Archive for December 17, 2020

Google Sued By States for Abuse of Search-Market Dominance

Posted in Commentary with tags on December 17, 2020 by itnerd

A bipartisan coalition of states sued Alphabet’s Google Thursday alleging broad antitrust violations in the online search market, marking the third U.S. case against the search giant in two months:

The lawsuit, led by Colorado, Iowa and other states, marks the latest escalation of the antitrust battle against Google. It comes a day after 10 Republican state attorneys general led by Texas sued the company for anticompetitive practices, and follows an October complaint by the Justice Department. “Combined with the other recent lawsuits filed against Google, never before have so many states and the federal government come together to challenge a company with such power,” Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller said a statement. “Google has more data on consumers, and more variety of information, than perhaps any entity in history.” The lawsuit, filed by 38 attorneys general, accuses Google of illegally monopolizing internet search and search advertising through a series of anticompetitive contracts and conduct, hurting consumers and advertisers in the process.

Clearly the US Government is on an all out mission to go after big tech and anything that big tech does. That means that this lawsuit won’t be the last one that you will see. And it’s a safe bet that this isn’t going to change under the incoming Biden Administration.

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Assassin’s Creed Valhalla’s Yule Season Begins Today With Free Content

Posted in Commentary with tags on December 17, 2020 by itnerd

Today, Ubisoft announced that Assassin’s Creed® Valhalla’s first Season named “Yule Season” is available, lasting for three months with exclusive narrative content and in-game events accessible to all players for free. Starting today, players can celebrate winter as part of the Yule Festival with new challenges and rewards.

Seasons are coming to Assassin’s Creed Valhalla to extend the post-launch experience throughout 2021, delivering a variety of new free content for all players focused on gameplay and world evolution, with updates coming in at different points during the Season.

The first Seasonal content of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, the Yule Season, invites players to discover the Yule Festival, an in-game event active until January 7 in a dedicated area of the settlement. During the Yuletide celebration, players can join in the festivities with a new Drinking game, an Archery mini-game, a Fist Fight tournament, and two new character quests available in the settlement. In addition, players can earn exclusive rewards including a new gear set, settlement decorations, and more.

To experience the Yule Festival, players must reach England and complete one of the first narrative arcs, either Grantebridgescire or Ledecestrescire. The festival will then be triggered automatically when players visit the settlement.

The real-life Ravensthorpe (population 498) is also celebrating the in-game Season 1 launch, with the Lord of the Manor, Charlie Reeve, declaring a week-long Valhalliday. From now until December 24, the local Chequers Pub & Village Shop, the village hub, will offer an Assassin’s Creed Valhalla-themed takeaway menu to patrons. Finally, a donation of $5,000 from Ubisoft will go towards supporting Ravensthorpe’s playground project, as well as other community projects.

A second update will add more content for the Yule Season in February:

  • River Raids: a new game mode building on the core raiding mechanic will be introduced, delivering a dynamic, challenging, and highly replayable raid experience. As the River Raids rely heavily on the Jomsviking recruits, players can hire Jomsviking from their friends online to take on an entire crew. The River Raids game mode features raids with higher stakes and different difficulty levels. 
  • Ranks for Jomsviking: In the Yule Season, an update to the Jomsviking feature will allow players’ Jomsviking to earn XP and rank up – the higher the rank, the more silver players can earn when their Jomsviking are recruited by other players
  • Additional new abilities and rewards

With development led by Ubisoft Montreal, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla offers players the captivating experience of playing as Eivor, a legendary Viking warrior, driven from Norway by endless wars and dwindling resources in ninth century AD. Players can relive the ruthless fighting style of Viking warriors with a revamped dual-wielding combat system and experience new gameplay features such as raids, assaults, and the settlement, as well as a revamped progression and gear upgrade system. Political alliances, combat decisions and dialogue choices can influence the world of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, so players must choose wisely to protect their clan’s home and their future.

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is available on Xbox Series X | S, Xbox One consoles, PlayStation®5, PlayStation®4, the Epic Games Store and Ubisoft Store on Windows PC, as well as on Stadia, Amazon Luna and Ubisoft’s subscription service, Ubisoft+.

For more information about Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, please visit: assassinscreed.com

For the latest news on Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and other Ubisoft games, visit news.ubisoft.com.

