New Dell partnership casts doubt on traditional antivirus programs

New Dell partnership casts doubt on traditional antivirus programs

Software  

A partnership announced by Dell on Tuesday shows how cybersecurity defenses are evolving, which could have wide-ranging effects on vendors like Symantec, McAfee and Trend Micro.
The PC giant has partnered with Cylance, an Irvine, California-based company that specializes in detecting and blocking attacks on endpoint computers.

Early next year, Dell will wrap Cylance’s Protect product in its Data Protection Endpoint Security Suite, said Brett Hansen, Dell’s executive director of data security solutions. The suite is an integrated package with encryption capabilities, authentication features and malware detection.

Many antivirus programs still rely in part on systems that require identification of a piece of malware, which is then further identified by security products once a “signature” is pushed to a PC’s security application.
But most security experts have agreed that signature-based detection is fairly ineffective these days since what is essentially the same malware can be changed to avoid detection.

Other technologies in antivirus suites can detect strange behavior and block malware, but often only after it has already infected a machine and done something bad.

“Our customers have been telling us the same thing: it is just not working,” Hansen said.
Cylance doesn’t use signatures. Instead, it uses an algorithm that analyzes seven million characteristics of files and programs and scores those elements on the likelihood of them being malicious, and can block them.

It’s a lightweight agent that runs on a computer, and it only occasionally needs updating. Two or three times a year, Cylance send out an update to fine tune the algorithm.

That also means Protect doesn’t need a consistent network connection to work, which is also appealing to those frustrated by daily or even hourly downloads of new signatures.
Finding a satisfactory product took Dell security experts more than a year. There are a lot of new companies that are trying different approaches to stopping malware and advanced attacks, and Dell looked at products from more than 60, Hansen said.

Most were the same, using a combination of cloud computing, heuristics and behavioral analysis. They couldn’t guarantee that a computer wouldn’t get infected, but did say they could detect and remediate it, Hansen said.

That wasn’t good enough, and Dell was looking for something that would prevent machines from getting infected in the first place. One of the common complaints from Dell customers is that they spend an inordinate amount of time answering helpdesk calls about infected computers.

Cylance’s Protect was tested by Dell’s SecureWorks, the company’s crack security division. SecureWorks put about 200 samples of the most effective malware and exploits together on a USB stick and was impressed with how Protect handled it, Hansen said.

Dell used a signature-based antivirus product in the first version of Data Protection Endpoint Security Suite, which Hansen declined to name. The second version of the suite, which will be released early next year, will still have that kind of product, along with Cylance’s.

But Hansen said he expects over time that as customers see how Protect works, they’ll be “more than happy” to drop signature-based malware detection.

Kia announces £1.3 billion investment in driverless car technology

Kia announces £1.3 billion investment in driverless car technology

Technology  

Kia has revealed ambitious plans to develop entirely driverless cars by 2030.

The Korean car company has said it will invest £1.3 billion into the development of the technology by 2018. The first goal will be to introduce partially-autonomous driving technologies, such as a remote parking system that will make a car park itself at the press of a button on the keyfob. Cars with this technology could be on the road by 2020.

Hyundai Group’s vice president, central advanced research and engineering institute, Tae-Won Lim, said: “Fully-autonomous vehicles are still some way off, and a great deal of research and rigorous product testing will need to be carried out to make the ‘self-driving car’ a reality. Kia is still in the early stages of developing its own technologies, and we are confident that the latest innovations – both partially and fully autonomous – will ultimately make driving safer for everyone.”

Smart Kia cars of the future will have a range of technologies focusing on three areas so they can function without a driver.

They will have new sensors so they can detect other vehicles, read the road ahead and identify poor driving conditions. Advanced computing systems will enable the cars to make decisions based on the information gathered by the sensors. And the computers will use their active mechanical and electronic systems to drive the car.

In order to reach this stage Kia will first work on three semi-autonomous systems. Highway Driving Assist will comprise a lane guidance system and smart cruise control. Traffic Jam Assist will take over around town and prevent the vehicle getting too close to the car in front. And, our favourite, the Remote Advanced Parking Assist System, will enable a driver to park their car simply by pressing a button on the keyfob.

Drone Maker DJI Adds Technology to Limit Where Its Machines Can Fly

Drone Maker DJI Adds Technology to Limit Where Its Machines Can Fly

Technology  

DJI, a Chinese company that makes more small-scale drones than anyone else, announced on Tuesday a new, so-called geofencing system, which is a way to better control what a drone is flying over.

The system, built on flying restrictions DJI first introduced in 2013, promises continually updated information on a machine’s airspace. Information on something like an airport is already in the system; this might add something like a request by emergency personnel not to fly over a forest fire. 

