WhatsApp is one of the world’s most popular messaging apps, with about 1.5 billion monthly users. The app is marketed as secure with end-to-end encryption that prevents messages, photos, videos, voice messages, calls and documents from falling into the wrong hands. WhatsApp says neither it nor third parties can access these messages.

However, a recent security breach that affected WhatsApp on iOS or Android phones is a clear reminder that no service is 100% risk-free.

The breach may have allowed a malicious actor to install unauthorised software and gain access to personal data on devices running WhatsApp. The attack – attributed in media reports to a private company working with governments on surveillance – is believed to have targeted a group of human rights campaigners. WhatsApp quickly released an updated version of its app to address the vulnerability.

For businesses, the lesson is clear – security plans, platforms and processes need to account for and minimise the risks of using these types of services. We recommend organisations carefully consider the use of proprietary messaging apps to distribute sensitive corporate or customer information, and implement robust policies governing the use of these services for business-related activities.

These policies need to be backed by education programs that should extend beyond an organisation’s own workforce to partners, suppliers, and other stakeholders.

The incident is also a powerful reminder to IT security specialists of the importance of installing updates as quickly as possible to address vulnerabilities that may leave a corporate network open to attack.

The media reports of the WhatsApp attack present an uncomfortable reminder to businesses that cyber-attacks may be carried out by well-resourced, technically skilled organisations and experts acting on behalf of nation-states, as well as criminal groups and rogue individuals. For businesses involved in critical infrastructure or systems of national importance, this means implementing security platforms, architectures, and processes – and working with relevant government agencies – to reduce the risk and impact of a breach.

NMIS has long been one of the most widely used open-source network management systems in the world, but what many users don’t know is how easy it is to extend the core with the suite of add-on modules that replace other network tools and allow businesses to save on licensing costs and increase overall network performance visibility through system expansion and consolidation of applications.

Building Solutions with NMIS Modules

By combining NMIS with various other modules, FirstWave is able to provide software solutions to suit many different enterprise needs – here are a few of the popular combinations that are delivering strong results and allowing our customers to roll several stand-alone applications into one single NMIS licensing bundle.

Network Performance Management and Diagnostics

NMIS, opCharts and opReports

This combination of modules will provide you with the full NMIS capabilities for monitoring network health, capacity planning and event management and alerting, presented in interactive dashboards and reports that can be customised for user groups so that business users can see relevant performance information and engineers can see more detailed operational and information.

Configuration Management Database:

Open-AudIT Professional and opConfig

Looking to replace your CMDB?  This combination of modules is saving organisations thousands of dollars in licensing fees each year by automating device discovery and audit, storing configurations, monitoring changes and pushing configuration changes out to sets of devices.

Network Configuration and Compliance Automation

NMIS, Open-AudIT Professional/Enterprise, opConfig and opEvents

Save time and money on network administration by using process automation to manage inventory, remediate known issues, consolidate and deduplify events, automatically gather network information, detect and roll back configuration and file changes and more.

Traffic Management

NMIS 

This combination replaces other network monitoring and Netflow tools to give you a consolidated view of flow data including heat maps that visually indicate areas of congestion.

Anomaly Detection, Event Prediction and Remediation

NMIS, opTrend and opEvents

Identify issues and threats before they impact your business by leveraging the device and network data gathered by NMIS along with advanced machine learning to determine minute by minute standard baselines for your environment that can help you to identify new threats, unusual behaviour and escalating problems before they impact operations.

Remote Monitoring and Management

NMIS, opHA, opEvents and opCharts

For Managed Service Providers you can replace multi-million dollar RMM systems by combining NMIS with opHA and opCharts.  opHA allows you to increase the performance of applications and deliver high scale and high availability environments, including geographical distribution of the system and overlapping IP address ranges, while opCharts provides a single pane of glass and tiered user views, so that engineers can drill down from a full view of all managed customer equipment to a single device in a remote location, while customers can view their own sites privately and in real time.

