Cyware today announced that CRN, a brand of The Channel Company, has named Matt Courchesne, Head of Channel–North America, as a 2024 Inclusive Channel Leader. In its second year, the list recognizes executives from vendor, distributor, and solution provider organizations who are dedicated to making a positive impact across the IT channel through inclusive leadership.
The CRN 2024 Inclusive Channel Leaders honorees are passionate about advancing equity and diversity within their organizations, the channel, and across the greater technology industry. With this recognition, CRN highlights these executives for their desire to foster inclusion and belonging.
With nearly a decade of senior leadership experience, Matt has consistently championed inclusivity. His dedication fosters a culture where diverse opinions, backgrounds, and experiences are valued, and team members are empowered to approach problems as business owners. This holistic approach not only enriches the workplace but also drives sustainable, long-term.
The 2024 Inclusive Channel Leaders list will be featured in the August issue of CRN Magazine, with online coverage starting July 8 at www.CRN.com/Inclusive-Leaders.
Posted in Commentary with tags Epson on July 8, 2024 by itnerd
When parents are planning their back-to-school shopping and narrowing down what’s essential, a high-quality printer should be at the top of the list. Epson offers reliable and affordable printer options that will help children and parents power through many school years to come. Epson’s line of EcoTank printers can support the entire family with their important printing tasks while offering long-term cost savings.
The ET-2850 is the ideal wireless all-in-one printer for any busy family with a variety of printing needs. It’s ultra-convenient at home or on the go, with smart device compatibility once connected to the internet. This comes in handy during the morning rush when someone forgot to print out their assignment the night before. Parents can rest easy knowing there’s one less cost to worry about since this printer is cost-effective, as it comes with a large supply of ink in the box. Plus, with each set of EcoFit ink bottles equivalent up to approximately 80 ink cartridges, the kids can print in colour as much as they want!
ET-4850 Wireless Colour All-in-One Cartridge-Free Supertank Printer(MSRP: $599.99 CAD) The perfect printer for post-secondary students is one that will last them through multiple semesters. The ET-4850 can print up to 5000 pages approximately, limiting the number of times they’ll ring home asking for a top-up on ink, and eliminating the fear of running out of ink the night before an assignment is due. With premium productivity features like an Auto Document Feeder and a high-resolution flatbed scanner, this printer will benefit students long after graduation and support them in the workforce.
From the “things that make you say hmmmm” department, comes this report from Bloomberg where they’ve seen a memo from Microsoft that tells Microsoft China employees that starting in September, only iPhones can be used for authentication purposes. Effectively killing Android phone usage in Microsoft’s Chinese operation:
The US company will soon require Chinese-based employees to use only Apple devices to verify their identities when logging in to work computers or phones, according to an internal memo reviewed by Bloomberg News. The measure, part of Microsoft’s global Secure Future Initiative, will affect hundreds of workers across the Chinese mainland and is intended to ensure that all staff use the Microsoft Authenticator password manager and Identity Pass app.
Staff who don’t already have an iPhone will be provided an iPhone 15. And this affects Chinese and Hong Kong employees. You have to wonder how the Chinese government will react to this as they will see this as a shot at them.
A press release from Freedom Mobile owner Quebecor is saying that they’re met all the commitments that they had to make in order to buy Freedom Mobile.
The Progress Report on Fulfilment of Videotron Ltd.’s Undertakings submitted to ISED on July 3 describes this remarkable progress, including:
Maintaining the prices of wireless plans by introducing a Mobility Price Freeze Guarantee for all current and future customers of Freedom Mobile;
Promoting competition and lowering wireless prices by offering affordable mobile packages backed by an enhanced customer experience, which was instrumental in the 26.6% reduction in the wireless component of the Consumer Price Index1 during the year following the acquisition of Freedom Mobile;
Extending Freedom Mobile and Fizz services to Manitoba and other Canadian markets through MVNO2 agreements;
Offering low-cost 5G plans to an ever-growing number of Canadians.
I have to admit that Quebecor has used Freedom Mobile to make life difficult for the “big three” telcos. From a personal standpoint, their deals and coverage were good enough for us to switch from TELUS. If they can keep this momentum up, their existence may actually provide the competition that the telco market in Canada desperately needs.
