Archive for May, 2022

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Zoho Unifies Marketing Operations With New Platform 

Posted in Commentary with tags on May 10, 2022 by itnerd

Zoho Corporation, a leading global technology company, today announced Zoho Marketing Plus, a new unified platform that brings together marketing activities across campaign ideation, creation, execution, management, and measurement, providing stakeholders across the entire marketing organization with a single, shared view of critical information for improved collaboration and results. The new marketing platform increases the effectiveness of digital marketing strategies by giving marketing leaders a deeper understanding of customer preferences and behaviors so they can deliver dynamic, high-value customer experiences that drive brand affinity and customer happiness.

CMOs require their teams to leverage technology solutions that capture customer insights in ways that add value both to the business and customers. Through automation and business intelligence, the platform synchronizes engagement data to help marketing teams better understand customers, make more informed decisions, and ultimately drive better results, growth, and revenue. 

The unified platform empowers marketing teams to build continuous and consistent experiences for end customers and deliver more personalized journeys through:

Improved Collaboration Across Campaigns: Marketing teams will be able to connect and collaborate on various projects in tandem and with ease, enabling users to create, manage, execute, and monitor individual activities, across different stakeholders, and accurately track the progress of each task and brand asset. The platform delivers a strong creative suite that empowers teams to develop and improve marketing assets through comments, with the ability to maintain version control with flexible sharing capabilities for both internal and external stakeholders. 

Streamlined Management of Marketing Projects: Brand Studio eliminates the need for siloed solutions by serving as the centralized workplace where marketing campaigns can be created and managed. Users strengthen the brand from a single, unified platform where they can oversee all marketing strategies and progress. Capabilities like Brand Assets, powered by Zoho Workdrive, for example, help digital marketers better manage documents and assets, serving as the repository for all project support materials. 

Unified Digital Brand Asset Creation and Repository: Documents, presentations, sheets, videos, and other files can be kept in a single shared space, making assets easy to locate, reuse, or share. Machine-learning-powered search capabilities streamline team efforts, quickly and accurately locating the correct file. 

Strong Marketing Automation Capabilities: Customer insights are surfaced through AI-powered data analysis, which activates marketers to design the journeys customer respond to best. The platform properly tracks engagement and response data of customers, giving marketing teams insights to improve their journeys over time. This clear and granular understanding of customer behaviors gives marketers the ability to collaborate with customers like never before, ultimately delivering experiences that speak to their unique wants and needs.

Omnichannel Engagement: Customers bounce between channels and devices regularly, yet marketing teams can be ill-equipped to adapt to this rapid movement. Zoho enables marketing teams to access and manage all channels, driving better connections with customers and brand engagement. Email campaigns, social media, customer surveys, webinars, events, and more can all be created and managed from one single interface within the platform.

Supported Integrations: Zoho’s new marketing platform supports strong integrations with third-party solutions, making it easy to share data and insights where needed. For example, sales teams can connect insights from Zoho CRM to existing systems like Salesforce, Microsoft, HubSpot, and more to help measure how much marketing spend is converting to sales. Other key integrations across finance, commerce, and event management strengthen the connections between apps that marketers already have in their arsenal. Platform integrations include Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Google Analytics, Google Search console, YouTube, Survey Monkey; on the finance side it integrates with QuickBooks, Xero, Stripe; on the commerce front it integrates with WooCommerce and Shopify; and on the events front, it integrates with Eventbrite. Integrations can be accessed via Zoho Marketplace from the Campaigns and Analytics sections of the platform.  

Accurate and Real-Time Measurement: Real-time data aggregation and analytics deliver business intelligence that helps marketing teams and leaders determine true marketing ROI. Integrations further support a more accurate view of customer impact, ROI, and revenue growth projections.  

The unified platform includes a vast array of integrated capabilities aimed at helping digital marketers achieve greater results through simplified processes, tighter collaboration, shared assets, and consistent data. Zoho Marketing Plus combines the capabilities of multiple Zoho applications including Campaigns, Social, Webinar, Analytics, Marketing Automation, Workdrive, PageSense, Survey, and Backstage. This newest iteration of Marketing Plus will continue to evolve through tighter integrations with existing Zoho tools such as Cliq, as well as new apps including LandingPage, a no-code page builder that enables marketers to create high-converting website landing pages in minutes without needing a developer-level skillset.

