Ransomware targets smaller businesses, security CEO warns

Trending cyber attacks such as ransomware may be typically overlooked by small and midsize businesses, but the CEO of security firm Lumension warns that they are actually in the line of fire.

Pat Clawson
Around the world, ransomware has been proved to be effective in midsized business environments and below, mainly due to the lack of tools available to deal with the attack, said Pat Clawson, chairman and CEO of Lumension, which is based in Scottsdale, Arizona.

"Most corporations have the means to deal with that outright from a technology and people perspective," he said. "However, if it is a ten person business environment, it is going to cost them a lot of money to get the issue resolved."

Clawson admits that it is not uncommon for these smaller businesses to even consider paying the ransom with the hope all of the stolen data returns.

"For that reason, ransomware is more effective when it targets SMBs that do not have the ability to fight it by themselves with technology or people," he said.

The benefit that bigger companies have is access to the necessary tools and manpower to take care of the problem, as well as prevent it from happening in the first place.

"The guys who create the ransomware are also smart enough to know where the money is to be made," Clawson said. "Instead of corporations, they tend to target SMBs and individual people that may fall prey to the attack."

In addition to having the necessary tools to combat ransomware, Clawson said corporations have a culture where staff are more aware of the pitfalls of ransomware, if it manages to get through at all.

"Their technology is already catching the ransomware at the gateway," he said. "However, if something does get through, their ability to undo the ransomware is significantly easier than for a private business or single user on their own."

Joyent targets Amazon, Google by blending compute/storage services

Cloud computing provider Joyent, a company with robust engineering chops that's looking to compete with the heavyweights of the industry, today rolled out Manta, its newest service that offers object storage with baked in compute features.

 

Combining compute and storage into one offering allows processing and data analytics jobs to be done without the need to transfer data from a storage system into a compute engine, speeding the time to process the transaction and creating a more efficient process.

 

Joyent engineers are no strangers to shaking up the cloud industry. Under the radar of even some in the cloud community, the company has developed its own SmartOS infrastructure stack, which includes an open source in-memory hypervisor. Joyent sells its SmartDataCenter as a public cloud IaaS option, or for users to install on their own premises.

 

CTO Jason Hoffman says Manta is the next logical iteration of the company's products. "This completes our platform," he says, after working on the project for about four years, internally using it for the last year and running a six-month multi-petabyte beta project on it with some of Joyent's largest customers.

 

Gartner analyst Henry Baltazar says the key to Manta is the ability to run compute jobs without having to extract, transform and load (ETL) the data from object storage into compute servers. In traditional formats, the object storage is meant for the retention of data, but if some sort of processing is needed to be done on it, then a copy of the data is usually made and then transferred to make it accessible to the compute services. "You avoid the transformation and migration of the data because it's already sitting with the compute," he says.It's ideal, he says, for archival of data heavy information that may need some sort of processing done to it. Joyent specifically lists use cases such as video and image coding and reformatting, data analytics and log processing.

 

Customer Konstantin Gredeskoul, who is CTO of Wanelo, an online retail community, is already raving about it after using it as part of the beta. The company hosts a website for about 8 million users that has more than 6 million products from more than 200,000 stores that shoppers can browse, search and then be sent to other websites to buy from. During the past few months, Wanelo has been using Manta to storage log files of everything that happens on the company's website each day - what items people view, which are purchased and how they rated products. Storing those files in Manta allows commands to be run directly on the data.

 

Gredeskoul is currently using Amazon Web Services Simple Storage Service (S3) as its back-end repository for all of Wanelo's images, but he hopes to migrate those over to Joyent's Manta service. If there's ever a point when Gredeskoul needs to convert petabytes worth of images from one format to another, that process could be done directly within Manta. On AWS, he would have likely had to make a copy of the files, transfer or copy it into Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) or another compute service like Elastic MapReduce (EMR), run the processing job, then transfer it back into storage. Hoffman says Manta is like having AWS's EC2 and S3 baked into a single offering.

