Today's new IT term is spear-phishing. According to Kaspersky Labs, Australia is attacked by phishers a quarter of the time, which I suppose makes them the most gullible nation.
A phishing attack typically arrives in a well crafted email that contains a link or URL. The aim of the email is to have the recipient click on that link. The majority of existing malware scanners can scan an email but they can't check the destination of an embedded link so if the link is not a known bad one it will be ignored.
You might think that email scanner could work it out from the content of the email but thanks to new social engineering approaches the latest generation of phishing emails are often innocuous or even look like a regular message they would normally see. In Australia recently, Energy Australia customers were targeted by such a message, one that looked exactly the same as their regular electricity bills.
The key is education of all users. Don't click on any links in emails from unknown or unfamiliar sources. Make sure your browser checks for suspicious links when they are clicked on. If you hover over a link and the address displayed doesn't make sense or looks wrong then it is probably a phishing attempt. In short, the best firewall is often a well informed human one rather than only relying on the installed malware product.
The latest version of the annual International Telecommunications Union's (ITU) "Measuring the Information Society" report is out and the winner this year is Denmark, pushing last year's winner South Korea into second place. The UK moved up to fifth, the US and Australia are still sitting at 12th and 14th places respectively, while Thailand jumped from 91st to 81st place. Hong Kong is fourth but India is way down at 129th place.
The ranking is based on 11 factors including telephone subscribers, international internet bandwidth, percentages of households with a computer and internet access and other factors including education levels. Worldwide, 87% of the population now lives within range of a mobile phone signal in their country, and overall, 93% of the population has coverage. In one interesting graph of teachers with IT training skills, Thailand came second only to Singapore.
Most IT people remember Stuxnet, the malware that attacked the Iranian nuclear processing plants. Enter Regin, a new malware primarily aimed at spying on organisations. Like Stuxnet, the prevailing theory is that due to the advanced sophistication it must have been constructed by a nation-state of some kind. The code identified to date is customisable and uses mixed attack vectors and zero-day flaws. According to Symantec, there have been at least 10 countries identified as being infected with a wide range of organisations as the target of this malware, including small businesses and individuals. Of these, Russia and Saudi Arabia were the targets of about half the known attacks.
Apple iPhone sales will drop by a third after the New Year. That is the prediction of Ming-Chi Kuo of analyst group KGI Securities. Running up to Christmas there will be a bump but after that he predicts a sharp drop off. He is also predicting poor sales of the iPhone 6 Plus model, or iPhablet as some are calling it, and current sales support this with the larger model being out-sold by three to one compared to the smaller unit.
According to the vice-president of CCS Insight, Android will be out of favour by the end of 2016, replaced by Windows Phone. As predictions go, this one is about as brave as I have seen. To date Microsoft has not made any real dent in the mobile phone OS market and there is no indication that they will do so by 2016. For a start, there will be a number of new versions of Android out between now and then, so whatever Microsoft comes out with, Android will probably match it or improve on it.
SanDisk expects to have a 16TB flash memory based drive available in 2016 compared with Intel claiming that it will have a 10TB version by then. It will be interesting to see what the prices will be and if it becomes cheaper to buy flash drives compared to regular platter based hard drives by the end of 2016.
The Samsung Galaxy S5 has not done as well in sales as the S4 model did. Given that top-end smartphone sales are slowing in many places due to a saturated marketplace this is not unexpected. The biggest driver at the moment seems to be fashion. With technology and features very similar, the main selling point seems to be who has the best looking devices.
James Hein is an IT professional of over 30 years’ standing. Contact him at jclhein@gmail.com