Satechi announces Aluminum Monitor Stand for MacBook, iMac, and more

For as long as I've used computers, I've always owned desktops. Sure, I've also leveraged laptops when on the go, but I had the reliable tower at home waiting for me too. Unfortunately, not everyone has the luxury of owning two computers. Some folks must leverage a laptop as a desktop.

There are many ways to create a solid desktop experience using a laptop, such as a monitor with a docking station. Of course, a secondary display and dock costs money. The most cost-effective option is a simple monitor stand that can raise your laptop, making its display more appropriate for on-desk viewing. Today, Satechi announces its unimaginatively named Aluminum Monitor Stand, which is absolutely perfect for Apple's MacBook, but iMac owners should take a look too.

"The Aluminum Monitor Stand raises larger computer monitors (up to 31 lbs) or laptops for a more comfortable viewing angle that reduces eye and neck strain by promoting good posture. The slim, modern monitor stand also improves ventilation and creates free workspace, by adding an additional platform to organize a tablet, laptop, charging station, smartphone, office supplies, printers and more", says Satechi.

Not only does it raise your display, but it allows you to store your mouse, keyboard, or potentially both, inside of it. If you are tight on desk space, this solution can alleviate that a bit.

Click to view slideshow.

True, a monitor stand is not new, nor ground-breaking, but Satechi's product looks attractive and is reasonably priced. The $39 accessory is available in Space Gray, Gold and Silver -- the same as the newest MacBook. While it is clearly designed for that machine, it can, of course, be used with any laptop, all-in-one computer, or monitor that is 31 pounds or below.

If you are interested in purchasing, it is available on Amazon here.

How your servers might support a DDoS attack

The largest scale of internet attacks enlist thousands or tens of thousands of previously hacked computers to simultaneously attack and overwhelm the websites and e-commerce services of selected victims.

Whilst there is often media coverage of the victim organizations affected, and sometimes discussion about the motivation of the attackers, there is rarely any awareness by those computer owners that are participating in attacks and facilitating online crime.

Take a recent example from one of our clients. A server belonging to one of our customers in the London-based financial services industry was observed participating in Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against a range of websites, as well as being involved in suspected criminal financial deals.

The server was observed making huge numbers of connections over a period of a few hours to a variety of foreign websites dedicated to online gaming. This was unusual compared to its normal everyday activities, which raised a warning alert.

After further research, we discovered that the customer’s server had been indiscriminately hijacked by a hacking group from South-East Asia and was being used in a large-scale DDoS attack against a range of target websites.

After discovering that one of the websites that was being attacked had previously been taken over by a hacking group, we were also able to attribute the DDoS attack to a rival hacking organization using the hijacked customer’s server as a tool to take revenge on the first group.

Following this attack, it was subsequently observed that the same customer’s server was connecting to a website that facilitated criminal financial activity, indicating that the attackers were still in control of the server and was using it to carry out clandestine financial operations.

Often, transactions of this type involve money laundering and payment for carrying out online criminal activity such as targeted attacks against both criminal and legitimate targets. The attackers had actually bypassed all of the customer’s traditional security defenses and monitoring, so having the right kind of software in place, meant they were able prevent further use of it to attack others.

This is just one example of how an organization can be vulnerable to the attack. Only if the right systems and software are in place, can organizations compete with the potential attacks they face on a daily basis.

Dave Palmer, director of Technology at Darktrace.

Published under license from ITProPortal.com, a Net Communities Ltd Publication. All rights reserved.

Photo credit: sibgat / Shutterstock

Facebook irks devs by shutting Parse mobile development platform

Facebook is closing down Parse, its mobile development platform, just three years after acquiring it for $85 million. The shutdown comes as something of a surprise as it is not long since Facebook was talking about using Parse to make giant steps into the Internet of Things.

But it seems that Facebook's IoT future is going to be one that is Parse-free. The shutdown will take place over the course of the next year, but starts with immediate effect. As of right now Parse is in wind-down mode, and will be fully shuttered by January 28, 2017. Believed to power tens of thousands of mobile apps, the killing of Parse will see Facebook diverting funds to other ventures.

