Volume LXII, Issue 11

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In This Issue

Equifax CEO Steps Down in Hacking Scandal

Excerpted from Washington Post Report by Hamza Shaban

The chief executive of Equifax is retiring, the company said Tuesday, just weeks after the troubled credit reporting agency disclosed that it had suffered a massive data breach affecting as many as 143 million people.

The departure of Richard Smith comes as Equifax has drawn fire from countless consumers and dozens of federal lawmakers over its handling of the breach.

Equifax announced earlier this month that hackers gained unauthorized access to sensitive personal data – Social Security numbers, birth dates and home addresses – for nearly half of the country.

The company also faces multiple federal investigations over its handling of the hack and reports that executives sold an unusual amount of stock before the breach was publicly disclosed.

Equifax’s Board of Directors appointed Board Member Mark Feidler to serve as the company’s Nonexecutive Chairman, the company said in a statement Tuesday.

Paulino do Rego Barros Jr., who led the company’s Asia Pacific division, will become the interim chief executive.

“The cybersecurity incident has affected millions of consumers, and I have been completely dedicated to making this right… Read More

Big Lessons from Equifax Data Breach

Excerpted from CNBC Report by Daniel Dobrygowski and Walter Bohmayr

We’ve all seen the news reports, again and again:

A massive breach has occurred.

Many millions of customer records have been obtained by hackers.

The company in question has flubbed the response to the incident.

Wall Street is punishing the company, and the stock has plummeted since the breach was reported.

That opening to articles on almost-daily cyber crises has become all too familiar.

The recent incident involving Equifax, the US credit-reporting company, is particularly egregious and may make it seem as if every attempt to secure our data and personal information is doomed to failure.

However, our failures do not come solely from technology and its misuse, but rather from a mindset that, unless we change it, will force us into the same mistakes time and again.

These breaches are a failure of leadership and culture as much as they are failures of network security… Read More

Security with Social Security Numbers Public

Excerpted from PaymentSource Report by Daniel Wolfe

After Equifax disclosed a devastating data breach, much of the attention focused on whether the company did everything it could in response.

But the scary truth may be that this is the sort of incident that goes beyond a single company’s ability to fix.

Whatever the long-term effects will be, one thing is immediately clear: Social Security numbers are no longer as valuable as they used to be in evaluating consumer identity and creditworthiness.

“Know-Your-Customer requirements were written for a world that expects some privacy of Social Security numbers,” said Zach Perret, Co-Founder and CEO of the fintech company Plaid, at SourceMedia’s PayThink event, which took place last week in Phoenix, AZ

“The assumption that we previously held, which was that Social Security numbers and driver’s license numbers are relatively private… that’s now gone,” he said.

“Beyond how Equifax changes credit scoring, there’s a big question about how Equifax changes identity validation.”

This is a distinctly separate issue from fraud detection, Perret said… Read More

Report from DCIA CEO Marty Lafferty

The DCIA supports tax cuts proposed by President Donald Trump and Republican lawmakers.

The nine-page framework announced this week would spur Congress to revamp the US tax code by cutting corporate taxes to 20 percent from the current 35% and reducing taxes on foreign profits.

The tax system will also be made “territorial,” meaning only domestic earnings would be taxed.

Businesses will be enabled immediately to write-off the full costs of capital investments.

These and other benefits will help industry participants become more competitive in the global marketplace and accelerate the pace of technological innovation.

Industry leaders — including Apple, Cisco, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle — currently hold over $1.3 million overseas, largely to avoid repatriation taxes.

Of Apple’s $246 billion in cash holdings, for example, as much as 94% is being kept out of the country.

The proposal will “tax at a reduced rate and on a global basis the foreign profits of US multinational corporations.”

The plan also makes it mandatory that such offshore earnings be brought back to the US.

The Trump proposal is particularly timely given the EU’s report last week that it plans to increases taxes on US tech firms.

Such permanent tax reductions will provide long-term benefits to the US economy. Share wisely, and take care.

Lawmakers Dig into SEC Chairman and Equifax

Excerpted from US News Report by Andrew Soergel

Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman Jay Clayton shared details of the agency’s 2016 information breach during a hearing Tuesday on Capitol Hill.

