As stated by Corliss Tech Review Group, a malware is a type of software that is specifically created to gain access or damage user's sensitive data. Android has long been seen as vulnerable to malware because it is an open platform and several devices run older versions of the mobile operating system. Android is also one of the world's most popular mobile platform where it powers hundreds of millions of mobile devices in more than 190 countries worldwide, but its popularity has also made it a magnet for malwares based on Corliss Tech Review Group.

As Americans spend billions on holiday shopping this month, online security experts say a little caution can go a long way when it comes to avoiding identity theft.

"In general online shopping is good. It's safe for the most part, but it's the safest when you initiate the contact, when you log onto a known website," said Rick Avery, president of Boston-based Securitas Security Systems.

Directly visiting trusted, reputable online retailers is just one way to attempt to avoid the cyber criminals who try to steal sensitive information from vulnerable computers and unsuspecting consumers.

"There is a risk in commerce …" said Sam Ransbotham, an information systems professor at Boston College. "There is also a risk from walking around with a wad of cash. We've got years and years of experience walking around with wads of cash that we just don't have with these newer mechanisms."

Purchases at brick-and-mortar stores aren't immune to data breaches either. Last year, hackers stole data from 40 million credit cards from Target, while cyber thieves got information from 56 million credit cards from Home Depot earlier this year.

To reduce the chances of fraud, Avery advises that shoppers be wary of offers sent via email. Criminals, he said, may send legitimate-looking emails that appear to be from online merchants or banks. Rather than clicking on a link in an email, he recommends directly typing the website address into your browser.

"One of the most dangerous ways people get involved with credit card fraud or theft on the Internet is they get emailed a link offering 50 percent off, or saying it's from the bank, and it's actually a false website made to look like the authentic website," he said.

Cyber criminals can use fraudulent websites to gather financial information from a person or install malware on their computers.

"If you're shopping around and find an extra, extra really good deal, that might be the online equivalent to buying cheap speakers out of the back of a truck," Ransbotham said. "If it's too good to be true, it is."

Avery also recommends using credit cards or one-time use credit cards instead of debit cards.

"Some banks have protections on a debit card, but not all do at the point of an ATM," Avery said. "Usually, your debit card is tied to your other banking accounts, and it's a lot more difficult to get your money back. It may be weeks before you get your money back."

In some cases, a victim might never get that money back.

Med alle rapporter om sikkerhetsbrudd, føler du at det er bare et spørsmål om tid før din identitet blir stjålet? Og hvis det er sant, vil registrere deg for en beskyttelse mot identitetstyveri tjeneste redde deg fra den tid, kostnad og forbitrelse med å rydde opp en identitet tyv rotet? Du har sikkert blitt tilbudt disse tjenestene, men det er vanskelig å vite hva som er verdt prisen. Trenger du virkelig en beskyttelse mot identitetstyveri tjenesten? Her er en titt på hva noen av de mest kjente identitetstyveri beskyttelse tjenester tilby, hvor de kommer til kort, og hvor mye de koster.

1. ID Essentials fra TrustedID

Mange beskyttelse mot identitetstyveri tjenester er tilgjengelig som frittstående tjenester gjennom et selskap som spesialiserer seg på ID-tyveri beskyttelse. TrustedID startet ut på den måten. Det har siden blitt kjøpt av Equifax, men Equifax har også sin egen separate, kjente merker ID-tyveri beskyttelse service. Vi valgte en anmeldelse TrustedID siden det har vært mye omtalt i nyhetsartikler om ID-tyveri, som kan øke sannsynligheten for en forbruker å registrere deg for denne tjenesten. Her er hva ID Essentials fra TrustedID tilbyr forbrukere.

Kreditt-rapporter, kreditt score og kreditt overvåking: TrustedID sin beskyttelse mot identitetstyveri tjenesten overvåker kreditt daglig med alle de tre store kreditt-byråer. Du vil også få Equifax 3-Bureau kreditt rapporten og scorer; men dette er resultatet et pedagogisk score og ikke er den samme långivere og kreditorer bruke.