Pricing and Availability

Zoho Marketing Plus is available immediately with a starting price of $31/month, billed annually. For more information, please visit www.zoho.com/marketingplus/

Leave a comment »

Conti Pwns The Cost Rican Government

Posted in Commentary with tags on May 10, 2022 by itnerd

BleepingComputer is reporting that Costa Rica has declared a national emergency after Conti ransomware attacks on multiple government bodies has led to a 672GB data dump, where BleepingComputer observed that Conti’s data leak site had been updated to state that 97% of the data had been leaked:

Conti earlier demanded a $10 million ransom from the Ministry which the government declined to pay, according to Swissinfo.ch.

Conti’s leak site presently lists the following government purportedly affected by the attack, as seen by BleepingComputer:

  • The Costa Rican Finance Minsitry, Ministerio de Hacienda
  • The Ministry of Labor and Social Security, MTSS
  • The Social Development and Family Allowances Fund, FODESAF
  • The Interuniversity Headquarters of Alajuela, SIUA

BleepingComputer has not yet analyzed the leaked data but a preliminary analysis of a very small subset of the leaked data shows source code and SQL databases that appears to be from government websites.

Chris Olson, CEO and Founder of The Media Trust had this to say:

“Although Conti does not appear to have been acting on behalf of the Russian-government during its recent attack on Costa Rica, its Russian ties suggest that the country still possesses advanced cyber capabilities which could be leveraged to carry out similar strikes against NATO-aligned countries. This possibility – which experts have debated since the beginning of its attack on Ukraine – is especially worrisome given that Conti targeted more than a dozen critical organizations in the U.S only months before the attack began.”

“Either way, it’s clear that the ransomware game has changed – it’s no longer just about stealing money from large corporations. Faced with the prospect of cyberwarfare and weaponized ransomware attacks, organizations in both the public and private sector should be preparing themselves by hardening their defenses and locking down their digital ecosystem.”

Well, at least they declined to pay the ransom. That’s somewhat positive as that sends a message that you won’t play ball with these scumbags. But this leak appears to be bad. And it is likely we have not heard the last of this story.

Leave a comment »

Kaspersky Researchers Discover A New “Fileless” Malware Campaign

Posted in Commentary with tags on May 10, 2022 by itnerd

Researchers at Kaspersky have found a malicious campaign that used Windows event logs stored in malware, a new technique for attacks in the wild. This method enables threat actors to plant fileless malware in the file system, enabling the attack activity to be as stealthy as possible:

The initial infection of the system was carried out through the dropper module from an archive downloaded by the victim. The attacker used a variety of unparalleled anti-detection wrappers to keep the last stage Trojans even less visible. To further avoid detection, some modules were signed with a digital certificate.

The attackers employed two types of Trojans for the last stage. These were used to gain further access to the system, commands from control servers are delivered in two ways: over HTTP network communications and engaging the named pipes. Some Trojans versions managed to use a command system containing dozens of commands from C2.

The campaign also included commercial pentesting tools, namely SilentBreak and CobaltStrike. It combined well-known techniques with customized decryptors and the first observed use of Windows event logs for hiding shellcodes onto the system.

Saryu Nayyar, CEO and Founder of Gurucul had this comment:

“Emerging techniques such as these continue to highlight the importance of incorporating behavioral-based analytics, which constantly monitor users, endpoints and other security solutions in the enterprise, to further augment anomaly detection and investigation capabilities.”

“Detection evasion is the name of the game these days, so identifying and alerting on anomalous behavior during early stages of an attack is critical for any effective security program.”

This is truly next level stuff from these threat actors. Which means that your response to these threats has to be next level as well. In the meantime the Kaspersky report does offer some mitigation strategies that are well worth implementing.

