Category: News

Bard’s mistake costs Google shareholders $100 billion, GitHub and GoDaddy lay off thousands and the chaos at Twitter continues.

Welcome to Hashtag Trending for Friday, February 10th, 2023. I’m your host Jim Love.

Google had an undeniably tough week. The tech giant’s AI offerings were overshadowed by a mistake we covered yesterday.

Google desperately needs a win as Open AI integration into Microsoft’s Bing search engine captivated the public attention and for the first time gave Google a credible competitor. 

Google generates on average an annual revenue of around 250 billion dollars US. The majority of that revenue comes from search ads. That revenue is threatened by AI that changes the nature of how search is displayed, possibly making profitable search ads irrelevant.  Then came the other shoe dropping, with Microsoft’s AI powered search. 

These threats forced Google to issue a ‘code red’ to fast-track AI innovation.  But did they make a critical mistake in this rush to market?

Google’s AI chatbot Bard, that was supposed to help restore Google’s AI credentials, gave an inaccurate answer to a simple factual question, in its Google’s own promotional piece.  That one wrong answer, in the public spotlight, may have wiped $100 billion in Alphabet’s market value, with the company’s shares dropping as much as 9 per cent.

Inaccuracies with AI language models are not unique to Bard. Bing has also acknowledged that there will be factually inaccurate information with the budding technology, but for the error to appear in Google’s own advertisement, right after Google’s launch event was a tough blow for the search giant.

Source: Reuters

Another day, another regretful statement from a CEO apologizing for layoffs

The reasons are starting to sound repetitious– sorry we overhired during the pandemic, you were essential in helping us build the company, but now we don’t need you anymore. 

Github and GoDaddy are the latest tech companies to announce thousands of layoffs. Github slashed 10 per cent of its workforce and GoDaddy 8 per cent.

GoDaddy said impacted employees will receive a meeting invite to learn the details of their transition, in line with local employment processes.

Github also announced other cost cutting measures.  It will not be renewing its office leases to go fully remote. Not surprisingly, it is moving to Microsoft’s Teams for all its videoconferencing needs. 

Source: TechCrunch & GoDaddy

Yahoo also announced plans to cut 1600 employees today, but, for a change, not because of economic conditions. 

Plus, Yahoo, in general, is profitable, with about $8 billion in yearly revenue. But its advertising business, where it had hoped to take on rivals like Google and Meta, simply never achieved what the company hoped it would, so the company has decided to shut down that part of its business.

Resulting layoffs will impact more than 50% of Yahoo’s ad tech employees. 

These changes will be “tremendously beneficial for the profitability of Yahoo overall, “said Yahoo’s CEO Jim Lanzone , which will allow the company “to go on offense” and invest more in other parts of its business that are profitable.

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Low profits and a bleak economic outlook have been synonymous with layoffs. But not all companies have the same response. Nintendo, the Japanese video game company announced it will give 10 per cent raises to employees, despite a slump in profit. 

“It’s important for our long-term growth to secure our workforce,” Nintendo’s President Shuntaro Furukawa said during an earnings call this week, according to Reuters.

Nintendo’s net profit in the first nine months of the fiscal year through March was 346 billion yen ($2.6 billion dollars US), down 5.8 per cent from 367 billion yen in the same period of the previous year.

Source: TechCrunch, Axios and  Global News

The crypto market has seen better days. Crypto amateurs, fanatics, miners, lending platforms are all feeling the pressure as the value of their altcoins plummet. 

It turns out that crypto ATMs could also take a hit.

Unlike regular ATM machines connected to bank accounts, these kiosks take cash and then transfer bitcoin to a digital wallet. Some also allow the customer to sell their bitcoin.

These crypto access points have appeared in bars, corner stores and truck stops across the world after the rise of the crypto fad between September 2020 to September 2022.

They’ve had their fun, enjoying fat profit margins at the height of the market, imposing exorbitant fees, sometimes as much as 20 per cent per transaction.

According to howmanybitcoinatms.com, a site run by academic researchers and volunteers interested in measuring bitcoin adoption, there were around 63,000 of them in the U.S. as of September 2022.

But, amid the market downturn, they are now kind of useless. 

As a matter of fact, Top-5 bitcoin ATM operator Coin Cloud filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in Nevada on Tuesday, just steps behind its lender, Genesis Global. They have also cut their headcount and will inevitably shrink their ATM operations.

Source: Axios

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So called Direct Messages have always been less private than people may have thought they were.

Direct messages on Twitter are not end-to-end encrypted which puts personal messages and information, at risk, if Twitter suffers a data breach. The company’s staff, with the right permissions, can also access your DMs.

With the departure of important security and data staff after Musk’s takeover, the security outlook of Twitter’s messages was even more precarious.

