"privacy" articles

Amazon's announcement of a new Amazon Key in-home delivery service caused some media buzz this week, following on the heels of a similar announcement of an in-home delivery partnership between Walmart and August Home. Announcements of innovative services like these always create opportunities for media outlets to grab some attention and clicks, though the coverage can sometimes lack nuance. Case in point: a polling firm called Morning Consult contacted me this week to discuss...

According to Parks Associates research, nearly half of consumers rank data security and privacy issues as their greatest concern about connecting devices to the Internet. Parks Associates and Alticast recently released the whitepaper, Cybersecurity: Turning Necessity into Business Opportunity , which provides an overview of current content security systems and the pain points in the transition from content security to big data security, with an emphasis on real-time threat detection...

Parks Associates' 21st-annual CONNECTIONS™: The Premier Connected Home Conference will take place May 23-25 at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco Airport in San Francisco. The event provides a day of pre-show research workshops highlighting Parks Associates’ consumer data and analysis and two days of conference sessions focused on technology adoption and trends, forecasts for new products and services, evaluation of new business strategies, and recommendations about technology...

They say every cloud has a silver lining and that is certainly true for broadband operators in the wake of one of the biggest DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks yet and one which significantly was launched by hijacking IoT (Internet of Things) devices. The victim was French ISP and cloud hosting provider OVH, which in late September faced a massive DDoS attack  from a botnet comprising at least 150,000 IoT devices, mostly CCTV cameras. According to OVH founder and CTO...

Data breaches that expose sensitive data of millions of customers and cost large companies millions of dollars are now pervasive in the news.  As cyber-criminals formulate new ways to attack, many companies and consumers are now more aware of the vulnerabilities involved in providing and using connected products and services. Despite the fact that cybercriminals are consistently devising new attack strategies, device manufacturers and consumers are yet to pull out all the stops...

Last week, half the Internet was shut down by an unprecedented hacker attack on the servers of Dyn, a major U.S. domain name server (DNS) host for media companies such as Netflix, Facebook, and Twitter.  The hackers used what is commonly referred to as a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. DDoS attacks basically bombard a server with so many requests it has to slow down or shut down because it can’t handle the traffic. Even with sophisticated DDoS protection software in...

Before attending CONNECTIONS™Europe  in Amsterdam, Christopher Schouten , Senior Director Product Marketing at Kudelski Security, answered several industry questions: Where do you feel the largest opportunity is for the smart home industry in Europe? The largest opportunity for the smart home industry in Europe is to continue to make itself relevant to the daily lives of consumers; to ensure the solutions they provide meet real needs in four major areas: security,...

Safety and security in the home has expanded beyond the long-term mainstays of burglar and fire alarms. There are now varied smart home devices that provide security and safety in the home  as well as convenience and peace of mind for the consumer. Key industry players are leading various sales channels for these devices, with security system providers at the forefront of that effort. Security system providers represent the sales channel for about one-third of all the safety...