Month: July 2020

The Windows 10 security guide: How to protect your business

It is tempting to think that the process of securing a Windows 10 device can be reduced to a simple checklist. Install some security software, adjust a few settings, hold a training session or two, and you can move on to the next item on your to-do list.

Alas, the real world is far more complicated than that.

There is no software magic bullet, and your initial setup simply establishes a security baseline. After that initial configuration is complete, security requires continued vigilance and ongoing effort. Much of the work of securing a Windows 10 device happens away from the device itself. A well-planned security policy pays attention to network traffic, email accounts, authentication mechanisms, management servers, and other external connections.

This guide covers a broad spectrum of business use cases, with each heading discussing an issue that decision makers must consider when deploying Windows 10 PCs. And although it

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Barclays CEO says Canary Wharf office set to stay despite home working success

Barclays CEO Jes Staley has praised the bank’s IT staff for enabling the business to operate despite tens of thousands of staff being stuck at home.

He said the reaction to the Covid-19 lockdown had been a learning curve for the bank and had helped it to understand how a “dynamic work environment” would work.

“It’s extraordinary that we’re running a bank of the complexity of Barclays with over 60,000 people working from their kitchen tables,” said Staley. “A lot of credit goes to our technology staff and our operations people who have enabled us to do that.

“It’ll be fascinating to see how it evolves over the next couple of years.”

But Barclays wants to get its people back into some offices, said Staley. During the bank’s results announcement, he said it would, for example, maintain “a major presence in places like Canary Wharf”.

“We do need to get

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Department says ‘vast majority’ of FttN lines to get 25Mbps speeds in December

An NBN FttN node getting a Nokia line card installed


Image: Corinne Reichert/ZDNet

With the 18-month period of co-existence — where fibre-to-the-node (FttN) infrastructure also needs to support legacy services over copper, such as ADSL — coming to an end across Australia, the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Communications has said it expects the “vasty majority” of FttN connections to hit the minimum 25Mbps speed on the National Broadband Network (NBN).

By comparison, NBN only guaranteed speeds of 12Mbps in co-existence.

“NBN Co Limited has indicated that, as at 1 July 2020, co-existence has ended on 5,750 nodes out of a total of 27,933 nodes in the fibre to the node footprint,” the Department said in response to questions from the Joint Standing Committee on the National Broadband Network.

“The vast majority of fibre to the node lines are expected to achieve a peak speed of at least

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UK households suffer as online problems disrupt work during lockdown

As the lockdown has made connectivity more important than ever, research from Quadient has found that as many as 8.5 million UK households have suffered work, schooling or entertainment disruption, or were cut off from their families, because of internet connection problems.

In its survey of 2,000 UK adults in June 2020, carried out by Opinium Research, Quadient aimed to explore how consumers view the customer service they are receiving from their providers, and just how important these new connections – both fixed and mobile broadband – are.

It investigated whether consumers feel that the industry in 2020 has the right priorities and whether they are likely to switch to a provider that is better able to meet their needs.

It also sought to discover what consumers were demanding from their service providers and, most importantly, just how much they have come to rely on connectivity during lockdown, as

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Bye-bye, Chrome: 10 steps to help you switch to Microsoft’s new Edge browser

For years, Microsoft has made the browsers that choosy web users loved to hate. First there was Internet Explorer, with an endless supply of security and compatibility issues. Then there was the original version of Microsoft Edge, which shipped with early releases of Windows 10. It was significantly better than Internet Explorer (granted, that’s a pretty low bar), but there were just enough problems to make it unacceptable for everyday usage. That’s why Google’s Chrome browser is hands-down the most popular software on the web.

But all that changed with the release of the new Microsoft Edge (same name, new logo), which is now widely available on every major desktop and mobile platform. Because it’s built on the same open source Chromium Project code base that Google uses for Chrome, it’s almost a perfect clone of Chrome for things that matter, like rendering web pages and working with third-party code.

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Bank of Ireland fined for six-year-old IT breach

The Bank of Ireland has been hit with a €1.66m (£1.5m) fine for a data breach that happened in its private banking arm in 2014.

Ireland’s financial services regulator, the Central Bank of Ireland, criticised the bank’s policies and processes and its failure to report the incident as soon as it knew about it.

The country’s central bank imposed the fine in relation to the transfer of €100,000 from a client account at Bank of Ireland Private Banking (BoIPB) to a fraudster, who had hacked a customer’s email account, gaining access to confidential information.

The bank failed to make the necessary security checks of the transaction. It repaid the client, but did not inform the police, who were alerted to it a year later.

According to the regulator, BoIPB did not cooperate with investigations appropriately. “[It] failed to provide complete and timely information and documentation in response to the

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