CTA is offering smart home technology installers a security checklist for internet-connected devices, it announced Thursday, with protocols for installing and configuring products to help protect consumers’ smart home devices from malware or hackers. “Trust is at the heart of the smart home business, and to succeed we need to equip experienced installers with the latest best practices,” said Dan Fulmer, CTA TechHome board member.
Cisco closed a $3.7 billion acquisition of application-performance monitoring company AppDynamics (see 1701250060), Cisco said in a Wednesday news release. AppDynamics CEO David Wadhwani will continue to lead as the company becomes a software business unit in Cisco's IoT/Applications business, Cisco said. "We acquired AppDynamics because they are a market leader in a category that will be a cornerstone for how enterprises drive their business forward," Cisco Senior Vice President Rowan Trollope said.
Acting FTC Chairman Maureen Ohlhausen scheduled a Twitter chat Thursday with Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts (R) on economic liberty, she tweeted Monday. Ohlhausen recently created a task force that will look at removing or narrowing occupational licensing regulations when they don't have a public safety or health rationale (see 1703160032). The chat starts at 3 p.m. EDT.
The adoption rate of smart speakers with voice assistants grew from 5 percent of U.S. broadband homes in Q4 2015 to 12 percent in Q4 2016, said a Parks Associates report Tuesday. Some 56 percent of consumers want to use voice-activated personal assistants to control smart home devices, similar to the percentage (55 percent) who want to use them to control entertainment devices, said Parks, which estimates 15.3 million Amazon Echo devices were sold in 2016. Voice interfaces are advancing due to “continued improvements in machine learning and natural language processing,” and their implementation in portable devices, said analyst Dina Abdelrazik. Amazon’s Alexa has taken the “clear lead” in the category since Apple’s Siri launch in 2011, Abdelrazik said. "Adoption for voice assistants will increase as these devices add more and varied capabilities to match the many use cases possible in the smart home and IoT," Abdelrazik said. The Alexa Skills Kit has grown about 40 percent since January 2016, recently topping 10,000 skills, and Amazon plans to release new Alexa devices that also can make phone calls and work as intercoms, she said. Google Home, meanwhile, countered by adding its Google Express delivery network for home shopping. Parks plans a session on voice assistants at its Connections conference in San Francisco May 23-25.
The Internet Security Alliance released a fact sheet the group says illustrates that the “tremendous growth in cybersecurity rules and regulations is diverting scarce security resources and actually undermining our nation’s cyber defenses.” Some corporate chief information security officers' reported spending almost 40 percent of their time meeting government-mandated compliance measures and audits, and some firms reported spending up to 30 percent of their cybersecurity budget on compliance, ISA said in the fact sheet. “We now have cyber mandates springing up like weeds as virtually every governmental entity, federal state and local, fight to be the ‘cyber guy,'” said ISA President Larry Clinton in a statement Monday. “The result is an uncoordinated, inconsistent and often counterproductive set of requirements that actually hurts, not [helps], increased security.” ISA and other groups aren't “saying we ought not to have cyber controls or assessments,” Clinton said. “But, we need to have a rational and well-thought out system or we will waste vital resources and undermine our security.”
Twitter received more than 6,000 government requests globally for information targeting more than 11,400 accounts during the second half of 2016, it reported Tuesday. That's a 7 percent increase over the prior six-month reporting period, but it affected 13 percent fewer accounts. Three new countries -- Guatemala, Taiwan and Ukraine -- were added to the list. The U.S. made the most requests of any government, about 2,300 targeting more than 5,600 accounts. The company said its latest report shows "modest growth" due to decrease in total requests from the U.S. and France. Twitter said it didn't comply at all or only partially with 39 percent of all global requests. It provided noncontent information -- such as email address, phone number associated with the account or to/from information of a direct message -- in 88 percent of the cases, and content information, which is the contents of the communications, in 11 percent of the cases, similar to the previous reporting period.
The FTC launched a website that will spotlight the work of a new "economic liberty" task force, said a Thursday news release. Acting Chairman Maureen Ohlhausen mentioned the task force in several speeches, saying it will focus on removing or narrowing occupational licensing regulations when they don't have a public safety or health rationale (see 1702230012). In a blog post, Ohlhausen wrote about examples of "excessive occupational licensing," saying the task force will "increase awareness of this vexing problem."
Many new members joined a DOD-created cybersecurity trade association, the Consortium for Command, Control, Communications and Computer Technologies, said a Thursday notice in the Federal Register. New members included companies, universities and consultants, among them AT&T, Brocade, Booz Allen Hamilton, Cornell University, George Mason University and Tuscaloosa.
The DOJ indicted two Russian intelligence agents and two Russia-hired hackers Wednesday for their roles in the 2014 Yahoo data breach that resulted in the theft of information on 500 million Yahoo accounts. That breach and a 2013 breach, both disclosed last year, collectively compromised 1.5 billion user accounts. Yahoo has been dealing with congressional inquiries, lawsuits and a $350 million price reduction in the Verizon deal to acquire the company (see 1612150010, 1612230029 and 1702210024). Among the indicted were Dmitry Aleksandrovich Dokuchaev and Igor Anatolyevich Sushchin, both agents with Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB), DOJ said. The department said it also indicted Russian national Alexsey Alexseyevich Belan and Canadian-Kazakh national Karim Baratov, and that FSB hired both. The defendants face a combined 47 charges, including conspiracy, computer fraud, aggravated identity theft, trade secret theft and economic espionage, DOJ said. The defendants “targeted Yahoo accounts of Russian and U.S. government officials, including cyber security, diplomatic and military personnel,” said acting Assistant Attorney General Mary McCord during a news conference. “They also targeted Russian journalists; numerous employees of other providers whose networks the conspirators sought to exploit; and employees of financial services and other commercial entities.” McCord said Belan has been on the FBI's most wanted cyber criminals list for more than three years and faced charges in the U.S. on two other occasions for hacking e-commerce companies. Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner, D-Va., praised DOJ Wednesday for the indictments, which he said are “yet another reminder that American businesses must invest in robust cyber defenses, be more willing to share threat information, and be much more upfront with consumers when their defenses fail.” Warner said in a statement he continues to believe Yahoo “had a responsibility to be more forthcoming in publicly reporting this breach sooner than it did, and both the public and private sectors often move too slowly to address the growing threats posed by cyber criminals.”
President Donald Trump should order the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies to “responsibly disclose” any cyber vulnerabilities they've identified in U.S. devices and software, said Information Technology and Innovation Foundation Vice President Daniel Castro in a Monday blog post. It responded to WikiLeaks’ posting last week of more than 8,700 documents purporting to originate from the CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence, including some unverified files about how the agency could use smart TVs and other devices as surveillance tools (see 1703070047). The documents “validate concerns that U.S. spy agencies are stockpiling cybersecurity vulnerabilities,” Castro said. “The intelligence community uses undisclosed vulnerabilities to develop tools that can penetrate the computer systems and networks of its foreign targets. Unfortunately, since everyone uses the same technology in today’s global economy, each of these vulnerabilities also represents a threat to American businesses and individuals.” Full disclosure of stockpiled vulnerabilities will help the private sector patch “security holes,” Castro said.