The Chairman of the US SEC was grilled by Senate lawmakers Tuesday after last week’s disclosure that data collected by the agency had been exposed to a cyber intrusion in 2016.

But the hearing was in some ways overshadowed by the ongoing fallout from a separate breach of credit-reporting agency Equifax, as lawmakers wrestled with cybersecurity standards and the role large data-collection operations should play in the public and private sectors.

Speaking before the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, SEC Chairman Jay Clayton described his own agency’s breach but admitted he had little to go off of, aside from the fact that nonpublic information from its corporate announcement database had been accessed at some point last year.

An internal investigation is ongoing, but Clayton said he was unsure exactly when the breach took place and that a “defect in a custom piece of software” is believed to have been the primary point of vulnerability… Read More

Deloitte Says Few Clients Affected by Hack

Excerpted from Reuters Report by Paul Sandle and Jim Finkle

Global accounting firm Deloitte said on Monday it was the victim of a cyberattack that affected the data of a small number of clients, providing few details on the breach.

Deloitte said in a statement that attackers accessed data from the company’s email platform, confirming some details in a report by the Guardian newspaper, which broke news of the hack on Monday.

The attack appeared to target the firm’s US operations, was discovered in March and could have begun as early as October 2016, according to the Guardian. Deloitte’s statement did not confirm those details.

The breach at Deloitte, which says its customers include 80 percent of the Fortune 500, is the latest in a series of breaches involving organizations that handle sensitive financial data that have rattled lawmakers, regulators, and consumers.

The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Wall Street’s top regulator, and Equifax, one of the largest credit-monitoring bureaus, this month reported that confidential filings and sensitive personal data were compromised by hackers… Read More

Federal CIOs Report Progress on Agile

Excerpted from Grant Thorntion Press Announcement

The Professional Services Council (PSC) and Grant Thornton today released the findings of their 2017 federal Chief Information Officer (CIO) survey, Transitions: Managing Federal IT in a Dynamic Environment.

“CIOs must continually find creative ways to innovate and bring new ideas to their organizations while addressing enduring challenges like battling increasing cyber threats and maintaining mission-critical legacy systems.”

Based on extensive in-person interviews and online surveys of CIOs, Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs), and other IT professionals across 29 agencies, the survey reveals new excitement about innovation and change related to the adoption of Agile practices and DevOps processes, structure and culture, as well as continued progress moving relevant systems and services to cloud computing platforms.

Yet budget constraints, cybersecurity challenges and senior IT leadership vacancies during an unusual presidential transition period impede progress toward modernizing and securing federal IT systems.

The installation of new agency leadership, including many CIO positions, has been slower than usual under President Trump… Read More

Telecom Cloud Market 2017-2022

Excerpted from TradeCalls Report by Kim Swaby

Global Telecom Cloud Market Size, Status and Forecast 2017 to 2022 provides a unique tool for evaluating the market, highlighting opportunities, and supporting strategic and tactical decision-making.

This report recognizes that in this rapidly-evolving and competitive environment, up-to-date marketing information is essential to monitor performance and make critical decisions for growth and profitability.

It provides information on trends and developments, and focuses on markets and materials, capacities and technologies, and on the changing structure of the telecom cloud market.

Companies mentioned are AT&T, BT Group, CenturyLink, China Telecommunication Corporation, Deutsche Telekom, Fusion Telecommunications International, Huawei Technologies, International Business Machines (IBM), Level 3 Communications, NTT Communications, Orange Business Services, Singapore Telecommunications, TATA Communications, Telefonica, Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson, Telstra Corporation, Telus Corporation, Verizon Communications, and Vodafone Group, ZTE Corporation.

The global telecom cloud market consists of different international, regional, and local vendors… Read More

OpenFog Consortium Welcomes Carrier Input

Excerpted from FierceWireless Report by Monica Alleven

The head of the OpenFog Consortium wants wireless operators to know they’re welcome to join a diverse group of people to validate or help shape their assumptions about fog computing.

There are a lot of “open” groups out there and OpenFog is a relatively new and growing one, but it would like to see more carrier involvement.