To make matters worse, it appears you cannot even delete your direct messages from Twitter’s servers. 

That puts Twitter at odds European privacy legislation, GDPR, that seeks to give users rights over how their information is collected, stored, and used, including their right to have their data deleted. One of the fundamental rights under GDPR is the right to be forgotten.

People have complained and Twitter seems to be ignoring the requests of users, by pointing them to a generic guidance that fails to explain whether Twitter deletes your DMs from its servers or not.

Twitter’s help center says messages and conversations are “deleted from your account only.” They don’t say messages are deleted from its systems or servers.

Previous research has shown that that deleted DMs are held within Twitter’s servers for years. In 2022, Twitter whistleblower and former security chief Peiter “Mudge” Zatko claimed it was not possible in some cases for Twitter to delete data.

Source: Ars Technica

And that’s the top tech stories for today.  Hashtag Trending is produced by the ITWC podcast network and is heard Monday to Friday with a special weekend edition hosted by me where we feature interviews on key subjects in technology.

Follow us on Apple Podcasts, Google, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.  

If you follow stories about cybersecurity, why not check out our sister podcast CyberSecurityToday.

You can find all our podcasts and the text versions, as well as more in-depth coverage itworldcanada.com  and on technewsday.com in the US. You can also find instructions on how to get us on your smart speaker.

I’m Jim Love and I’ll be back later today with our weekend edition interview. Hope you can join us then. And I’ll be back on Monday morning with a new lineup of the top tech news stories on Hashtag Trending.

The post Hashtag Trending Feb 10th- Bard costs Google $100 billion in market value; GitHub and GoDaddy announce layoffs; Twitter chaos continues first appeared on IT World Canada.

Can AI make Microsoft’s search engine a real competitor to Google?  Google unveils search capabilities based on AI enablement and can AI have more ethics than we do?   

Welcome to Hashtag Trending – today’s top tech news stories for Thursday, February 9, 2023. 

I’m your host, Jim Love.

Can AI bring some real competition to the search business?

Google, has for years dominated search.  As of December 2022, Google held 84 per cent and Microsoft, with it’s Bing search engine was the second biggest, some might say the only competitor, but with only a miniscule 9 per cent of the search market. 

Today, as Microsoft announced plans to revamp its search engine to include the popular ChatGPT AI, Bing is emerging as a viable competitor to threaten Google’s search engine dominance.

When you are the big kid on the block, it’s fair to see others nibbling away at your market share.  Neeva, the new search engine from former Google executive Sridhar Ramaswamy recently came to market with an ad free alternative.  But in our interview with Neeva on Hashtag Trending’s weekend edition, Ramaswamy acknowledged that Neeva wasn’t trying to dominate search, but to take a relatively small niche market, at least initially. 

But Microsoft’s recent fusion of Bing and OpenAI creates a product that threatens Google’s dominance in the search domain.  

Microsoft’s plan is to offer their AI engine as part of Bing’s search capability. It claims that about 50 percent of almost 10 billion search queries go unanswered today, or at least without very good answers,” according to Microsoft executive Yusuf Mehdi in an interview with Axios today.

Microsoft is betting big that they can address that missing 50 per cent, investing US$10 billion using AI tools to improve standard Bing results. Additionally, the Edge browser will offer new AI-powered features including summaries of web pages and new tools to employ those results, including a writing assistant.

Mehdi told Axios that this shift to AI enabled search is profound and can disrupt the market.  For anyone who has experimented with ChatGPT you will see that while classic search might generate a list of links to hundreds or even tens of thousands of articles, AI delivers a concise summary that answers natural language questions with seemingly intelligent answers.

“We can afford to be more innovative and disruptive on experience,” Mehdi said.

Microsoft is already reaping the benefits of this shake-up. According to an article in Tech Crunch, the Bing app saw a 10 times increase in downloads after the announcement. In fact, users who want to try out the new AI features must join a waitlist of millions of users.

With Google, for instance, paying Apple billions of dollars per year to be the default search engine in Safari, a large number of users moving to the Edge browser with Bing as the search engine is a real threat to Google’s dominance in this area.

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Google’s claim to accuracy of their AI has an embarrassing set back

Microsoft has acknowledged that despite safeguards, its AI may still produce factually inaccurate information, known as a hallucination, but hopes that users’ feedback will gradually improve the technology.

One of Google’s key competitive differentiators, and its reason to be late to market is it’s cautious approach it claims produces an AI that is more accurate that Microsoft’s ChatGPT.

So it was a huge blow when Google’s Bard AI gave an inaccurate answer in a recent demonstration.  In answer to the question “What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can I tell my 9-year old about? Bard confidently answered that James Webb was used to photograph the very first pictures of a planet outside the Earth’s solar system (an exoplanet). The first pictures of exoplanets were, in fact, taken by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in 2004, according to NASA.

