CyberScout shares key cybersecurity predictions for 2020; predicts persistent threats in areas of privacy and cybersecurity

As 2019 comes to an end, cybersecurity experts are preparing for a new year—and a new decade—and all the cyber scams, breaches, attacks and privacy concerns that threaten consumers and businesses. CyberScout continues to strengthen defenses against the constantly evolving cyber threats that will shape the 2020 security landscape, encouraging consumers and business owners to stay informed and aware. 

"While consumers and business leaders are more aware of cybersecurity and privacy than ever before, cybercriminals continue to innovate," said CyberScout founder and chairman Adam Levin. "As defenses improve, the attack vectors become more nuanced and technically impressive. You are your best guardian when it comes to your privacy and personal cybersecurity."  

Levin's has listed the following 20 cybersecurity predictions for 2020:

1. Cybersecurity workforce shortages. There will be a shortage of experts, adding pressure on CISO's charged with tackling an increasing issue environment. With the demand for cybersecurity professionals far exceeding supply, the market will have to start filling openings with less qualified people. 

2. The disinformation blob will grow. With the success of weaponized misinformation campaigns in the 2016 and 2018 U.S. elections, expect to see more of them in the private sector, with businesses adopting troll farm tricks to hurt the competition. 

3. Ransomware will continue to thrive. Phishing attacks will continue to lead to ransomware infecting more and more networks. Businesses, municipalities and other organizations will continue to pay whatever they must in order to regain control of their data and systems, and will also see better backup practices that will help minimize or neutralize the threat of these attacks.  

4. IoT botnets will make dystopian paranoia seem normal. IoT will continue to grow exponentially. In 2020, there will be somewhere around 20 billion IoT devices in use around the world. Unfortunately, many are not secure because they are protected by nothing more than manufacturer default passwords readily available online. They will be weaponized (like in years' past), but with increasing skill and computing power.
   
   
   

5. The integrity of the U.S. elections will be questioned—for good reason. There are still voting machines in use that are far from secure and would not pass the simplest of audits. Some states continue to use machines that leave no paper trail. Look forward to questions regarding election security all year.  

6. Cryptocurrency miners will continue to get rich off stolen electricity. Related to the botnet craze, we will see an increase in computing power theft used to mine cryptocurrency. With bots becoming exponentially more effective as the result of AI and cloud computing, a renaissance of Wild West behavior in the global blockchain digital ledger can be expected. 

  

7. Zero-trust environments will be talked about. A few may exist. The assumption that one can trust the home team—people within one's organization—has been replaced with zero-trust policies. Zero-trust simply means that no one can be trusted, in or outside the organization. With this assumption foremost, new systems make breaches and compromises harder to happen. 

8. More people will know what "protect surface" means. Protect surface is part of the zero-trust environment. An organization's attackable surface includes every error-prone human in its employ as well as the mistakes in configuration they may have committed along the way and any number of other issues. The protective surface is much smaller and must be kept out of harm's way. The more the subjects is spoken about, the stronger its cybersecurity is expected to be. 

9. Cars will be frozen. Driverless cars are going to hit things as well as get hit by hackers. Cars that talk to satellites are toast. It's going to happen. (Or not. But it totally could.) 

10.  5G will make the cyber smash grab a thing.  5G is going to make everything move fast, as will the new generation USB4 devices. With quicker speed, it will take much less time to transfer data. Coincidentally, criminals appreciate this as much as the rest of us.  

11. Social media will no longer need to be private. Social media companies will probably become a bit more responsible when it comes to the way they gather, store, crunch, analyze and sell our data to marketing companies and small to medium sized businesses looking to connect directly with consumers. 
    
    
    

12.  State-sponsored traffic jams will be a thing. Hackers are going to target operational systems with an array of tactics that include ransomware and more DDoS attacks that will snarl things up in ways we've not yet seen. The targets will be financial institutions, the power grid, elections, proprietary business information, city services and infrastructure like traffic lights and much more that can wreak havoc on our day to day lives.

13.  You're going to have personal cyber insurance. Insurance companies will be writing more comprehensive cyber liability policies for businesses and offering innovative personal cyber coverage for consumers. 

14.  HR will save money by spending some. More employers will offer their employees identity protection products and services as part of their paid or voluntary benefits programs. An employee who has their identity stolen is not very productive and if, as part of that identity theft, their user ID or passwords are exposed, a thief might have what he or she needs to access an employer's network and sensitive databases. 

