Tag Archives: Technology Tips

Posted on Author Atlantic Computer Services Categories Blog

New Graphene Technology May Increase Hard Drive Storage

HDDs are old, well understood technology. They haven’t changed much in recent years. In fact, increasingly, people are writing them off, preferring SSDs for their greater speed and smaller size, even though HDDs are less expensive.

The clever folks at the University of Cambridge’s Graphene Centre, however, are hoping to change that.

Their plan? To create ultra-high density HDDs using graphene. The Cambridge researchers aren’t wasting any time, either. They recently published a paper in Nature, where they detailed a process by which they’ve substituted a graphene overcoat for the current standard carbon-based overcoat.

In order to increase hard drive capacity, HDD manufacturers have decreased the distance between the head and the platter. Back in the 1990’s, the distance averaged 12.5nanometers (nm), while in today’s HDDs, that distance has shrunk to just 3nm. The resulting shrinkage has allowed a storage capacity of about 1 terabyte per square inch. Three nanometers sound tiny, but a graphene overcoat is only one atom thick, which is how the researchers were able to create hard drives with such an incredible amount of storage.

The researchers had this to say about their project:

“Demonstrating that graphene can serve as protective coating for conventional hard disk drives and that it is able to withstand HAMR conditions is a very important result. This will further push the development of novel high areal density hard disk drives.

Considering that in 2020, around 1 billion terabytes of fresh HDD storage was produced, these results indicate a route for mass application of graphene in cutting-edge technologies.”

A very important result indeed.

At present, there’s no timetable for when we might see a commercially produced graphene HDD, but just knowing that they’re possible is incredibly exciting and represents a potential renaissance in storage technology.

0
Posted on Author Atlantic Computer Services Categories Blog

New Wifi Vulnerability May Affect Most Devices

Recently, a whole raft of security flaws have been found that impact all Wi-Fi devices, including smart phones, IoT devices, and personal computers going back as far as 1997. This unfortunately means that almost every Wi-Fi device in use today is vulnerable.

Collectively, the attacks associated with these issues have been dubbed FragAttacks.

Mathy Vanhoef, of the University of Abu Dhabi, and the researcher who discovered FragAttacks had this to say about them:

“Experiments indicate that every Wi-Fi product is affected by at least one vulnerability and that most products are affected by several vulnerabilities.

The discovered vulnerabilities affect all modern security protocols of Wi-Fi, including the latest WPA3 specification. Even the original security protocol of Wi-Fi, called WEP, is affected. This means that several of the newly discovered design flaws have been part of Wi-Fi since its release in 1997!”

If there’s a silver lining to be had, it lies in the fact that an attacker needs to be within the Wi-Fi range of the device targeted in order to execute the attack and either inject malicious code or steal sensitive data. However, if the attacker is in range, it’s entirely possible for him to take complete control of the target device.

Vanhoef also notes that the flaws are somewhat difficult to abuse because they rely on network settings not commonly used, which, combined with the first point does offer a measure of protection.

Nonetheless, this is about as serious as it gets, but fortunately, vendors are already in the process of developing patches to address the issues.

The patches are being tracked as follows:

  • CVE-2020-24588
  • CVE-2020-24587
  • CVE-2020-24586
  • CVE-2020-26145
  • CVE-2020-26144
  • CVE-2020-26140
  • CVE-2020-26143
  • CVE-2020-26139
  • CVE-2020-26146
  • CVE-2020-26147
  • CVE-2020-26142
  • CVE-2020-26141

Finally, note that there’s no evidence at this point that any of these attacks are being used in the wild. Even so, these flaws represent a serious point of weakness. Until patches are developed and deployed, researchers recommend disabling fragmentation, disabling pairwise rekeys and disabling dynamic fragmentation in Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) devices.

0
Posted on Author Atlantic Computer Services Categories Blog

Consider Replacing Your Old Broadband Routers For Security

A company named ‘UK security Watchdog, Which?’ recently released a report with some disturbing security ramifications.

Based on a survey of more than 6000 UK households, the company identified 13 different older routers that are still regularly being used today. Of those 13, nine were found to fall well short of meeting modern security standards.

