Another day… another app security attack.

The very popular productivity app, Evernote, was hacked this past Saturday.  In response to the security attack, the company has decided to reset the passwords of its entire user base. This means an estimated 50 million users will need to reset their account info. According to Ingrid Lunden at TechCrunch:

“Evernote is requiring its nearly 50 million users to reset their passwords after the popular personal note-taking app became the latest high-profile victim of wide-scale hacking attempts. The breach follows malicious activity at Twitter, Facebook and others in recent weeks.

Phil Libin, Evernote’s CEO and founder, told TechCrunch in an email everything is running, although if you try to access the site things may not work as normal at the moment: ‘We just pushed out a password reset, so the servers are going to be saturated for a bit,’ he wrote. ‘Everything is up, although response is choppy. There’s no threat to user data that we’re aware of.’”

A pattern of these security attacks seems to be emerging. It’s important for app makers to note that the effects of an attack like this can be detrimental. Trust is everything for an app’s users, and once their privacy is breached it’s extremely difficult to regain. Luckily,  Lunden says in Evernote’s case no bank information was stolen:

“In a blog post, the company said that ‘individual(s) responsible were able to gain access to Evernote user information, which includes usernames, email addresses associated with Evernote accounts and encrypted passwords,’ but that no payment details were accessed. ‘We don’t store any user payment info, so no payment info can be compromised,‘ Libin told TechCrunch.”

Since most apps do store payment information, Evernote’s latest incident prompts a massive app-wide need for security testing. As the Evernote team can likely attest, it’s impossible to predict and test for these attacks inside the lab. Utilizing white-hat security experts under real world conditions is the only way to identify and patch these vulnerabilities.

For more information on In-The-Wild Security Testing, click here.

Sure we’ve seen the launch video that featured a few select people wearing Google Glass. And recently, we’ve seen photos of people wearing actual prototypes out in-the-wild. But what would it be like to wear the glasses your self while doing everyday (and not so everyday) activities? This is what it’s like:

Crowdsourcing is no longer a rarely used practice, as countless businesses now trust the crowd to help them with their day-to-day operations. Crowdsourcing offer unique attributes that other ways of obtaining a service cannot, and that is exactly what tech writer Jenna Branch uncovers in this guest post. 

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Whether you’re a small startup or big enterprise your company requires a strong business plan, product, brilliant team and of course – funding. Small businesses, however, cannot do everything themselves and have limited resources.  This is where crowdsourcing comes into play, because it is an excellent tool to fill in the gap between funds and requirements.

Crowdsourcing is the process of obtaining services, ideas or content from a large group of people. Any job, whether it is innovation, problem solving, design, customer support, development or testing can be crowdsourced.

While a good place to use crowdsourcing is via social media – as one can get easy responses and reply instantaneously – there are other places where this method can be used, as well. Private online forums and closed websites allow for advanced crowdsourcing efficiency.

Here are some ways by which small businesses can utilize crowdsourcing:

• Development of products and ideas – Crowdsourcing lets help small businesses perceive the public’s opinion about their products. Crowdsourcing is also very helpful in the ideation process of a product. For example: Atizo, Ideavibes, and GenCrowd are all crowdsourced ideation companies where one can look for thoughts and feedback for their new product or business.
• Micro-tasking- In small businesses, often there is not enough staff to complete important tasks like researching, translating, writing small passages, or organizing. One can post these tasks on platforms like Clickworker or Amazon Mechanical Turk and outsource the tasks to the crowd.
• Design – Tasks like designing business cards, insignia or, brochures, in which a smaller business may not have the expertise, can be posted on design platforms like Design Crowd or 99Designs. A fixed price is set for such tasks.  The designer presents initial guidelines and suggestions throughout the process to yield better results.
• Innovation platforms – Using platforms like Innocentive or Hypios one can get in touch with professionals to access their industry knowledge.
• Crowdfunding – Small businesses can use platforms like Indiegogo Kickstarter to raise funds from the public to fuel their startup ideas.

In today’s world, crowdsourcing is a very popular business practice, and there is no better way to get large coverage and quality results in a timely manner. Being able to access a large pool of specialized skillsets and ramp-up quickly allows businesses to achieve more, faster.

Don’t be surprised when you find yourself out in-the-wild wearing a computer in the form of a wrist-watch or eye glasses.

Wearable technology is a market that is expected to grow significantly. In fact, this past summer IMS Research predicted the wearable technology market to exceed $6 Billion by 2016.

We’ve heard countless reports of Google’s “Google Glass” prototype, a pair of augmented reality glasses, and we’ve even seen reports of the famed glasses being tested in-the-wild. But now, Apple is reportedly diving into the wearable computing race with today’s talk around the alleged iWatch. While the actual name of the watch is unknown, the news had even The New York Times’ reporter Nick Bilton jumping on the story this morning:

“In its headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., Apple is experimenting with wristwatch-like devices made of curved glass, according to people familiar with the company’s explorations, who spoke on the condition that they not be named because they are not allowed to publicly discuss unreleased products. Such a watch would operate on Apple’s iOS platform, two people said, and stand apart from competitors based on the company’s understanding of how such glass can curve around the human body.”