Trusselvurderingen og reduksjon: TrustedID skanner offentlige databaser og Black Market Internett sider for ulovlig bruk av Social Security og kredittkortnumre. Det er tvilsomt hvor nyttig denne informasjonen er siden du ikke kan unexpose en kompromittert personnummer eller kontonummer.

Tjenesten gir også en identitet Threat poeng for å hjelpe deg å vurdere risikoen for å bli en identitetstyveri offer. Identitet Threat Resultat ser på hvor mye av informasjonen er offentlig tilgjengelig - og hvor det er tilgjengelig - for å finne ut om du er på lav, moderat eller høy risiko for identitetstyveri. Basert på risikonivået, vil tjenesten anbefale tiltak for å redusere risikoen. Tjenesten prøver også å få din offentlig tilgjengelig personlig informasjon fjernet fra Internett, selv om det ikke kan garantere at nettstedene vil hedre forespørsler om fjerning eller ikke vil gjeninnføre din informasjon senere.

TrustedID sjekker også Facebook-profilen og personverninnstillinger for å avgjøre om de setter deg i fare for ID-tyveri. TrustedID også får ditt navn av søppelpost og forhåndsgodkjent tilbudslister. Du kan håndtere disse oppgavene selv gratis gjennom optoutprescreen.com og DMAchoice.org.

Assistanse Oppløsning: TrustedID sier sin restaurering prosessen omfatter gjennomgang kreditt-filer med deg for å sjekke for unøyaktigheter og svindel, varsle tilbyderne av den berørte kontoer (finansinstitusjoner, kredittkortselskaper, nytte tilbydere og handelsmenn) og varsle de aktuelle offentlige organer. Det sier også du kan bli pålagt å varsle store kreditt-byråer, Federal Trade Commission Identitetstyveri hotline og hensiktsmessig politimyndigheter hvis du ønsker å dra nytte av forsikring, så det er uklart hvor mye av oppryddingsarbeidet må du gjøre selv.

Forsikring: TrustedID tilbyr opp til $ 1 million i dekning for ut-av-lomme kostnader du kan pådra deg hvis identiteten din er stjålet. Mistet lønn dekning maxes ut etter 4 uker eller totalt $ 5.000. Forsikringen, som tjenesten kaller en "garanti", også dekker administrative utgifter du pådrar deg i å rydde opp ID-tyveri (som porto og kjøpe flere kreditt-rapporter, med en grense på 6 rapporter i 12 måneder) og juridisk forsvar avgifter til godkjent advokat.

Penger stjålet fra bankkontoen din og andre direkte tap er utelukket fra garantien. Tapt lønn for selvstendig næringsdrivende ser ikke ut til å være dekket, men ansatte kan bli refundert for ferie eller personlige dager treffes for å løse ID-tyveri. Du må varsle tjenesten innen 30 dager oppdage identitetstyveri for å være kvalifisert for forsikringsdekning. I motsetning til enkelte ID-tyveri tjenester, betyr TrustedID ikke ut til å kreve at du bruker noen annen forsikring som kan dekke ditt tap før forsikrings spark i. Imidlertid ikke forsikringen ikke dekker ID tyveri hendelser som skjedde før du abonnerer på tjenesten.

Priser: Planer koster $ 14,99 i måneden eller $ 125 per år (. $ 10,42 / mnd) for enkeltpersoner; familie planer som dekker to voksne (pluss "barn" og "andre slektninger som bor i din husholdning") er $ 27,99 per måned, eller $ 240 per år ($ 20 per måned). Alle planer har en 14-dagers gratis prøveversjon, men du må oppgi kredittkortnummeret ditt når du registrerer deg, og den gratis prøveperioden vil automatisk konvertere til et betalt abonnement med mindre du ringer for å avbryte. Planer fornye automatisk.

2. Experian sin ProtectMyID

Hver av de tre store kreditt-byråer - Experian, Equifax, og Transunion - tilbyr sin egen beskyttelse mot identitetstyveri service. Vi valgte tilfeldig å evaluere Experian tallet.

