IBM and ABB partner to focus on Internet of Things and Industrial artificial intelligence

ABB has sealed a collaboration agreement with International Business Machines Corp, the Swiss engineering company said on Tuesday, the latest step in its efforts to ramp up its presence in digital technology and the Internet of Things.

In a joint statement ABB said it would combine its digital offering, which gathers information from machinery, with IBM’s expertise in artificial intelligence featured in its Watson data analytics software. The two companies will jointly develop and sell new products.

“This powerful combination marks truly the next level of industrial technology, moving beyond current connected systems that simply gather data, to industrial operations and machines that use data to sense, analyse, optimise and take actions that drive greater uptime, speed and yield for industrial customers,” ABB Chief Executive Ulrich Spiesshofer said in a statement.

For example, instead of manual machinery inspections, ABB and IBM intend to use Watson’s artificial intelligence to help find defects via real-time images collected by an ABB system, and then analysed using IBM Watson.

ABB has identified digital technology – where machinery communicates with control centres to increase productivity and reduce downtime – as a driver of growth. It now gets around 55 percent of sales from products that are digitally enabled.

As part of the drive, the company last year signed a strategic partnership with Microsoft to roll out digital products for customers in the robotics, marine and ports, electric vehicles and renewable energy sectors.

To spearhead its strategy, it appointed former Cisco executive Guido Jouret as its first chief digital officer last year.

Reuters

Publish date: April 25, 2017 12:30 pm| Modified date: April 25, 2017 12:30 pm

McAfee suggests about 2.5 million IoT devices were infected in Q4 of 2016

Image: Linino

Two and a half million Internet of Things (IoT) devices were infected by Mirai botnet by the end of fourth quarter last year, a new report by cyber security company McAfee said on Tuesday.

Mirai is a malware that turns networked devices running on obsolete versions of Linux into remotely controlled “bots” which can be used for a large-scale network attacks.

The ‘McAfee Labs Threats Report April 2017’ estimated that five IoT device IP addresses were infected by Mirai botnet each minute.

“The security industry faces critical challenges in our efforts to share threat intelligence between entities, among vendor solutions, and even within vendor portfolios,” said Vincent Weafer, Vice President McAfee Labs, in a statement.

Overall count of new malware samples grew 24 per cent in 2016 to 638 million samples despite showing a drop of 17 per cent in fourth quarter.

McAfee also detected 176 new cyber-threats every minute, almost three every second in fourth quarter of 2016. Further, the total mobile malware grew 99 per cent in 2016.

“The number of total ransomware samples grew 88 per cent in 2016, despite 71 per cent drop in fourth quarter,” the company said.

The findings further showed that the number of new Mac OS malware samples grew 245 per cent in fourth quarter due to adware bundling, though still small compared to Windows threats. Also, overall Mac OS malware grew 744 per cent in 2016.

IANS

Publish date: April 11, 2017 4:30 pm| Modified date: April 11, 2017 4:30 pm

Cloud will be an enabler of innovation and growth: Here’s how to leverage it

By Narsimha M

Previously, enterprises viewed cloud as a way to reduce costs and optimise their workloads. Today, the cloud is no longer about merely simplifying infrastructure but about providing faster applications. Delivering applications faster, with innovative features, is the key to creating exciting user journeys and improving customer stickiness. Empowered thus, organisations are increasingly putting customer experience ahead in their strategy for business growth.

In this digital age, data has become paramount. Data is the lifeblood of today’s digital marketplace – the means by which digital enterprises uncover how lean are their operations, how effective are their processes and how engaged are their customers. The ability to leverage data about every customer action can help enterprises craft delightful customer offerings – and this is where cloud is a key differentiator.

Cloud as an enabler of innovation and growth

Applications on the cloud work dynamically to ensure always-on and always-available business operations. With integrated data analytics powered by big data, enterprises can enhance their decision-making process by gleaning insights into possible downtime incidents and failures, understand how their customers interact with their products and services and build services to improve customer satisfaction.

