How small businesses can improve their cybersecurity

It’s not only large companies that face cyberattacks – there are affordable steps small companies can take to protect their business data and IT systems.

You can’t assume that your small business is not a target for hackers. As many as three-quarters of smaller businesses are at risk, according to the latest Government Security Breaches Survey, with the worst breaches costing up to £300,000.

Small companies face attack from multiple angles. “Like [larger] enterprises, they face targeted attackers who are interested in intellectual property and other confidential data, as well as using smaller organisations as a way into larger ones,” says David Emm, principal security researcher at Kaspersky Lab. “And like consumers, they face random, speculative attacks that make up the bulk of the threat landscape and are distributed indiscriminately by cybercriminals.”

That’s problematic for SMEs, which are less likely to have a dedicated IT department staffed with security professionals. “SMEs typically don’t allocate resources to cyber security, and they allocate very few resources to IT,” says Andy Patel, senior manager for technology outreach at F-Secure. “This leaves them open to attack in a variety of ways. A cyber security incident is likely to cost an SME proportionally more to recover from than a well-prepared company.”

Improving the security situation at your small business doesn’t need to be expensive, and it could well save you money in the long run. We asked experts across the security industry for their tips on how small businesses can stay secure without breaking the bank.

Adopt two-factor authentication

Take security into your own hands and enable two-factor authentication on any service or device used by the company for email accounts, social media feeds or more sensitive systems. Anyone using these accounts will need an extra credential to gain access from a new device, or to change profile settings, which stops hackers from breaking in even if passwords are leaked.

“Multi-factor authentication reduces the risk of a compromise, since a password alone is not enough to gain access to an online account,” says Mr Emm. “At the very least, multi-factor authentication should be mandatory for changes to account settings.” He adds that it’s essential for companies to shut down accounts, or change login credentials, when someone leaves employment.

Two-factor authentication does add steps to employees’ login procedures, so avoid frustrating them by taking it one step at a time. “Start with the critical accounts and scale up from there as it becomes a habit,” advises F-Secure security advisor Sean Sullivan.

Get smart with email

Email is a weak point for smaller enterprises, with criminals targeting companies with malware via phishing attacks. This is where an email is crafted to look like it’s coming from a trusted source, such as a supplier or bank, but is loaded with dodgy attachments or links to malicious pages, says Trustwave’s threat intelligence manager, Karl Sigler. “Our research has found that the vast majority of companies have been targeted with a phishing attack at least once over the past year, and the number is set to increase over the next 18 to 24 months.”

Phishing messages can be sent to any email address at random, but clever hackers can also use information gleaned online – from social networks, data breaches, or even your company website – to make attacks more effective (a trick called spear phishing).

To avoid becoming a victim, Mr Patel says staff should be trained to pay attention when reading an unexpected email. “Check the sender address carefully. Don’t open attachments you weren’t expecting. If you’re unsure, ask the sender. Be suspicious of certain file types – most people don’t use zip files nowadays. If you are asked to ‘enable content’ on an office document, don’t.”

Mr Sullivan takes a different approach. “Almost everybody can spot phishing during training,” he says. “Phishing works when people are distracted – and people are distracted by tools they don’t use well. Pay for productivity training and you will end up with better email hygiene.”

Avoid ransomware threats – and don’t pay up

Ransomware is where hackers gain control of your data, encrypt it and demand a payment to hand over the key. Research by Kaspersky Lab found that 49pc of SMEs believed such “crypto-malware” was one of the most serious threats they faced , with two-thirds of SMEs reporting complete or partial data loss from such attacks.

To mitigate the threat, follow the the email security tips above, as malicious messages are a common delivery method for crypto-malware, says Mr Emm. And, ensure your company has up-to-date, secure backups, so you aren’t forced to pay criminals to get your data back.

Beyond these steps, control access to files to those who need them, to help limit the spread of malware, and ensure staff don’t have administrator rights, as that makes it easier for malware to spread more widely across your network.

If you don’t have a backup, should you pay the demand? Mr Sigler says: “We would advise against paying the ransom as there’s no reason for the attacker to keep their promise and restore the system. Communicating with cyber criminals also provides them with more information, such as IP or email addresses, which can be used in future attacks – very likely if a company is willing to pay up.”

Undertake regular assessments

It’s an industry cliché, but the weakest link in any network is the people – and this applies to company leaders, as well as the IT department. “Security assessments should not be treated as a one-time event. It’s vital to perform regular testing to keep track of the fast-moving security landscape, especially if the business expands or implements new technology,” notes Mr Sigler, adding thatTrustwave research revealed that one in five companies hadn’t done any testing in the past six months, “leaving them blind to new vulnerabilities and threats”.