15.  The cloud will leak. The parade of stories about misconfigured cloud clients and data stored without any password protection on cloud services will continue apace, perhaps in part because of the CISO and cybersecurity workforce shortage discussed in the first prediction.  

16.  AI will gladly take one’s job. AI is here and it's willing to work. The CISO shortage as well as many of the innovations discussed in this list of predictions will be increasingly addressed and powered by Artificial Intelligence. 

"Disinformation efforts, election security and continued attacks on local governments and major metropolitan hubs are escalating concerns of how disruptive and dangerous cybercrimes are becoming," continued Levin. "2020 promises to be an interesting ride. Be smart and stay safe by staying informed and seeking cyber insurance protection for you, your family and your business."  

Greenliant SATA 2.5-inch EnduroSLC industrial enterprise SSDs deliver SLC data storage that provide ultra high endurance

Greenliant is currently sampling its SATA 2.5-inch EnduroSLC Industrial Enterprise EX Series solid state drives (SSDs) for primary storage applications that require ultra high endurance under extreme temperature conditions. 

Designed with Greenliant’s EnduroSLC technology, SATA 2.5-inch Industrial Enterprise EX Series SSDs provide ultra robust data retention and ultra high system-level lifetime endurance of 30 drive writes per day (DWPD) for 5 years. EnduroSLC is a proprietary 3D NAND management technology that delivers high reliability applications requiring superior data retention and endurance in extreme temperature, high stress environments. 

With advanced hardware ECC capabilities and NAND flash management algorithms, EnduroSLC Technology significantly extends the write endurance of 1-bit-per-cell (SLC) SSDs reaching industry leading 250K+ program-erase (P/E) cycles. EnduroSLC enabled products meet robust data retention requirements under complex temperature conditions and support wide cross-temperature ranges between data programming and reading. Further, due to its substantially lower bit error rate, an EnduroSLC SSD provides better consistency in read/write performance throughout product lifetime. 

The SATA 2.5-inch EnduroSLC industrial enterprise SSDs with 1-bit-per-cell (SLC) NAND include ultra high endurance that reaches 30 DWPD for five years; high capacity offered from 800 gigabytes to 1.92 terabytes; on-chip adaptive RAID that improves SSD reliability; power interrupt data protection that helps prevent data corruption during power failures; industrial temperature that operates between -40 and +85 degrees Celsius; and data security supports AES 256-bit encryption and crypto erase.

By leveraging over 25 years of solid state storage design expertise, Greenliant is dedicated to developing durable, reliable and secure storage solutions for embedded systems and enterprise data centers. The company is headquartered in Silicon Valley with product development centers in Santa Clara, Beijing, Shanghai, Xiamen and Hsinchu.

“Greenliant has brought its SLC NAND expertise to the enterprise with its new line of EnduroSLC Industrial Enterprise EX Series SSDs,” said Xuanhui Li, vice president of business development for datacenter products, Greenliant. “With high reliability and outstanding quality of service, Greenliant’s industrial enterprise storage products are ideal for mission critical, I/O intensive applications in aerospace, defense, transportation, energy and power, communications and industrial control.”

The SATA 2.5-inch Industrial Enterprise EX Series expands the EnduroSLC product family, which also includes SATA M.2 2242/2280, mSATA, SATA 2.5-inch and CFast ArmourDrive, and SATA 6Gb/s NANDrive and 100-ball/153-ball eMMC NANDrive ball grid array (BGA) SSDs.

Greenliant is sampling its new G3200 Industrial Enterprise EX Series SSDs to customers now, and expects to start shipping in volume production by end of this year. Greenliant is also shipping its 3-bit-per-cell (3D TLC NAND) G3100 Enterprise PX Series SSDs in capacities from 480 GB to 3.84 TB. 

Centilytics releases initial cloud management platform to debut flat fees and widget-based pricing

In the cloud management industry, Centilytics becomes the initial management platform that offers widget-based pricing. With cloud computing having almost limitless benefits, cloud vendors deliver benefits to attract customers; and this strategy is working quite well. Cloud computing is becoming a preferred choice by entrepreneurs, whether for a startup or a well-established enterprise.

It was all a walk in the park up until the first data breach, or an unexpected cloud bill that can shrink the numbers in the bank account, ergo the dawn of cloud management. 

