Today's Tech Digest - Sep 14, 2019

Chinese APT Group 'Thrip' Powers Ahead

Thrip continues to attack the same types of organizations as when Symantec researchers first discovered the group in June 2018. What caught the researchers' attention last year was the group's targeting of a satellite communications operator, infecting computers that included software designed to monitor and control satellites. ... The 12 attacks that Symantec attributes to Thrip since it was first detected have spanned targets in maritime communications, education and the media in addition to the military and satellite communications, researchers say. "Thrip seems to be leaning, like most other targeted attacking entities, toward usage of clean tools in-built into the operating system," Thakur says. "This is critical for Thrip as their targets over the past couple years have spanned satellite operators, defense contractors and militaries of countries. Maintaining presence on such sensitive networks requires the attackers to avoid reliance on custom, low-prevalence malicious files. In one sense, Thrip has evolved in their tools and procedures over the past year. Their targets continue to remain high-profile by anyone's standards."

Sandboxie becomes freeware, soon-to-be open source

“Sandboxie has never been a significant component of Sophos’ business, and we have been exploring options for its future for a while,” Seth Geftic, the Director of Product Marketing at Sophos, explained. “Frankly, the easiest and least costly decision for Sophos would have been to simply end of life Sandboxie. However, we love the technology too much to see it fade away. More importantly, we love the Sandboxie community too much to do that.” So, they decided to open-source it. They are still working on the details of making the transition but, in the meantime, they decided to make all premium features of Sandboxie free. To that end, they have released v5.31.4 of the software, which does not restrict any features. It can be downloaded here. The software supports Windows 7 through 10, all major browsers, Microsoft’s Office suite, PDF and multimedia files. Versions up to 5.22 support Windows XP.

Google: We've changed search rankings to reward 'original news reporting'

"This means readers interested in the latest news can find the story that started it all, and publishers can benefit from having their original reporting more widely seen," wrote Gingras. However, Google hasn't described how these changes will direct more search traffic to original stories. For example, whether original stories would stay longer in the Top Stories section at the top of search results. Gingras told the New York Times that the changes are intended to serve Google's interest in engaging its users. "We do everything here with Google Search and Google News to continue to earn and retain the trust of our users," he told the publication. The change also comes as 50 US state attorney generals mount an antitrust investigation into the company's advertising business. For the time being, most publishers will have to just wait and observe how Google's changes impact them, since Google doesn't actually have a clear definition of original reporting when it comes to search rankings. That's somewhat understandable, given that even original stories are often built on top of earlier reports from other publications, while other reports can provide background and context that wasn't included in the breaking story.

Azure Data Lake Analytics and U-SQL

Even though big data and Hadoop technologies are more than a decade old now, big data and big data analytics are more relevant than ever. While the initial version of Hadoop was only able to handle batch workloads, now Hadoop ecosystem has tools for other use cases like structured data, streaming data, event processing, machine learning workloads and graph processing. While Hadoop ecosystem has a bunch of tools like Hive, Impala, Pig, Storm, and Mahout to provide the complete set of features, newer data analytics framework like Spark have an integrated approach to handle different types of workloads. Azure Data Lake Analytics, or ADLA, is one of the newer big data analytics engines. ADLA is Microsoft’s fully managed, on-demand analytics service on Azure cloud. Together with Azure Data Lake Storage and HDInsight, Azure Data Lake Analytics forms the complete cloud hosted data lake and analytics offering from Microsoft. Azure Data Lake Analytics introduces a new big data query and processing language called U-SQL.

The use of AI in robotics and hardware — what CTOs need to know

“In truth, the fears around humans losing their jobs to robots are, for the most part, unfounded. When one thinks about this, for every complex task resolved, there will always be another more difficult one set to appear, so the advancements made in robotics will leave humans free to focus on more pressing and important jobs. This, in turn, will naturally upskill the workforce and ensure it is better equipped to deal with future problems that arise.” While this is true to an extent, it is difficult to imagine a taxi or lorry driver being able to run the software of an autonomous fleet ahead of a wide-eyed tech graduate or tech professional. Where will the automation age leave those whose careers have been forged in manual intensive roles? Organisations will have to invest more time and effort into helping employees develop new skills — they can’t be left behind. “It is an economic shift that has be planned and take action progressively,” Espingardeiro agrees. “Yes, the ethical standards are crucial but most importantly it’s how we shape the foundations and how we put it into practice that will make the real difference.”

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