“It’s a tremendous opportunity for them operators to actually come in and work with a diverse group of perspectives and perhaps validate some of their assumptions or help shape some of their assumptions,” said Helder Antunes, Chairman of the OpenFog Consortium and Senior Director for the Corporate Strategic Innovation Group at Cisco.

“This is a tremendous opportunity to come and join us and help us define what this looks like.”

The consortium was an idea that Antunes had along with Professor Mung Chiang of Princeton at the time, who is now the Dean of Purdue’s School of Engineering, and Dr. Tao Zhang, a Cisco Distinguished Engineer and IEEE Fellow.

They decided they needed a more horizontal organization to tackle the issues of the day.

“We thought someone needed to come and put together a group that would sort of look at the whole thing horizontally… Read More

Edge Computing Groups Wrestle with Interoperability

Excerpted from Light Reading Report by Iain Morris

Interoperability has emerged as a huge concern for the different industry groups working on standardized approaches to edge computing.

The proliferation of groups tackling the edge-computing challenge has exacerbated concern about fragmentation and the risk that incompatible technologies and techniques begin to appear.

Standards group European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) and an industry association called the OpenFog Consortium this week said they would collaborate on defining the application programming interfaces that will link computing assets to the applications that need to use them.

But as alternative groups such as the Open Networking Foundation, Open Edge Computing and the Telecom Infra Project (TIP) also eye roles in the edge computing drama, industry executives have voiced some anxiety.

“There is more work that needs to be done on interoperability testing between these different systems,” said Steve Vandris, the board director of the OpenFog Consortium and a director of IoT and 5G solutions in Intel’s datacenter network solutions group, during this week’s MEC World Congress in Berlin… Read More

When Disasters Strike, Edge Computing Must Kick-In

Excerpted from Network World Report by Patrick Nelson

Edge computing and fog networks must be programmed to kick-in when the internet fails during disasters, a scientific research team says.

That way, emergency managers can draw on impacted civilians’ location data, social networking images, and tweets and use them to gain situational awareness of scenes.

Routers, mobile phones, and other devices should continue to collect social sensor data during these events, but instead of first attempting to send it through to traditional cloud-based depositories operated by the social network – which are unavailable due to the outage – the geo-distributed devices should divert the data to local edge computing, fog nodes and other hardened resources.

Emergency officials can then access it.

It’s “a new way of gathering and sharing information during natural disasters that does not rely on the internet,” says the Georgia Institute of Technology.

“Using computing power built into mobile phones, routers, and other hardware to create a network… Read More

Edge Computing for IoT Efficiency

Excerpted from IoT Evolution Report by Julia Sowells

Managing IoT devices can be very tough.

Chiefly because they sometimes depend heavily on quick data processing.

For this to happen, the data centers or servers responsible for processing the IoT device data has to be located in close proximity to the IoT device.

This is not possible always.

Therefore to avoid this problem and improve the network’s efficiency (as well as security) so that IoT data is processed as quickly as possible, administrators these days are making use of what is being termed as Edge Computing.

Edge computing is the process of designing the IT network infrastructure such that the data emerging out of various IoT devices get processed as close to them as possible in order to increase the response time.

Edge computing, apart from improving the network efficiency, also plays a major role in decreasing the cost of computer components… Read More

Big Data Solution in Enterprises

Excerpted from CIOReview Report by Advait Kulkarni

Data is the most valuable currency in today’s digital era.

Whether it is trying to gather information about internal operational process metrics, collecting customer satisfaction scores or getting insights into the sales and marketing effectiveness, data is of prime importance.

This is then used to implement continuous improvement and predictive planning to improve customer satisfaction, quickly inform big decisions, eliminate waste and reduce risk in different areas.

Since this collection of data sets or information has too large and complex to be processed by standard tools, Big Data is the art and science of combining various changing enterprise, social and machine data to derive new insights.

The biggest and the early entrant in the Big Data space is the Hadoop infrastructure.

To make indexing of the immense amount of data generated by the web possible, Google created the MapReduce style of processing. MapReduce programming uses two functions, a map job that converts a data set into key/value pairs, and a reduce job that combines the outputs of the map job into a single result.

