There was rare good news on the ransomware front this week. Police in Ukraine arrested a 51-year old man in the city of Nikopol in connection with the spread of the NotPetya virus. A raid was conducted on the man’s house and computers that are suspected of having spread the malware were seized.
The suspect’s name was not released. The police said that the man gave them a statement admitting that he uploaded the malware to a file-sharing account and that it was downloaded about 400 times.
Several companies, the man claimed in the statement, downloaded NotPetya in an effort to evade payments to the state and to “conceal criminal activity.”
The story says that the man was arrested. It also said that it is unclear if he is a formal suspect or just “a person of interest” in the cyberattack in which the malware reached more than 60 countries.
European Consortium Working on 5G-as-a-Service
Cloud-based “as-a-service” offerings and 5G are two of the big buzzwords of contemporary telecom. They are coming together.
BT, Orange and Nokia Bell Labs France announced a wide-ranging consortium that will look at next-generation platform as-a-service (NG-as-a-service). The consortium is part of the 5G Infrastructure Public Private Partnership (5G-PPP) initiative launched in 2014 to facilitate cooperation between European telecom operators and the European Union, according to RCR Wireless.
5G is a key to this difficult task. The consortium will deal with building, shipping and operating virtual network function applications that perform at telephone company levels for latency, reliability and capacity. That’s not all:
The platform must also combine all sorts of third-party applications with those VNF, thereby creating more versatile and powerful cloud objects breaking silos between connectivity (to humans, robots, sensors, etc.) and computing (machine learning, big data, video applications).
Other members of the consortium include Nokia Bell Labs France, Nokia, Atos, BT, Orange, Virtual Open Systems, Vertical M2M, B-COM, ONAPP, the University of Milano-Bicocca, Danmarks Tekniske Universitet and IMEC.
Organizations Spending Lots on Gear for Sales Reps
It’s clear that organizations spend a lot of money on technology for their employees. SugarCRM has provided some specifics. The company found in a survey of 400 sales executives that employers spent at least $1,000 on 80 percent of sales representatives.
The survey, conducted for the company by CITE Research, found that companies spend $1,500 on two-thirds of employees and at least $2,000 on 49 percent of the employees. Sixty-nine percent of respondents worry about training staff and 63 percent about keeping pace with innovations and updating systems adequately.
The survey found that the technology is helpful. Customer relationship management (CRM) was found to be the most frequently used tool.
Will the IEEE See the Light?
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is considering including Light Fidelity (LiFi) in the 802.11 standards family.
LiFi uses LED lights, mostly in the invisible spectrum, to transmit data, says Network World. It theoretically can operate 100 times faster than Wi-Fi. Realistically, however, it is seen as a complement to fill in where Wi-Fi falls short.
As odd as LiFi sounds, the story says that using light to transmit data is an old technology. Television remotes, for instance, use it to change channels and adjust volume. The difference is that these devices use infrared light are thus are limited.
Toyota Heads the Vehicular Edge Computing Consortium
The Toyota InfoTechnology Center, the Toyota Motor Corp., DENSO, Ericsson, Intel, NTT, NTT DOCOMO have formed the Automotive Edge Computing Consortium.
The press release highlights the vast increases in data moving between vehicles and the cloud. It says that by 2025, monthly volume will reach 10 exabytes, which is 10,000 times more than it is today. This will necessitate additional capacity and the movement of much of the computing to the edge.
Among other things, the group will define requirements and develop vehicular use cases for mobile devices. It will also develop best practices. It is not clear from the press release if the consortium will deal with actual vehicle operations or just ancillary data.
Carl Weinschenk covers telecom for IT Business Edge. He writes about wireless technology, disaster recovery/business continuity, cellular services, the Internet of Things, machine-to-machine communications and other emerging technologies and platforms. He also covers net neutrality and related regulatory issues. Weinschenk has written about the phone companies, cable operators and related companies for decades and is senior editor of Broadband Technology Report. He can be reached at cweinsch@optonline.net and via twitter at @DailyMusicBrk.