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Sharp Electronics Of Canada Announces Eight New Letter-Sized A4 Printers And MFPs

Posted in Commentary with tags on December 17, 2020 by itnerd

Sharp Electronics of Canada has announced eight new models in its lineup of letter-sized A4 printers for office and home use. The range features compact designs that fit easily into any space, and out-of-the-box copy, print, scan and fax capabilities. These new models are designed with high-performance features typically found on larger machines, delivering the productivity, performance and reliability needed for busy work environments. 

This new expansion of our A4 lineup is complementary to our solid, award winning A3 products and other document solutions we support and provides our channel partners and customers with a one-Sharp solution across their businesses and their home offices; our way of supporting the change in work from home trend.The new models include three monochrome multifunction printers (MFPs): MXB557F, MXB427W and MXB467F; three colour MFPs: MXC357F, MXC407F and MXC507F; and two monochrome Single Function Printers (SFPs): MXB427PW and MXB467P. With speeds ranging from 35-60 pages per minute, these products can integrate seamlessly into any existing office or home environment.

Users will benefit from a compact design with robust technology and advanced workflow features for virtually any sized office. These new products include easy connectivity to your popular public cloud services such as Box, Google Drive, OneDrive and Dropbox. Mobile printing is supported for Chromebooks and for iOS devices via AirPrint. Users can use MS Office Direct to print from USB drives, or send scanned files directly to USB. All of these can be easily navigated by a robust, intuitive and easy to use touch panel display.

Businesses are assessing their needs as they plan returns to their office spaces, but are also considering how to ensure employees have all they need for their offices at home. The new monochrome and colour MPFs from Sharp fit into any space or workflow, supporting our goal to provide Canadian companies with the tools right for them so employees can be productive no matter where they’re working.

All models will be available through authorized Sharp dealers in February 2021.

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Guest Post: ESET Discovers Operation SignSight: Supply-chain Attack Against A Certification Authority In Southeast Asia

Posted in Commentary with tags on December 17, 2020 by itnerd

ESET Research discovered another supply-chain attack in Asia, this time on the website of the Vietnam Government Certification Authority (VGCA). The attackers modified two of the software installers available for download on this website by adding a backdoor in order to compromise users of the legitimate application. Supply-chain attacks appear to be a quite common compromise vector for cyberespionage groups. Cybercrime operation SignSight leverages malware known as PhantomNet or Smanager.

“In Vietnam, digital signatures are very common, as digitally signed documents have the same level of enforceability as wet signatures. In addition to issuing certificates, the VGCA develops and distributes a digital signature toolkit. It is used by the Vietnamese government, and probably by private companies, to sign digital documents. The compromise of a certification authority website is a good opportunity for APT groups, since visitors are likely to have a high level of trust in a state organization responsible for digital signatures,” explains Matthieu Faou, one of ESET’s researchers investigating the SignSight operation.

The PhantomNet backdoor is quite simple and is able to collect victim information (computer name, hostname, username, OS version, user privileges [admin or not], and the public IP address) as well as install, remove and update malicious plugins. These additional and more complex plugins are probably only deployed on a few selected machines. By also installing the legitimate program, the attackers make sure that this compromise won’t be easily noticed by end users.

ESET researchers uncovered this new supply-chain attack in early December 2020 and notified the compromised organization and the VNCERT. We believe that the website ceased delivering compromised software installers at the end of August 2020. The Vietnam Government Certification Authority confirmed that they were aware of the attack before our notification and that they notified the users who downloaded the trojanized software.

ESET has seen victims in the Philippines in addition to Vietnam.

For more technical details about operation SignSight, read the blog post “Operation SignSight: Supply- chain attack against a certification authority in Southeast Asia” on WeLiveSecurity. Make sure to follow ESET Research on Twitter for the latest news from ESET Research.

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OVHcloud Joins The Open Invention Network

Posted in Commentary with tags on December 17, 2020 by itnerd

OVHcloud, the European leader with a global footprint in the cloud industry, announced today it joined the Open Invention Network (OIN). This engagement affirms OVHcloud’s approach in terms of Open Innovation and will strengthen the company’s ecosystem, by supporting a world-class open source innovation community.

One of the keys to the success of OVHcloud over the years lies in the company’s ability to develop and promote innovation, both in IT itself, but also in its industrial practices. This innovative DNA is core to constantly researching and developing new technologies and optimizing the performance of OVHcloud’s solutions portfolio. By joining OIN, OVHcloud contributes more to the open source community and therefore protects its open ecosystem, on which its always relied to build more flexible and cost effective solutions to support the evolution of its users’ needs. 