Gartner was the initial vendor to advocate the importance of a cloud management platform. They acknowledge that a management platform is needed to see through the complexities of the cloud. It should be equipped to protect the user's data under industry defined regulations and provide solutions for any additional cost overhead.

Centilytics is a fully-automated SaaS solution that helps organizations with the management and control of their infrastructure. It is an intelligent cloud management platform that enables public cloud users to gain 360-degree visibility, identify loopholes and deploy one-click fixes on their cloud infrastructure.

Cloud Management Platforms (CMP) can safeguard the data and prevent cost leakages from the accounts. Typically, a CMP charges a percentage fee on the cloud consumption; In other words, that's a part of savings.

Which seems to be a conflict of interest, doesn't it?

On a percentage pricing model, the CMP's revenue becomes directly proportional to cloud spending. It means they'll earn more when the cloud bill increases. This conflict has been generalized and never been visible because users have gotten used to it. Cloud already has a complex pricing model, and in no way, percent pricing going to ease that complexity. When Centilytics, noticed this conflict, it went ahead. It introduced a flat fee model for its customers.

Centilytics is the only CMP that eradicates the conflict of interest by charging one fixed amount, which is independent of increased bills.

The users have finally understood the conflict and are now moving away from the percentage pricing. Not only did the previous pricing take away a chunk of there savings but also that they had to pay for the whole platform, even for the services that they were not using.

Centilytics, yet again, disrupt the market by introducing a widget-based pricing model. To offer this pricing, The entire Centilytics platform was broken down to 5 products, 12 services, and 2200+ widgets. With widget-based pricing, the users can pick and choose only those services which they require. They also get the capability to bundle widgets as per their unique infrastructure requirements. This model eliminates the need to pay for the entire platform and genuinely save money.

DISH introduces Google Nest Hello to the Hopper platform, directly sends notifications to connected TVs

DISH announces that its Hopper and Wally receivers now support the Google Nest Hello Video doorbell. When the doorbell rings, Nest Hello sends on-screen notifications directly to the television. 

DISH is the first pay-TV provider to integrate a Google Nest device into its ecosystem with the Device Access program. The Nest Hello announcement is the first in a series of Google Nest integrations coming to the Hopper platform. 

After pairing their Google Nest account with their DISH Hopper or Wally receiver, customers will receive on-screen notifications, including an image, when their Nest Hello has been pressed.

The whole-home Hopper platform leads the industry in DVR features and functionality. Hopper 3 boasts 16 tuners, two terabytes of DVR storage, live and on-demand 4K compatibility, PrimeTime Anytime, AutoHop and integrated apps like Netflix, YouTube, YouTube Kids, Pandora and Amazon Prime Video. 

Voice-control capabilities through Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant and the DISH voice remote give customers easier access to their favorite programming. Hopper (all generations) gives customers access to live, on-demand and recorded content on DISH's online streaming app, DISH Anywhere. 

DISH's Hopper platform becomes a whole-home solution with the company's line of Joey client receivers, delivering the best in technology and value.

"Google Nest on Hopper is about giving our customers added choice and control over their home environment — with the subtle on-screen alerts delivered by the Nest Hello, customers are better equipped to hit pause and take action right away," said Rob Sadler, DISH director of product management. "This is just the beginning of a powerful relationship with Google Nest and their vast portfolio of products." 

In 2018, DISH introduced the ability for Google Assistant to control its Hopper receivers. It expanded that capability earlier this year, with the introduction of the Google Assistant-enabled DISH Voice Remote.

The Nest Hello feature is available to all broadband-connected Hopper and Wally receivers. Support for Joey (all clients) will begin rolling out in the following weeks. Nest joins DISH's suite of smart-home control options, including Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa and Josh.ai.

RealPage ActiveBuilding resident portal debuts eCommerce platform that drives incremental property yield, improves resident experience

RealPage Inc. has delivered its initial eCommerce platform for residents via its ActiveBuilding resident portal solution. The solution is purpose-built to enhance the resident experience and drive incremental yield from amenities, spaces, services and events. A radically redesigned, custom-branded mobile app facilitates all transactions by enabling residents to make purchases and manage apartment-related needs easily and conveniently. 

These advances deliver benefits to property owners and managers with proven success in beta testing. Residents can reserve and pay for amenities, spaces and events directly, including parking, guest suites, self-storage, clubhouses, conference rooms, yoga classes, cleaners, child care, dog walkers and more. 