Google was forced to issue an acknowledgement of the error.  

Source: IT World Canada 

Either playing catchup or an amazing coincidence, Google just announced new AI enabled search capabilities to Google Lens and Maps.

Multisearch, which allows users to search using both text and images at the same time, and is powered by A.I. technology called Multitask Unified Model or MUM, which understands information across text, photos and videos and draws insights and connections between topics, concepts and ideas is a technology that Google originally launched last April, but this week announced the integration of MUM within its Google Lens visual search features to allow users to add text to a visual search query.

Using MUM a user can pull up, for example, a photo of a shirt they liked in Google Search. The can then ask Lens where they can find the same pattern on a different apparel or in a different color. This combination of words and images help Google to process and understand search queries that it couldn’t have previously handled.

Multisearch was made available last October in the U.S. and in December in India. “Multisearch near me” will map stores carrying the goods in the search. 

Google adds to this what they have termed Immersive View. It uses billions of Street Views and aerial images to create a 3D model of a location which might have the searched for items. This can be useful to find a clear and contextual layout of a neighbourhood, a business or the entrance of a building. Immersive view also shows weather and traffic to help users plan their visits.

Google also announced Glanceable directions to allow drivers to view their route before tapping “start” or directly on the lock screen. This feature is available for both Android and iOS and will be launching in the coming months.   

And to appeal to the high-tech segment of the search audience, built-in Google Maps software will enable users to choose the most energy-efficient route for electric vehicles, including suggesting the best charging stop, fast charging stations if the driver is in a rush, or supermarkets that have charging stations in case the user needs to run errands.

Source: TechCrunch & Mashable & IT World Canada

Communications technology company, Zoom has announced plans to lay off 1300 people -15 per cent of its workforce but the CEO will also feel the pain.

Zoom is the latest company to reduce its headcount in response to the slowing demand of remote work technology in the post pandemic world.

Zoom’s CEO, Eric Yuan wrote in a post that the company “didn’t take as much time as we should have to thoroughly analyze our teams or assess if we were growing sustainably, toward the highest priorities.” 

 But Yuan took responsibility, noting that he plans to cut his own salary by 98 per cent for the coming fiscal year and forgo his fiscal year 2023 corporate bonus.

Markets responded favourably – despite the disappointing earnings, the company’s shares closed up nearly 10 per cent after the company made the announcement. 

In contrast,  Paypal also announced plans to reduce its workforce by about 7 per cent or roughly 2000 jobs.  Unlike Zoom, Paypal’s stock declined in today’s trading.  

Source: Axios

I’m afraid I can’t do that Dave….

ChatGPT has raised concerns by educational institutions and others globally for enabling AI plagiarism for  essays, exams and even resumes and cover letters.

But even though Microsoft’s new AI-enabled Bing search engine is based on on OpenAI’s Chat GPT, it seems to have certain built-in ethical boundaries, and refuses prompts which it flags as “unethical”

Business Insider asked the new Bing, now available in trial format, to write a cover letter for a job application.

Bing refused. “I’m sorry, but I cannot write a cover letter for you. That would be unethical and unfair to other applicants.”

It did give the users some tips and links to several cover-letter writing resources.

In fact, Bing also wished the user good luck at the end, with a smiley emoji.

In contrast, ChatGPT generated a 270-word cover letter based on the job description.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said Tuesday at the presentation of the new Bing that it’s important to develop AI that is “more aligned with human values, more aligned with what our preferences are — both individually and as a society.”

It’s important to note that Bing also cites where it got the information from. ChatGPT does not.

Source: Business Insider

And that’s the top tech stories for today.  Hashtag Trending is produced by the ITWC podcast network and is heard Monday to Friday with a special weekend edition hosted by me where we feature interviews on key subjects in technology.

Follow us on Apple Podcasts, Google, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.  

If you follow stories about cybersecurity, why not check out our sister podcast CyberSecurityToday.

You can find all our podcasts and the text versions as well as more in-depth coverage itworldcanada.com  and on technewsday.com in the US. You can also find instructions on how to get us on your smart speaker.

I’m Jim Love – talk to you tomorrow with the top tech news stories on Hashtag Trending.

The post Hashtag Trending Feb. 9th- AI brings competition in the search business; Google unveils search capabilities and Canada hates the Metaverse the most first appeared on IT World Canada.

Canada’s biggest book chain has suffered what it calls a cyber incident that knocked it offline on Wednesday.

“We experienced a cybersecurity incident earlier today and are working with third-party experts to investigate and resolve the situation,” a notice on the Indigo website said.