Image Credit: IBM

Take for example, a global automobile manufacturer that used APIs to leverage big data on cloud and offer real-time contextual services for drivers as well as the extended automobile ecosystem. This way, the company moves beyond being just car manufacturers, but also a creators of a complete experience that covers financial services, concierge services and more, all with the car at the center.

Deploying applications on cloud allows enterprises to play with new functionalities, set up infrastructure much faster than before and go live within days. DevOps plays a vital role in helping such enterprises change on the go and adopt new technologies by leveraging agile practices and people transformation. For instance, an education service provider has leveraged a cloud-based platform that integrates niche enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions and applications to create an integrated community cloud that now connects over 450 schools. This ensures seamless and uniform learning for students of all schools irrespective of location while simplifying the management.

Multi-cloud environments give businesses the flexibility to reduce their dependency on a single cloud provider. In doing so, these environments simplify large-scale operations, manage a variety of workloads and prevent vendor lock-in while improving reliability and accelerating operations – for themselves and their customers.

An enterprise may choose to keep their external facing applications on one cloud vendor while keeping their internal applications hosted on another cloud vendor.

Three ways to leverage the cloud

Lift and shift 
By moving applications in their current state from an on-premise server to that in a cloud environment, enterprises can infuse better functionalities, ensure higher security and deliver a better customer experience at a much lower cost. A case in point here is of a global provider of technology and hardware for document and information management that embarked on a journey to move their services to private clouds, by simply consolidating 9 data centers to two tier-III data centers. By reducing their server count, they not only increased system availability to 99.99 per cent, but were able to slash costs for hosting, hardware, utility, and licensing infrastructure by 30 percent. Besides improving performance, migrating to cloud has helped the client deliver new hosting services for their customers.

Image: Microsoft

Re-engineer applications 
Enterprises need to modernise and upgrade many of their existing applications to be able to work with modern technology. Applications need to be upgraded to function seamlessly in a cloud environment to make them truly scalable and efficient. For example, a software developer for legal firms had designed their products to run on physical servers within law firms. While this was done to safeguard sensitive information, data could be only be accessed from within the customers’ offices. To make things simpler for their customers, the company re-engineered their software to work on the cloud on a multi-tenant model. Now, the software is provided as a service with improved performance and 99.99 per cent system availability. Besides reducing costs incurred by customers, they increased their business by targeting new segments such as small, medium and large firms who can buy their products with zero investment in hardware.

Cloud Native Applications 
While a large number of enterprises are still investing in moving/re-engineering applications for a cloud environment, for many a parallel journey of building applications that are cloud-first is the way forward. This involves understanding cloud computing architecture and taking advantage of cloud computing frameworks, to build and deliver various services directly from the cloud. Recently, a global retailer looking for scalability, agility, productivity, and performance deployed a cloud-based solution that merged a robust e-commerce platform with various systems such as content management, search and recommendations, and cart management. The new platform has helped the retailer rapidly deploy their digital solutions and enter new markets such as Australia, the Middle East and China.

Today, cloud is already an enabler of transformation for organisations looking for simpler operations and leaner workloads. Going forward, it is set to drive greater innovation and growth. The way forward is to leverage cloud along with innovative and emerging technologies such as IoT, blockchain and AI, thereby creating a robust digital foundation that will help smart organisations stay ahead.

The author is SVP and Head – Infosys Validation Solutions & Cloud, Infrastructure and Security, Infosys

Publish date: April 10, 2017 10:52 am| Modified date: April 10, 2017 10:52 am

How to secure your IoT devices from botnets and other threats

iot security

By Scott Matteson | November 25, 2016, 7:33 AM PST

There are resulting challenges ahead in IoT security arena. Gartner predicts that over the next two years more than half of IoT manufacturers won't be able to contain weak authentication methods, which can pose a data risk. They estimate that "by 2020, more than 25% of identified enterprise attacks will involve IoT, though IoT will account for only 10% of IT security budgets." Last April they projected security spending on IoT will approach $350M this year - nearly a 24% increase from last year, but this may not be enough.