“This is an example of the technology empowering operators to make smart decisions,” said Brendan Schulman, vice president of policy and legal affairs at DJI. “It’s an example of how technology solutions can address concerns.”

What action to take is often up to drone’s pilot, though it is clear that freedom of the skies faces increasing limits. The system has built-in restrictions around sensitive locations such as prisons and power plants, where potential payloads, not the flying itself, are a concern. 

By default, the drone won’t be operable in such places, though users who open DJI accounts will be able to self-authorize flights in some locations. 

Registering for those accounts will require verification from a credit or debit card, or a mobile phone number. DJI will apparently make the information available if there are legal investigations of flights, but it won’t collect or store the information for any other purpose for the free service. For national security locations (the company mentioned all of Washington as a “prohibited area”) even the override won’t work.

The move appears to be at least in part an effort to curb increasing regulation of drones.

Mr. Shulman spoke about privacy and safety issues expressed by individuals and regulatory authorities.

The Federal Aviation Administration, which is responsible for the conduct of most of what flies around, wants to register drones, and is mulling how to further control an airspace suddenly plied by millions more operators.

As a result of new regulations, many companies besides DJI have taken steps to influence the rule-making. A number of interested parties, including Google, Amazon, GoPro, Parrot and 3D Robotics, are participating in the F.A.A.’s registration task force.

While DJI’s effort, which will go live in December, is proprietary, it shows a trend of building more awareness into the systems, which may become common among drone makers. It also shows an interesting conflict in building this artificial intelligence: DJI is leaving how to treat information about new “no fly” areas up to individual pilots.

One reason for this may be to avoid liability, either from offering a product that unnecessarily limits its buyers’ or from offering a product whose artificial “fencing” technology fails, opening it to lawsuits.

To Mr. Schulman, the new industry of drones is being unfairly singled out. “There is no other technology whose functionality is disabled by geography,” he said. “Your car’s speedometer goes to 100 miles per hour or more – it’s up to individuals to use that properly.”

Whether the government, from federal agencies to local municipalities, feels the same way about robots in space remains to be seen.

Samsung Galaxy Note 5 review:

Samsung Galaxy Note 5 review:

Android  

Samsung's Galaxy Note 5, the newest addition to the market of extra-large smartphones, and the most elegant alphabet-style device you've ever seen. It's as sleek as any phone with a 5.7-inch display could be, so beautiful you won't want to hide it in some smartphone case.
But it's also a tricky device for which to define an audience, thanks to Samsung's vast collection of devices in 2015, and it removes some of the previous advantages of the Samsung line over that venerable old Apple iPhone. The Note 5 is a phone destined to have fans, and it should be celebrated for its beautiful chassis. But yes, some flaws do lurk.

The good, though, is plenty impressive, not to mention the first thing you notice. The Galaxy Note 5 is an eye-catching phone, the sleekest a Note has ever been. Much like this year's S6 Edge, the Note ditches the usual detachable back on the frame in favor of a unibody design. It maintains a curvature on the unibody, too, but unlike the S6 Edge, the curves sit on the back of the device instead of along the display.

The Note 5 is all soft edges — and very comfortable to hold during phone calls. And while this is a large phone, Samsung keeps its profile light; it weighs six ounces and is just three inches wide and 0.3 inches thick, just small enough that one-handed smartphone users will feel right at home. The S-Pen, the Note's stylus, sits along the bottom right side, with a spring-loaded release that feels gentle and friendly.

The unibody design lends the Note 5 a rigidity that previous Notes didn't have as well. This phone doesn't bend at all, a juxtapose from the Note 4, a well-designed phone that had a touch of give to it if you pressed just hard enough.

But the strengths of the Note 5 design breed their own weaknesses. The once-removable battery of previous Notes is gone now, in favor of a non-detachable battery. You'll get consistent battery life from the 3,000 mAh battery inside, though, and, like most smartphones, you should expect to get nearly a full day out of a charge. The Note 5 is also compatible with Samsung's line of wireless charging devices, so charging is simple. Aside from the fact that, at some point long into the future of an expensive phone, the battery will eventually turn your device into a brick, this is a minor quibble.

The other issue with the design, however, isn't. The strength of Android devices when measured against Apple's phones has long lain in the fact that Android devices offered a level of storage customization; you could almost always expand the memory. Not so with the Note 5.

There's no SD memory card slot here, so the storage capacity that you buy at the start is all you have past cloud storage. There's no way to increase to 128GB of storage for movies and music. Just as frustrating, the Note 5's largest-capacity version is only 64GB. Two years ago, that would have been fine, but with the rise of HD video capture and more and more people watching movies on their films, it's somewhat tiny. Again, cloud storage can mitigate some of that, but, if only to stay right there with Apple, it's critical that Samsung offer a 128GB version of its devices next year.

