July 4th weekends just aren’t the same without cookouts and fireworks. This year, however, the weather will do the cooking, and you can light your fireworks by holding the fuse to your sunburned cheek. On the other hand, the price of gasoline dropped enough from a year ago that you can afford to drive up north and invade your relatives for a few days.
HPE news. At its Discover conference in fabulous Las Vegas, Hewlett Packard Enterprise pulled a big curtain aside on the expansion of its HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform, the new SaaS offering of the now-acquired OpsRamp, HPE GreenLake for Backup and Recovery, and more.
HPE also tightened links with AWS to make it easier to develop and manage applications and workloads across HPE GreenLake and AWS. HPE GreenLake for Backup and Recovery now supports Amazon RDS as well as EKS.
Of course, AI tools are included in recent announcements, including the introduction of HPE GreenLake for Large Language Models for privately training, tuning, and deploying AI with cleaned data rather than recycled Twitter and Reddit comments.
HPE announced the HPE Diversity Startup Program to ensure women-owned and minority-owned startups have equitable access to the HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform. Developed with Alpha3 Cloud, an HPE Partner Ready service provider.
News from other heavyweights. Salesforce will soon roll out Sales GPT and Service GPT to harness the power of ChatGPT. Sales GPT wil auto-generate customer emails, call summaries, account research, and more. Service GPT will auto-generate service replies, summarize customer interactions, and prepare field service agents before they go onsite.
It may be early July, but schools need to get equipment ordered and installed before school starts. New education apps and content for Chromebooks, including accessibility tools, more apps through licensing, and more secure admin controls will earn you extra credit, and maybe a sticker.
Goodies for Google Classroom are here as well. An expanded Google for Education App Hub, and tweaks to Google Meet, and personal learning tools to help differentiated student groups read at appropriate levels.
Security news. SonicWall started monthly firewall security service bundles for MSSPs and MSPs to put critical threat protection updates in the field double fast.
Hello to ESET PROTECT Elite, available now, which delivers enterprise-grade XDR for increased visibility and threat-hunting tools.
Cato IPS now offers real-time, deep learning algorithms for threat prevention, powered by Cato’s data lake.
Better email security is on everyone’s wish list, so the beta launch of the IRONSCALES
Themis Co-pilot for Microsoft Outlook will check that box. Yep, full of security-oriented large language model GPT goodness.
Leveraging its huge managed detection and response dataset, the eSentire AI investigator (pictured) adds in generative AI-powered cybersecurity extras from over one million investigations and response actions.
Hands were shaken and deals were made so that the Rubrik Security Cloud will integrate with Microsoft Sentinel and Azure OpenAI to speed cyber recovery and remediation after an incident.
In a special version for Dell customers, McAfee Business Protection is built for small business online protection and scales to support business growth.
In a move that will expand its GravityZone unified risk and security analytics platform, Bitdefender agreed to acquire Horangi Cyber Security in Singapore.
Pick your tier of silver, gold, or platinum in the newly-revved Malwarebytes Reseller Partner Program.
DNSFilter announced its first-ever partner portal built with a community focus. Easy access to learn more about the Global Partner Program launched last November.
Perhaps you need some password help? Check out the brand new LastPass Allegiance Partner Program for solution providers, technology partners, and MSPs.
IoT news. Users of the Pepper consumer IoT Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), can leverage the Pepper platform to get cyber insurance from Embedded Insurance, thanks to a new partnership.
We need to make the T in IoT bigger soon, because the latest IDC Spending Guide predicts worldwide spending on IoT will pass $1 trillion (T) in sales in 2026. A CAGR of 10.4% over the 2023-2027 timeframe will boost the total even more.
Which city is the world’s smartest? Vienna just raised its hand, thanks to the new partnership of Weien Energie and Actility to deploy a LoRaWAN network across the city. Country level winner? The Philippines, with 6,000 base stations, makes a bid thanks to Packetworx and Actility.
A research report from our friends at Parks Associates, Smart Lighting Assessment, examines the changing directions in lighting, including in security perimeters, new form factors, and a universal “plug and play” architecture from SKYX Platforms.
RCRWireless News reports the underside of the explosive growth of IoT devices: by 2025, as many as 78 million IoT batteries will be dumped every single day. Yes, that’s a year and a half away.
Maybe this primer of IoT device management will help find a way to recycle or eliminate a few of those millions of batteries.
Surprise: a national network of vetted resellers and installers who can collaborate with landlords will help that market expand. In the U.K., Switchee started a project with more than 100 housing providers who worked with multiple installers.
Food Safety Tech outlines how IoT boosts food safety with automated temperature monitoring.
Other product news. Wrangling mobile devices ranks with cat herding, so the new GoTo Resolve MDM lets admins secure, set up, and manage all devices, whether owned by the company or the individual.
