Alexa for care homes The UK launch of Alexa Smart Properties for Senior Living continues Amazon’s integration of Alexa into different business applications. Following last year’s launch of Alexa Smart Properties for Hospitality, the new solution makes it easy for managers of care homes and assisted living facilities to manage and service a fleet of Echo devices remotely and at scale. With features such as Alexa-to-Alexa voice and video calls and announcements and the ability of residents to control lighting, blinds and thermostats by voice and property managers to display menus, activities and reminders using Echo Show, Alexa Smart Properties for Senior Living helps elderly residents to stay connected, informed and entertained. Its first UK locations include Majesticare’s Cavendish Park Care Home, Morris Care Isle Court, The Royal Airforce Association’s Rothbury House and Blind Veterans UK’s respite care centre in North Wales. amazon.co.uk/about · · · · · · The difference one letter makes Cyber security specialist Linten Technologies is advising UK businesses to strengthen their defences by adding an extra letter, digit or symbol to company passwords. CEO and Founder Steven Allan said: “Typically, a 10-character password can take hackers just 26 minutes to break whereas a password with 11 characters can take about three days. The world of cyber is rapidly evolving. Previously, eight to 12 characters was a typical password length, but now between 10 and 18 and sometimes 16 and 24 are becoming the standard.” He added: “We advise clients to stay well away from common password types, such as password123 or the names of loved ones, and to incorporate a password with three random words that is hard to figure out.” · · · · · · Data backup needs blamed for cloud budget overspend Veritas Technologies, a leader in multicloud data management, is warning of significant over-spending on public cloud service providers (CSPs) like AWS, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure. According to new research by the company, 83% of enterprises are paying more than they originally planned on public cloud. On average, UK businesses are exceeding their original cloud budget by 33% largely due to unplanned data backup and recovery costs, cited by 42% as their leading area of overspend. An international survey of 1,500 technology and IT decision-makers for The Veritas Securing Your Enterprise in a Multi-Cloud Environment Research report shows that while enterprises with 1,000+ employees value the flexibility and scalability provided by public CSPs, many don’t fully understand what they will need to pay for. For example, 98% believe that the CSP is responsible for protecting some of their assets in the cloud, even though most CSPs make it clear that while it is up to them to ensure the resiliency ‘of’ the cloud, customers are responsible for data and applications ‘in’ the cloud. This misunderstanding, suggests Veritas, stops companies from factoring in the requirement for third-party data protection, leaving critical data vulnerable to ransomware and other attacks. Two thirds (68%) agree that current offerings from CSPs fall short of their organisation’s security needs, with 24% saying they have lost data as a result of relying on backup tools built into solutions by their CSPs. Ian Wood, UK Head of Technology at Veritas, said: “Our research highlights the need for a better understanding of what purchasers are actually responsible for and the paramount importance of including comprehensive cloud data protection and management in their budgets. Without it, organisations are taking a huge risk and are likely to experience vast overspend when subjected to the extensive damage to brand and operations caused by a cyber attack.” · · · · · · Spitfire enhances hosted PBXs Spitfire Network Services Ltd has added mobile and desktop softphones and optional full system call recording to its new hosted PBX for SMEs. Hosted PBX 2.2, branded FireSwitch, is currently available with no connection or set up charges for £10 per telephone extension per month. www.spitfire.co.uk 01732 759725 06 NEWS continued... Steven Allan Linten Technologies 76 thousand and counting The UK’s largest organisations each have an average of 76,600 internet-facing assets to identify and protect, according to analysis of 22 FTSE 50 companies by Tenable. One organisation has more than 500,000 assets. Assets include domain names, subdomains or IP addresses of internet- or network-connected devices, such as web servers, name servers, IoT devices, network printers etc., spread across 51 countries. Just 11% of assets are located in or delivered from the UK, compared to 61% in/from the US. On average, 25% of companies’ infrastructure is public cloudbased, mainly with Amazon Web Services. Worryingly, every company looked at by Tenable had thousands of web-based assets that still support TLS 1.0, a security protocol for establishing encrypted channels over computer networks defined in 1999 and disabled by Microsoft in September 2022. Twelve of the 22 companies analysed still have a few instances of SSL 2.0, the precursor to TLS. Jeremiah Grossman, Security Strategist at Tenable, said: “Internetfacing assets are essential for organisations in the modern business world. The flipside is that any one of these assets is a potential entry point for an adversary. Threat actors are probing these openings, looking for one to climb through. Security professionals need to know what assets they’re protecting in order to secure themselves.” www.tenable.com Jeremiah Grossman, Tenable
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