Appropriate tactics will be a key element in the security battle. A recent Forbes article covered the topic of IoT security, advocating "strict regulatory standards," the need to "enhance security while simplifying compliance" and implementing "an end-to-end approach that integrates both IT and operations technology (OT)."

Let's look at some best practices to address the concepts of authentication, data privacy and botnets:

Authentication

Devices which must authenticate against other systems (generally in order to access or transmit data) should be configured to do so securely, such as with unique IDs and passwords. It may also be possible to implement encryption (SSH) keys to provide device identity to permit it to authenticate against other systems (securing the keys themselves is obviously a critical priority for this model to work). Examples of IoT devices with this capability can include closed-circuit TV (CCTV) or DVR devices and satellite antenna equipment.

In other instances, device SSL certificates can be issued during the manufacturing process or added later to establish device identity and facilitate the authentication process. The concept of building security into the device from the outset is an important concept for IoT manufacturers to consider, so that a careful consideration of possible vulnerabilities or flaws is factored into the design process. Some examples of IoT devices which can use SSL certificates are the Amazon Web Services IoT Button, smart meters and home energy management devices.

When it comes to device updates (software and firmware, for instance) authentication should be employed where possible to ensure these can retrieve code only from approved systems, such as internal servers or authorized devices.

Depending on your IoT devices, researching and implementing the capabilities above (if not already) present would be a good first step in security.

Data Privacy

IoT devices can use hardware-based trust anchors, also known as "roots of trust", which utilize a trusted boot process to ensure devices operate in a known secured state and their contents remain private. It's also possible to defend against untrusted software attacks by isolating code in different hardware locations so they cannot access secured resources.

Whether data is moving or at rest, it should be encrypted to protect the contents where possible.

IoT on-chip memories can protect data from being accessed or stolen by utilizing cryptography to encrypt or decrypt information. Communication between IoT devices and other systems should be secured via encrypted links using protocols such as TLS (Transport Layer Security), which is commonly used with web browsers such as when conducting financial transactions. TLS can prohibit "man in the middle" attacks whereby data in transit is captured and analyzed for confidential material.

It's also a good idea to isolate data so it's only available to systems which need to access it. Using firewalled networks with only the requisite systems is one such example.

Botnets

Internet of Things (IoT) devices can be at risk from botnets (also referred to as "thingbots.") A botnet is a privately-harnessed group of systems controlled via malware (which has previously infested a device). Botnets are often utilized to mount distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks intended to incapacitate or cripple target systems, for purposes of revenge, extortion and calculated disruption.

One such example is known as the Mirai botnet, which launched large DDoS attacks earlier this year on Imperva, KrebsOnSecurity and Dyn (which affected Twitter, Spotify and other sites). Mirai source code was leaked publicly and Imperva researchers analyzed it to understand Mirai better. One of the results of the research was the development of a scanner that can check whether devices on a network are infected by or vulnerable to Mirai malware. This scanner, currently in beta mode, can be found here.

Here are some recommendations for protecting IoT devices from threats posed by botnets: For device owners: "Be careful of what you connect to the internet. Are you sure it needs to be exposed to the entire world? If not, put it behind your router, and in the settings do not do port forwarding to it, or limit its access...Change the default password that came with the device to a hard-to-guess one," said Ben Herzberg, security research manager at Imperva.

Travis Smith, senior security research engineer at Tripwire, commented that updates on IoT devices can also pose a security risk:

"Most devices are running on some variant of Linux, which can be outdated and highly vulnerable before the device is even released. Even if a vendor releases an update, there are no guidelines on how to handle the update. Some vendors automatically install the update on the devices as it is released. However, the majority of devices either never release any security updates, or fail to notify the owner of the device about the update. End-users need to be vigilant about finding out which devices they have installed and continually check for updates from the vendors."