Kreditt-rapporter, kreditt score og kreditt overvåking: Experian sin beskyttelse mot identitetstyveri tjeneste, kalt ProtectMyID, gir deg online tilgang til din Experian kreditt rapporten og scorer. Den overvåker dine Experian, Equifax og Transunion kreditt-rapporter og varsler deg om potensielt bedragersk aktivitet som nye kreditt eller lån kontoer eller nye forespørsler om kreditt.

Trusselvurderingen og reduksjon: ProtectMyID skanner Internett daglig for ulovlig bruk av Social Security, debet og kredittkortnumre. Tjenesten varsler deg også dersom din postadressen er endret. Hvis det ikke er aktivitet knyttet til din identitet for en hel måned, vil du motta hva tjenesten kaller en All Clear Surveillance Alert.

Assistanse Oppløsning: ProtectMyID lover å koble deg med svindel utvinning fagfolk som kan hjelpe deg med å løse et identitetstyveri problem. Selskapet sier sine fagfolk vil kontakte de rette myndighetene og bistå med papirarbeid.

Forsikring: Experian tjeneste gir også $ 1 million i identitetstyveri forsikring uten egenandel. Forsikringen dekker falske elektroniske pengeoverføringer, tapt lønn, juridisk forsvar og privat etterforsker kostnader samt utgifter knyttet til papirarbeid og erstatte identifikasjon. Den tapte lønn grensen er $ 1000 per uke i 4 uker, og er begrenset til lønn tapt innen 12 måneder oppdager at din identitet har blitt stjålet. Selvstendig næringsdrivende kan mottatt refusjon for tapt lønn basert på deres tidligere års selvangivelser, og enkeltpersoner ansatt av noen andre kan motta godtgjørelse hvis de måtte bruke ferie eller personlig tid å løse ID-tyveri. Les hele artikkelen her…

The way we navigate in cities has been revolutionized in the last few years by the advent of GPS mapping programs. Enter your start and end location and these will give you the shortest route from A to B. That's usually the best bet when driving, but walking is a different matter. Often, pedestrians want the quietest route or the most beautiful but if they turn to a mapping application, they'll get little help. That could change now thanks to the work of Daniele Quercia at Yahoo Labs in Barcelona, Spain, and a couple of pals. These guys have worked out how to measure the "beauty" of specific locations within cities and then designed an algorithm that automatically chooses a route between two locations in a way that maximizes the beauty along it. "The goal of this work is to automatically suggest routes that are not only short but also emotionally pleasant," they say. Quercia and co begin by creating a database of images of various parts of the center of London taken from Google Street View and Geograph, both of which have reasonably consistent standards of images. They then crowdsourced opinions about the beauty of each location using a website called UrbanGems.org. Each visitor to UrbanGems sees two photographs and chooses the one which shows the more beautiful location. That gives the team a crowdsourced opinion about the beauty of each location. They then plot each of these locations and their beauty score on a map which they use to provide directions. The idea here is that the user enters a start and end location and an algorithm then finds the most beautiful route, rather than the shortest one. It does this by searching through every possible route, adding the beauty scores for each and choosing the one that ranks highest.

The Corliss Group Latest Tech Review - The leadership team at online fraud detection firm iovation had a choice to make: remodel their existing 18,500 square feet in U.S. Bancorp Tower or move into new, bigger space to accommodate its growing 88-person Portland team.

They decided to stay, work with their landlord and retool what was previously a very traditional office.
The new space should hold about 100 people, which is what the company's Portland team is projected to be by the end of this year. The company currently has about 90 people worldwide. The company also expects business to grow 30 percent this year over last year.

iovation is the latest tech firm to reimagine what a workspace within a corporate tower can look like. The others were New Relic, SurveyMonkey and Webtrends.

For iovation, the company is reducing the size of workspace cubicles, from roughly eight feet by eight feet to six feet by six feet - though Vice President of Operations and co-founder Molly O'Hearn assures that they will still be roomy. The cubicle walls are also coming down in height allowing for more of an open feel and more sight lines.