This approach to problem solving was then adopted by developers who were working on Apache’s “Nutch” web-crawler project… Read More

Senate Panel Reviews FTC Data Security Enforcement Powers

Excerpted from Bloomberg Report by Jimmy Koo

The recent Equifax data breach prompted senators at a September 26th hearing to question whether the FTC has the proper authority to effectively enforce data security standards.

How to better define the Federal Trade Commission’s authority to oversee corporate data security is a long-standing issue, and U.S. credit bureau Equifax’s breach compromising the personal data of 143 million consumers has, at least for the moment, further raised interest in the subject.

The Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, Insurance, and Data Security heard testimony on proposals to improve the FTC’s handling of consumer protection issues, including its role in overseeing data security efforts. Subcommittee Chairman Jerry Moran (R-KS) said that there will be a full committee hearing on the Equifax data breach in “mid-October.”

Subcommittee Ranking Member Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) said that he will soon introduce legislation to allow the FTC to investigate any data breaches, exercise oversight, and issue penalties.

Companies under the FTC’s jurisdiction-from internet giants Amazon and Facebook to smaller businesses… Read More

Future of 5G, IoT, and Embedded AI

Excerpted from Fog World Congress Press Announcement

The OpenFog Consortium (OpenFog) and the IEEE Communications Society (IEEE ComSoc), today introduced Fog World Congress, the first multi-day conference and exhibit on fog computing and networking.

The event will take place on October 30th and November 1st at the Santa Clara, CA Marriott.

The conference features more than 75 speakers, 55 sessions and an exhibit area to showcase the technologies, applications and research enabling new business models in the Internet of Things (IoT), 5G and embedded artificial intelligence (AI).

Fog computing enables rapid, secure processing of critical data-dense applications, addressing inherent challenges that neither cloud nor edge can resolve alone.

Fog distributes computing, storage, control and networking services, enabling real-time data analytics, supporting time-critical local control, connecting and protecting vast and diverse resource-constrained devices, and overcoming network bandwidth and availability constraints.

“Supporting complex, emerging systems and applications, such as the IoT, 5G mobile systems, embedded AI… Read More

GLTS Returns to GV Expo

Register Today for Your Free Pass to Attend

Join us on November 29th and 30th at the 2017 Government Video Exposition (GV Expo) as event host NewBay Media works with the team at the Federal Government Distant Learning Association to bring you the Government Learning Technology Symposium.

Last year’s inaugural GLTS was a rousing success, bringing together the growing community of distance learning professionals in the Federal Government.

Attendees came from all parts of the military and civilian agencies, corporate partners, and many affiliated organizations.

This event provided attendees with a chance to gain insights into the latest in media technologies for government users.

NewBay is working with industry leaders focused on making sure you leave with tangible knowledge to help you reach your goals.

Here are a few speaker highlights: Dr. J. Richard Kiper, Special Agent, Federal Bureau of Investigations US Department of Justice… Read More

Coming Events of Interest

IoT Solutions World Congress — October 3rd through 5th in Barcelona, Spain. This event has grown enormously in no time and is an excellent barometer and source of information, inspiration, collaboration and transformation.

2017 Storage Visions Conference — October 16th in Milpitas, CA. “New Visions for Digital Storage” will bring together the vendors, end-users, researchers, and visionaries who will meet the growing demand for digital storage for all aspects of unstructured and lightly structured data.

Mobility Unmanned — November 1st and 2nd in Washington, DC. Providing key stakeholders the unique opportunity to explore cutting-edge autonomous technology and examine the emerging regulatory landscape governing the commercial use of unmanned vehicles in all sectors – air, land, and sea.

Industrial Internet of Things (IoT) Europe — November 7th and 8th in Munich, Germany. IoT Europe will bring together forward-thinking companies from the manufacturing, energy, and transportation sectors to pave the way for the Industrial IoT revolution.

Government Video Expo & National Drone Show — November 28th-30th in Washington, DC. The 22nd annual GVE will feature a full exhibit floor with numerous training options, free seminars, keynotes, networking opportunities, and five new educational pavilions.

Delivery of Things World 2018 — April 23rd and 24th in Berlin, Germany. Meet the most influential DevOps practitioners and experts and discuss what DevOps means for your business.

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