For organizations: "Due to the increase in IoT devices, it's easier for attackers to generate massive DDoS attacks. Therefore, it is important to plan for such attacks, and make sure that the attacking traffic is mitigated in the cloud before it reaches your organization," said Herzberg.

Tim Matthews, Vice President of Imperva, stated: "Securing IoT devices will require both better education of consumers, and security by design on the part of manufacturers. Ideally, security companies and device manufacturers would work together to create standards for credentials and access akin to a UL compliance seal."

The Internet of Things Security Foundation also seeks to address these concerns by providing best practices, tips, and news updates to help companies and consumers stay abreast of security hazards. If you own or administer IoT devices, I recommend visiting their page regularly to stay informed about new developments in the IoT security landscape.

MediaTek to foray into making chipsets for the automative industry

Image Credit: REUTERS

By tech2 News Staff /  30 Nov 2016 , 14:45

MediaTek is known for making chipsets for smartphones, connectivity, home entertainment and IoT devices. The company has today announced its new plan to foray into the automotive industry in the beginning of Q1 2017.

According to the company, the market for connected and autonomous vehicles is growing rapidly and there is need for advanced technologies that offer a blend of power-efficiency, processing power and affordability. MediaTek believes that with its technology expertise in chipset design. It positions the company well to bring innovative multimedia, connectivity and sensor solutions to the automotive industry.

MediaTek solutions for automobile manufacturers will cover four key areas, including:

• Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (Vision-based ADAS): Reimagined from the ground up, MediaTek’s ADAS system will feature cutting-edge, decentralised Vision Processing Unit (VPU) solutions to optimally handle large amounts of real-time visual streaming data. MediaTek employs Machine Learning to increase the accuracy and speed of detection, recognition and tracking, making it more comparable to human decision-making performance.
• Precision Millimeter Wave (mmWave) Radar: MediaTek is drawing on its technology expertise and heritage in high frequency RF and connectivity, bringing the automotive industry mmWave radar solutions that use higher frequencies to gain better object resolution and more precise detection. Residing in the high frequency band, mmWave radar can recognise targets more accurately and is more resistant to fog, rain, snow and other weather conditions than current types of radar.
• Superior In-Vehicle Infotainment: MediaTek has developed powerful 2D and 3D processing technologies to ensure its application processors perform at the highest levels of efficiency and speed. MediaTek in-car entertainment solutions offer a high level of integration of navigational and multimedia features and connectivity options.
• Enhanced Telematics: MediaTek Telematics is a robust solution to handle a variety of high-bandwidth information transfers and can support a wide variety of connectivity standards (Cellular 4G/3G/2G, Wi-Fi, BT/BLE ) and map-based applications. MediaTek Telematics offerings align with the company’s core strengths: power-efficiency, highly integrated system-in-packages, broad networking and connectivity support.

“The demands of connected and autonomous vehicles require a unique portfolio of technologies. MediaTek’s core competencies create a natural progression for us to design for the future of driving,” said JC Hsu, Corporate Vice President and General Manager of the New Business Department Business Unit at MediaTek.

“We have a strong technology portfolio generated from $10 billion in research and development investment over the past 12 years from modem and RF advancements, computing technologies and connectivity to intelligent algorithms. We are developing semiconductor solutions to make an impact in the automotive industry and are focused on core areas of in-vehicle Infotainment, Telematics and safety ADAS to further the evolution toward autonomous driving. The complicated systems of tomorrow’s high-tech cars will require a high degree of integration, innovative power management and improved functionality to support both the highest level of safety demands and driving experiences consumers need. MediaTek will bring one integrated package of semiconductors to the market – a holistic solution that is now lacking in the auto industry.”

Intel creates Automated Driving Group following partnership with Delphi and Mobileye

Image Credits: REUTERS

By tech2 News Staff /  30 Nov 2016 , 10:58

Intel has created a new organisation dedicated to autonomous driving technologies, called Automated Driving Group (ADG). The move follows close on the heels of an announcement that Intel chips would be used in self-driving cars being made by Delphi and Mobileye. ADG will be creating the next generation of driver assist systems and other solutions needed for autonomous vehicles.