Leave a comment »

Jetstack launches industry-first toolkit to reduce software supply chain risk

Posted in Commentary with tags on May 10, 2022 by itnerd

Jetstack, a cloud native products and strategic consulting company, today announced the availability of an easy-to-use, interactive and comprehensive toolkit for securing modern software development. The web-based resource is open for anyone to use and is designed to help organizations evaluate and plan the crucial steps they need to tackle active software supply chain security. Software supply chain security has become an increasingly critical issue for all organizations. After the attack against Solar Winds at the end of 2020 which affected over 1800 companies, software supply chain attacks increased over 300 percent  in 2021.

The Software Supply Chain toolkit is a practical resource that consolidates advice and recommendations from multiple frameworks and whitepapers that each provide comprehensive guidance for software supply chain security including: 

The toolkit presents the guidance from these frameworks broken down into four key areas: build pipelines, source code, provenance and deployment. Recommendations from each section include insights on priority and complexity along with links to the original open source toolsets that can help with that specific recommendation. 

Jetstack, a Venafi company, is a cloud native products and strategic consulting company working with enterprises using Kubernetes and OpenShift. Venafi is the cybersecurity market leader and innovator in machine identity management.

An open source pioneer, Jetstack has achieved notable industry recognition as the creator of cert-manager which is the open source industry standard for cloud native machine identity management. Jetstack’s open source solutions and products protect the application environments and platform infrastructure of global banks, multinational retailing companies and defense organizations. 

Venafi and Jetstack are pioneers of enterprise machine identity security, and Jetstack provides enterprise platform and security teams the power to build, scale and secure their cloud native infrastructure for advanced developer automation, workload security and application innovation.

Leave a comment »

Competition Bureau Confirms That It Wants To Stop The Rogers Shaw Merger

Posted in Commentary with tags , on May 9, 2022 by itnerd

Yesterday I reported that Rogers and Shaw received communication from the Competition Bureau saying that they were going oppose the merger of the two telcos. Now the Competition Bureau has confirmed that this communication happened. And they provided among other details, this:

The Competition Bureau is seeking to block Rogers proposed $26 billion acquisition of Shaw in an effort to protect Canadians from higher prices, poorer service quality and fewer choices, particularly in wireless services.

The Bureau challenged the merger today by requesting an order from the Competition Tribunal to prevent it from proceeding. The Bureau is also requesting an injunction to stop the parties from closing the deal until its application can be heard. The Bureau must now prove its case before the Tribunal in order for the deal to be stopped. 

The Bureau alleges that removing Shaw as a competitor threatens to undo the significant progress it has made introducing more competition into an already concentrated wireless services market, where Rogers, Bell and Telus (the Big 3) serve approximately 87% of Canadian subscribers. 

Following an extensive investigation, the Bureau determined that competition between Rogers and Shaw has already declined. The Bureau’s position is that if the proposed merger is allowed to proceed, that harm will continue and may worsen. The applications filed seek to safeguard an effective, growing and disruptive regional competitor for the benefit of consumers.

Well, this is a very interesting development. The Competition Bureau sees this merger the way that Canadians see this merger. Which is that it is harmful to Canadians because it shrinks competition. I for one will be cheering for the Competition Bureau in this fight as Canada needs to do better when it comes to its telco services.

Leave a comment »

Telstra Appoints Noah Drake As President For The Americas

Posted in Commentary with tags on May 9, 2022 by itnerd

Telstra has named Noah Drake as President for the Americas, responsible for leading the company’s future direction within the region. Drake will oversee all sales and business operations, playing a key role in further expanding Telstra’s portfolio of technology solutions and continuing to accelerate strategic partnerships. 

Drake takes the reigns during a time of rapid Telstra growth and network expansion fueled by increasing worldwide demand for connectivity and access to global markets.

He has a diverse and successful background in telecommunications leadership. Most recently, he led Telstra’s Customer Solutions and Architecture group, directing a specialized team of professionals working with customers to harness the full capabilities of Telstra’s products and services. 

Drake has more than a decade of experience in the international communications space, specializing in building best-in-class performing teams and aggressively scaling in high growth environments. Prior to joining Telstra, Drake was Vice President of Product Management at Boulder (CO)-based Zayo Group, responsible for the Fiber and Infrastructure portfolio of services. Prior to this role, he served as Senior Director of Global Reach where he was tasked with launching the company’s new market expansion team.