While developers will not be happy with the sudden announcement, they are not being left completely high and dry. The Parse API will continue to function for the time being, and the company is making available its database migration tool to help devs move Parse app data to a MongoDB database. There's also a full migration guide available that details how to use the open source Parse Server to run most of the Parse API from a custom Node.js server.

Announcing the gradual shutdown in a blog post, Parse co-founder Kevin Lacker says:

We have a difficult announcement to make. Beginning today we're winding down the Parse service, and Parse will be fully retired after a year-long period ending on January 28, 2017. We're proud that we’ve been able to help so many of you build great mobile apps, but we need to focus our resources elsewhere.

We understand that this won’t be an easy transition, and we’re working hard to make this process as easy as possible. We are committed to maintaining the backend service during the sunset period, and are providing several tools to help migrate applications to other services.

While it's fair to say that there are alternatives to Parse out there, developers have voiced their anger at the closure. With Amazon, Google and Microsoft all offering their own mobile app development services, it remains to be seen whether Facebook has shot itself in the foot with this closure.

Photo credit: tulpahn / Shutterstock

Sorry 'pundits', but Windows Phone was never alive

After Microsoft revealed that Windows phone revenue fell 49 percent and Lumia sales dropped to 4.5 million units last quarter, disingenuous headlines like "Windows Phone is dead" started to show up. Believe it or not, some pundits actually believe that Q4 was the quarter when the platform met its end, like it did not "die" a long, long time ago.

Objectively speaking, Windows Phone was never relevant enough in the modern smartphone market to be truly alive. Lumia sales, which have typically accounted for the vast majority of Windows Phone sales each quarter, were never strong enough to pose a threat to the iPhone line or let alone the Android crop. Windows Phone was a feeble player from the start, which lost any real chance of mattering years ago, outside of the Microsoft crowd that is.

Once upon a time, some overly optimistic analysts believed that -- and I am not making this up -- Windows Phone would be the second most popular smartphone operating system in 2016. But that is clearly not the case, right? My colleague Joe Wilcox is now resting easy knowing he will not have to clean Steve Ballmer's toilet -- although I am sure that that was never something he really had to worry about.

Obviously, we are just a month into 2016, but I seriously doubt that that prediction will pan out by December 31. Windows Phone's market share right now is somewhere close to 1.2 percent, based on the number of smartphones shipped in Q4 coupled with the number of Lumias sold in that quarter. If you do not know this yet, IDC estimates that vendors shipped just shy of 400 million smartphones in the last three months of 2015.

If you click on the link above and read the story, you will understand just how large a difference there is between Samsung and Apple, and Apple and the third-largest smartphone vendor, which is now Huawei, in terms of unit shipments. It is extremely hard for any vendor to make it in this crowded market, and it is even harder -- if not impossible -- to make a splash with an operating system other than Android powering your devices. (Apple's iOS is in a league of its own, because no other company can offer it.)

Joe saw the writing on the wall years ago. He did not need to wait for Windows Phone to have tens of terrible quarters to have a serious conversation surrounding its fate. Joe did not have to clean Steve Ballmer's feet either, because Windows Phone also did not reach the second place on the smartphone podium by 2015. What a shock that must have been, right?

I am also personally responsible for a quite a few headlines that do not flatter Windows Phone's health. A recent one is "Windows 10 Mobile is dead in the water", from early December. Lots of commenters (wrongfully) believed that I was wrong, like somehow this new operating system actually stands a chance. I am sorry to say this, but it will not take off, folks. Its only chance of gaining a significant number of users is through software upgrades. And those are not going well. In fact, Microsoft has not even officially launched Windows 10 Mobile. What's more, Joe Belfiore, the leader of the team responsible for the project, is on a year-long vacation, using an iPhone.

Before someone accuses me of being a hater, you should know that I do not dislike Windows Phone. I have bought Windows Phones for myself and my family, and I also (still) recommend them to anyone looking for an affordable first smartphone. The operating system itself is not bad, but Microsoft's strategy leaves a lot to be desired.

Over the years, Microsoft has disappointed us with its smartphone strategy. The software giant has been unable to "get" smartphones, even though its latest mantra is "mobile first, cloud first". We have seen disappointing flagships, ineffective exclusivity deals, long waiting periods between models, an app store that developers did not really warm to, a platform that did not manage to attract the support of major vendors outside of Nokia, a release cycle that was too slow compared to those of its rivals, elementary features missing for years, late integration with Windows on PCs, the lack of availability of the real Office suite, and some other things that you can find by perusing our list of articles on Windows Phone.