“Our hope is to have systems back online as soon as possible. In the interim our website will remain unavailable. At this time we look forward to welcoming customers in our stores for cash transactions. We are temporarily unable to process electronic payments, or to accept gift cards or returns.”

Formally known as Indigo Books & Music, the publicly-traded national chain sells books and a wide range of household items such as gloves, scarves, blankets, mugs, toys and stationery. With 8,000 employees, it operates 89 superstores under the Indigo and Chapters banners as well as over 80 small format stores under the names Coles, Indigospirit, SmithBooks, and The Book Company.

At the close of Wednesday’s market the stock was trading at $2.35.

In its latest quarterly results, reported for a 13-week period ending October, 2, 2022, the company said it has revenue of $236.2 million. Merchandise sales, the total of retail and online sales and excluding other revenues, were a record high of any second quarter for the company.

The post Indigo suffers ‘cyber incident,’ knocking it offline first appeared on IT World Canada.

Ottawa should deploy a wide range of strategies, including tax breaks, to encourage small businesses to take cybersecurity more seriously, a member of a think tank told a parliamentary committee this week.

“I think the government should incentivize companies to adopt the latest security measures, such as the cybersecurity standard established by ISED (Innovation, Science and Economic Development) and CSE (the Canadian Security Establishment, the country’s electronic spy agency that also protects federal IT networks) for small and medium organizations,” Aaron Shull, managing director and general counsel of the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) told the House of Commons defence committee.

The standard he referred to is CyberSecure Canada, a program for small and medium-sized firms. Companies that meet certain criteria and pass a security audit can tell customers and partners they have met the certification standard.

Started in 2019, the program hasn’t been widely adopted. A year after the program was announced, IT World Canada found that only three firms had been certified.

“The standard provides a high level of protection,” Shull told the committee, “but its adoption — and this is the problem — has been limited. Implementing a tax benefit system as an incentive to help increase the overall level of cybersecurity in the country and reduce the risk of cyberattacks on businesses would be a way forward.”

Second, the federal government should establish a clear and concise legal framework for  how the private sector can deal with cyber attacks, including guidelines for attribution of attackers, response, and for liability should companies be allowed to hit attackers back. But, he added, the framework should also be “nimble and respond to a fast-changing environment. And the regulations should be driven by “sound policy” and not politics.  The cabinet would set standards, a code of practice and certification programs to act as an integrated compliance program, he said.

Third, Shull said, Ottawa should convene an annual cybersecurity conference for a wide range of stakeholders — companies, the IT industry, provincial, territorial, and municipal governments, academics, Indigenous communities, non-profits — to learn more about cybersecurity and do tabletop exercises. Not all sessions would be open to the general public.

One model, he added, is a “cybersecurity dialogue” that CIGI will host in June in Waterloo, Ont., where it is headquartered.

“In my view, cybersecurity is a whole of society concern for Canada,” Shull explained, “and everyone should do more to address this issue.”

In an interview, Shull noted the CyberSecure Canada program has been put forward by the Standards Council of Canada and the Digital Governance Council (formerly the CIO Strategy Council of Canada). “If you are a small and medium-sized enterprise you will probably be OK” to withstand attacks from unsophisticated threat actors, he said. It’s “relatively rare” for nation-state actors to go after SMEs here, he said.

But the federal government needs to give incentives to the private sector to act, Shull said. “We always wait for the ‘Oops’ moment before we do something.”

He isn’t sure how much of a tax incentive Ottawa should offer, other than “make it big enough that people will actually do it.”

But he added, the economic benefit of having companies spend less on recovering from a cyber attack should increase government revenue, and spur innovation.

The post Give tax break so small Canadian firms can invest in cybersecurity, Parliament told first appeared on IT World Canada.

Microsoft has long used its own rendering engine for displaying PDFs in its Edge browser, but that will change next month.

Microsoft and Adobe have announced that, in March, the Adobe Acrobat PDF engine will be embedded in Edge on Windows 10 and 11 to power its PDF viewer. Edge for MacOS will not be immediately affected, but Microsoft says that the change is coming “in the future”.

Only organizations with managed devices will have the option to opt in to the change via Intune policy – for now. For everyone else, the update will be automatic and irreversible. And the legacy PDF engine will be removed from Edge in March 2024, according to the announcement.

In a blog post, Microsoft noted, “the built-in Microsoft Edge PDF solution will continue to be free. Users who want more advanced digital document features, such as the ability to edit text and images, convert PDFs to other file formats, and combine files, can purchase an Acrobat subscription that enables access to these advanced features inside Microsoft Edge via an extension. Those with an existing Adobe Acrobat subscription can use the Acrobat extension inside Microsoft Edge at no extra cost.”

