ThingWorx, the ‘platform as a service’ (PaaS) vendor, has made empowering the Internet of Things (or Internet of Everything) its rallying cry. Now the company says it is the first to market with an IoT “marketplace” that it claims will speed development of smart, connected products. The company announced ThingWorx Marketplace at Salesforce.com’s “Dreamforce” event in San Francisco on Monday. The new platform will allow ThingWorx and third party firms to offer “components and services” that are needed to build full-featured IoT applications. Those may be things like new kinds of sensors, widgets, device connectors, protocol adapters, hooks into device clouds or integrations with enterprise management platforms, according to a ThingWorx statement. The platform will be accessible by ThingWorx partners, independent hardware and software vendors, and third party developers, the company said. Enterprises will be able to deploy private instances of the Marketplace to host internally developed applications, application templates, analytics, […]
Tag: trends
Ephemeral, In-Memory Attack Used With New IE 0Day
It was just last week that we wrote about research from the security firm Triumfant that found evidence for the growing use of ephemeral “diskless” malware. That point was driven home over the weekend, with a report from the firm Fireeye that found a new Internet Explorer zero day vulnerability was being used in conjunction with a disk-less variant of the Hydraq (aka “McRAT”) Trojan horse program. Fireeye first called attention to the existence of attacks exploiting new, “zero day” (or previously unknown) vulnerabilities in the Internet Explorer web browser on Friday. The company discovered the malicious activity on the web site of a “strategically important website” that was being used as a “watering hole” to attack visitors who were “interested in national and international security policy.” The company described two IE vulnerabilities: an information leakage hole and an IE out-of-bounds memory access vulnerability. The information leak affects Windows XP […]
IT Pros: Internet Of Things Is A Governance Disaster
Not that we needed a survey to tell us this: but IT pros are seriously concerned about the risks posed by all the IP-enabled devices that are starting to connect to their corporate networks. That’s the conclusion of a survey of 2,013 members of ISACA, a worldwide association of information security professionals, which found almost unanimous agreement that the Internet of Things poses a governance problem for their networks, with increased security threats the most oft-cited governance issue raised by IoT adoption. The survey (PDF) also polled 4,000 consumers in the U.S., U.K., India and Mexico, finding that IT professionals were less sanguine than consumers about the transformative potential of the Internet of Things for enterprises. Just four in 10 agreed that the benefits of IoT adoption outweighed the risks, while half of the ISACA members polled felt that the benefits of IoT to consumers outweighed the risks. Around a quarter of […]
Windows XP Users Six Times More Likely To Be Infected By Malware
Microsoft came out with a new edition of its Security Intelligence Report today, saying that company data shows that Windows XP machines are much more likely to be infected in encounters with malicious software on the Internet. Windows XP machines were six times more likely to be infected than machines running Windows 8, the latest version of Microsoft’s operating system, the company said. The Security Intelligence Report (or SIR) is a unique window into the malicious activity online, given Microsoft’s massive footprint of more than 1 billion systems running versions of the Windows operating system, and the detailed data it collects from them through its automatic update patching- and malware removal features. This is the 15th such report Microsoft has issued. The company used the latest report to hammer home a message about the need for Windows XP users to move off that system to a newer version of the […]
Microsoft Tests Glass Competitor. But Do Wearables Threaten Privacy, Social Norms?
Forbes has a really interesting article a couple of days back that posited the huge dislocations caused by wearable technology – including front-on challenges to social norms that are thousands of years in the making and contemporary notions of privacy. The applications for wearable technology like Google Glass are too numerous to mention. Just a few include “heads up” displays for surgeons in the operating room. Teachers (or their students) could benefit from having notes displayed in their field of vision, rather than having to resort to printed notes or the (dreaded) Powerpoint slide. But the devil is in the details of the wearable technology, Forbes argues. Unlike external devices – pagers, mobile phones, smart phones – wearable tech is more intimately connected to ourselves: in constant contact with our bodies and notifying us with vibrations and sounds in ways that it may be difficult to ignore, Forbes argues. Indelicately implemented, […]