When online crime impacts climate change
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in phishing, Business, Green IT, Blog, Security on
Welcome to my oddest headline since I suggested Vista added to the global warming problem. Bear with me and I’ll explain the connection between the data thieves and carbon emissions.
As you are probably aware, the world of greenhouse gas, carbon emissions and global warming is a highly politicised and highly complex one. One of the ways that those companies which pollute the most are encouraged to reduce their carbon emissions is the good old bribery option, formally known as an economic incentive I do believe but we all know what they mean really. Anyway, these bribes, sorry I mean incentives, operate by a limit being set on the pollution level that is allowed and those companies being issued with emission permits. The companies also get an equivalent number of ‘emission credits’ that give them the authority to pollute to that level.
Which is where it starts to get interesting, as companies are not allowed to go over the cap set by the allowances and credits that they hold. Unless they buy more credits that is, and they can do this as companies which pollute less than their caps are able to sell their excess credits. Still with me, good. The idea is that the seller is being rewarded for lower emissions while the buyer is being penalised for higher emissions, and to oversee the exchange of these carbon credits there are trading registries.
And that’s where the phisher connection comes in.
According to the BBC this international carbon trading market has suffered at the hands of the bad guys, no not the highly polluting companies but rather the conmen and phishing gangs. Apparently some 250,000 carbon permits were stolen this week, with a market value in excess of 3 million Euros. Trading registries in a number of EU countries were forced to close down as a direct result, albeit temporarily.
It seems that the phishers created fake emissions registries and then emailed thousands of companies across Australia, New Zealand, Germany and Norway in order to fool them into handing over the registration details needed for the fraudsters to steal their emissions permits. Enough companies did just that for the scam to be successful.
Phil D’Angio, director and online security expert at VeriSign, told me “It’s no surprise that fraudsters targeted the lucrative business of emissions trading. Phishing scams are most often seen targeting consumers, requesting banking customers to reconfirm account information for example. However, the concept is always the same. People are duped into entering sensitive data into fraudulent sites, resulting in them or their companies losing money or crucial information.”
And how has this contributed to global warming? Well according to several reports, and common sense for that matter, the scam and subsequent closure of registries and exchanges has hampered trading in carbon credits. And trading in carbon credits is mostly agreed to be a pretty important part of the drive to slow down climate change, ipso facto online crime is making global warming worse.
Without wishing to dismiss the importance of this too much, but at the same time attempting to swing the story back around to the enterprise, the moral of this should be that phishing gangs do not just target the consumer. Sure, that is the all too readily accepted assumption in the enterprise, and many CIOs and those responsible for information security at board level will dismiss the notion that the enterprise is at risk as a result. This particular attack shows that criminal gangs target whoever and whatever can make them a return, and that includes your business. Education, or perhaps I should say re-education, at all levels from workers to directors is required to prevent people falling for this kind of ‘for security reasons you need to re-register your details’ scam.
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
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Welcome to Cisco’s Project California
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Business, networks, Standards, Green IT, IBM, hardware, HP on
With apologies to The Eagles:
Cisco stood in the doorway; I heard the marketing yell
And I was thinking to myself, this could be heaven or this could be hell
Now that Cisco Systems has landed with both feet firmly in the server business with the launch of its Project California ‘Unified Computing System’ the big question is will it rock the competition?
Certainly the whole point is to try and top the data centre charts with a mix of networking and virtualisation beats that Cisco hopes will worry the likes of old rockers IBM and Hewlett-Packard. Talk by Cisco CEO of “25 percent or more of the data centre market” might, however, be a little premature.
Not that there is anything inherently wrong with the UCS concept, which brings together both Ethernet networks and Fibre Channel storage with a single 10 Gbit/s FCoE link and so reduces cards and cabling while embedding a VMWare co-developed virtualisation module for server hopping fun in the switch.