The announcement also pointed out that it is “part of an ongoing Adobe and Microsoft initiative that is transforming digital work and life by bringing Adobe’s industry-leading PDF, e-signature and document automation tools directly to Microsoft users. This PDF experience in Microsoft Edge joins an already comprehensive set of Adobe PDF and e-sign integrations across Microsoft solutions, including Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint and others.”

The post Microsoft Edge switching to Adobe PDF rendering engine first appeared on IT World Canada.

Today, Google unveiled several new search capabilities and a demo of its AI chatbot, known as Bard, a day after Microsoft announced plans to inject AI into its Bing search engine and Edge web browser.

Google’s spate of AI announcements come after the tech giant reportedly issued a ‘code red’ to rapidly accelerate its AI strategy, following the viral success of rival ChatGPT and Microsoft’s US$10 billion investment in the product.

Bard is conceptually similar to ChatGPT, which, since its launch two months ago, has garnered over 100 million active users. Amateurs and experts alike are dazzled by its capabilities that keep extending, going from producing essays and poems to passing MBA exams.

But Google did take the credit for pioneering the technology that ChatGPT relies on and boasted of its ambitions for responsible AI.

“We made significant contributions to the scientific community, like developing the Transformer (Google’s machine learning model), which set the stage for much of the generative AI activity we see today, and we will continue to bring these technologies to the world in a responsible way that benefits everyone,” said Prabhakar Raghavan, senior vice president responsible for search, geo, ads, commerce products and more at Google.

Bard, released currently in a lightweight version to “trusted testers”, is powered by Google’s LaMDA large language model trained on dialogue to allow free-flowing, open-ended conversations. Google also plans to integrate LaMDA into its search results to generate narrative responses to queries that do not have one clear or right answer.

Microsoft’s Bing, which currently occupies only a small fraction of the search engine market, has similar plans to roll out an intelligent chatbot alongside Bing’s search results that summarizes and synthesizes web pages and different sources, as well as composing emails.

With investors flocking to AI stocks right now, Microsoft expects every percentage point of share it gains will bring in another US$2 billion in search advertising revenue, Reuters wrote.

“This technology is going to reshape pretty much every software category,” said Microsoft chief executive officer, Satya Nadella, to reporters during a briefing at the company’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington.

Microsoft’s new Bing search engine is live in limited preview on desktop computers, and will be available for mobile devices in coming weeks.

During the livestream event this morning, Google also sneaked in a few other AI-powered capabilities including:

Addition of 33 new languages, including Corsican, Latin and Yiddish, to Google Translate’s offline mode
New capabilities added to Google Lens to facilitate visual search across the web 
Immersive View AI that uses 2D images and information from Google Maps to generate a 3D representation of the entire context of a location. Rolling out today in London, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco and Tokyo.
APIs that will allow developers, creators and enterprises to build applications using its large language model, starting with LaMDA.
Eco friendly routing in Europe, designed to help users choose the most energy-efficient route for electric vehicles, including suggesting the best charging stop, fast charging stations if the driver is in a rush, or supermarkets that have charging stations in case the user needs to run errands.

With all these announcements, the only limit to search, Google said, is our imagination. But there’s another limit: inaccuracy, and that did not take long to manifest.

This morning, on Twitter, Google published an advertisement for Bard in the form of a short GIF of it being prompted to respond to a query, to which it confidently delivered – a wrong answer.

The prompt was “What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can I tell my 9-year old about?”, to which Bard responded with a number of answers, including the statement that JWST was used to photograph the very first pictures of a planet outside the Earth’s solar system (an exoplanet), which is grossly inaccurate. The first pictures of exoplanets were taken by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in 2004, according to NASA.

The mistake was spotted hours after the livestream event, and the criticisms and derision inevitably flooded in. At the time of writing, the advertisement has been viewed over 1.2 million times. 

Microsoft has also warned that its AI may still produce factually inaccurate information, known as a hallucination, but hopes that users’ feedback will gradually improve the technology.

The post Google unveils new AI search capabilities as rivalry with Microsoft intensifies and Bard spews its first nonsense first appeared on IT World Canada.

Today, global technology company Zoho unveiled its unified communications platform, Trident, and added new capabilities to its virtual office platform, Zoho Workplace.

Trident seeks to help businesses communicate and collaborate more efficiently across channels, reduce tool ambiguity and boost an organization’s digital adoption. The platform combines mail, messages, audio/video calls, calendar, tasks, and more into the same place. Additionally, Trident is Zoho’s first native desktop app for email and chat.

Zoho Workplace also now features a flexible and comprehensive business mail and cloud office suite, built on a common data model and unified through search and AI. 

