200 Million Data Records Stolen In January-March 2014 Globally

NEW DELHI: Data breaches have witnessed a major surge this year with cyber criminals stealing around 200 million data in the first quarter, a whopping 233 percent rise over the year-ago period, a report by SafeNet said on Wednesday.

According to data protection solutions firm SafeNet's Breach Level Index, records stolen during the quarter equals about 93,000 records stolen every hour.

"Of the 254 data breaches that occurred during the quarter, only 1 per cent were secure breaches or breaches where strong encryption, key management or authentication solutions protected the data from being used," the BLI report said.

Due to varying strictness of data breach reporting requirements globally, this quarterly data does not include organisations that did not disclose the amount of data records that were exposed. In all probability, the total number is likely to be even higher, it added.

South Korea was the hardest hit with loss of 158 million records across a variety of industries, representing 79 percent of the total number of reported breached records worldwide, it said.

While, the number of South Korean breached records was extremely high, the number of breach incidents in Asia Pacific as a whole accounted for only 7 per cent of the total number of global breaches, dwarfed by the 78 per cent that occurred in North America and 13 per cent in Europe.

The report revealed that financial industry was hit the hardest, accounting for 56 per cent of all data records lost or stolen. However, it represented 14 per cent of the total breaches during the quarter.

Healthcare industry was hit hard in terms of breach events, accounting for 24 per cent of all breaches. However, the industry accounted for just 9 per cent of data records lost or stolen, it said.

Twenty per cent of all records lost or stolen came from the technology industry, while retail represented just 1 per cent of data records lost or stolen and 10 per cent of all data breaches even including the Sally Beauty Supply breach, which made major headlines, the report added.

Government and education breaches accounted for less than 1 per cent of total records stolen and 23 per cent of data breaches, including the University of Maryland's breach of 287,000 records stolen early this year.

"There were approximately three breaches and 2.2 million records stolen each day, and more than 93,000 per hour," BLI report said.

Commenting on the report, SafeNet Chief Strategy Officer Tsion Gonen said: "In differentiating between secure and insecure breaches, it's important to look at which victims have protected their data with encryption to limit the damage from a breach and render date unusable to cyber crime.

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Google's new desktop strategy: Invade and conquer

Google's adopting a new strategy to make Chrome OS into everyone's OS: build it straight into Windows by way of Chrome itself

The most recent batch of changes to the developer version of Google Chrome in Windows 8 includes a new mode to run Chrome OS in the Metro/Modern UI portion of that OS. That by itself isn't unusual; many software makers (Mozilla, for instance) are making Modern UI versions -- or at least facets -- of their apps.

What's unusual is that this full-screen version of Chrome has been tailored to look and work exactly like the full-blown version of Google's Chrome OS.

It all ties into Google's long-term plan to shift users away from any particular desktop platform -- be it Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux -- and onto Google Chrome, and Google generally, as a platform.

Among the other interesting changes, while Chrome normally launches to the legacy desktop, it can now also be set to launch directly into the new full-screen UI -- in essence, a kind of click-to-boot into Chrome OS. Anyone curious about running Chrome OS no longer has to dual-boot, run a VM, or keep a separate device handy. As long as you're running Windows 8, Chrome OS will be only a tap away, and with no more of a resource expenditure than launching Chrome itself.

Plus, nothing says a variant on this stuff (not using Modern UI, of course, but a full-screen mode nonetheless) can't be back ported to Windows 7 as well.

The Web browser has quickly become one of the most broadly used (if not the most broadly used) application on the PC desktop. By taking the guts of Chrome -- its rendering engine, JavaScript engine, and cross-platform technology (i.e., Native Client) -- and packaging apps that run in it so they feel less like "browsers apps" and more like just another native app, Google's making it that much easier for people to shift their already heavily Web-centric workloads away from the desktop.

Eventually, if users have enough casual exposure to Chrome OS in a form they're comfortable with -- and have that much less dependency on the rest of their PC by then -- they may well shift to the full-blown Chrome OS without feeling they're missing anything.

