Avast
Fraud attacks on banks are becoming more common and attackers use sophisticated methods to steal big amounts of money. We have witnessed several large attacks on ATMs globally over the past few months; in Thailand, India, Latin America, across Europe, and other countries around the world. In these incidents, attackers managed to steal millions of dollars.
What do millions of desktop and laptop users have in common? I’ll give you a hint: You are busy with some activity on your laptop and a message pops up informing you that one of your software programs or tools needs updating. If you are like most people, you hit the ‘Remind Me Later’ option, and keep doing what you’re doing. Later often never comes. Does that sound familiar?
Have you ever been tempted by one of those ads promising “You can earn $20,000 a month by working from home just 4 hours a day!”? Most of us probably have, even for a moment.
The topic of fake news is at the forefront of our political debate, now more than ever. What gave rise to its ubiquity? How do we combat it? Is this just an inevitable outcome of the Internet opening up a wider space for communication?
When we moved the Prague headquarters of Avast to the beautiful new Enterprise Office Center in January 2016, we strived to create a Silicon Valley-style working environment. Popular design ideas, conceived to foster collaboration among individuals and teams, were built into the 15,000 square meter office space. At the opening of the new building, Avast CEO, Vince Steckler said, “Avast has chosen a building that reflects its open, innovative, and inspirational company culture.”
We were surprised by a recent research report that found enterprises are moving more quickly to managed security service providers (57 percent to provide 24×7 IT systems monitoring, 45 percent for threat detection and intelligence, and 41 percent for technology assessment and analysis). The results were surprising because SMBs are facing even more threats than enterprises, and they have less resources – tools, skills, and personnel.
Machines can learn incredibly fast. Faster than us, actually. They are already changing our world, our business, and our life. Avast, as a part of the artificial intelligence revolution, is proud to be a gold partner of Machine Learning Prague 2017, held from April 21st to April 23rd in Prague, Czech Republic.
Late February 2017, a new type of ransomware for Mac was discovered. This ransomware, called FindZip, infects users by pretending to be a cracked version of commercial applications, such as Adobe Premiere Pro. Once it infects a Mac, it utilizes a ZIP encryption to encrypt documents – the exact same scheme used by the Windows ransomware, Bart, which we decrypted last summer.
While overall IT budgets are experiencing minimal growth – a compound annual growth rate of 0.9 percent in 2016 (to $3.4 trillion) – the sky is the limit when it comes to cloud: Cloud infrastructure spending will increase 16.2 percent in 2016 to $37.4 billion, with a 5-year CAGR of 13.6 percent to $60.8 billion in 2020. That’ss just the hardware; public cloud services are expected to reach $208 billion in 2016, up from $178 billion in 2015. Gartner attributes the growth to the fact that organizations are saving 14 percent of their budgets as an outcome of public cloud adoption.
Ever answered your mobile phone only to find silence? Or that a machine has called you? Or even that it’s a completely unexpected call from someone claiming to be from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS)?