A reader tipped me off to the posting of this executive summary written by a third party named Xona Partners Inc. on behalf of the CRTC in relation to the major Rogers outage that happened in July of 2022. I encourage you to read it at your leisure. But I want to draw your attention to two items. The first is this:
Root cause of the network failure. The July 2022 outage is attributed to an error in configuring the distribution routers within the Rogers IP network. Rogers staff removed the Access Control List policy filter from the configuration of the distribution routers. This consequently resulted in a flood of IP routing information into the core network routers, which triggered the outage. The core network routers allow Rogers wireline and wireless customers to access services such as voice and data. The flood of IP routing data from the distribution routers into the core routers exceeded their capacity to process the information. The core routers crashed within minutes from the time the policy filter was removed from the distribution routers configuration. When the core network routers crashed, user traffic could no longer be routed to the appropriate destination. Consequently, services such as mobile, home phone, Internet, business wireline connectivity, and 9-1-1 calling ceased functioning.
But there’s more. This also got my attention:
Deficiency in the change management process. The configuration error, which led to the removal of the policy filter from the configuration of the distribution routers, is the result of a change management oversight by Rogers staff. Rogers staff deleted the policy filter that prevented IP route flooding in an effort to clean up the configuration files of the distribution routers. The change management process, which includes audits of change parameters, failed to flag the erroneous configuration change.
That’s pretty bad that a top tier telco like Rogers had a change management process that was suspect. If I was still a customer of Rogers, I’d be rethinking whether I should be doing business with Rogers. Though I have to say that this report also says that Rogers is making improvements in this area.
There’s a couple of other items that I want to draw your attention to. Staring with this:
Limited communication among Rogers staff. Rogers staff relied on the company’s own mobile and Internet services for connectivity to communicate among themselves. When both the wireless and wireline networks failed, Rogers staff, especially critical incident management staff, were not able to communicate effectively during the early hours of the outage. Rogers had to send Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) cards from other mobile network operators to its remote sites to enable its staff with wireless connectivity to communicate with each other. The absence of sufficient alternative means of communication slowed the Rogers response to the July 2022 outage.
This is a problem. Again this report indicates that this has been addressed. But it’s pretty bad that Rogers assumed that nothing would ever happen to their network. And as a result didn’t come up with a plan to have another option for key staff to communicate.
The second item that I want to draw your attention to is this:
Separate IP core for the wireless and wireline networks. Following the outage, Rogers announced it had decided to separate the IP core network for its wireless and wireline networks. This decision entails deploying a new IP core for the wireless network, while the existing IP core would remain to serve the wireline network. Therefore, if one IP core network were affected by an outage, the other IP core network would remain unaffected and operational.
Rogers has not yet finalized the implementation of the IP core network separation, which remains a work in progress. When implemented, separate IP core networks for the wireless and wireline networks will help to contain a failure to its respective access network and, therefore, avoid the type of catastrophic network failure experienced in the July 2022 outage, where both wireless and wireline services were unavailable due to the outage in the common core IP network. IP core network separation would improve the overall resiliency of the Rogers wireless and wireline networks.
Rogers would do well to give customers and non-customers exact timelines as to when this will get done. I say that because simply saying you’re going to do something without saying when you’re going to do it is meaningless. More on this in a bit.
One thing to keep in mind is that the CRTC has put this out there to keep Rogers honest. Specifically:
Today, the CRTC published the executive summary of the expert report completed by Xona Partners Inc. (Xona) on Rogers’ July 2022 outage.
Based on Xona’s findings, the measures taken by Rogers have addressed the cause of the outage. Xona also made additional recommendations to Rogers to further enhance the reliability and resilience of their network, and Rogers has confirmed the implementation of all measures.
In order to prevent future outages, Rogers must report to the Commission on: 1) whether the measures continue to effectively address reliability issues; and 2) progress made to separate the wireline and wireless core networks. The report must be provided by 4 July 2025.
We’ll see a year from now if Rogers is truly serious about making sure that their infrastructure is actually reliable for all Canadians.
Posted in Commentary with tags Roku on July 5, 2024 by itnerd
One of the advantages that Roku had is that they handled updates to their TVs in the same way that they updated their streaming sticks and streaming boxes. Which is for the most part, any Roku device got the same features and fixes. Up until recently I thought that was good. But back in June that changed when Roku rolled out RokuOS 13. Specifically, the picture quality became worse for some people And after reading the release notes that Roku put out in regards to version 13 of the RokuOS, the answer is pretty clear:
Roku Smart Picture:Roku Smart Picture, available on Roku TV models, automatically improves picture quality dynamically as users stream. Backlighting, uniformity, and colors will automatically adjust based on the type of TV, and Picture Mode will optimize across detected content types including sports, movies, reality, animation, and more. Users can turn on Roku Smart Picture by pressing the * button on a Roku Remote while streaming and clicking into Picture Setting then Picture Mode. This feature will not override Dolby Vision® and HDR10+ formats if they are detected on compatible devices.
