Not Much Silver Lining in Latest PC Market Reports

It's a tale of two PC markets this week, with Gartner and IDC each releasing their latest reports on worldwide PC shipments, but neither story is particularly positive.

The less-negative news comes from IDC, which found evidence of a flat market. That's right, this was the good news. More

Posted by Scott Bekker on April 13, 20180 comments


Mimecast Updates Partner Program

Mimecast on Tuesday unveiled a revamped partner program newly organized to offer a consistent global experience and three new channel executive appointments.

Major updates from the old Mimecast channel programs for the new Mimecast Global Partner Program include: More

Posted by Scott Bekker on April 10, 20180 comments


Report: Cryptomining Attacks Way Up in Q1 Even as Bitcoin Prices Fall

Cryptomining leapfrogged almost all other forms of malware detected in the first quarter of 2018, according to a new security report from Malwarebytes Labs.

"Cryptomining has just gone insane," said Adam Kujawa, director of Malwarebytes, in an interview about the report. "It's all over the place. We've never seen a mass migration to the use of one particular type of threat so fast by so much of the cybercrime community as we have seen with cryptominers." More

Posted by Scott Bekker on April 09, 20180 comments


Flinders Named Channel Chief at VMware

Longtime senior Microsoft channel executive Jenni Flinders has landed the channel chief role at VMware Inc.

Flinders' formal title at VMware is vice president, Worldwide Channels, and she reports to Brandon Sweeney, senior vice president, Worldwide Commercial and Channel Sales. More

Posted by Scott Bekker on April 05, 20180 comments


Riverbed Elevates Mountford To Replace Retiring CEO

In the midst of a pivot from a WAN optimization business to an SD-WAN and cloud networking and application and network performance monitoring, Riverbed Technology is also changing CEOs.

Effective immediately, Paul Mountford, a four-year veteran at Riverbed, is taking over as CEO of the 16-year-old company from co-founder Jerry M. Kennelly, who will retire after he serves in an advisory role for the rest of the month. Mountford's appointment follows an internal and external search by the Riverbed board of directors. More

Posted by Scott Bekker on April 05, 20180 comments


CLOUD Act Fulfills Microsoft's Legal Wish: Now What?

Microsoft got its legal wish.

That wish fulfillment in the form of the CLOUD Act came about in such a surprising fashion that it took Microsoft more than a week to release a full public response. More

Posted by Scott Bekker on April 04, 20180 comments


AI Training Course Added to Microsoft Professional Program

Microsoft launched a new program on Monday to potentially train tens of thousands of people in artificial intelligence skills and concepts.

The Microsoft Professional Program for Artificial Intelligence will consist of 10 parts, each of which is supposed to take eight to 16 hours to complete. Attendees can either audit the courses or pay in order to get a certificate of completion. More

Posted by Scott Bekker on April 02, 20180 comments


Feds Issue US-Cert Alert for 'Password Spraying'

Network managers need to be on the lookout for password-spray attacks, according to warnings from the FBI and U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

In a password-spray attack, a hacker tests a single password against multiple user accounts at an organization. The method often involves weak passwords, such as Winter2018 or Password123!, and can be an effective hacking technique against organizations that are using single sign-on (SSO) and federated authentication protocols, but that haven't deployed multifactor authentication. More

Posted by Scott Bekker on March 28, 20180 comments


Report: 'Meltdown' Patch Did More Harm than Good for Windows 7

Patches that were released in January to protect Windows 7 from the Meltdown flaw may have opened an even worse can of worms for the OS, according to one security researcher.

Ulf Frisk, a security researcher who specializes in direct memory access (DMA) attacks, described the problem this week in a blog post called "Total Meltdown?" More

Posted by Scott Bekker on March 28, 20180 comments


Analyst Bets on Microsoft To Reach $1 Trillion Market Cap

Could Microsoft's cloud strategy, partner channel and customer base help it vault ahead of its tech rivals to become the first trillion-dollar company?

Apple, Amazon and Alphabet (Google) have been front-runners in investor speculation about which company could be first to reach the psychological milestone of a trillion-dollar market capitalization. More

Posted by Scott Bekker on March 26, 20180 comments


Marketing, Sales, AI Features Highlight Spring Dynamics 365 Release

Microsoft unveiled details and highlights of the upcoming Spring '18 release of Microsoft Dynamics 365 on Wednesday at Business Forward Amsterdam.

"We're unleashing a wave of innovation across the entire product line with hundreds of new capabilities and features in three core areas: new business applications; new intelligent capabilities infused throughout; and transformational new application platform capabilities," said James Phillips, corporate vice president of the Microsoft Business Applications Group, in a blog post unveiling the changes. More

Posted by Scott Bekker on March 21, 20180 comments


For Meltdown/Spectre, Intel Says Microcode Updates Done, Silicon Fixes Coming

Intel is officially declaring that it's done with the massive effort to provide software updates to protect against Spectre and Meltdown for all the products it has released in the last five years.

The chip maker also says it has redesigned the processors being released later this year to offer additional protections. More

Posted by Scott Bekker on March 15, 20180 comments