these applications where work streams follow users as they move from screen to screen. This convergence of business, communication, productivity, and collaboration applications allows users to effectively work in context within teams, across their organization or with external stakeholders. Zia and Zia Search boost user productivity as AI and search work across all 9 apps on the platform. Instead of having to extract data across multiple solutions, users can complete projects, from start to finish, all on Zoho. IIFL, Equitas Bank, Lambda Students, India Cements and Don Franklin Auto have chosen Zoho Workplace instead of other solutions because they require tight integration across their enterprise collaboration and business applications.

Zoho Privacy Pledge

Zoho Workplace also ensures a level of confidentiality that no other vendors in this space can guarantee. Zoho does not allow any third-party trackers to monitor usage behavior and never sells any data to ad-based companies. Because Zoho owns, and has built its entire technology stack, the company is able to offer the most secure experience to its 50 million users without any compromise on data privacy. Zoho Workplace users have the assurance that their data is confidential and protected, and only users themselves maintain ownership of that data. 

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EnGenius Announces The New Rugged ECW260 Cloud Managed Wi-Fi 6 Outdoor Wireless Access Point

Posted in Commentary with tags on July 28, 2020 by itnerd

EnGenius Technologies Inc., a high-profile multinational networking company for over two decades, today announced the release of its new EnGenius ECW260 Cloud Managed Wi-Fi 6 Outdoor Dual-Band Wireless AP designed to handle enormous crowds on multiple devices using the fastest speeds available.

The AP uses the latest in Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) technology to support the ever-growing bandwidth demands of densely congested outdoor environments such as airports, smart cities, campuses, parks, and massive industrial sites—all while reaching combined wireless speeds of up to 1.8 Gbps.

Easy Cloud Management: The EnGenius Cloud solution can manage an unlimited number of APs from anywhere. Devices can be quickly scanned, registered, pre- & auto-configured, and remotely monitored and troubleshot. EnGenius Cloud’s dashboard quickly checks network health, provides managed device status, and displays overall top network performance and insights including client applications & operating systems.

Rugged Weatherproofing: Backed by EnGenius’ decades-long expertise in outdoor wireless networking, the redesigned hardware form-factor ECW260 is armored by an IP67-rated dust and water-resistant enclosure, fully capable of withstanding harsh weather.

Security: Each ECW260 AP securely communicates with EnGenius Cloud using two-factor authentication, non-sequential serial numbers, and MAC address verification to ensure only authorized cloud devices are connected. It also uses the latest, most advanced wireless security WPA3 and WPA3 Enterprise to strengthen encryption. EnGenius Cloud offers MAC filter, event-based alerts and push notifications to divert and prevent network hacks and other security threats.

Powerful coverage: The ECW260 AP has a 2.5 GigE PoE-compatible port for easy placement where power outlets are scarce. It also features four detachable 360° antennas that boost signal strength and allows users to swap them out for bigger, better antennas. When meshing, the AP uses high power radios to extend the distance between itself and other access points.

Unmatched Affordability: The ECW260 AP is valued at $499 and—like all EnGenius cloud managed access points—comes with no access point licensing or subscription fees. 

For more information, visit https://www.engeniustech.com/engenius-cloud/hardware.

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EvilCorp: The Criminal Hackers Behind The Garmin Ransomware Attack

Posted in Commentary with tags on July 28, 2020 by itnerd

Now I have spent a lot of time talking about the Garmin ransomware attack that has pretty much crippled Garmin and pretty much infuriated users of of their products. And I’ve mentioned that the word on the street is that the people behind this want $10 million in ransom. But now that Garmin’s services appear to be coming back on line, it’s time to talk about who the people are behind this ransomware attack?

The ransomware that is apparently being used is “WastedLocker” made by a group of hackers calling themselves “Evil Corp.” MalwareBytes has more info on both:

The ransomware name is derived from the filename it creates which includes an abbreviation of the victim’s name and the string “wasted”.

For each encrypted file, the attackers create a separate file that contains the ransomware note. The ransom note has the same name as the associated file with the addition of “_info”.

The ransom demands are steep, ranging from $500,000 to over $10 million in Bitcoin. Given that the operators make every effort to go after any backups, some organizations may feel the need to pay up. Where other ransomware operators are adding the exfiltration and even auction of stolen data to their arsenal, the Evil Corp gang has shown no inclination in that direction yet.

Historically the Evil Corp gang targets mostly US organizations and it looks like they are staying on that track with a few victims in Europe. The main players in the group are believed to be Russian.

The ransomware itself is very interesting in terms of how it operates:

The ransomware itself is custom built for each client so there is nothing to be gained by doing a full analysis. The attacks do have some commonalities though which we will discuss here.

  • Deletes shadow copies, which are the default backups made by the Windows OS.
  • The main executable for the ransomware is copied to the system folder and gets elevated permissions
  • A service is created that runs during encryption.
  • During encryption the encrypted files are renamed, and the ransom notes are created.
  • A log file is created that lists the number of targeted files, the number of encrypted files, and the number of files that were not encrypted due to access rights issues.
  • The service is stopped and deleted.

This is very crafty and would almost be worthy of praise were it not for the damage that it causes.

Now over to Evil Corp. Their top guy is said to be a fellow by the name of Maksim Yakubets according to the FBI. His right hand man is said to be Igor Olegovich Turashev and both are Russian nationals wanted by the FBI. And if you’re interested in why the FBI wants to get them into a jail cell, this Wired article can help you with that. They’ve been around for a while and have become increasingly more sophisticated, which makes them a threat to computer users everywhere. And if they are truly behind the Garmin ransomware attack, they’ve now got the eyeballs of a whole lot of people behind them who would love to take them down. Especially if the rumors are true that Garmin paid the ransom to get themselves out of this. Thus I would not want to be them as there’s not a whole lot of places outside of Russia that they can go without the FBI being able to nab them. Plus with this latest attack, the FBI is going to work double time to get them into a nice cosy jail cell.

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