Now the key part is that Roku added this:
Roku Smart Picture, available on Roku TV models, automatically improves picture quality dynamically as users stream.
This is some sort of motion smoothing feature that Roku has implemented. And people who want the best picture quality possible turn off any sort of motion smoothing. They do that because viewing content filmed at 24 or 30fps looks really weird on TVs that run at 120 Hz and above. The insanely smooth motion makes the video almost seem too real. Or put another way, it completely destroys the movie watching experience. But for some reason Roku feels that it should be on. And not only that, in Roku’s infinite wisdom, they have no way to turn it off. Unless you have a Dolby Vision and HDR10+ TV from one of Roku’s partners. Or the streaming stick or box detects one of those TVs.
Frankly, this is the single dumbest thing that Roku has ever done. In effect, they’ve managed to anger a significant percentage of their user base for no good reason. Not that angering the people who buy your products is a good thing. In any case, Reddit for example along with Roku’s own community forum has a lot of angry users complaining about this feature, and the fact that you can’t turn it off. What makes the situation worse is that while Roku seems to acknowledge that the issue exists, they don’t seem very interested in fixing it. Or more accurately giving users the ability to turn off motion smoothing. Now there’s an extra twist to this. This feature might have existed before. While I haven’t noted that, and I am not affected negatively by this as I have a Dolby Vision and HDR10+ TV, older threads on Roku’s forums have mentioned similar issues before. Which makes me wonder if this is something that the company has been trying to push at the behest of their hardware partners.
Regardless, even though I am not affected by this, this whole experience has left a bad taste in my mouth when it comes to Roku. I happen to like their products specifically because I perceived it to be an open platform that gave me a fair amount of choice. And their support for things like Apple HomeKit and Fitness+ really fit into my home which is deep down the rabbit hole of the Apple ecosystem. But if Roku is going to do things like this where they force things upon their user base that their users don’t want, then I may hop over to a Google powered TV. While it is Google which means that they are as invasive in terms of collecting data about you as Facebook is, they aren’t known for this level of stupidity. Perhaps Roku might want to keep that in mind and not only find a way to roll back this change, but also find a way to calm their user base before Roku TV’s end up on Craigslist en masse.
Posted in Commentary with tags Telus on July 4, 2024 by itnerd
Today, TELUS Health announced a collaboration with Nova Scotia Health (NSH) to enable residents of Nova Scotia to access their primary care information through the
YourHealthNS app. This health data interoperability initiative marks the first large-scale effort in Canada to standardize and connect primary care data and empowers people in Nova Scotia to better manage their health and improve health outcomes.
TELUS Health is a leader in digital health data and currently supports most of Nova Scotia’s clinicians with electronic medical records (EMRs) to enhance their practice and patient care. Through this collaboration, TELUS Health is using its integrated data platform to extract relevant patient summary data from these EMRs.
Providing patients with seamless and secure access to their health information benefits not only the patients themselves but also clinicians and care providers. This access leads to greater efficiencies, supports effective communication and ultimately enhances the overall patient experience, as demonstrated by a pilot project launched in early 2024. Among the 13,000 participants, 68 per cent who accessed their health records reported their patient experience as good or excellent.
As the first company in the world to achieve the ISO 31700-1 Privacy by Design certification, TELUS Health is committed to safeguarding privacy and advancing the principles of trustworthy data practices across Canada and beyond. TELUS Health aligns with the Government of Nova Scotia’s dedication to using healthcare data solely for the advancement of healthcare, ensuring that individuals can lead healthier lives.
TELUS Health looks forward to collaborating with other provinces across the country to replicate this success.
Here’s something that seems a bit suspect to me. Via a blog post, Twilio who makes two factor authentication apps, specifically an app called Authy, said that it was hacked. But the way that it provides details about this hack leads to more questions than answers:
Twilio has detected that threat actors were able to identify data associated with Authy accounts, including phone numbers, due to an unauthenticated endpoint. We have taken action to secure this endpoint and no longer allow unauthenticated requests.