Google made previous steps in this direction with the release of the Chrome Apps launcher, a way to package Chrome-powered apps through a launcher on the host system's desktop. Some of the preloaded apps in the launcher are demos of Google's Native Client technology, which allows high-speed code to be run in a cross-platform way. That's yet another way Google is attempting to unseat people from running a specific desktop OS and move them towards running, well, Chrome.

Mozilla attempted something like this with Prism, which launched in 2011 and was designed to wrap Web applications in such a way that they could run right on the desktop with minimal browser chrome (pun intended). In fact, many of Prism's ideas were moved into another Mozilla project called -- you guessed it -- "Chromeless."

Tellingly, both Prism and Chromeless are now inactive projects, with Mozilla focusing its platform efforts on a version of Firefox-as-a-platform for portable devices.

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Google introduces the biggest algorithm change in three years

New 'Hummingbird' algorithm will make core search better at answering longer, more complex and spoken queries

Marking Google's 15th birthday, Hummingbird is the biggest change to the inner workings of the world's most popular search engine since Google's "Caffeine" update in 2010, which sped up Google's indexing of sites and delivery of search results.

The Hummingbird update focuses more on Google's Knowledge Graph – an encyclopedia of about 570m concepts and relationships that allows Google to anticipate facts and figures you might want to know about your search term.

New engine with old parts

Hummingbird isn't an overhaul that Google search users will instantly notice, however.

"In general, Hummingbird – Google says – is a new engine built on both existing and new parts, organised in a way to especially serve the search demands of today, rather than one created for the needs of 10 years ago, with the technologies back then," said Danny Sullivan of the search blog Search Engine Land.

It will benefit those using more modern forms of search, such as conversational or voice search, where you ask Google a question rather than typing keywords into the search box.

"The goal is that pages matching the meaning do better, rather than pages matching just a few words.

"Google said that Hummingbird is paying more attention to each word in a query, ensuring that the whole query – the whole sentence or conversation or meaning – is taken into account, rather than particular words," said Sullivan.

But will it really work?

Unfortunately, it's very difficult to do before and after comparisons, especially as Google has pushed out the Hummingbird update over the last month without any public announcements.

For the moment we only have Google's word that Hummingbird will make a difference, although it gave a few examples of searches that could benefit from the new algorithm.

For instance, a search for "acid reflux prescription" pre-Hummingbird produced sites with lists of drugs, but now brings up search results with more information about acid reflux treatment in general.

Likewise, a search for "pizza hut calories per slice" now links the answer directly from Pizza Hut.

It’s a smart move, but there’s a long way to go

“Apps are the biggest long-term threat to Google’s current search-based business model – people turn to apps for information on discrete services like flights rather than search,” said Ian Maude, a search analyst at Enders Analysis.

Google Now – Google’s personal digital assistant that uses context, location and knowledge of the user’s habits to preempt requests for information like flights, your daily commute and film times – has been one of Google’s attempts to fight the silos of individual apps and keep you within the Google search ecosystem. That all helps Google maintain its estimated 53% market share of internet advertising.

Google Now relies on Knowledge Graph, as well as natural language interpretation, which were both boosted by the Hummingbird update.

“Hummingbird doesn't replace keyword search, it augments it, speeding up the process of search using natural language processes that understands conversational search or speech – it’s a smart move, but there’s clearly a long way to go.

“Right now, when I search for trains to Warwickshire, I get a list of search results for train operator websites, but I don’t yet get times for the next trains pulled into fact boxes by Google,” said Maude.

Not everything is so straightforward in Google land, as Google's chat protocols Hangouts and Talk, suffered a privacy issue on the 26 September that saw instant messages routed to unintended recipients.

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Facebook lets you search for old posts

FACEBOOK finally rolled out its Graph Search to all of its users around the world.

Graph Search has been available to a select few users for the past year or so, during which time they were allowed to search for pages, people, music, notes and other features of Facebook.

But until now you couldn't search for individual posts.

Starting today Facebook users can now search their posts and those of their friends and followers.

So if you're trying to remember that stupid thing your mate posted last New Year's Eve, it won't be quite so hard to find.