Tim Stammers, a senior analyst at Ovum, reckons that Cisco’s move could “signal a milestone in the convergence of computing and networking.” According to Stammers businesses will want to buy their unified management systems from one supplier rather than stitching it together from multiple sources, which puts Cisco in a strong position. “Alongside the servers” Stammers explains “Cisco is also promising networking gear that it says will simplify connections to racks of virtualised blade servers.” Which could, in effect, mean Cisco server blades in the Nexus switch, eliminating complex I/O protocols between server application and network transport layers.
The small matter of competition is also something that Cisco might not need ne as worried about as some, generally speaking the competition itself it has to be said, are claiming. After all,
Cisco is already in competition with HP and IBM on the networking front. While HP has a small share of the high-end data centre networking market (Procurve switches) and IBM partners with Juniper, Cisco pretty much owns the data centre network side of things. “That” Stammers insists “highlights Cisco’s huge strength in a coming unified market.”
Of course, the question remains as to whether a networking giant such as Cisco can become a systems management player? But then again, on the flipside, server and systems suppliers need to become networking management specialists in order to survive in this new space.
There will be an avenue of opportunity as the Cisco market stalls, waiting for industry standards ratification for the FCoE protocol, but that is expected to close by the start of the summer. Which happily coincides with the scheduled release dates for the new Cisco blade server family of course.
As The Eagles sang: “They gathered for the feast, They stab it with their steely knives, But they just can’t kill the beast.” Which just might sum up the problems IBM and HP face in dealing with Cisco over the coming year.
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
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Too many computers
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Green IT, Blog, hardware on
Gartner has been coming out with some seriously big figures over the last week or so. I mean huge, even by Gartner standards. Take, for example, the little gem revealed in the “Market Trends: Worldwide PC Market Scenarios, 2Q08” report that says some 297 million computers will be shipped worldwide this year. That’s up 12.5 percent on the 264 million that were shipped last year if you believe the Gartner numbers.
The rise being predominantly down to the strength of the mobile market, causing a revision of the 10.9 percent growth that was being touted around by its analysts as recently as March.
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
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Saving the planet? Saving a few quid more like…
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Kyocera Mita Europe has published the results of its latest survey, carried out by the IFAK Institute, which looked at the way in which environmental issues impacted upon the European enterprise from the employee perspective. British companies were pretty clear cut in thinking that they could do better with 89 percent saying so, compared to the European average of just 69 percent.
Us Brits are also leading the way when it comes to understanding the importance of getting the green message across to employees. While only 59 percent of the French companies asked considered this of importance, and 62 percent of the Germans, the British enterprise response was a credible 73 percent.
Overall though, across Europe, employees thought that they were doing a decent job in saving the planet while working through the adoption of green practises of some kind or another: 90 percent to be precise. Interestingly, top of the save the planet pops were switching off equipment at night with 55 percent, followed by using digital documentation on 52 percent and duplex printing and photocopying on 43 percent. Shame on the 9.7 percent who readily admitted to doing absolutely none of the above though.
The enterprise itself is doing its bit, at least that is the message coming across when employees were asked the question. 44.8 percent of European companies recycle used ink and toner carts for example. Methinks the employees are wearing rose tinted spectacles if they truly think that less than 50 percent bothering to recycle carts is ‘doing their bit’ for the planet. It is an appallingly low figure. Indeed, this is borne out by the 77 percent of respondents who thought the business could be doing more in general, and 69 percent when it comes to recycling in particular.
Let us not forget that saving the planet is not, perhaps, the driving force behind environmentally friendly computing practises - that would have to be reducing costs as suggested by 38 percent of those asked about enterprise motives for going green. 21 percent thought it was some kind of politically correct branding exercise designed to boost the image of the company concerned. Only 24.9 percent thought that environmental change was the main influencing factor.
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
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Fight global warming with local cooling
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Green IT on
An interesting take on environmentally friendly computing hit my desktop today, the LocalCooling.com project from Uniblue Systems, better known for the Windows Task Manager on steroids, WinTasks Pro. LocalCooling.com aims to build a community of people all using the Local Cooling software utility to control the power consumption of their PCs. The idea being that if enough people join in, and the target is a perhaps rather optimistic 100 million, the global computing carbon footprint could be reduced dramatically.
Here
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