Naturally, those older routers have not received security updates for quite some time. In some cases, that means their last update was back in 2018, with a few not having seen an update since 2016. Two years is bad enough, but four is almost an eternity in the world of tech.

The UK and US markets are broadly similar, so what’s true there is almost certainly also true here, even if the names of the specific routers change.

Of course, it’s worth mentioning that a significant percentage of users don’t set up their own home networks, but instead rent their equipment from their internet providers.

One would think that this would improve their security, as the company renting the equipment would take care to make sure that their customers got regular security updates. Unfortunately, that doesn’t happen as often as you might think. Even if it did, the simple fact is that most older equipment has weak, or completely nonexistent default passwords which make breaking into them a trivial undertaking, even with ongoing, regular security updates.

This, in fact, is one of the reasons why many manufacturers are moving toward simply eliminating default passwords from the equation. It’s a great idea, but it does nothing to help the tens of millions of users around the world who currently own and are actively using older, vulnerable equipment.

Sadly, there are no simple answers here. In a perfect world, every person who went online would do so with security at the forefront of their minds, but that will literally never happen. The best we can hope for is that each time we draw attention to the issue with articles like this, a few people will take heed.

0
Posted on Author Atlantic Computer Services Categories Blog

Fake Gift Card Balance Checking Sites May Steal Your Money

Scammers have a new way of ripping people off this year. If you’re not mindful of it, it could literally cost you. Gift cards have always been fairly popular, but this year, they seem to be more popular than ever. According to the online fraud prevention company, Bolster, thieves have been hard at work setting up bogus ‘gift card balance’ checking websites designed to siphon money away from unsuspecting consumers.

Here’s’ how it works:

You get a gift card for Christmas and put it in a drawer for a few weeks or even months. Eventually, you find it, but by now, you can’t remember if you spent some of the money that was on the card. So you’re not at all sure how much money is left. You go online and do some searching, which brings up a link to a site promising to give you your gift card balance in just a few clicks.

You surf to the page, enter in your card number and instead of giving you your balance information. (usually you’ll get a timeout message, but some are more sophisticated than that), it will send the gift card number to a command and control server so the hackers can steal it. They use it to order goodies for themselves, either to keep or resell.

It’s low, but it’s an easy scam to pull off, and even relatively unsophisticated criminals can manage it, so expect to see lots of bogus balance checking sites this year.

While Target seems to be the retailer that the scammers are most focused on this year, Bolster has spotted a number of other fake balance checking sites targeting companies like:

  • Bath and Body Works
  • Forever 21
  • Amazon
  • The Google Play Store
  • And HBO

Just be aware that the scam exists, and be mindful of where you go on the web when you check your gift card balances.

0
Posted on Author Atlantic Computer Services Categories Blog

Facebook Working On Business Suite For Managing Social Media

Social Media giant Facebook, recently announced a new app aimed at Enterprise users.

If you maintain an active corporate presence on Facebook and Instagram, you’ll be particularly interested in the company’s new offering.

It is designed to give business owners a dashboard that will make it easier to manage their company’s social media presence, allowing users to post simultaneously to both Facebook and Instagram and receive notifications and alerts related to both platforms in a single location.

Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook, had this to say about the new app:

“We’re building Facebook Business Suite for small businesses first, but this is a long-term investment to make this the main interface for businesses of all sizes who use Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp. It is available for small businesses globally starting today and will expand to larger businesses next year.”

The new Business Suite is the latest in a series of moves the company has been making in recent months as it pushes more earnestly into e-commerce. In May of this year (2020), the company rolled out a new set of tools allowing business owners to set up a digital storefront on Facebook and sell goods and services to their followers.

As Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently noted, companies of all sizes have made significant investments into their digital footprints and are “increasingly viewing them as their primary storefronts. So we’re working on a number of ways to deepen this experience, helping people buy items and services directly within our apps… Overall, though, our business depends on the success of small businesses, so this is a moment where we feel that we’re well-positioned to be champions for small business’ interests and supporters of important infrastructure that they’re going to need in order to move online.”

The bottom line is, if you use Facebook and/or Instagram, the new Business Suite is well worth a look.

0
1 … 8 9 10 11