News

A Mirai botnet attacked Liberia, a small west African country, nearly taking the entire country offline this week and causing intermittent internet connectivity.

Brief internet outages this week in Liberia have captured the attention of cybersecurity researchers around the world, who fear the small West African nation has become a testing zone for global hackers.

Sites that repeatedly violate Google’s safe browsing policies will be classified as repeat offenders, the company said last week.

A small number of websites take corrective actions after Google displays alerts on their landing pages warning visitors that they’re harmful. However, they typically revert to violating the policies after Google goes through the process of verifying that they’re safe and removes the warnings.

What will a Donald Trump presidency mean for the Internet of Things? Even attempting to answer that question is daunting, given the ambiguous-sounding policy proposals from his campaign during the election. The stock market, after initial jitters, has apparently warmed to the prospects of a Trump presidency. In the week following election day, the Dow has hit all-time highs but the Mexican peso has plunged to record lows versus the dollar. The tech sector, too, had dropped 1.8% on November 15. After nearly uniformly opposing Trump during the presidential election, many in the tech industry are still in a state of shock. But Trump has also promised to make considerable investments in infrastructure and to boost the U.S. manufacturing sector.

It’s clear that all signs seem to be pointing to a big gain in holiday sales in 2016.

But according to Michael Patterson, CEO of Plixer says, retailers may be so focused on the predicted holiday sales that they are overlooking the looming holiday cyber threats.

“Black Friday and Cyber Monday are the biggest shopping days of the year and for cyber criminals, that means open hunting season for both consumers and retailers alike. With denial of service attacks (DDoS), ransomware, account takeover and more, cybercriminals have a customized arsenal for the holidays,” Patterson explained.