The internals of the phone are solid, if not stunningly spectacular. We've reached a level in 2015 where plenty of smartphones and tablets seem to be plateauing when it comes to horsepower, but performance is almost never an issue. The Note 5 is powered by an Exynos 7 octacore processor, and it's more than capable of running all your processes, backed by 4GB of RAM.

Just about everything you could want to run on the Note 5 will handle in elegant, snappy fashion. Even games such as Hearthstone, which can test hardware in its most wild moments, exhibit few signs of slowdown. The Exynos 7 is not a drastic step up from last year, but it proves capable of most tasks.
The S-Pen, meanwhile, Samsung's most distinctive improvement to its Note line, takes a drastic step forward. With the rise of the Galaxy Edge Plus, an extra-large phone with a curved screen that offers extra features, the key reason to purchase the flat-screened Note 5 is for its stylus capabilities. And Samsung does everything possible to make that worthwhile.

The spring-loaded release on the S-Pen is a small touch, but it gives the whole stylus experience a slightly more premium feel, setting the tone for that throughout your usage of the S-Pen. The button is now slightly recessed, so the annoying accidental presses of previous years happen far less frequently.
The pen itself seems to write a bit more reliably than it once did, although this still isn't a real pen, and even the finest penmanship can transform into chicken scratch here. You'll get a stronger sense of the "weight" you use when writing here as well; Samsung's quietly improved the S-Pen's ability to sense the pressure with which you aim to write.

The suite of apps here has been redesigned slightly as well. There's a new Instant Memo feature that's accessible as soon as you pull out the pen, essentially letting you write quick notes to yourself more swiftly, making the Galaxy Note 5 feel more like a notebook and less like a phone trying to be a notebook.
And the S-Note app experience opens up more quickly and has more levels of customization. A few years ago, it was at its best for solely taking notes. With the improvements to the pen and some added artistic software, it's now far more capable as an art tool.

And the Note 5 is blossoming into a more elegant, more inviting phone, as long as you can look past its shortcomings. It's no longer a phone for everyone wanting a large smartphone, in large part because there are so many options on the market, headed by the Apple iPhone 6 Plus and Samsung's own Galaxy 6 Edge Plus.

Experts Warn It Just Takes 10 Seconds To Hack Fitbit Fitness Trackers:

Experts Warn It Just Takes 10 Seconds To Hack Fitbit Fitness Trackers:

Hacking  

Wearables may be a hacker's dream and Fitbit trackers could be the jackpot, according to security researchers who revealed a 10-second hack, but Fitbit disputes such claims.
As wearable devices are increasingly gaining momentum, people store more data on their smartwatches, fitness trackers and other such gadgets. Whenever there's data stored, there are also hackers lurking in the shadows and wearables are a new category capable of carrying malware.

Fortinet security researcher Axelle Apvrille recently detailed how a Fitbit tracker is vulnerable to hacking through its Bluetooth radio, presenting the security breach at the Hack.Lu 2015 conference.
Aprville managed not only to manipulate data stored on the tracker, such as the logged fitness data, but took the hack to the next level and used the Fitbit to distribute code to a computer. If a malicious hacker exploited that vulnerability, that code transmitted to a computer could very well be malware.

Aprville was able to infect the Fitbit Flex tracker in just 10 seconds from as much as 15 feet away, given the gadget's Bluetooth range. Malicious software could pack some code designed to slip a Trojan on a computer, or open a backdoor, when the Fitbit connects to the device for data synchronization.
The security researcher published some slides to show a few hacks, after demonstrating the more severe vulnerability at Hack.Lu.

Nevertheless, this doesn't mean that just anyone could hack a Fitbit tracker to manipulate the data stored on it or to push malicious code to a computer. Vulnerabilities reported by security researchers do not mean such attacks actually occur in the wild, and Apvrille tried to clarify this in a series of tweets following the presentation.

"To complete the scenario you'd need to execute the malicious code on the victim's host. This is yet to do (requires an exploit?)" explains one of the tweets.
In other words, this vulnerability could lead to malicious code being pushed to computers, but this is not the case just yet. For now, it's just a proof-of-concept that it's not that hard to inject code into wearables. It remains unclear for now whether the Flex is the only Fitbit tracker affected by this 10-second hack.
Fitbit, for its part, denied such allegations and argues its devices cannot serve as vehicles for infecting users with malware.

"As the market leader in connected health and fitness, Fitbit is focused on protecting consumer privacy and keeping data safe. We believe that security issues reported today are false, and that Fitbit devices can't be used to infect users with malware. We will continue to monitor this issue," Fitbit said in a statement to Engadget.