Drake holds a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Colorado at Boulder as well as a Master of Public Administration from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville.

Leave a comment »

India Orders VPN Providers To Retain Data…. VPN Providers Are Considering Their Options Including Leaving The Country

Posted in Commentary with tags , on May 9, 2022 by itnerd

India has ordered VPN’s to collect and store users’ data, including names, addresses, contact numbers, email and IP addresses, for up to five year. With this move, Wired reported that VPN providers have since threated to quit India:

The justification from the country’s Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) is that it needs to be able to investigate potential cybercrime. But that doesn’t wash with VPN providers, some of whom have said they may ignore the demands. “This latest move by the Indian government to require VPN companies to hand over user personal data represents a worrying attempt to infringe on the digital rights of its citizens,” says Harold Li, vice president of ExpressVPN. He adds that the company would never log user information or activity and that it will adjust its “operations and infrastructure to preserve this principle if and when necessary.”

Artur Kane, CMO at GoodAccess had this to say:

“Though controversial upon inception, the so-called data retention legislation has now been with us for decades. Most technologically developed countries enforce these directives with varying retention periods, usually ranging from 6 months to 2 years. In some countries, all expenses on data retention are even covered by the government.

Until now, the data retention obligations were limited to infrastructure providers (internet service providers, telecommunications), and asking the same of VPN vendors is without precedent in democratic countries.

The use of VPNs, in the past widely adopted by companies to provide remote access to company IT resources, has rapidly spread to millions of consumers over the past decade, who use it to avoid surveillance by internet providers, bypass country-based content filtering, and other restrictions. In my opinion, cybercriminals had been using VPNs to anonymize their activities even before ordinary users jumped on the trend.

Now, forcing VPN providers to track user traffic and their private data (like source and destination IP, port, protocol, and timestamps) is going to invalidate one of the last remaining safeguards of personal privacy on the public internet while helping to expose only a handful of lawbreakers. 

The value for the price doesn’t add up, either. Privacy is a basic human need, legally protected in many free countries, and people have the right to protect it, especially now, when their sensitive data is more valuable than ever and is being collected on a shocking scale.

Law on the public internet can be enforced in other ways that do not impact user privacy, such as the use of behavioral algorithms by vendors, looking for characteristic patterns of potentially malicious behaviors, or disabling VPN services to those accounts where such events were detected.”

I have been to India a number of times and this news is very disappointing. India really needs to reconsider this as this is a massive overreach by the Indian Government. And it risks making them a very repressive country that nobody will want to visit or do business in.

3 Comments »

WARNING: A New Text Message #SCAM Involving Scotiabank Is Making The Rounds

Posted in Commentary with tags on May 8, 2022 by itnerd

The scumbags that want to use nefarious means to separate you from your money clearly aren’t taking this Mother’s Day off. I say that because I just got this text message on my iPhone:

I have left the phone number in so that if you get this text, you can compare it to my picture. Though the scammers may change this at any time. In any case, it claims to be from Scotiabank, but it’s not really from Scotiabank as the website that the text is asking you to go to is “myscotia-mobilealerts.com” which isn’t a domain that Scotiabank would ever use. In fact, if you do a Whois lookup on the domain, you get this:

The scammer has used a service called Privacy Guardian to hide their identity. Scotiabank (or any other bank, company, etc) would ever do that. That’s a big hint that this domain isn’t legitimate. Also if you look at the creation date, it was created a few days ago. Another big hint that this website isn’t legitimate as companies have domains for years and not days.

Because I like to go down the rabbit hole in order to educate my readers on how to avoid these scams, I clicked on the link, which is something that you should never do, and got this:

This has phishing scam written all over it. As in you put your bank login details into this website and the scammer then uses them to steal everything out of your bank accounts. The questionable grammar is the next big hint that this isn’t legitimate as companies take the time and effort to get that right, and scammers don’t. Take this for example:

Sent to [you]? #Fail.

