There are many people that have recently been urging you to switch your website to the HTTPS security encryption. They cite Google’s announcement that HTTPS is a ranking signal and that failure to switch could mean your ranking will take a hit. But what is the true difference between HTTP and HTTPS?

HTTP stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol. It’s a protocol that allows communication between different systems. Most commonly, it is used for transferring data from a web server to a browser to view web pages. The problem is that HTTP (note: no “s” on the end) data is not encrypted, and it can be intercepted by third parties to gather data being passed between the two systems. This can be addressed by using a secure version called HTTPS, where the “S” stands for secure.

Without HTTPS, any data passed is insecure. This is especially important for sites where sensitive data is passed across the connection, such as e-commerce sites that accept online card payments, or login areas that require users to enter their credentials.

Sure, there are limits to this. HTTPS is not like a web application firewall. It’s not going to prevent your website from getting hacked. It’s not going to stop phishing emails getting sent, either. If you’re using a content management system (CMS), like WordPress, or you have any other login where you host any kind of sensitive data, then setting up a secure HTTPS login is the absolute minimum precaution you should take. In reality, HTTPS is the basic price of security these days. It’s the very minimum you can offer your visitors. Aside from security, HTTPS also improves trust.

HTTPS offers the base level of website security. Whether or not you should switch to HTTPS is a decision increasingly being driven by Google’s search algorithm. Switching to HTTPS is fairly straightforward for smaller websites. For larger websites, it’s more complicated, from an SEO perspective and requires skilled technical staff to make the changes.

We live in a mobile and technology based world where nearly a billion new mobile phones ship each year. Businesses that are most efficiently adapting to today’s app lifestyle are the ones most successful at deepening customer engagement and driving new revenues in this ever-changing world. Where business opportunities rise, opportunities for black hat Hackers that conduct illicit, illegal and malicious activity also begin to rise. Hence creating an issue with security in mobile apps.

Hackers are increasingly aiming at binary code targets to launch attacks on high-value mobile applications across all platforms. Binary code is the 0’s and 1’s people may see on movies or TV shows. It is code that machines read to execute an application, essentially it is what you download when you access mobile apps from an app store like Google Play or Apple’s app store. It is translated into words, images, encryption details, many different things. Binary code is a secure way to keeping apps secure and safe for use, however, there are backdoor ways to disrupt an app, take for example Code modification (Code Injection).

Code Modification or Code Injection is the first category of binary-based vulnerability exploits, whereby hackers conduct unauthorized code modifications or insert malicious code into an application’s binaries. Code modification or code injection threat scenarios can include a hacker or hostile user, modifying the code to change its behavior. For example, disabling security controls, bypassing business rules, licensing restrictions, purchasing requirements or ad displays in the mobile app. A hacker can injecting malicious code into the binary code, and can; repackage the mobile apps and publish it as a new (supposedly legitimate) app, distribute under the guise of a patch or a crack (crack meaning with more freedom, you can do more on the app than what it was intentionally designed for), or (re)installing it on an unsuspecting user’s device.

Mobile hacking is something that is very important but has gone a little under the radar within the cybersecurity world. There a couple of methods to prevent such a thing from happening to an app you may be developing, or to your favorite app. By using a secure mobile management system this ensures that all the content that you are sending is being sent securely to users. What I think is the most important is the use of Two-Factor Authentication. Two-Factor Authentication is simply an extra step measure that is put in place to help determine you are who you say you are. If you are an admin and what access to the code, then you will be granted access, but if you are an intern not assigned to work on the code, then your credentials to sign in will not work, thus helping keep who sees what to a minimum. If you like to read more, like and share this article and follow my Facebook page. Thank you and Enjoy!

Encryption (or Cryptography) is a form of cyber security created

by altering information before transmission. Only an authorized sender and receiver can encode or decode the information. It is an effective form of information security. Encryption has been around for centuries, most notably as a province of war rather than commerce. If intercepted by an enemy, it is unreadable. The method of security protects vital information from reaching enemy hands.

Over the years many people have made it their job to attempt to decode encrypted messages. If a person was successful they could gain access to the Nation’s most sensitive assets one of which could be the Nuclear launch codes, and the loss of intellectual property rights, this could lead to a catastrophic disaster. While most encryption attacks have proven themselves to be harmless attempts to exploit the weaknesses of  encryption methods, the implications of these attacks has demonstrated that more secure methods and techniques of encryption across networks is imperative in the near future.

The main purpose of encryption, as it pertains to any type of exchange of information across networks, is to ensure that the transactions will be executed with confidence that they will not be intercepted and viewed by anyone other than the intended receiver(s).