PMCs earn income from assets they already have and through third-party service providers. So far, clients have monetized 25 different amenities and rentables with guest suites and parking generating the most incremental revenue with one client reporting over US$150 per unit per year in revenue lift. 

PMCs can build their brand by custom-branding the app with a property’s logo, color palette and photography. This also makes it simple to provide a community’s branded resident portal to residents. Residents simply enter their community name in the app store and the custom-branded app will appear. 

Residents can make all reservations and purchases from the app through a simple, end-to-end shopping cart experience. They can also renew their leases with just a few clicks. Residents were 2 to 3 percent more likely to renew according to beta test results.

“Property owners and managers have long faced the challenge of supplementing base rent because of market conditions, changing laws and competitors who are better set up to provide eCommerce,” says Jon Pastor, RealPage SVP Consumer Solutions. “Our new eCommerce platform and custom-branded app leapfrog that. Residents will jump at the chance to rent amenities and pay for services and events if they’re a click away. They love the convenience, too! By enabling residents to perform these tasks themselves, there is an added benefit of freeing staff to focus on other core duties. For example, during the beta test, property staff saved an average of 16.5 hours previously spent processing rent checks.”

Western Digital begins sampling of its 20TB SMR and 18TB CMR hard disk drives, to help scale data centers for zettabyte age

Western Digital announces that it has started shipping its high-capacity HDD samples to enterprise OEMs and hyperscale customers worldwide, so that users can efficiently scale their data centers for the zettabyte era.

The 20TB Ultrastar DC HC650 SMR HDDs and 18TB Ultrastar DC HC550 CMR HDDs, first previewed in June 2019, and announced in September 2019, feature its initial commercial implementation of energy-assisted magnetic recording technology on a nine-disk platform, enabling customers to more efficiently provision and scale their data center environments with improved total cost of ownership.

Optimized to deliver improved capacity and low TCO, the Ultrastar DC HC600 series provides unprecedented capacity capability by harnessing two core complementary technologies: HelioSeal technology and host-managed SMR (HM-SMR). These field-proven technologies provide the foundation for delivering efficiency, quality and reliable performance required by cloud and hyperscale data centers. 

Unlike CMR drives, HM-SMR drives are not drop-in replacements for traditional drives and require system software modifications that take advantage of the new command sets to ensure data is written sequentially to the drive. This software investment helps yield cost-efficient storage solutions.

With zettabyte-scale data growth, the need for higher-capacity data storage across a broad spectrum of applications and workloads can be reliably met only with high capacity enterprise HDDs. 

The capacities of Western Digital’s Ultrastar 20TB SMR and 18TB CMR HelioSeal HDDs enable customers to deploy up to 22 percent fewer racks and reduce their TCO by up to 11 percent, along with the corresponding reductions in power consumption, cooling costs, and data center infrastructure needs when compared with 14TB CMR HDDs.

Western Digital achieves high areal density performance in these drives through the innovative use of energy-assisted magnetic recording. Together with the company’s HelioSeal and SMR technologies, triple-stage micro actuation and 9-disk platform, the energy-assisted recording technology provides an integrated solution, resulting in the dramatic gain in drive capacities.

“The market outlook for capacity-optimized enterprise HDDs remains very positive as IDC expects petabytes shipped to hyperscale cloud data centers and for OEM storage systems and servers to grow at a combined compound annual growth rate of 28 percent through 2023,” said Ed Burns, Research Director, HDD and Storage Technologies at IDC. “Western Digital’s new 20TB and 18TB HDDs should make a compelling case for customers to transition to higher capacity points as they seek greater storage and energy efficiencies in the near-term while building more cost-effective and scalable infrastructures for the future.”

“Delivering samples of our Ultrastar 20TB SMR and 18TB CMR HDDs marks a significant milestone for Western Digital—demonstrating our enduring commitment to the open SMR-based ecosystem, as well as our strong track record of innovation to provide great value for our customers,” said Phil Bullinger, senior vice president and general manager of Western Digital’s Data Center Business Unit. “These new HDDs deliver unsurpassed capacity and are our first to leverage energy-assisted magnetic recording technology, enabling new levels of data center efficiency and driving value creation from data at scale.”

Western Digital is now sampling the 20TB Ultrastar DC HC650 SMR HDD and the 18TB Ultrastar DC HC550 CMR HDD, with qualification and volume shipments expected in the first half of next year.