Jada's Tech Tips

 Biden's Impact On Cybersecurity With Bidens presidential term coming to an end, there are plenty of articles about what went right and what went wrong. This week I found an article on how the current president affected the nations information-security shields. In 2021 Biden issued an executive order on cybersecurity that contained goals, tasks, and deadlines for many agencies. A main goal of this executive order is to stop putting the burden of security on customers, and to put more focus on the companies making these products. I think this is a great idea, given that most people do not recognize many of the flaws within software/technology. Biden had also been able to upgrade security standards for government contracts and has set up a cybersafety review board. Overall, I think he has done at least a couple good things for the tech world. You can read more here: https://www.fastcompany.com/91167716/biden-administration-cybersecurity-improvements-executive-order-analysis...

 CrowdStrike Sued! Following the recent global cyber outage, the company in which caused it is getting sued by shareholders. The lawsuit claims that CrowdStrike made false and misleading claims about its software testing. This is a big deal because the issue that caused the outage was a faulty software update If the company did make these false claims, the shareholders will probably win the lawsuit, but CrowdStrike is sticking to their word that these claims are not true. The outage crashed over eight million computers, causing the whole world to be effected, but now all computers should be back to normal. CrowdStrike claims there was problematic content data within a file that went undetected, and that their testing of software is functioning and was not the issue. CrowdStrike also claims they would be able to prevent this from happening again, but I don't know if they are trustworthy at this point. Read more here: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy08ljxndr4o

 Amazon's Newest Security Feature  Amazon is now using a new CPU called the Graviton4. It is a new processor that is arm-based chip and aims to protect against branch prediction attacks, as well as other new features. The chip supposedly provides up to thirty percent higher quality compute performance, and 75 percent more memory capacity. The most interesting feature of this chip is the new Branch Target Identification, also known as BTI. The BTI is designed to protect against sophisticated cyber threats, and mitigates against branch prediction attacks. The BTI guesses the outcome of a threat, then does any work needed to protect the security, and if that work is unneeded after the outcome, the work is undone. Which I think is pretty cool. You can read more about the Graviton4 chip with this article:  https://spectrum.ieee.org/aws-graviton4

Major Tech Outage On July 19th, 2024 a global tech outage occurred. This outage hit many different types of businesses anywhere from airlines to small businesses. The culprit of this major outage was a software update for Microsoft Windows. This update was issued from a company called CrowdStrike, and the reason for the update was for the company's cybersecurity. CrowdStrike is a company that provides businesses with preventing security breaches, and is a major provider, with more than 500 customers on the Fortune 1000 list. Multiple people reached out to me personally, and let me know their own workplace has been affected. The major outage that occurred in places all over the world is said to not be an attack, but it leaves me wondering if that is true or not. You can find probably over a hundred articles on this topic, but here are a couple articles that I used.  https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/19/24201864/crowdstrike-outage-explained-microsoft-windows-bsod https://www.cnn.com/bu...

 AT&T Cyberattack Today July 12, 2024, AT&T came out with an announcement that data has been breached from almost all customers of the giant brand. The attack occurred in 2022 and lasted over five months. The data leak impacted around 109 million accounts. I believe the number of people affected could be around 200 million, because usually there is more than one phone on an account. AT&T does not believe the data leaked is publicly available, and they state that "the data does not contain the content of calls or texts, personal information such as Social Security numbers, dates of births, or other personally identifiable information." But I find that last statement hard to believe. AT&T also said the data compromised includes calls and texts, which contradicts other statements they have made. This means people can see texts and the phone number associated with those texts, and then go online to find out whose number that is. This data breach calls attention to...

 Cybersecurity Budgets Are On The Rise I found an article stating corporate cybersecurity budgets have increased almost 60 percent just this year. You can thank the rise of cyber threats, as well as the increase in the desire for artificial intelligence for this budget increase. Out of the organizations in this research, 61 percent said they have experienced a cybersecurity incident within the past two years. More than half the organizations state the budget increase is based on the proven effectiveness for reducing security incidents, as well as assessing risks and threats that those organization face. These methods to find better security practices also costed an average of 26 million dollars per company.  These numbers show the importance of the need to keep up with the fast changing world of technology. With new ways of attacking a company coming with new technology, as well as the rise of AI. You can read the article here: https://www.cfodive.com/news/60-corporate-cy...