So, what new threats are looming on the horizon? Kaspersky’s Mr Emm warns SMEs to keep an eye on the Internet of Things (IoT), which includes everything from smart CCTV cameras to connected children’s toys. “The IoT is bringing not only risks to privacy, but also the danger that connected devices will be used as a weak link to gain access to other systems,” he warns. Perhaps think twice before buying that web-connected coffee machine for the office kitchen.

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Touchung Robots in Private Parts Makes People Uncomfortable

Robots can’t feel shame, which saves them from any awkwardness when they ask a human to touch their buttocks. Humans are not so lucky, and when asked by a robot to touch part of its body, humans will get uncomfortable if that body part is generally thought of as private.

In a new study, Stanford researchers found that people get weirded out touching “low-accessible” parts of the robot’s body (crotch, butt, that sort of thing). The paper will be presented this week in Fukuoka, Japan, at the Annual Conference of the International Communication Association.

For the study, undergrads were placed alone in a room with a NAO robot. They put their non-dominant hand on a sensor that measured physiological factors like “attention, alertness, and awareness,” and not other sorts of arousal. Here’s how IEEE Spectrum explains what happened next:

"Anyway, once the subjects were all hooked up to the sensor, NAO introduced itself, and then asked the subjects to use their dominant hand (the one without the sensor on it) to either point to different parts of its body, or touch them. Each anatomical region was scored on its accessibility: how often, in general, people touch other people in those areas. For example, high accessibility areas include the hands, arms, forehead, and neck, while low accessibility areas include (unsurprisingly) inner thighs, breasts, buttocks, and (you guessed it) the genital area."

As expected, the researchers found that touching this small, humanoid robot on its butt made people uncomfortable (pointing at the various parts showed none of the same indicators). This study didn’t venture a guess at why, exactly, that made people feel weird, but it’s safe to speculate that the humanoid form of the NAO robots was responsible for a large part of that. Robots shaped differently, like Roombas, quadcopters, or bomb squad robots would probably not cause the same kind of reaction ... probably because they don't have butts.

Future studies might try with different robot shapes, or they might track reaction over time. Maybe it’s weird the first time a robot asks someone to touch its butt, but by the tenth or so time, the human could get used to the action. Until then, we’ll sit perched on the edge of the Uncomfortable Valley, with shameless robots starting up at us, asking awkward questions.

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Meeting ‘the Other’ Face to Face

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Sitting in a conference room at a hotel near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology here, I slip on large headphones and an Oculus Rift virtual reality headset and wriggle into the straps of a backpack, weighed down with a computer and a battery. It feels as if I were getting ready for a spacewalk or a deep-sea dive.

But when I stand, I quickly find myself in a featureless all-white room, a kind of Platonic vestibule. On the walls at either end are striking poster-size black-and-white portraits taken by the noted Belgian-Tunisian photographer Karim Ben Khelifa, one showing a young Israeli soldier and another a Palestinian fighter about the same age, whose face is almost completely hidden by a black hood.

Then the portraits disappear, replaced by doors, which open. In walk the two combatants — Abu Khaled, a fighter for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and Gilad Peled, an Israeli soldier — seeming, except for a little pixelation and rigid body movement, like flesh-and-blood people who are actually in the room with me.

Their presence, in a deeply affecting experiment in communication, called “The Enemy,” underway at M.I.T., is the result of a collaboration between Mr. Ben Khelifa and Fox Harrell, an associate professor of digital media. It holds the promise of opening up new frontiers for the integration of journalism and art in a socially oriented 21st-century performance piece poised at technology’s cutting edge.Continue reading the main story


The work grows out of more than half a century of collaborations between the world of art and the worlds of science and technology, spurred by pioneers like Experiments in Art and Technology, begun in 1967 by the Bell Labs engineers Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer and the artists Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman. M.I.T. has been at the forefront of such cross-pollination, which has taken off at schools around the world in recent years.

In an interview before I experienced the virtual reality environment, Mr. Ben Khelifa, 44, said the idea emerged from a frustration that deepened over almost 20 years he spent as a photojournalist covering strife — often entrenched, interminable warfare — mostly in the Middle East. “Being a Tunisian growing up in Belgium, I think I always felt like I was wearing two different kinds of shoes,” he said. “In Iraq and Afghanistan, I could sometimes see things about fighters on both sides of the conflict that some other Europeans couldn’t.”

What he saw there was a culture of warfare that often perpetuated itself through misunderstanding and misinformation, with no mechanism for those of opposing sects or political forces to gain a sense of the enemy as a fellow human being. “I began to think, ‘I’m meeting the same people over and over again,’” he said. “I’m seeing people I knew as kids, and now they’re grown-up fighters, in power, fighting the same fight. And you start to think about your work in terms of: ‘Am I helping to change anything? Am I having any impact?’ ” He added: “I thought of myself as a war illustrator. I started calling myself that.”