There are two primary ways to ensure encryption: Symmetric Encryption, or Asymmetrical Encryption. Symmetric Encryption is also known as secret-key encryption, this cryptosystems requires the sender and receiver to have the same secret key in order to decrypt the message/information. Asymmetrical Encryption is also referred to as Public Key encryption systems. The idea of public key encryption is that both parties, the sender as well as the receiver, have a pair of keys. The one key does not have to be kept secret and is called the public key. The two different keys held by the parties have different uses one is used for encryption and the other for decryption..

Our government takes encryption (cryptography) very seriously. In today’s society so much information is passed along using a secure network. Even the use of your phone is encrypted. Your phone uses the symmetrical system, where both the sender and receiver have the same key, this is how we are able to read one another’s text messages. Without encryption on your phone,  at any moment someone can openly see your  private messages. The dual purpose of encryption is for both end users to enjoy privacy. If you like to read more, like and share this article and follow my Facebook page. Thank you and Enjoy!

Your next car might be one that you don’t need to sit in the driver’s seat to operate. They are called autonomous Cars. More and more cars and car companies are transitioning to automated car services. After years of trials on city streets, driverless vehicles are now nearing the live phase. Last month, a driver less bus began carrying passengers through Lyon, France. Most in the automobile industry think self-driving vehicles will be on the road by 2020 or before, says Richard Holman, who is head of trends at General Motors.

Driverless cars will initially coexist with human-driven cars. But the first places where they will become dominant are dense urban areas precisely the spots most damaged by the automobile age. This is “a chance to have a do-over for cities,” Chase told this month’s Autonomy conference in Paris. Many advanced cities are already reducing the role of cars. Driverless cars will hasten that process. Nissan, Tesla, and Mercedes-Benz all have a leading role in bringing autonomous cars to the front running of cars. Tesla has since developed autonomous a line of different models of autonomous cars. These cars are a combination of driver less cars and manual cars.

Cities don’t want everyone to own their own driver less car. That would prolong congestion, and isn’t necessary anyway. A driver less car is the perfect cheap taxi — it can drop you at work, and then go off to collect somebody else. If you still insist on driving your own car, cities will probably charge you for the privilege: motoring will become a luxury, like owning and flying your own plane. Driver less cars could allow cities to cut vehicle numbers by about 90 per cent while transporting the same number of people. They will bring us enormous benefits:

• Driverless cars will reduce accidents by around 90 per cent, predicts Pascal Demurger, director-general of French insurer MAIF. That’s big — the annual death toll on the world’s roads is about 1.2 million a year, or double the toll from armed conflict and homicides combined.

• Pollution and carbon emissions will drop, because urban driver less cars will be electric.

• The elderly, the disabled and teenagers will suddenly gain safe mobility.

• People will save fortunes by ditching their cars. The average cost of owning a car in Europe is about €6,000 a year. If you think personal cars will survive as a status symbols, remember that horses were once a “status symbols”.

2017 will mark the 10th anniversary of the what many say is one of the greatest inventions; iPhone smartphone. For this 10 year anniversary Apple has something major planned to celebrate the occasion. There are still a couple months to go until the launch of the iPhone 8, but because of Apple’s ambitious plans for the device, there are already an abundance of rumors leaked hinting at the impressive features coming in the 2017 iPhone.

Apple is rumored to be testing more than 10 prototype iPhone models , so it’s not entirely clear what we’re going to see, and because there are so many test devices in play, rumors are also conflicting and murky at this time.

Rumors suggest the iPhone 8 will feature a radical redesign, with an edge-to-edge display that does away with the top and bottom bezels where features like the Touch ID fingerprint sensor and the front-facing camera are housed. Instead, most rumors suggest Touch ID will be built directly into the display, meaning there will be no physical home button. Apple was rumored to be having trouble implementing Touch ID under the display, but the company may overcome those issues.

The display itself is said to be flexible plastic OLED rather than an LCD, allowing Apple to introduce a thinner device that consumes less power and offers a better display with higher contrast ratio and more true to life colors. Early rumors suggested it could feature edges that are curved on both sides like the Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge, but it’s looking more like it will have the same highly curved 2.5D display that’s similar to the display used in the iPhone 7 because Apple suppliers still have difficulty  producing more curved displays.

As for the body, rumors suggest Apple is finally going to move away from the aluminum used in the iPhone 5, 5s, 6, 6s, 7, and SE that could be so easily bent, to instead re-adopting a glass body that’s similar to the body that was used in the iPhone 4. At least one iPhone model coming in 2017 will use a glass body, according to Apple supplier Catcher Technology, and according to analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, the glass will be built around a polished stainless steel frame that’s similar in design to the Apple Watch.