The open working methods have always been at the heart of its corporate culture. As a global alternative cloud provider, OVHcloud actively encourages a whole ecosystem of advocates to collaborate, innovate, and deliver to open communities. In accordance with its company values of trust and working together, and its product values of transparency, reversibility and interoperability, OVHcloud has chosen to join OIN in order to accelerate its open innovation strategy, and thus confirms its commitment to digital sovereignty and an open approach to software technology.

OVHcloud is now committed to licensing the OIN community with its current and future Linux System patent portfolio, in order to promote open innovation and preserve the open community.

Open to all, OIN’s community practices patent non-aggression in core Linux and adjacent open source technologies by cross-licensing Linux System patents to one another on a royalty-free basis. Patents owned by Open Invention Network are similarly licensed royalty-free to any organization that agrees not to assert its patents against the Linux System. You can join the OIN community by signing the OIN license online at  http://www.j-oin.net/

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TikTok Music 2020: The Full Playlist

Posted in Commentary with tags on December 17, 2020 by itnerd

Freed from the limitations of programmed radio or streaming playlists, a viral song on TikTok can come from any year, any genre, or any artist, fueled by a community eager to find and share new musical obsessions. 

Canadians were a major part of this year’s Year On TikTok – Music 2020 list, from established superstars like Drake, Justin Bieber and The Weeknd (and really what’s more meaningful a Grammy nomination or TikTok’s Top Artists?), to #TBT artists like Avril Lavigne and Nelly Furtado and new emerging artists that attribute their success to TikTok like Curtis Waters, 437Aiden and Tate McRae.

You can find the complete top TikTok – Music 2020 list here. And here’s an overview of what’s inside to help you discover and navigate the categories that will matter most to you: 

What’s Inside: 

  1. Real Quick: The Fastest Songs To A Billion *Drake
  2. Pick Your Sound: Top Genres
  3. They’ve Got The Hits: Top Artist Catalog
  4. The Come Up: Emerging Artists *Curtis Waters, 437Aiden and Tate McRae
  5. Down The Rabbit Hole: Unexpected Hits and Niche Discoveries 
  6. TikTok LIVE: 2020’s Essential Music Moments *The Weeknd
  7. Celebrating Culture With Music
  8. Iconic: Legendary Acts On TikTok
  9. Remember These? Songs Revitalized On TikTok *Simple Plan, Nelly Furtado and Avril Lavigne

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Guest Post: Atlas VPN Says That 1 in 5 Employees Fall For Phishing Emails Even After Security Training

Posted in Commentary with tags on December 17, 2020 by itnerd

The year 2020 was challenging for cybersecurity on many levels. The global pandemic brought a wave of cyberattacks exploiting the mayhem, while remote work made employees more vulnerable to such attacks.

In particular, phishing attacks hit record levels, with Google reporting over 2 million phishing sites in 2020 alone. However, even more alarming is that current cybersecurity measures employed by organizations worldwide are inadequate to protect against such threats.

According to the data presented by the Atlas VPN team, one-fifth (19.8%) of employees fell for phishing emails even if they have gone through security awareness training. 

Rachel Welch, COO of Atlas VPN, shares her thoughts on the situation:

“We are in an age where cyberattacks are evolving faster than ever before. However, the data shows that organizations are not doing enough to educate their employees on cybersecurity threats.

Organizations have to realize that just as the cyberthreat landscape is shifting, so should their response to cyberthreats. Otherwise, the organization is left vulnerable to cyberattacks, which have devastating and long-lasting consequences to both the organization itself and its clients.”

Out of the employees who did click on phishing email links, 67.5% also entered their credentials, such as password, on the phishing webpage. It means that overall, 13.4% of employees provided their credentials to phishers. 

The Public Sector is the most vulnerable to phishing attacks

While no sector is immune to phishing attacks, some industries were better educated on recognizing such assaults than the others.

Five industries had above average phishing email click rates, with the public sector being at the top of the list.  A total of 28.4% of employees working in the public sector clicked on a phishing link in an email.

Next up is the Transport industry. Nearly a quarter (24.7%) of employees in the sector fell for phishing emails. 

To read the full report, head over to: https://atlasvpn.com/blog/1-in-5-employees-fall-for-phishing-emails-even-after-a-security-training

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