Doug Davis, Senior Vice President and General Manager of the ADG group

Intel has appointed Doug Davis as the Senior Vice President and General Manager of the ADG group. Davis has been working at Intel for over 30 years, and has been at the forefront of some of the most disruptive technological innovations at the company. Davis started his career at Intel in the Military Division, and has worked with the Embedded Microcomputer Division, the Network Processor Division, the Infrastructure Processor Division and the Embedded and Communications Group over the course of his career. Davis has extended his retirement to take up the position. Most recently, Davis was the General Manager of the Internet of Things group.

Davis will be assisted by Kathy Winter. Winter was previously the Vice President of Software and Services for Automated Driving at Delphi. Winter is now the Vice President and General Manager of the Automated Solutions Division (ASD) at Intel. Winter will be working on solutions for automated driving. Winter was recognised for the first cross country drive in an autonomous vehicle in 2015. Before Delphi, Winter had worked in senior positions at Motorola Mobility.

Internet search engines need to update to keep up with IoT products, says experts

Image: Linino

  26 Nov 2016 , 14:19

Internet search mechanisms will need to change to support the Internet of Things (IoT) whereby billions of devices will become connected, say experts.

“Search engines have come a long way since their original purpose of locating documents, but they still lack the connection between social, physical and cyber data which will be needed in the IoT era,” said the study’s lead author Payam Barnaghi, Reader in Machine Intelligence at the University of Surrey in England.

“IoT data retrieval will require efficient and scalable indexing and ranking mechanisms, and also integration between the services provided by smart devices and data discovery,” Barnaghi said.

With more and more IoT devices being connected to the internet, there is an urgent need to develop new search solutions which will allow information from IoT sources to be found and extracted, the researchers said.

Complex future technologies such as smart cities, autonomous cars and environmental monitoring will demand machine-to-machine searches that are automatically generated depending on location, preferences and local information.

New requirements will include being able to access numerical and sensory data, and providing secure ways of accessing data without exposing the devices to hackers.

“IoT technologies such as autonomous cars, smart cities and environmental monitoring could have a very positive impact on millions of lives. Our goal is to consider the many complex requirements and develop solutions which will enable these exciting new technologies,” Barnaghi noted.

The article highlighting the latest research in this area by academics at the University of Surrey and Wright State University in the US was published in the journal IEEE Intelligent Systems.

While in the past, human users have searched for information on the web, the IoT will see more machine-to-machine searches which are automatically generated depending on location, preferences and local information.

Autonomous vehicles, for example, will need to automatically collect data (such as traffic and weather information) from various sources without a human user being involved.

The IoT also presents a challenge in terms of cyber security. Applications which rely on public data, such as smart city technologies, need to be very accessible to make them available to a wide range of applications and services.

“I see tremendous opportunities to effectively utilise physical (especially IoT), cyber and social data by improving the abilities of machines to convert diverse data into meaningful abstractions that matter to human experiences and decision making,” Amit Sheth of Ohio Center of Excellence in Knowledge Enabled Computing at Wright State University said.

“IoT search, particularly for devices or machines to interact with each other to find and aggregate relevant information on a human’s behalf, will become a critical enabler,” Sheth noted.

IANS

IoT Zombies are eating the Internet

  03 Nov 2016 , 13:16

By Alex deVries and Tim Skutt

Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks have always been a problem for popular hosted sites, but the ones from the last few weeks are different.

The first one to make the news was Brian Krebs’ krebsonsecurity.com, one of the most comprehensive security news sites today. The DDoS attack was on the order of 620Gbps, which cost Akamai too much to defend and resulted in krebsonsecurity.com going offline for a couple days. The source: hacked webcams acting as DDoS zombies.