Over the last two years, as a visiting artist at the university’s Center for Art, Science and Technology, he transformed what he initially conceived of as an unconventional photo and testimonial project involving fighters into a far more unconventional way of hearing and seeing his subjects, hoping to be able to engender a form of empathy beyond the reach of traditional documentary film. He interviewed Mr. Khaled in Gaza and Mr. Peled in Tel Aviv, asking them the same six questions — basic ones like “Who’s your enemy and why?”; “What is peace for you?”; “Have you ever killed one of your enemies?”; “Where do you see yourself in 20 years?”

Then he and a small crew captured three-dimensional scans of the men and photographed them from multiple angles. (He later repeated this process in the Democratic Republic of Congo. He hopes to expand the project to El Salvador, which is being decimated by gang violence.)

With help from several technology and digital media companies and funding from a collection of prominent foundations, he began to build avatars of his interviewees and ways for them to move and respond inside a virtual world so realistic it makes even a 3-D movie seem like an artifact from the distant past. Mr. Harrell describes it as “long-form journalism in a totally new form.”

“It should have a kind of lush imaginative vitality to it — a kind of lyricism,” he said of the effect that he and Mr. Ben Khelifa have been working to achieve, polishing the project with the help of test viewers since introducing it to mainstream audiences in 2015 at the Tribeca Film Festival. He added: “You have something here you don’t have in any other form of journalism: body language.”

And, indeed, inside the world they have made, the power comes from the feeling of listening to the interviewees speak (you hear Mr. Ben Khelifa’s disembodied voice asking the questions, and the men’s voices answer, overlaid by the voice of an interpreter) as your body viscerally senses a person standing a few feet away from you, his eyes following yours as he talks, his chest rising and falling as he breathes. I listened intently and immediately felt compelled, out of basic politeness, to remain in front of one interviewee until he had finished answering all of his questions before crossing the room to the other man. I could have sworn the 37 minutes that Mr. Ben Khelifa told me I had been inside the world, listening to the first two enemies and then to those from Congo, was no more than 15.

Sofia Ayala, an M.I.T. sophomore, tested the project after I did and emerged — as I did — with a mesmerized flush on her face, a feeling of meeting someone not really there. “It makes it feel so much more personal than just reading about these things online,” she said. “When someone’s right there talking to you, you want to listen.”

While Mr. Ben Khalifa hopes the project will eventually reach large audiences in the way documentary films do now, he said his target audience was “really the next generation of fighters from wherever we are.”

“In many places I’ve been, you’re given your enemy when you’re born,” he said. “You grow up with this ‘other’ always out there. The best we can hope is that the ‘other’ will now be able to come into the same room with you for a while, where you can listen to him, and see him face to face.”

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China's actually built that awesome bus that drives over traffic

Engineers have finally completed a full-scale moving mock-up of China's wacky transport idea, the Transit Elevated Bus (TEB), a large straddling bus that allows cars to drive underneath it.

The prototype was unveiled on Tuesday in Hebei province’s Qinhuangdao city.

The TEB is about 22-metres (72.2-feet) long, 7.8-metres (25.3-feet) wide, and 4.8-metres (15.8-feet) tall. It can pack up to 300 passengers, but underneath, multiple cars less than 2-metres (6.6-feet) tall can drive under the TEB.

The TEB crawled rather slowly at the short 300-metre demo track, but engineers brushed it off because it was more a proof of concept than a technical test run.

Song You Zhou, chief engineer, says the team behind the TEB plans to make the vehicle commercially available within a year to a year and a half.

The TEB could be a cost-effective way solve traffic congestion because it can carry hundreds of passengers at a time, without disrupting the regular flow of vehicles underneath.

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The company of Samsung has confirmed galaxy S7 Edge

There has been little doubt about the existence of the upcoming Galaxy S7 edge (or its name). Still, confirmation of both by Samsung’s own website is a welcome step towards the final launch.

Samsung has recently added a new section about the edge screen functionality on its own website where the company distributes SDKs and other such tools to developers. This section not only explains several edge screen functions, but also mentions the devices for which they will be available. The usual suspects, the Galaxy S6 edge and Galaxy S6 edge+ are there, as is the Galaxy S7 edge. This confirms the existence (and the name) of Samsung’s upcoming flagship smartphone in one fell swoop.

Moreover, new edge screen features, which are the same as those of the S6 edge models after receiving the Android Marshmallow update, have also been showcased on the website. Next to the regular, narrow edge panels (‘Edge Single’), there will be wider type (‘Edge Single Plus’) panels that offer more information and functionality. These wider edge panels will definitely please those who liked the extensive functionality of the edge screen panels on the Galaxy Note Edge.
It is good to see Samsung actively seeking new and improved ways to make use of a feature that, until now, mostly wowed users with beauty but fell short on with functionality part. The Galaxy S7 edge is off to a good start, it seems.

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