“The goal of Zoho Workplace is to enable businesses to unify their work to a point where the line between apps disappears. It’s heartening to see so many new businesses join the Zoho family, using Zoho Workplace as their customizable center of gravity,” said Zoho Canada managing director, Chandrashekar LSP.

The company said that Zoho Workplace grew 30 per cent over the 2021-2022 period, and now has more than 16 million users, a growth that it attributes to the increasing demand for streamlined, cost-efficient solutions, as well as higher standards for user privacy. 

Privacy is one of the main reasons that the company runs its services on its own infrastructure operated by Zoho’s IT management division, ManageEngine, which recently opened two new data centres in Canada. 

Having made a promise in 2005 to never show ads or sell data, Zoho differs from large organizations who indulge in “perverted” privacy abuses and “treat any fines and penalties as cost of doing business, because they’ve already made billions,” stated LSP.

Migrations from Google, Microsoft, and from GoDaddy Workspace Email to Zoho Workplace doubled in 2022, the company boasted.

Other new capabilities launched:

Zoho Voice Platform is now a full phone system integrated directly within team collaboration app Zoho Cliq and web conferencing app Zoho Meeting. Employees can make direct line calls, send SMS messages, and pick up inbound calls across apps.
New AI-based grammar tool, BluePencil, that brings writing suggestions and a text editor that can be used on any third-party webpage.
Universal Drag and Drop seeks to help users save time when working across multiple workplace products
Mobile Device Management capabilities and OTP-restricted Emails to enhance security
TrueSync added to Zoho Workdrive for unlimited storage limits. TrueSync also replicates all WorkDrive files and folders on the desktop to enable users to switch between the cloud and computer. Files can be accessed and edited locally, without using up hard drive space.

Zoho Workplace is available in three editions: Standard is C$3.75 per user per month, Professional is C$7.50 per user per month and Zoho Mail is C$1.25 per user per month.

The post Zoho launches new unified communications platform first appeared on IT World Canada.

It’s time to start preparing your personal income tax return in Canada and the U.S. Just remember that crooks are preparing, too.

Researchers at Sophos said on Tuesday that they are seeing email messages to individuals pretending to be from the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA), claiming the person is entitled to a refund from the government. To collect, the individual is asked to create a CRA account. The message includes a link to a fake CRA website; the goal is to get personal information from victims.

There are several versions of the scam. One says recipients can sign up for an Interac e-transfer of funds.

Crooks hope victims will be fooled by the lure of money and copies of government logos. However, there are several clues messages like these are scams. In this scam

— neither the Canadian nor the American government will send a message that you are entitled to a refund;

— some messages are in fractured English. One, for example, asks recipients to deposit their money rather than withdraw it;

— smart people who hover their mouse over the link for signing into or creating an account will see it doesn’t go to a Government of Canada site. Often the link goes to a page created on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

— smart people who have enabled their email to show the sender’s full email address will see it obviously doesn’t come from the government. A hacker can make the sender’s name appear to be from any well-known agency, company or person. But the full email address will show the real sender.

There is a large number of tax scams aimed at American residents as well. These include phone, letter, or email messages claiming you owe taxes. They will demand that you pay the amount immediately, usually with a prepaid debit card or wire transfer. They may even threaten to arrest you if you don’t pay.

Click here for information from the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) about identifying tax fraudsters.

Click here for advice from the Canada Revenue Agency. See also this page for details on CRA scams.

Be suspicious of any email, text, or phone call from anyone asking for personal information including your birthdate, credit or debit card number, bank account number, or Social Insurance/Social Security number. Crooks will claim they need these numbers from you to verify information.

If you call a government agency on your own — not using a phone number in an email or text — using personal information for verification is safe.

The post Income tax scams targeting Canadians – and Americans – have already started first appeared on IT World Canada.

A website used by Toyota suppliers is hacked, a ransomware gang partner pleads guilty and more.

Welcome to Cyber Security Today. It’s Wednesday, February 8th, 2023. I’m Howard Solomon, contributing reporter on cybersecurity for ITWorldCanada.com and TechNewsday.com in the U.S.

 
Threat actors are expected to focus this year on compromising supply chains, bypassing multifactor authentication (MFA) and taking advantage of misconfigured APIs. That’s the prediction of analysts at the NCC Group in their annual Threat Monitor Report. Ransomware attacks were down slightly in 2022, the report says. But, it also warns ransomware gangs are effective in finding new ways to squeeze victims.

Speaking of ransomware and supply chains, last week I told you about a ransomware attack on a British-based company, ION Group, that makes applications for banks and financial trading firms. The latest news is a claim by the LockBit ransomware gang that a “very rich unknown philanthropist” paid the ransom demand. Evidence of that, perhaps, is that ION Group’s name has been removed from the gang’s data leak site, says CPO Magazine. The unit of ION Group that was hit supplies solutions for the financial derivatives market. According to the news story, derivative trading has suffered long delays in processing transactions since the attack.