 

Gartner's Baltazar, says Manta is part of a larger wave of converging storage and compute into single systems, but he says it's one of the first large-scale cloud offerings in the category. Other providers like Simplivity and Nutanix offer customers so-called data centers in a box, which have compute, storage and networking functionality baked into a single system, which is usually run on customer premises. Baltazar calls this the "big squeeze" of infrastructure.

 

Joyent could kick off this wave for cloud providers to do the same. Already Amazon has a variety of storage options, between S3, Elastic Block Storage (EBS), its RedShift data warehousing service and Glacier, which is a long-term cold storage option that is cheap to write into and slow to retrieve information from. Amazon offers analytics services on top of such storage options, but they're not architected to be baked into the storage services as Joyent's is. Google has its Hadoop-like BigQuery data processing cloud-based service, which is an adjacent offering to its application development PaaS and Compute Engine IaaS.

 

Manta is generally available starting today. Prices start at $0.043 per GB of storage, up to the first 1 TB, with volume discounts applied after that. Joyent's default setting is to make two companies of all data. Compute service is priced by the second at $0.00004/GB of DRAM.

 

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China targets shadow bankers in credit squeeze

China's central bank is applying pressure to the country's shadow banking system.

Beijing's tactics are designed to crack down on the banks, securities dealers and underground operators that make up the country's flourishing shadow banking system.

The government's concern is that lending has grown too big, too fast, and it hopes higher rates will restrain that expansion. At the same time, the fear among investors is that the lending crackdown could slow the economy more than expected.

In recent years, shadow banks have carved out a niche trade in China. They offer loans to small and medium-sized companies that are ignored by large state-run banks. Often, the loans are packaged and sold to investors looking for higher returns.

In many cases, the shadow lenders provide a valuable service -- offering capital for run-of-the-mill projects that would otherwise go unfunded.

This is no small operation. The shadow banking sector's exact reach is unknown, but the Fitch ratings agency estimates its size has reached roughly 60% of China's GDP.

But Beijing is now worried that credit is becoming inefficient, increasingly dominated by unregulated lenders and reaching a scale where it could sap growth.

By allowing rates to rise, the central bank is signaling that the era of easy credit -- which has helped spur shadow banks -- is over.

The central bank last week allowed the rate at which Chinese banks lend to each other to hit a record high above 13%. Another key measure of cash in the banking system -- the seven-day "repo rate" -- peaked at 25%.

Under normal circumstances, the central bank would have moved quickly to provide liquidity and lower rates. But the bank stood idly by as investors grew increasingly nervous over the bank's inaction and lack of guidance. The unease manifested in equity markets, which were battered as rates increased.

Some clarity emerged over the weekend, when official state media reported that the China's shadow banking system was indeed the central bank's target.

"It's not that there's no money," a Xinhua commentary said. "It's that the money is not in the right places."

Related story: In China, a little bit of financial chaos is just fine

The decision not to jump in and push down borrowing rates for financial institutions is seen as a way to force them to get back to traditional banking. Beijing had recently issued warnings to its banks to avoid risky loans and excessive expansion of credit.

The central bank broke its silence on Monday, indicating that its harsh medicine is likely to continue.

"Commercial banks must pay close attention to the liquidity situation in the market and must strengthen their analysis and forecasts of factors affecting liquidity," the central bank said in a note posted Monday but dated June 17.

Related story: Is China's debt: a crisis in the making?

The bank elaborated after a wild day of trading on Tuesday, going so far as to hold a press conference and issue a pledge to keep lending rates at a reasonable level.

Mark Williams, chief Asia economist at Capital Economics, said in a research note Monday that the central bank's efforts to rein in credit were the strongest sign yet that China's leadership is "willing to suffer short-term economic pain if necessary to achieve more sustainable growth."

But Williams also said the lack of communication from the central bank was troublesome.

"By most standards, the behavior of the People's Bank over the last couple of weeks has been extraordinarily reckless," he said. "It did not intervene as interbank rates spiked to extreme levels, despite having the tools to do so, and it offered no explanation for its inaction."