A second one was on OVH, a French hosting provider. They survived a 1.5Tbps attack. Their claim that the attack was from 145,000 hacked cameras and DVRs is consistent with Akamai’s observations.

Besides the scale, what’s different about these attacks? IoT

The advent of IoT brings with it incredible scale of powerful low-cost devices. A botnet of 150k devices gives a great platform for an attacker. The devices are often scattered on the Internet, making them difficult to track.

Devices like cameras can be easy to hack. Devices have relatively long life spans and firmware is rarely updated, so devices often remain vulnerable to attacks long after known vulnerabilities are patched. Firmware can be reverse engineered, having either have been ripped from a purchased device or downloaded from firmware updates. Many devices also have default usernames and passwords to make this even easier.

Targets aren’t hard to find, either. Sites like shodan.io make it trivial to find certain devices on the Internet.

Securing devices

There are best practices that can be followed to secure devices. Device identity, secure default configuration, secure updates and resource protection are just some. These work well for new designs.

Let’s also be realistic: in the meantime, there’s millions of improperly secured devices on the Internet and they’ve been there for years. Fixing them is

India enterprises have the highest adoption rate for cloud services: Microsoft Survey

Image Credit: REUTERS

  24 Oct 2016 , 18:13

Technology decision makers in Indian enterprises are the highest adopters of public Cloud solutions in the world, a survey by Microsoft revealed on Monday.

“Fifty seven per cent respondents from India have adopted public Cloud solutions and 33 per cent respondents stated that their companies use hybrid Cloud — a combination of public and private Cloud solutions,” the findings showed.

These are among the highest rate of adoptions and are better than markets such as the US, the UK and Japan, said the Microsoft survey conducted with market research firm Wakefield Research.

IT decision makers (ITDMs) refer to sales functions — CRM and ERP, data analytics and Internet of Things (IoT) — as the top three services or applications that their organisation would like to host on the public Cloud.

Microsoft has expanded its Cloud access for local customers by enabling Web Direct and Cloud solution provider channels that makes it easy for developers and startups to use the local Cloud.

“Sixty four per cent Indian respondents were comfortable in hosting their company’s most essential applications or services on the public Cloud,” the survey revealed.

Sixty four per cent Indian respondents believe that public Cloud solutions are very important to connect seamlessly to the organisation’s existing data centres five years from now.

Five major sectors — healthcare, Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI), e-commerce, startups and government — are leading Cloud adopters in the country, the survey noted.

IANS

What is 5G and what does it mean for me?

By Anirudh Regidi /  19 Oct 2016 , 08:43

The Qualcomm 4G/5G summit held in Hong Kong covered a lot of ground on mobile networks and the technology that enables them. By far the most important question the summit answered however, was: “What is 5G?”

To the average consumer and the layman, each generation of mobile network only means speed. 1G was analogue communication, 2G was GPRS and EDGE, 3G was 3Mbps speeds and 4G/LTE meant 20-60Mbps speeds.

To the engineers at Qualcomm, however, 5G is not just about speed. Yes, 5G promises ludicrous speeds that directly compete with wired “broadband” services, but 5G also means a vastly more efficient network and a more cohesive one.

We spoke to Peter Carson, Senior Director, marketing, Qualcomm, and Serge Willenegger, Senior Vice President, Qualcomm, who took the trouble to explain 5G to us.

What follows is a summation of the conversation we had with the two executives.

So what is 5G?

To put it simply, the use cases for 4G networks has expanded well beyond the initial scope of the standard. 5G is what you get when you reset the standard/design to cope with the increase in scope.

4G networks don’t just support mobile devices anymore. IoT (Internet of Things) devices are everywhere and the number of them is only going to increase. We’re seeing 4G modems in smart watches, in CCTVs and even in doorbells.

The complexity of 4G.

The problem is that 4G was never designed to support such a varied set of devices and as a result, the 4G ecosystem is fragmented and also congested.

5G, as happened when the transition to 4G happened, will consolidate all these standards under one roof and accommodate for