While the wearable technology rage is thrilling for consumers, it presents a new set of challenges (and headaches) for developers. Developing software that runs well on these unique devices will require a whole new development process, and that many more real world tests.

But developers and QA professionals better buckle up. With the rumored iWatch on the horizon, and Google Glass being tested out and about in the real world, other major tech names are soon to join the likes of Apple and Google in the wearable technology game.

We say time and time again that testing in-the-wild is important because you never know how a real life location is going to effect your app. Sure, you probably expect to have iffy reception in a rural area, but what about the middle of Manhattan? Well, as it turns out, the heavy population and sheer number of smartphones could actually be slowing down response times in the borough. RootMetrics did some speed tests on NYC’s five boroughs to see how service actually is in-the-wild.

As you can see, Manhattan actually has the slowest download speeds, though it beats Brooklyn and Staten Island when it comes to upload speeds.

Gigaom reports that things get even more interesting as your move into the suburbs surrounding New York City.

In all five boroughs, Root recorded the fastest average speeds on AT&T’s LTE networks. Verizon’s LTE came in second in all five cases, while T-Mobile and Sprint were a distant third and fourth respectively (neither carrier has LTE in NYC yet). But in Root’s overall testing of the NYC metro region – which by Root’s definition spans northern New Jersey, bits of southern New York and most of Long Island — Verizon came away with the speed prize, averaging 13.4 Mbps to AT&T’s 10.3 Mbps. While AT&T has built LTE over ever inch of NYC, that coverage seems to fall off when you leave the city.

No matter how much in-the-wild testing you do, things will always occur that you simply couldn’t have been prepared for. Things like – oh, I don’t know – your IT guy spraying your servers with a power cleaner repeatedly over a three-year span. That couldn’t really happen, could it?

A peeved employee took revenge on his company by repeatedly spraying Cillit Bang into its servers in a three-year campaign that caused £32,000 of damage.

Edward Sobolewski was convicted of criminal damage at Oxford Crown Court on Friday and sentenced to 8 months in prison for the attacks on his employer’s computers. He was also ordered to pay £1,000 in compensation.

Sobolewski, an employee at market research company Frost and Sullivan, was upset he had been passed over for a pay rise, prosecutor Steve Malloy QC told the court, as reported by the Telegraph.

Between 2009 and 2012, Sobolewski apparently took revenge by pouring cleaning fluid into the servers and routinely bringing the company’s systems down. The company told the court it had spent thousands of pounds paying for out-of-hours fixes and coping with downtime.

Read the Rest >>>

It has become fairly apparent that software security is a complicated and important issue these days. There are a lot of options if you’re looking to upgrade your security software to protect your devices and data. Which is the best you ask? The folks over at PCWorld and AV-Test checked out nine security suites both in the lab and in-the-wild to see which ones worked best. Here’s a bit of background on the process, from PCWorld:

AV-Test ran each suite through a comprehensive battery of tests to find out how well each would stand up to the worst malware currently in existence. AV-Test also performed speed testing to determine whether the suites will slow your PC to a crawl. We analyzed the data that AV-Test provided, and then tried each of the products ourselves to give you an idea of which suites you should go for—and which ones you should pass on.

These four suites rose to the top:

Best Overall: F-Secure Internet Security 2013
Best Protection: Trend Micro Titanium Internet Security 2013
Best Speed: Norton Internet Security
Best Interface: Norton Internet Security

The full PCWorld article is definitely worth checking out. It has sections that cover which suites were tested (and how they scored), why the winners came out on top, what the security suites don’t do and major security threats for 2013, among other things. And if you’re more concerned about mobile security, don’t discount this article or the suites they review, you might be surprised by some of the features available in the 2013 editions.

Awesome inforgraphic from our friends over at Veracode:

Infographic by Veracode Application Security

There have been countless spottings of him at events, navigating the streets or simply riding public transportation in those unmistakable glasses.

Google’s Co-Founder, Sergey Brin, was most recently seen last week riding the downtown train in New York sporting his Google Glass Specs. According to Jon Russell of The Next Web:

“That a man as fabulously wealthy as Brin uses the train to get around is quite amusing. With his winter hat, beard and plastic bag, he looks just like a regular guy. Albeit one rocking a $1,500 set of glasses.

It’s pretty incredible to think that this technology — which was unveiled last April and demoed at Google IO in June when Brin showed a video of him skydiving with a pair – is being worn out and about among ordinary people, many of whom probably have no idea what it is…let alone how much it is worth.

Is this a glimpse of the future when ordinary folks are wearing Google Glass while doing everyday activities…? Brin will certainly hope so.”

While flying through the air skydiving might not be the best representation of real world usage, a man as brilliant and powerful as Brin knows the importance of testing a product in-the-wild before launching it.  As Russell mentioned, people other than Brin are out testing the specs. In fact, we recently featured an interview with a Googler who was stopped by a reporter while taking the glasses for a spin. In-the-wild testing is a must – and Google knows it.