There are a lot of options to improve your network, however, the easiest way to start is with our Virtual Machine. The VM comes preconfigured and is operational in under 5 minutes, Download the Virtual Machine and activate free 20 device licenses of each of the modules that interest you or request a demo from one of our engineers.

Introduction

As at Open-AudIT 2.3.2 and later, we have introduced some easy to use and extremely powerful options for discovering devices. These options centre around directing Nmap on how to discover devices.

We have grouped these options into Discovery Scan Options. We ship seven different groups of options (items) by default that cover the common use-cases.

This benefits Community, Professional and Enterprise customers.

Summary

Data breaches can happen for a variety of reasons. Some companies are hacked. Data can be mishandled or sold to third parties. Holes in a website’s security system can leave information unprotected. Some data breaches are deliberate, while others can occur as a result of outdated or unpatched software. Regardless, the consequences of a breach are usually costly for any business.

2018 proved to be another eventful year for cybercrime, with a number of news-worthy data breaches impacting organisations around the globe. Some of these affected hundreds of millions of customers and users.

Here are three of the major incidents that made headlines:

1.   Cathay Pacific
Hong Kong’s flag carrier experienced a data breach that exposed personal information of almost 10 million passengers. While flight systems and safety were not affected by the breach, information accessed without authorisation included passport and credit card numbers, names, nationalities, dates of birth, phone numbers, as well as emails and addresses.

2.   Facebook
Cambridge Analytica – a data-collecting firm – illegally harvested the information of an estimated 87 million users without their permission. The operation was politically motivated – namely, to influence the 2016 US presidential campaign. While the breach occurred a couple of years ago, investigatory conclusions only emerged in 2018, giving us a clearer picture of what happened.

3.   Marriott
Marriott’s Starwood reservation database was breached by an unauthorised party, affecting up to 500 million guests who had booked at one of its Starwood properties. Around 327 million of these guests had some combination of the following information stolen: name, address, phone number, email address, passport number, Starwood Preferred Guest account information, date of birth, gender, arrival and departure information, reservation date, and communication preferences. Some credit card information was also leaked, but card numbers were encrypted.

Conclusion

As technology continues to advance, the need to evolve cyber security strategies is as prevalent as ever. Examining the shortcomings that lead to high-profile cyber breaches can teach us some valuable lessons.

FirstWave can help your organisation bolster its cyber security posture and stay ahead of zero-day attacks. Learn more about our Cloud Email Security.

It’s that time of year when every research organisation and tech magazine is sharing their top trends for 2019.  When it comes to IT Infrastructure and Operations Management trends, the focus is on catering for larger, more diverse networks and ensuring security and compliance as more and more ‘things’ are connected to an enterprise network.

According to Gartner’s Top 10 Trends Impacting Infrastructure & Operations for 2019 Network Agility (or lack of?) and Digital Diversity Management should be key focus areas for this year.

Network agility (or lack of?)

Moving forward we will continue to see our networks underpinning critical business processes across a broader range of connected devices.  Network teams over the past few years have been focused on increasing availability but to ensure future success the focus needs to go beyond this and on to how all network operations can be performed at greater speed.  RPA and building greater network agility that delivers automation and orchestration is key to success in this area.

“Network teams must collaborate heavily with other business units as new opportunities in 5G and edge computing arise”

As cloud-based infrastructure becomes more prevalent and the scale of ‘things’ and endpoints increase, networks will need to evolve to cope with the increased stress that it will create on the network.

Digital diversity management

When Gartner refers to Digital diversity management, they are not talking about people, but rather the growing combination of new, obscure and ageing assets and technologies that are now being utilised within modern organisations.

”The importance of identifying, discovering and monitoring those that directly impact or support the business cannot be understated”

Maintaining accurate inventory and ensuring visibility and management of assets are major challenges that will emerge between 2020 and 2025.