Walls for offices and conference rooms around perimeter will also now incorporate glass so people will be able to see in and see the view from the 32-story perch.

"We're taking advantage of the views and being efficient," said CEO and co-founder Greg Pierson.
The company is also paying attention to the amenities in the kitchen - which employees said is an important aspect of the office - and doubling the number of conference rooms.

While the work is occurring the company has decamped to another floor in the building. The team expects to be back in the space by mid-August. The company has more than 2 billion unique Internet devices in its knowledge base and from a production standpoint the temporary move hasn't been a problem.

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Corliss Tech Review Group Study: External audits not an effective tool for against fraud

Investors, corporate executives and analysts depend on external audits to maintain honesty in business organizations. However, a fresh study shows audits are .very poor at exposing fraud. In contrast, the study states more than 200% of frauds are uncovered by chance.

That is one of the findings released recently in the "Report to the Nations on Occupational Fraud and Abuse" study by the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, which is considered the world's biggest anti-fraud organization.

"You should never put the obligation on someone else to keep your surroundings neat," said ACFE faculty member Evy Poumpouras, formerly an agent in the U.S. Secret Service. She stated that internal controls are deemed more significantly effective in exposing fraud as well as preventing it beforehand.

The report was based on examinations of 1,483 fraud cases as reported by the Certified Fraud Examiners who had investigated the cases.

"The evaluation of these fraud cases offers important lessons on how fraud is perpetrated, how it is spotted and how organizations can minimize the potential to such danger," ACFE President James Ratley stated in the introduction to the report.

From the study's estimates, the typical organization loses 5% of its revenues yearly to fraud. Which could mean a worldwide phenomenon to the tune of $3.7 trillion, the report claims. But as appalling as the number might appear, Poumpouras says it is not surprising.

"Numerous other cases remain uncovered," she said.

Almost 50% of the fraud cases investigated was committed in the United States, where the most stringent anti-fraud controls are often applied. Yet, the greatest damages were uncovered in Eastern Europe and Central and Western. The median loss in those areas amounted to $383,000, compared to that of the US at only $100,000.

Workers and junior managers perpetrated the biggest percentage of fraud, with business owners and senior officers sharing only 19% of the offenses. But rather as expected, the study highlighted the fact that the higher up on the ladder the fraudster sat, the bigger the losses.

Nevertheless, financial fraud is for the most part hard to detect, Poumpouras stated, since the offenders have less of a psychological attachment to the crime they are committing than they do for other forms of illegal acts.

"Often, the person does not touch or see the money but rather thumbing reports or files. It does not feel as real," said Poumpouras, who has been engaged in many investigations covering financial fraud.

"Forcing people to admit to committing financial crime is much harder than forcing them to admit to homicide," she said, which could explain why external audits can be next to useless.

The study reports auditors uncovered only 3% of the fraud offenses reported in the previous year, compared to 7% identified by accident.

"While separate audits provide an essential aid in organizational management," the report says, "our findings show that they should not be totally depended upon as the organizations' main anti-fraud strategy."

Rather, the study suggests what it refers to as "proactive detection procedures", including in-house hotlines that provide workers a way to become anonymous informants of fraud and maintain honesty in the ranks. Continue reading…

Research and Markets (http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/gzs68x/global_antimoney) has announced the addition of the "Global Anti-money Laundering (AML) Software Market 2014-2018 with Fiserv, NICE Actimize, Norkom Technologies, SAS Institute Dominating" report to their offering.

The Global AML Software market will grow at a CAGR of 11% over the period 2013-2018.

The service providers are applying an analytical approach to meet AML compliance and there are different methodologies applied by service providers to identify suspicious activity reports. However, some traditional approaches such as linear regression analysis generate false alerts along with suspicious activity reports, which are not worth investigating. On the other hand, predictive analytics enables enterprises to reduce the false alerts by 60 to 70 percent and reduces the compliance cost of adopting AML software. Predictive analytics is also a better methodology because it can encode more information about an account or customer's activity.