The search works by letting you type in something like "posts about X". So you're going to have to remember certain key words or phrases.

Considering anything that you've posted publicly (note, not just to certain friends or followers) is now searchable, it might be time to go back and check which of your updates are public and which are private.

The silly season isn't too far away so it might be time to lock down your settings before it's too late.

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4 Methods to Take Screenshot Capture in Ubuntu Linux

Screenshot is an image taken by a computer to capture the visible items on the monitor or any other output devices. There are several ways of taking screenshots in Linux. In this article, we will cover few tools that are used for taking screenshots.

1. Use Print Screen

This is the most common method to take screenshots. Pressing the “Print Screen” button will take the screenshot of the “Entire Visible Screen”.

When we want to take a particular window, we can use “Alt+Print Screen”. Alt+PrintScreen will take only the particular window which is currently active.

2. Use gnome-screenshot

gnome-screenshot utility is part of the GNOME Desktop Environment, which can also be used to take screenshot. It also has a command line mode (gnome-screenshot)

Launch the screenshot tool as shown below.

Capture the Entire Screen:

From the UI, to take a screenshot with entire screen, select “Grab the whole desktop” and click “Take Screenshot”.

From the command-line, just type the command “gnome-screenshot” to do the same. The command will take a screenshot and provide a dialog to save it.

$ gnome-screenshot

Capture Only the Current Window:

From the UI, to take the screenshot of the current active window alone, select “Grab the Current Window” and click “Take Screenshot”.

From the command-line, use the -w option as follows to do the same.

$ gnome-screenshot -w

Take Screenshot After Some Delay:

From the UI, you can also set a delay before taking the screenshots. Set the “Grab after a delay” to the required number of seconds. This will be really helpful when we need to take screen shots of navigation.

From the command-line, use -d option to do the same. -d 2 is used for delaying the screenshot for 2 seconds. So within the 2 seconds, we can make the window which we want to take screenshot as active.

$ gnome-screenshot -w -d 2

Capture a Particular Area:

From the UI, if you want to take a particular rectangle area alone, then select “Grab a Particular area” and click “Take Screenshot”.

From the command-line, use the -a option to do the same. Once this command is entered, the mouse pointer will be changed, and you can drag and select which area to take screenshot.

$ gnome-screenshot -a

Take Screenshot Including or Excluding Window Border:

From the UI, you can also include or exclude the window border by selecting/deselecting “Include the Window Border” option.

From the command line, use -b/-B options respectively to do the same. This command will include the window border along with the screenshot.

$ gnome-screenshot -w -b

The following command will exclude the window border from the screenshot.

$ gnome-screenshot -w -B

3. Use ImageMagic’s Import Command

ImageMagick is an open source software suite for displaying, converting, and editing raster image files. It comes with various command line tools, and one of that is “import”. Now we will see, how we can use import to take screenshots. You can install it by using apt-get on debian/ubuntu as follows:

# apt-get install imagemagick

Capture Entire Screen using -window root option

Use the “-window root” option to take screenshot of the complete screen. The screenshot will be saved in the file name provided in the command line.

$ import -window root Pictures/Image5.png

ImageMagick supports more that 100 file types. You can use any one of them to store the output.

Capture a Particular Window/Area:

Type the following command, it will change the mouse pointer to “Cross” symbol. Select the window which you would like to take screenshot or click and drag to take screenshot of particular area.

$ import calc.png

Include the frame using -frame option:

You can also include the “frame” of the window using the -frame option.

$ import -frame Image6.png

Take Screenshot and Resize using -resize option:

You can also take screenshot and resize the screenshot using the -resize option. Pause option is used to make a delay before taking the screenshots.

$ import -window root -resize 640 -pause 4 Pictures/Image7.png

Please refer “man import” for more number of options supported by import command.

4. Use GIMP

You can also take screenshot from gimp. Launch gimp, and click “File->Create->Screenshot”. A new dialog window will open with options similar to gnome-screenshot.

Did we miss any of your favorite tools to capture screenshot? Leave a comment and let us know.