More on supply chain attacks: Supply chains are companies that link to your company’s IT systems. Hack one and access is gained to many other companies. It’s not necessarily hard. This week a security researcher for a company called Eaton Works revealed they were able to hack into the web portal used by Toyota’s parts suppliers. They did it after discovering four critical vulnerabilities. One was a backdoor login mechanism that allowed anyone to log in as a corporate Toyota employee or supplier by just knowing their email address. After finding a system administrator’s email address the researcher was able to log in and take over full control of the entire system. That included access to Toyota projects and accounts of the car maker’s suppliers, such as tire-makers Michelin and Continental, systems supplier Magna and other big-name firms. This is another reason why cybersecurity is every company’s responsibility — and why web designers have to take security more seriously. The researcher found the holes in October and notified Toyota, which quickly plugged them. News was released only this week.

Attention application and web developers: The OpenSSL Project has released a major security update. It closes eight security flaws threat actors can take advantage of. Developers using OpenSSL for secure communications in their applications or websites need to install the update fast.

A Russian man is facing sentencing in the United States after pleading guilty to laundering cryptocurrency received from victim companies hit by the Ryuk ransomware gang. The man was extradited to the U.S. last year after being arrested in Amsterdam in 2021. According to the U.S. Justice Department, the man was one of several who laundered ransom funds through multiple financial transactions. He faces prison time of up to 20 years.

Here are a few consumer-related cybersecurity news items:

It’s time to start preparing your income tax in Canada and the U.S. Crooks are preparing, too. Researchers at Sophos this week tweeted about seeing email messages to individuals pretending to be from the Canada Revenue Agency. The messages claim you are owed a refund. To collect you have to create a CRA account. Smart people who hover their mouse over the link for signing into or creating an account will see it doesn’t go to a Government of Canada site. This is a warning that governments don’t send messages like this. Another tip: The sender’s full email address obviously doesn’t come from the government. For more about protecting yourself against CRA fraud see this article.

Crooks are also sending fake package delivery notices to Canadians. This takes advantage of the fact that many people are expecting packages after making online purchases. City-TV News reports a Toronto-area woman recently received a text supposedly from Canada Post saying it couldn’t deliver a package to her. It needed a debit card payment of $1.25 to reschedule the delivery, plus her date of birth. No legitimate delivery service will demand a delivery fee or your date of birth.

With the Super Bowl coming this Sunday there’s another reminder that crooks will try to take advantage of the event. Researchers at Synopsys looked at 10 popular Android sports and betting apps and found a number have vulnerabilities, including outdated open-source components. These apps aren’t necessarily suspicious. Their developers may be lazy. But these apps are risky. Before you put money down, be sure what you’re betting on.

Valentine’s Day, which is next Tuesday, is another event crooks try to take advantage of through dating apps. The FBI this week warned people that criminals use personal information for fraud and romance scams. The goal is to steal either personal information that can be used for credit card or bank theft, or to get victims to send them money. Beware of meeting people online who promise to meet you in person but give excuses why they can’t. Beware of people you meet online and then ask for money. Take things slow with people you meet online and ask a lot of questions.

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The post Cyber Security Today, Feb. 8, 2023 – Toyota supplier website hacked, ransomware gang partner pleads guilty and more first appeared on IT World Canada.

More than half of cyberattacks will not be prevented by zero trust, 2,400 VMware servers hit in a ransomware attack, and a new app to fight digital amnesia.

Welcome to Hashtag Trending – today’s top tech news stories for Wednesday, February 8, 2023.

Zero trust is an emerging concept in cybersecurity that promises to reduce threats and make successful attacks less damaging. At its essence, zero trust takes the point of view that all network activity is untrusted until proven otherwise.

It calls for strict verification and authentication of all devices, users, and services trying to access an organization’s network, regardless of whether they are inside or outside the network perimeter. 

The idea behind zero trust is to minimize the risk of data breaches and unauthorized access to sensitive information by constantly verifying the trustworthiness of entities accessing the network.

As companies try to survive in what feels like a continual cyber war, hopes for zero-trust architectures as a solution remain high. A report published by Microsoft in 2021 found that 96 per cent of security leaders considered zero trust as critical to their success. Indeed, all large enterprises have some sort of zero-trust project going on.

But according to industry experts at Gartner, only one per cent of organizations have a mature security model that can be qualified as zero trust and by 2026, this will only go up to 10 per cent. By that time, more than half of cyber threats will target vulnerabilities that zero trust doesn’t even cover, given the ever-growing enterprise attack surface and the creativity of attackers.