So if you think that Windows Phone died last quarter, you might want to take a hard look at everything that has happened with the platform in the last few years. Who knows, maybe you will learn a thing or two.

Photo Credit: Ryan Jorgensen - Jorgo/Shutterstock

Threat of cyber crime drives higher salaries for security professionals

Employers are offering salaries up by 14 percent on average for IT security specialists in the light of the growing threat posed by cyber crime.

A Global Salary Survey by UK specialist recruitment company Robert Walters also sees salaries for developers increasing as major employers look to overhaul their online presence.

Developer salaries are set to grow nine percent this year as against five percent for the industry as a whole, thanks to digital transformation projects in large companies, many of them driven by a new emphasis on data security.

It's security roles that see the biggest increases though with heads of cyber security and security analyst roles seeing 18 percent increases. Even junior security support positions are set to have seven percent growth.

"Over the last year we've seen a massive increase in both permanent and interim cyber security roles due largely to the ongoing threat around IT and cyber crime. The challenges facing companies continue to grow in volume and complexity as cyber security threats constantly evolve," says Steve Corbett, Associate Director, IT recruitment at Robert Walters. "The impact of high profile IT security breaches involving attacks on major companies has served to bring this emerging threat into the public eye, increasing pressure from regulators and legislators on companies to have a dedicated cyber security representative and to meet specific standards of security".

More detail on the survey results is available to download from the Robert Walters website.

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Ultra Virus Killer gains VirusTotal support

Carifred has updated its malware hunter Ultra Virus Killer with integrated VirusTotal support.

No need to manually launch checks on individual files any more: just open the Process, Autorun, Service or Modules lists and a new column displays the VirusTotal score for every file.

This can take a while, because by default UVK uploads unknown files to VirusTotal, but fortunately there’s a setting to turn this off (Options > clear "Auto upload unknown items…").

While the basic scores were displayed without issue for us, we couldn’t get any more information. Clicking "Get VirusTotal report" only ever displayed a "Creating the report" alert, which disappeared after a fraction of a second, and nothing further happened at all.

Elsewhere, there are new maintenance tools to clean up the shell MuiCache (details on recently run programs) and empty AppData subfolders.

Sysinternals Sigcheck is now bundled with the program, and a new command uses it to check for untrusted root certificates.

Extra system tweaks include the ability to enable/ disable Windows Fast Boot and Windows Defender’s PUP detection, and there’s a selection of smaller improvements and bug fixes.

The missing VirusTotal report is an issue (try Process Explorer if that’s a must for you), but having the summary scores displayed up-front is a major plus, and overall UVK 7.6.0 is a worthwhile update.

Ultra Virus Killer is a free application for Windows XP and later.

HSBC online banking hit by DDoS attack

As workers eagerly awaited the arrival of their first payday of 2016, and others rushed to file their tax returns ahead of Sunday's deadline, HSBC's online banking services were knocked offline today.

The banking giant was hit by a DDoS, but it is not yet clear who is responsible. The attack meant that customers were unable to access their online accounts, and it is just the latest in a strong of high-profile security issues to affect well-known sites.

The bank says that while the DDoS attack was certainly problematic, customer accounts were safe: "HSBC internet banking came under a denial of service attack this morning, which affected personal banking websites in the UK. HSBC has successfully defended against the attack, and customer transactions were not affected. We are working hard to restore services, and normal service is now being resumed. We apologise for any inconvenience this incident may have caused".

While HSBC says that it has been able to successfully fight off the cyber-attack, the disruption continues. Users attempting to access their online accounts are greeted by an apologetic message:

Sorry…

We'd like to apologise to all our customers for Online Banking being unavailable.

We know how inconvenient this is and we are doing everything we can to rectify the problem.

Please try later.

The bank also used its Twitter account to reassure customers -- and investors -- that everything possible is being done to find the culprits:

HSBC is working closely with law enforcement authorities to pursue the criminals responsible for today’s attack on our internet banking.

— HSBC UK (@HSBC_UK) January 29, 2016