The Supreme Court should review a lawsuit against “warrantless, suspicionless” searches of electronic devices at U.S. airports and ports of entry, the American Civil Liberties Union and Electronic Frontier Foundation filed Friday. Merchant v. Mayorkas, filed in 2017, challenges the Department of Homeland Security's warrantless searches of electronic devices. A federal court ruled in 2019 that border agencies’ policies violate the Fourth Amendment; the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the decision in February.
Online scam activity in 2020 increased 185% from 2019, reported fraud prevention company Bolster Thursday. “Remote working, online distribution and digital sales channels created an explosion in digital business in 2020,” said Bolster. “As companies accelerated their digital transformation to adapt to the COVID-19 pandemic, online phishing and fraud activity exploded, averaging more than 19,000 new threats being created daily.” The company estimates 6.95 million new phishing and scam pages were created in 2020, with COVID-19 and gift card scams topping the list. Tech, retail and finance were the top three industries targeted, and Gmail was the phishing email service of choice.
SoundHound expanded its voice AI platform to 22 languages in a plan to add even more, blogged the company Wednesday. Houndify's speech-to-meaning and deep meaning understanding, plus advances in automatic speech recognition and natural language understanding, track speech in real time.
Global IoT connections will nearly triple to 23.6 billion by 2026, ushering in “a slew of new threat vectors and vulnerabilities” that will fuel a $16.8 billion business in IoT security, reported ABI Research Tuesday. Such concerns are “widespread,” said analyst Michela Menting. “There are limited IoT security solutions in the market, due in large part to the fragmented nature of the IoT itself.” The volume of IoT security revenue won’t always correlate with the number of connections, and some markets are expected to experience “disproportional revenue” growth, said Menting.
Intel and the FIDO Alliance announced an open protocol for “simply and securely” onboarding IoT devices Tuesday. This could “save the industry from a lot of frustration and unnecessary security risks,” blogged Richard Kerslake, general manager-industrial controls and robotics of Intel's IoT group and co-chair of the FIDO Alliance’s IoT technical working group. Security concerns are a major barrier to IoT adoption, Kerslake noted, calling the standard "an important first step in addressing the security gaps that currently exist in IoT deployment within enterprise and industrial environments." Companies have worked to automate the IoT onboarding process, but there isn't an industry standard, he said. Of current solutions, the end customer has to be known at the time of device manufacture so the product can be preconfigured, creating “unnecessary friction and cost in the supply chain,” he said. The open IoT protocol will enable industrial IoT devices to leverage public key cryptography to simply and securely onboard IoT devices to any cloud or on-premises management platform without the need for human intervention.
Over three-fourths of respondents said at the end of 2020 that they shopped more online due to COVID-19, and 86% of those plan to continue shopping online post-pandemic, said delivery management software company Metapack. But 81% of online shoppers had a negative delivery experience in the past 12 months, up fivefold from the prior year, which could lead to “lost customers and irreparable brand damage,” said Chief Revenue Officer Bruce Fair. Sixty-four percent would shop “the same” in stores in the future, 31% less than before, 6% more. The report cited two RetailX global surveys of about 10,000 consumers.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology scheduled its first virtual meeting with its Privacy Workforce Public Working Group for May 12, announced the agency last week. The group will develop a set of task, knowledge and skill statements based on NIST’s Privacy Framework and the National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education's Workforce Framework to assist with workforce recruitment.
The federal government should establish a comprehensive strategy for national cybersecurity and for mitigating global supply chain risks, the GAO said Friday. It urged federal agencies to implement hundreds of “critical” recommendations, including some 400 IT management and 750 cybersecurity proposals. Agencies have implemented about 75% of 4,700 recommendations since 2010, GAO said. It noted that in December, few of the 23 civilian federal agencies GAO reviewed “implemented foundational practices for managing information and communication technology supply chain risks.”
Staggering numbers stood out in Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ final shareholder letter as CEO, in Thursday's posting, citing the e-commerce pioneer’s revenue growth, employee expansion and towering stock price rise from its opening $18 per share valuation when it went public almost 12 years ago. Bezos will soon transition to executive chairman, relinquishing the CEO post to Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy. Of the company’s $386 billion revenue in 2020, $301 billion was value created, for consumer and AWS customers ($164 billion), employees ($91 billion), third-party sellers ($25 billion) and shareholders ($21 billion), said Bezos. The goal of a business “should be to create value for everyone you interact with,” said the outgoing CEO, who will hand over the reins to Jassy in Q3. Bezos calculated value to customers in terms of time savings. Customers complete 28% of purchases on Amazon in three minutes or less, and half of all purchases are finished in less than 15 minutes, said Bezos. He compared that time with “about an hour” shoppers spend in the physical store experience. He estimated a "conservative" $10 per hour in time savings. Bezos estimated the company’s value creation for customers using the AWS cloud computing platform last year at $38 billion, based on the assumption that operating in the cloud delivers a 30% improvement in costs, along with the increased speed AWS provides in software development. AWS revenue was $45 billion. Third-party seller profits from selling on Amazon were estimated at $25 billion-$39 billion, he said. Seven-eighths of the $1.6 trillion of wealth Amazon has created for shareholders since the stock began trading benefits pension funds, universities, 401(k) plans and individuals, he said. The stock closed marginally higher Thursday at $3,379.09.
Satisfaction runs high among U.S. adults who participated in at least one telehealth visit during the pandemic between March 2020 and Jan. 30, said a COVID-19 Healthcare Coalition survey published Tuesday. The group canvassed 2,000 patients December through February, finding that 79% of respondents were happy with their telehealth visits and 73% expected to continue to receive healthcare services virtually beyond the pandemic, it said. “It’s really encouraging to see that the high satisfaction scores are consistent across age ranges, insurance type, and regardless of whether the patient lives in an urban, suburban, or rural location,” said Steve Ommen, medical director of the Mayo Clinic Center for Connected Care, who supervised the study. “Years from now, we will point to 2020 as the year that the potential of digital care delivery became a reality.”