Despite the abysmal projections of success in adopting zero trust hopes for this security architecture remain high.  A report published by Microsoft in 2021 found that 96 per cent of security leaders considered zero trust as critical to their success.

But while companies struggle with adoption, attackers look to target areas not well covered by zero trust programs, such as public-facing APIs, social engineering, or vulnerabilities created by employees trying to bypass stringent zero-trust policies.

Gartner acknowledges that zero trust is no panacea. It may not stop all attacks but it can reduce the risk and limit the impact of an attack.

Gartner calls on CISOs to develop an effective zero trust strategy, to secure their most critical assets and run continuous threat exposure management and look to areas outside the scope of zero trust architectures.

Source: CPO Magazine and Data Center Knowledge

More than 2,400 VMware servers were hit worldwide with a ransomware campaign over the weekend. VMware has more than 400,000 customers, and according to analysts, 80 per cent of virtualized workloads run on VMware technology.

Reportedly, the ransomware targeted a two-year-old vulnerability in VMware’s popular ESXi machines.

According to Reuters, the largest number of affected servers is in France, followed by the U.S. and Germany. Regardless of location, companies who use VMware and who have not yet applied the necessary updates, should immediately patch their systems.

Virtualization and cloud migration has the promise of improved security, but this ransomware attack showed that the best security still requires that administrators properly keep their software up to date by applying the latest upgrades and software patches.  

Source: Axios and Reuters

Microsoft’s Outlook.com has recovered after a major outage that began late Monday night. Users in North America were the ones who were primarily affected. Outlook.com covers approximately three per cent of global email traffic.

The company said at the time of the outage that it identified a recent change that may be causing issues with send, receive, or email search within Outlook.com, but later revealed that functions such as Calendar were also impacted, which in turn affected products such as Microsoft Teams.

All services were recovered late afternoon yesterday and Microsoft identified the root cause as a “subset of infrastructure responsible for routing traffic that unexpectedly stopped responding to traffic requests.”  

Source: IT World Canada

A Synergy Research Group report detailed the revenue growth rate for global cloud infrastructure services spanning the three-month period ending Dec.31, 2021 

It shows a slowing cloud sector with Microsoft, AWS and Google Cloud taking the top three spots as market leaders – not much of a surprise.

But what was a surprise was Microsoft gaining ground over AWS – that did raise some eyebrows. 

As a matter of fact, Microsoft had 23 per cent of the market share a gain of two percentage points from the previous two quarters. In contrast AWS’ share was 33 per cent, down one percentage point from the prior quarter.

All three leading companies are reporting dips in revenue from the slowdown in the cloud sector. 

“Pandemic restrictions in China, the strength of the dollar as well as increasingly cost-conscious consumers are to blame,” according to John Dinsdale, chief analyst at Synergy Research Group.

Source: CIO Dive

Smartphones have reduced the need to remember things, like phone numbers, directions to get to various places or your shopping list. If you forget it, you can google it. An epidemic of poor concentration and divided attention also comes along with cell phone use.  

For many of us, cameras have become memory replacement. I can’t be the only one who takes a picture of his car to remember where I parked in a large underground facility. 

All of this has led researchers to claim that smartphone use is increasingly linked to decreased memory skills.

But University of Toronto researchers might have a fix for us. Meet the HippoCamera app.

With this app, instead of randomly taking photos throughout the day, you choose one event that you are going to document, you record the event and the scene on video and explain, in an audio, why this is important to you. Later, the app combines the audio and video and then prompts you to watch and listen, which helps you form a stronger memory.

“We’re trying to mimic how the hippocampus stores memories. So it’s not about trying to capture beautiful photos or beautiful videos, it’s about making a memory cue.”  That’s according to Morgan Barense, one of the researchers.

The HippoCamera isn’t available for download yet, but you can sign up for an email notification once it’s released – if you remember. 

Source: Toronto Star

And that’s the top tech stories for today.  Hashtag Trending is produced by the ITWC podcast network and is heard Monday to Friday with a special weekend edition hosted by me where we feature interviews on key subjects in technology.

Follow us on Apple Podcasts, Google, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.  

If you follow stories about cybersecurity, why not check out our sister podcast CyberSecurityToday.

You can find all our podcasts and the text versions as well as more in-depth coverage itworldcanada.com  and on technewsday.com in the US. You can also find instructions on how to get us on your smart speaker.

I’m Jim Love – talk to you tomorrow with the top tech news stories on Hashtag Trending.

The post Hashtag Trending Feb.8th-Most cyberattacks not prevented by zero trust; VMware servers hit; new app to fight digital amnesia first appeared on IT World Canada.