We have seen no evidence that the threat actors obtained access to Twilio’s systems or other sensitive data. As a precaution, we are requesting that all Authy users update to the latest Android and iOS apps for the latest security updates. While Authy accounts are not compromised, threat actors may try to use the phone number associated with Authy accounts for phishing and smishing attacks; we encourage all Authy users to stay diligent and have heightened awareness around the texts they are receiving.
You’ll note that the company hasn’t said how many users were affected. Now it is possible that Twilio has no clue how many users were affected. It is also possible that they just don’t want to say because the number is huge. There are reports that the number of users is 33 million which would be huge if true. And the fact that Twilio said that hackers got in via an “unauthenticated endpoint” is interesting. That kind of implies that they might have had computers on their network that weren’t properly authenticated to the network. IF that is the case, that’s not good. Either way, this isn’t trivial. All of this leads to more questions than answers. And Twilio will have to answer those questions sooner rather than later if they are to be trusted again.
You might recall that I have been implementing DMARC across all the domains that I own in order to increase email deliverability and to cut down, if not eliminate email spoofing via my domains. One thing that I did say at the time was that I was spending every morning looking at DMARC reports to get visibility into what was going on in relation to my domains. I specifically said this:
Now, let’s talk about the reports that I mentioned earlier. They show up in your inbox in xml format that isn’t human readable. To solve that problem, I use the MX Tools DMARC Report analyzer which makes these reports human readable. That way I have visibility into what’s going on from an email perspective. And I set aside a few minutes every day to read these reports. I admit that it’s bit time consuming. But it ensures that I don’t find out about my bad news from CNN so to speak.
Here’s the problem with that method. I am simply looking at one day at a time and one domain at a time. So I am missing out on anything that is trending for example. As in some threat actor who is spending multiple days trying to spoof my email addresses. That’s when Valimail hooked me up with Valimail Monitor. What this web based product does is that it allows users to monitor who is sending email from your domains and identify unauthorized senders. All from a single dashboard. That in turn gives you visibility as to where your good news (nobody is trying to spoof you for example) or bad news (someone is trying to spoof you, or someone inside your company is using a service that you haven’t authorized) is going to come from.
Let’s go into the weeds on this:
One of the first things that I do is to go into the dashboard and scroll through the different sections of the dashboard. DMARC status is one of the first things that usually gets my attention as that’s where I would get the first indication if anyone is spoofing me, or if I have a deliverability issue. In this case, it’s the former as seven email failed the DMARC check. That usually sends me off to the domains screen to see what is going on:
I have redacted my personal domain for privacy reasons. But it seems to be the source of the issue. Since I am a guy who likes to go down the rabbit hole on these things, let’s see why this is the case. So I am going to click the word “view” under the “Senders” column to see what’s going on.
Once I hit this screen, it becomes clear to me what’s going on. My hosting provider uses MailChannels as a proxy for all outbound mail to ensure that a bad actor who hosts with them doesn’t do anything that would cause their hosting infrastructure to be banned by other mail servers. So 100% of my email should go through there. But it’s not. It seems that some “Unidentified IPs” are trying to send mail using my personal domain.
And by clicking on “View” under the “Countries” column, it shows that what appears to be a Vietnamese based threat actor is trying to spoof my domain.
What I did from there is to increase the date range to one month to see what I found. Now Canada isn’t an issue as my email server is hosted in Montreal, and everything is clearly flowing through just fine. But I see that besides having a threat actor in Vietnam, a threat actor that appears to be in the US is also a problem as everything from that country is failing DMARC. Thus they’re trying to spoof me as well.
Now at the time that I went down this rabbit hole, I couldn’t see the exact IP addresses of the servers that were trying to spoof me. But I reached out to Valimail and they were able to get that straightened so that going forward, I can see the exact IP addresses of anything that is claiming to be sending email on my behalf. Some of them were hosted by Microsoft so I reached out to them via their abuse email address to address those threat actors. The other threat actor I have addressed by setting my domains to reject anything that fails a DMARC check.
Sidebar: Since I have done this, I have noted that phishing emails related to my domains have skyrocketed. Which illustrates that if a threat actor can’t get you using one technique, they’ll try something else.
While I continue to monitor the situation, I feel that I am in a better position to make sure that nobody is using my domains when they shouldn’t be as I have complete visibility of what is going on, and I can take action on anything that is suspect. Here’s the key part that you should pay attention to: This level of protection is free. Thus there’s really no reason why you shouldn’t use it.
Now if you need more than Valimail Monitor offers, they can help you with that. Valimail Align is the next level up from Monitor. It adds automated configuration of DKIM and SPF to allow you to get to a compliance level that satisfies Google, Yahoo, and others. It’s a great way to easily ensure that you’re in a good place when it comes to DMARC compliance.