Going further down the rabbit hole I get this when I click on “Verify Account”:

This is a very, very good replication of the actual Scotiabank login page. You can compare the picture above to the actual Scotiabank login page by clicking here. Clearly this is where the scammers invested their time and effort.

I didn’t go any further as it is clear that this is a phishing scam. As usual, I’ll be alerting Scotiabank to this so that they can take action against the scammers however they can. In the meantime, this is proof positive that you need to have your head in the came by constantly being on the look out for scams like these. Because they can literally come from anywhere and if you’re not careful, it could cost you a pile of money.

Leave a comment »

Review: Ekster Carbon Fibre Cardholder

Posted in Products with tags on May 8, 2022 by itnerd

Ekster wallets have been my go to cardholder for some time now. First I did a review of their Aluminum Cardholder, which my wife then promptly claimed as her own. Then Ekster was kind enough to send me a second wallet which I then tried out for two weeks and loved so much that it became part of my every day carry. But I wasn’t a fan of the camo look of the wallet. Sure it didn’t affect how the wallet functions, but my personal style is black, matte black, or carbon fibre all the things. So I decided to treat myself to a new Ekster wallet. Specifically their Carbon Fibre Cardholder. Instead of being made of 6061-T6 aluminum, this cardholder is made from 3K carbon fibre. 3K carbon is the workhorse of carbon fiber because it’s light and relatively stiff. 3K has a high threshold before failure and better strength than 6K, 9K or 12K. It is typically used in aviation, industrial purposes, sporting and recreation goods such as bike frames and tennis racquets. In short, this is quality stuff that also looks cool as a side benefit.

So let’s start with the fact that this is a light cardholder. Here’s the weight of the aluminum variant:

Now 77 grams is pretty light. But Here’s what you get for the carbon fibre variant:

It may be hard to read, but it says 62 grams. That’s a 15 gram difference. And surprisingly, I do notice it in my pocket. Plus it feels just as stiff and solid as the aluminum version. As far as I am concerned, that’s a win. And it comes with exactly the same functionality as the aluminum version. Specifically:

The main section of cardholder fans out your cards at the click of a button. This is where you store your less frequently used cards. The cardholder holds a maximum of 6 non-embossed cards, or a combination of 4 – 5 embossed/non-embossed cards (depending on the thickness of each card). You can also shove a couple of bills or something like a proximity card under the strap as well.

The expandable metal backplate (it is a shame that this wasn’t carbon fibre as well) allows you to carry a pair of cards that you frequently access (credit cards for example) while keeping a slim profile. There a notch at the bottom center of this section that helps you to push them out so that you can get to them. Finally, it still has the RFID protection in place.

My only gripe is the cost. This is not cheap as it $103 CDN. It does come in two styles in case you don’t like the carbon fibre weave that you see above. But if you want to add a bit of style your everyday carry, and shave some weight in the process, this is a great, though pricey way to do both.

Leave a comment »

Musk’s Pitch Deck For His Twitter Takeover Leaks

Posted in Commentary with tags on May 8, 2022 by itnerd

This has to be embarrassing for Elon Musk who at this point is the de facto owner of Twitter. It seems that his pitch deck recently leaked, revealing what Musk wants to do with Twitter beyond just making it “the platform for free speech around the globe”. The New York Times (via Tesla North) has details, but let’s bullet point them right now:

  • Quintuple Revenue to $26.4 Billion by 2028
  • Hit 931 Million Total Users by 2028
  • Job Cuts and Hiring Waves. I spoke about the former here.
  • A secret project of some sort that will launch in 2023 and have 9 million users by the end of year one.

And if that wasn’t enough, he said this on…. Twitter:

If I’m a Twitter employee, this does not inspire confidence. Especially given that because of the pandemic, companies who want to retain talent are doing everything possible to create a healthy work/life balance for employees. Thus the leaking of this pitch deck might send people running to the exits to so that they can be someplace else when he takes over.

I really don’t see how any of this will be possible. But I am an IT Nerd, not an entrepreneur. Thus I may be missing something. Which will make seeing if Musk can pull this off (or not) something to watch.

Leave a comment »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »