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With the creation of countless new Internet of Things (IoT) devices that are always connected to the internet, hackers have found a new means of easily creating large botnets that can deliver attacks which can be used to take websites offline and shut down businesses. In a recent string of attacks, two packet floods made use of a host of IoT devices to take down the website of the cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs, along with the French web hosting company OVH. Krebs' website was hit by the notorious Mirai botnet whose source code wasallowing anyone to utilise the malware for their own attacks. The attack launched against Krebs spread at the surprisingly fast rate of 620Gbps. The botnet attempted to break into thousands of other devices worldwide through the use of 61 username...

We spoke to Don Reeves, Chief Technology Officer, at, to find out his thoughts on the future of smart cities. 1. When people hear the phrase Internet of Things, they tend to think of Apple Watches and smart fridges. What’s Silver Spring’s vision for the IoT? The Internet of Things is more than just consumer wearables - it goes beyond fashion and home technology to the cities we work, live and play in. Imagine living in a city where you and your surroundings are completely interactive and optimised with little or no cost - visualise walking down a path where the street lights adaptively brighten your way as you walk beneath them, or where your car journey home is quicker because the traffic patterns are refined in real-time according to congestion. In a smart city, physical ...

GoDaddy, the world’s largest cloud platform dedicated to small, independent ventures, recently announced that it entered into an agreement to acquire WordPress site management tool ManageWP. ManageWP enables web designers and developers to manage multiple WordPress sites from a single dashboard, no matter where they are hosted. I spoke with Jeff King, SVP of Hosting at GoDaddy, to find out more about what this acquisition means for GoDaddy and ManageWP customers, what drives GoDaddy’s continued investment in WordPress, and to get his thoughts on how the online industry is shaping the SME segment. 1. Why has GoDaddy acquired ManageWP? With customer demand and experience at the very heart of everything that we do, GoDaddy has acquired ManageWP to offer a game-changing product fo...

Social media offers organisations tremendous business advantage in terms of reaching potential new customers and staying in touch with the ones currently on their roster. In fact, the number of organisations now actively using social media as one of their standard outbound forms of communications is on the rise. However, some social media channels are more popular than others and staying compliant is the key driver. For example, according to data from the Smarsh annual compliance survey for 2016, the use of Twitter and LinkedIn by compliance professionals, as well as those employed at financial services firms, over the span of the last four years has grown considerably whereas the use of Facebook has not. Chief Evangelist  

Middleware-tier is integral for an organization to ensure user requests are processed quickly and securely, connecting users and facilitating the integration of legacy applications with distributed corporate data and applications. In web architecture, it can refer to web servers, application servers, content management systems and other tools that support application development and delivery – and it is integral for an organization to ensure user requests are processed quickly and securely. It’s the nexus for a distributed multi-tier architecture, enabling the decoupling of the data consumer from the data producer – for example, decoupling a database from applications. It provides access to a wide variety of services, databases, messaging services and connection to external enterpri...

The source code responsible for the huge distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack launched against KrebsOnSecurity last month has been publicly released online, which will likely lead to numerous attacks using the Internet of Things (IoT) botnet.The English-language hacking community Hackforums announced the leak of the source code for the malware which has been dubbed “Mirai.” The malicious code works by spreading to vulnerable devices by continuously scanning the web for IoT systems that are protected by either factory default or hard-coded usernames and passwords.Mirai that seeds these vulnerable devices with malicious software which turns them into bots that report to a central control server. The bots can than be used in conjunction with one another to launch powerful DDoS attacks ...

The potential benefit IoT can bring to an economy is growing at a rapid pace: recent figures show big data and IoT together are expected to generatein revenue for the UK economy from 2015 to 2020 alone. Analyst firmhas also recently highlighted the top IoT technologies that should be on every organisation's radar through the next two years. The analyst emphasised these technologies will have a very broad impact, affecting numerous key areas of an organisation, including its business strategy. looking at 150 specific IoT applications that exist today or are likely to be in widespread use within ten years. With the trillions of dollars of value they could bring it is estimated two-thirds will be generated in business-to-business settings. Getting to grips with IoT data Industri...

The Internet of Things (IoT) is clearly gaining momentum – a testament to its potential to improve customer experience, drive down costs, and transform business operations. As organisations evolve from successful, one off pilots into broader IoT deployments new thinking is required to ensure IoT truly delivers. How for example, does a food retailer advance the concept of using IoT to reduce refrigeration energy consumption to create a more sophisticated approach that addresses the critical business issues of food safety, quality and wastage? How can the business then leverage IoT economies of scale to drive incremental value? And what opportunities exist to exploit existing machine data alongside new devices to create new, automated business processes? , there are very significan...

A new study has revealed that many consumers are suffering from “security fatigue” as a result of relentless cybersecurity warnings which have led to many of them failing to protect themselves online.The study was conducted by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) by conducting in-depth interviews with a wide cross-section of Americans between the ages of 20 and 60 living in rural and urban areas in both low and high-paying jobs.A large number of participants ignored the warnings they received from a variety of sources when it came to staying safe online. Many were also left feeling worn out as a result of constant software updates and the increasing number of passwords to remember. NIST warns that this “risky behaviour” may make these users more prone to an attack.O...