Valimail Enforce is the top tier of what Valimail offers. It allows you to automate DMARC tasks and ensure that absolutely nothing slips through the net so to speak. For example, I set up Enforce which required me to make a number of DNS changes which are outlined here, and then I set up a MailChimp account to send emails using my business domain without telling Enforce about it. Then I waited to see what would happen next. What I found was that Enforce was able to discover the existence of MailChimp and that it was sending emails on my behalf. I was then able to add it as an authorized sender within Enforce and Enforce handed all the DNS changes in the background for me with no need to act as my own IT department to make changes to my DNS setup. It was literally a few clicks to get that done. And this is the key point. Enforce allows you to monitor every aspect of your mail setup so that you can make changes as needed, or discover email products like MailChimp for example that might be used in your organization without your knowledge. Thus if I were to put on my consultant hat on for a second, I would recommend that enterprises should head straight to Enforce as I can see that there would be a close to immediate payback in terms of security, reputation management, and cost.
Here’s the bottom line. Valimail has suite of products that I feel that any company who sends email, which is pretty much every company, should be using to ensure that their email gets to the their intended destinations, and to ensure that said companies reputation remains intact. On top of that, they will save a few bucks along the way. That’s a win on multiple fronts, which means that if you’re the guy who’s responsible for mail, DNS, and perhaps even your security stack, you need to have a look at what Valimail has to offer as in my view, this suite of products can help you in so many ways.
Back in February I reported that Prudential Financial got pwned. At the time I said this:
In a 8-K form filed with the SEC this week, Prudential said a “threat actor… had accessed Company administrative and user data from certain information technology systems and a small percentage of Company user accounts associated with employees and contractors.”
And I said this:
The good news is that the threat actors were detected quickly and it looks like Prudential regained control in short order. Swift detection is one of the tools in the toolbox that has to be present to make sure that threat actors cannot set up shop and start to move within a victim’s environment.
Not so fast. Now the company has revealed that over 2.5 million people had their personal information compromised. Ouch. Rogier Fischer, CEO and Co-Founder, Hadrian Security had this comment:
“Although the finer details of the attack and the damage are not yet out, the breach notification throws up several compliance issues.There was a 52-day delay in notifying consumers of the breach, which exceeds the 30-day limit mandated by many state laws such as the Maine Data Security Breach Notification Law. Additionally, while the company did not need to notify consumer reporting agencies due to the number of affected Maine residents being below 1,000, vigilance is crucial for future breaches. The automated breach testing and compliance reporting could have identified vulnerabilities, ensured policy enforcement, and facilitated quicker responses to risks, thereby preventing the breach. These systems could have also flagged the need for improved employee training to mitigate social engineering risks, as in this case.”
“Organizations must be empowered to modernize their security operations and effectively share threat intelligence to stay ahead of these threats. Businesses must adopt proactive security strategies, leveraging AI-driven solutions to enhance their threat detection and response capabilities. By operationalizing threat intelligence, organizations can better protect themselves and their clients from future incidents. The financial sector, in particular, must prioritize these advancements to safeguard the personal information of millions.”
This incident proves that maybe everyone should wait until the full scope of any breach is revealed before making any comment. Myself included.
CRN Honors Cyware’s Matt Courchesne as a 2024 Inclusive Channel Leader
Posted in Commentary with tags Cyware on July 8, 2024 by itnerdCyware today announced that CRN, a brand of The Channel Company, has named Matt Courchesne, Head of Channel–North America, as a 2024 Inclusive Channel Leader. In its second year, the list recognizes executives from vendor, distributor, and solution provider organizations who are dedicated to making a positive impact across the IT channel through inclusive leadership.
The CRN 2024 Inclusive Channel Leaders honorees are passionate about advancing equity and diversity within their organizations, the channel, and across the greater technology industry. With this recognition, CRN highlights these executives for their desire to foster inclusion and belonging.
With nearly a decade of senior leadership experience, Matt has consistently championed inclusivity. His dedication fosters a culture where diverse opinions, backgrounds, and experiences are valued, and team members are empowered to approach problems as business owners. This holistic approach not only enriches the workplace but also drives sustainable, long-term.
The 2024 Inclusive Channel Leaders list will be featured in the August issue of CRN Magazine, with online coverage starting July 8 at www.CRN.com/Inclusive-Leaders.
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