1.) To all those who are still using Windows 7 operating system loaded PCs and Laptops, here’s a piece of bad news. Microsoft has announced that it is going to end support to its popular operating system from news January and so PCs which run on the said obsolete OS will become vulnerable to cyber attacks from then on.
As per the official statement released by the tech giant, Win 7 will no longer be eligible to receive security updates from September this year and said that the support service for the said Operating system will be no longer be made available from the said period.
For home users, the OS related updated will end from the end of January 2020. But businesses who still like to run their applications on the said OSes can go for the updated at a hefty price point.
Currently, over 42.8 percent of Windows 7 computers are said to be operating around the world, against Windows 10 which sits at 45.5 percent- as per the stats offered by Net Applications.
2.) Coming to the second news related to cyber attacks, Singapore government is said to have imposed a €650,000 penalty on SingHealth healthcare services provider for showing laxity in protecting the data of its users, resulting in a data breach last year which leaked info of more than 1.5 million people including the Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong.
Highly placed sources report that the penalty was imposed by Singapore’s Privacy Watchdog and the fine was amounted to be $1 million in Singaporean currency. As per the financial stats available to Cybersecurity Insiders, Integrated Health Information Systems, which was providing IT services to Singapore’s public healthcare sector was imposed a penalty of Sg$750,000. And SingHealth was imposed a fine of Sg$250,000.
3.) Google has put all Android phone users on a mobile security alert after more than 80 Google Play Store apps were reported to be infecting millions of smartphones operating around the world with dreaded malware.
TrendMicro, a Taiwan based Cybersecurity solutions provider that hackers were hiding malware and spreading it through Google Play Store in disguise of some fake apps which never work as intended in real.
For instance, the “Easy Universal TV Remote” was found to be the most downloaded Android App out of the 85 malware packed programs.
Researchers from TrendMicro say that the said app was downloaded more than 130,000 times by Android OS users and was discovered infecting phones with adware which popped up on the home screen for every 30 seconds.
4.) Yelp cries for HELP as AI backfires –Yelp, an American local service search engine cried for ‘help’ yesterday when an AI algorithm rolled onto its app to fix a bug ended up deleting all the data. As a result of this technical blunder, the app witnessed a downtime for a brief period or until the disaster recovery & management team of the company jumped into the rescue.
Now to those who think that neural networks can never go wrong, the above paragraph stands as the best example to prove it. And the fun part is that this instance works well to prove that ‘man-made technology’ can fail at ‘man-made inventions’.