Epson lit the spotlight on its new Epson Pro EX11000 3LCD Full UHD 1080p Wireless Laser projector (pictured). Bright, vivid images up to 300 inches will keep your cats entertained, even with the lights on. If you need to capture rather than project images, the new Epson 13000XL archival scanner that scans up to 12.2″ x 17.2″ at 2,400 x 4,800 resolution is ready to go with one-touch color restoration.
Built around the AMD Ryzen 7000 Series processors, the new Supermicro MicroCloud is a high-density 3U 8 node system will handle your data center jobs whether e-commerce, cloud gaming, development, or virtual private servers.
TRENDnet increases its SMB surveillance catalog with two new cameras (one bullet, one fixed turret, both rated indoor/outdoor) and the network vid recorder, all TAA and NDAA compliant. Smile, you’re on Candid Camera.
Non-product vendor news. New business cards for Lene Skov, moving up to be vice president of worldwide channel sales for HPE Aruba Networking.
Unroll the red carpet to the door of Barracuda, so Siroui Meshegian can walk in and take her position as the new Chief Information Officer.
The CrashPlan folks signed with Ingram Micro’s Emerging Business Group to distribute its cloud-based data backup line.
AvePoint revved up its Certification Program, added a new Partner locator and sweet DevOps capabilities, all to support its global partner network.
HP addresses some of the educational gaps brought by the pandemic lockdown as well as the poverty gap with HP Futures, a leadership initiative developed in partnership with the Global Learn Center.
This week’s (security) stats ticker
Acronis released its Mid-Year Cyberthreats Report, From Innovation to Risk: Managing the implications of AI-driven cyberattacks. Is it good news that email attacks are up less than 500%? Only up 464% so far this year, but that includes almost 50 million URLs blocked in Q1 2023, up 15% over Q4 2022. 30% of all emails received were spam. Unfortunately, spammers also now use AI to drill deeper into victim’s systems, and there were 809 publicly mentioned ransomware cases in Q2 2023, a surge of 62% in March over the monthly average of 270 cases. Phishing made up 73% of all attacks.
The latest Internet Security Report from WatchGuard reports phishers now leverage browser-based social engineering strategies, and that new malware appears to have ties to nation states (China and Russia). At least 75% of new threats in the Q1 Top 10 List came from threat actors in China and Russia. Attackers are turning to browser notification features to replace the regularly-blocked pop-up apps. For some reason, attackers drew a bead on Microsoft’s discontinued firewall, the Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server. Got a surprising number of hits on that, as well as the ever-popular Microsoft Office products.
We’re all used to organizations targeted by criminal hackers that don’t invest enough in cybersecurity. Arcserve released a portion of the findings from its annual independent global research report focused on local government and public services. Surprise! They found gaps galore. 36% of government IT departments don’t have a documented disaster recovery plan, 24% of remote government workers are not equipped with backup and recovery tools, 45% of government IT departments believe public clouds handle all their backup and recovery processes for them, and only 36% have a comprehensive business continuity plan that includes recovery, interim solutions, and communications. Bad actors have noticed.
A new “IT Compliance Survey” commissioned by Hornetsecurity discovered four out of five organizations are more worried about compliance than they were five years ago (Surprise!). No surprise that corporate execs dumped this responsibility on the IT department, and 69% report compliance has a “moderate to extreme” impact on their department operations. 13% can’t confirm that they were compliant with required controls. 40% rely on time-consuming manual processes, 52% say they lack internal knowledge of software that includes compliance features, and 37.5% don’t have a dedicated compliance officer even though one in eight have been penalized for non-compliance. Ony 21% use an automated process to verify compliance on a regular basis
Fire fetcher. In this issue’s “what were they thinking?” segment, say hello to the Thermonator. If that doesn’t sound ominous enough, the company selling it soon is named Throwflame, makers of compact, all-electric flamethrowers. Now put a plasma arc igniter and a tank of gasoline and diesel on the back of a robot dog. WTF?
Throwflame says its products are used for prescribed agricultural burns, ground clearing, snow and ice removal, killing weeds and insect hives, and so on. Plus, many report it’s a great adrenaline rush.
So what could be cooler? Putting it on a robot dog!
Not Spot, the Boston Dynamics robot dog, because it can’t be used to harm people. Instead, the Unitree Go1 quadruped robot, smaller and lighter than Spot, can mount a flamethrower on its back. For even more, um, fun, it has some level of autonomous navigation if you decide to stop using the wireless controller. We can’t wait to see the first news video of an unlinked robot dog with a flamethrower running loose on the news.
Don’t forget to buy the Napalm Mix Fuel Thickener.
Photo: Xmatter LLC