The appearance of phone sounds beautiful, but you don’t just look at a phone, you have to use it, and the biggest question a lot of people always have is “What about space?” “How can i get more space on my phone?” With this new phone, will come a new update, iOS 11. iOS 11 will feature a great deal of useful features. The biggest being “Offload unused Apps” What this feature will do is once you storage is low, a new feature will automatically remove apps that you done use very often. the selected apps are removed and you get back what can possibly be massive portions of your storage back. Your phone will keep all data that was associated with the phone if you ever need to re-download the app. All in all this very well be the biggest and best update to the iPhone yet. IN about 4 months many of us will be able to see for our selves.

As we are making the push past the halfway mark for 2017, some say we are beginning a slight decline when it comes to cybersecurity. Less security in the sense that there is an increasing number of people who are able to hack into personal information like banking statements, social media accounts, phone records etc. These “Hackers” are learning more and more advanced ways to bypass firewalls, elude anti-spyware, and are even capable of planting viruses, worms and Trojan horses. Like technology, things adapt, grow, develop and get better in the foreseeable future, however, when we discuss cybersecurity, we can not necessarily say the same. There often tends to be a new cybersecurity reports throughout the year with the latest report coming from Cisco. Reports shows that things are not necessarily getting better in the cybersecurity world. As of late, threats have been accelerating at an alarming rate, and many companies are not taking them seriously. As reported by Rob Endele, spam in recent years is at an increased level, up 65%. Over these past few years much of the spam was at an all time low. Out of that 65% increase 8% is malicious. Threats now are more so about the theft, and benefiting from stealing from companies in order to resell. Attackers have transitioned from attacking users PC’s to stealing passwords and ID’s that can be used to access personal and secure data. Attackers are on the update. Many attackers are effectively finding out which malware is no longer working and updating it. While detection time has has gotten better, there is little reason to celebrate because attack speed and the effectiveness of attacks is increasing even more quickly.
More than two-thirds of those surveyed believe their security system and tools are extremely effective, however, about 40 percent of the alerts these systems receive are never investigated. Of the 56 percent that are investigated, more than one in four are legitimate attack, and more than half of these are not fixed. A lot of companies systems do not get the alerts, which suggests that their security solutions are not working properly. With all that being said, there are many recommendations that can help a company’s security system. The majority of companies need to take the next step in their security system and take these issues far more seriously than they currently appear to be doing. Look into how hackers manage to slip back door into secure areas online, and work backwards on being able to make sure it can not happen to anyone. Some people refuse to heed the warnings of what cybersecurity analysts have to say. There are always people and companies who do not take it this matter in full understanding, by not paying attention, you leave yourself vulnerable and susceptible to being breached. For example, Rob Endele held a security showcase for IBM. They made the system as secure as possible yet it was still breached because the paid attacker got in through a trusted link by way of poorly secured vendor. If you aren’t auditing your vendors’ security preparedness and limiting their access, you are just as likely to suffer a breach as the folks that aren’t taking all of this as seriously as need be.

The internet and our brains are very much alike in today’s world, more so alike than people think. In society today we spend a great deal of our time online. Whether it is shopping, leisure, or reading the news. Yet many people do not stop and think how we understand information so effectively and fairly easy. Recent studies have shown that there are key mathematical algorithms that manage how our content is delivered to us. Included in these studies, certain instances were brought forth that there may be a certain algorithm used for the Internet is also at work in the human brain, an insight that improves our understanding of engineered and neural networks and potentially even learning disabilities.
In most engineered systems solutions include controlling the amount of information flow so the different routes become neither clogged nor underutilized by checking how congested the Internet is. To accomplish this, the Internet employs an algorithm called “Additive Increase, Multiplicative Decrease” (AIMD) in which your computer sends a packet of data and then listens for an acknowledgement (ACK) from the receiver: If the packet is promptly acknowledged, the network is not overloaded and your data can be transmitted through the network at a higher rate. As each packet is successfully sent, the computer knows to it is fine to keep sending packets. With that being said with every lose or drop of a packet, the computer knows that there is congestion and slows down significantly. In relation to the human brain, it turns out the neuronal equivalent of additive increase is what is known as long-term potentiate. It occurs when one neuron fires closely after another, which strengthens their synaptic connection and makes it slightly more likely the first will trigger the second in the future. The neuronal equivalent of multiplicative decrease occurs when the firing of two neurons is reversed, which weakens their connection, making the first much less likely to trigger the second. Understanding how the system works under normal conditions could help neurosciences better understand what happens when these results are disrupted, for example, in learning disabilities. All in all, it is a very extensive topic. If you like what you’ve read share and follow me on Facebook to read more and similar stories.