According to the report, most people are increasingly shifting toward debit cards as a preferred mode of payment because of the ease of use. This leads to data breach by criminals to access huge amounts and acquire debit card information. Large-scale data breaches of major retail chains are currently common. If there are a number of debit frauds against an enterprise customer satisfaction is not met and thus they stop availing the service. To save customers loss and prevent customers from becoming the victim of such activities, many enterprises are deploying AML software.

Further, the report states that one of the major challenges is the inconsistency in the data because of the data in enterprises are collected by the different departments and proper functioning of AML software requires consistency in data.

The Global AML Software market can be divided into four segments:

*     Internal Spending

*     Software

*     Services

*     Hardware.

Key Vendors

*     Fiserv Inc.

*     NICE Actimize Inc.

*     Norkom Technologies Ltd.

*     SAS Institute Inc.

Other Prominent Vendors

*     3i Infotech Ltd.

*     Accuity Birst Inc.

*     ACI Worldwide Inc.

*     Acquilan Technologies Inc.

*     Ficrosoft

*     Cellent Finance Solutions AG

*     EastNets Ltd.

*     Ficrosoft Infor Global Solutions

*     FIS.

*     Infrasoft Technologies Ltd.

*     Oracle Corp.

*     Tata Consultancy Services Ltd.

*     Thomson Reuters Corp.

Amazon revealed late September this year, aside from their announcement of the new Kindle Fire HDX tablets, Fire OS 3.0 and a revised 7 inch Kindle Fire HD tablet, they also announced that its new operating system introduces new enterprise and productivity features to the Kindle Fire platform. As a result, the 7 inch Kindle Fire HDX, the 8.9 inch Kindle Fire HDX, and the 7 inch Kindle Fire HD 2013 model will be enterprise-ready when they begin shipping next month.


"Kindle Fire is already the second most popular tablet at work in the U.S.," said Raghu Murthi, Vice President of Enterprise and Education, Amazon. "As employees increasingly bring their own devices to work, the new Kindle Fire tablets can be easily integrated into the workplace with the new enterprise features, including encryption, secure Wi-Fi, a native VPN client, integration with leading MDMsolutions, and Kerberos support for Intranet access."


A native VPN client for instant access to corporate networks is being provided by fireOS 3.0 even as you're on the road or at home, secure hardware data encryption (HDXmodels only), Kerberos verification for single sign-on and the capability to browse secure Intranet websites from the Silk browser on Kindle Fire. A native Simple Certificate Exchange Protocol or SCEP client is used to retrieve digital certificates for secure resources.


To make it more user friendly for IT departments to manage Kindle Fire, this latest platform furthermore provides Kindle-specific device management APls that integrate with existing Mobile Device Management (MDM) systems. According to the company,Kindle Fire supports a wide range of MDM solutions including Amazon's Whispercast service as well as third-party vendors like AirWatch, Citrix, Fiberlink, Good Technology, and SOTI.


In addition to make it more consumer-friendly, the latest OS supports Wi-Fi networks with the use of WPA2 security, printing documents and emails directly to a wireless printer, and a built-in OfficeSuite solution for reading documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. Business customers can make use of Android enterprise and productivity apps available in the Amazon Appstore like GoToMeeting, Evernote,Cisco AnyConnect, and Documents To Go.


The company said, some of these features will be delivered as part of the free, over-the-air Fire OS 3.1 update in mid-November. The Kindle Fire HDX models will also include a "Mayday" button, the company's on-device tech support that's available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and 365 days a year. Users simply tap "Mayday" to be connected to an Amazon expert who can co-pilot users through any features. Blind and visually impaired customers can leverage new and improved accessibility tools such as Screen Reader, Explore by Touch, and Screen Magnifier, the company further added.


As of today the 7 inch Kindle Fire HDX can be pre-purchased although not until October 18, the Wi-Fi version doesn't shipped while startingNovember 14, the 4G LTE models will ship. The customers can pre-purchase Kindle Fire HDX 8.9 tablet here while the Wi-Fi only model ships November 7 and the 4G LTE model ships on December 10.