What can I do to get ahead of the trend?

Opmantek software leads the way in IT Audit and Network Automation and Management for large and diverse networks. With over 10,000 hardware vendors preconfigured and a unique device modelling feature that enables you to discover, monitor and manage ANY DEVICE.  For a free demonstration on how Opmantek Software can help you gain control of the networks of the future fill out the form below.

As the world becomes more and more connected telecommunications, internet, and managed service providers must compete with one another to provide the fastest, most affordable, and cutting-edge services.

Traditionally these industries have been heavily laden with rules, requirements, and regulations that have resulted in large volumes of manual operational processes focused towards managing data, controlling cost and business efficiency, and developing new services.  Adhering to these processes can be so time-consuming that it prevents these service providers from focusing on the most critical aspect of their business: their customers.

In recent years, however, technologies have evolved to a point that networks can now be more digital and as a result, more dynamic, flexible, and customisable. The use of Robotic Process Automation can make systems intelligent and more automated, enabling predictive and near-real-time actions. These systems, when coupled with an agile management model, can have a massive impact on response times, time to root cause, and preventative remediation reducing costs while improving customer experience.

What Is RPA?

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is the integration of artificial intelligence and machine learning abilities into a computer or robot, to carry out repetitive tasks, manipulate data and communicate with digital systems in order to improve efficiency and performance.

Image Source: Deloitte

RPA Adoption In Numbers

In September 2017, Deloitte invited organisations globally to take part in an online survey on their use of RPA.  They received responses from over 400 organizations across many industries with a combined value of $1.8 trillion. The information was then analysed and published in a 2018 report titled “The robots are ready. Are you? Untapped advantage in your digital workforce.”

The report revealed the massive extent to which organisations are using RPA to improve business efficiencies.  RPA projects consistently outperformed expectations on non-financial benefits such as accuracy, timelines, flexibility, and improved compliance, with at least 85% of respondents reporting that RPA met or exceeded their expectations in these areas. In addition, a total of 61% reported their expectations of cost reduction were being met or exceeded. Some highlighted the fact that this enabled them to move people from performing transactional tasks to higher-value activities that also led to greater job satisfaction.

Expectations were also exceeded when it came to the FTE capacity that could be provided by robots. Most organisations in implementing RPA forecast it could replace around 20% of existing human tasks. In fact, those that have scaled RPA appear to have had such a positive experience that their expectations are even more ambitious: they believe that 52% of FTE capacity could be provided by robots. This can enable the human workforce to be redeployed to more value-adding activities.

“RPA augments what our people do: it supplements their capability, it means that they can focus on things that are more value added, that are more interesting.”   Shared Services Director, Multinational building-materials company

RPA – A Telco’s Best Friend

In the managed IT Services and Telecommunications industries, RPA is being rapidly adopted as a key strategy to help with enterprise planning to improve networks, including changes to performance management, network design, and network digitization.

Software providers such as Opmantek recognised early the opportunity for Managed Service Providers, Telcos and even centralised IT departments to utilise RPA to leverage the volumes of network data their monitoring systems were collecting to drive operational insights (predictive analytics) and to increase impact from this data significantly by combining it with Cognitive Automation – applying machine learning techniques to automate responses to trends and anomalies, based on the laws of probabilities.

Across some of the worlds largest and most complex telecommunications and enterprise networks, the sentiments and improvements recorded company-wide in the Deloitte survey are similarly reflected in the cost savings, service improvements and reassignment of skilled engineers from repetitive, mundane tasks to more specialised and impactful areas of the business.  

For these service providers, the operational tasks of IT teams have altered significantly, with RPA taking care of procedural and budgetary adherence and human resources now able to focus on every business’ top priority: customers.

Start exploring how RPA will work in your organisation by downloading the Opmantek Virtual Machine today and activating your free license for up to 20 devices.  If you would prefer to have an engineer walk you through the software, fill out the form below.