New apps in semicon — smart grid and secure transactions

Happy new year and welcome to my blog.

Let’s start this year by looking at René Penning de Vries, senior VP and CTO of NXP, who spoke this morning at ISA’s CXO Conclave, titled New Applications in Semiconductors (Smart Grid & Secure Transactions) – Role semiconductors play to make our society a better place!

Dr. René Penning de Vries touched upon the role semiconductors play in two of the societal mega-trends: energy and security. In 21st century, IC industry has gone from business driven to society driven and semiconductors play key role in solving problems like energy shortage and security threat. In essence, semiconductors make our lives better.

The first part of this talk touched upon “smart grid”, it’s applications, and associated semiconductor innovations in AMS domain. The second part covered “secure transactions”, innovation, and transition in this domain from “IC hardware focus” to “HW-OS-Apps holistic”. Rene illustrated with real-life NFC example from the recent Google-NXP collaboration.

According to Rene, the IC industry is being driven from business to consumer, and now, to society. Some of the well known areas where ICs are being used today include health and wellness, transport and mobility, security and safety, energy and environment, communication and e-society.

Some of the key macro drivers in electronics include:
Energy efficiency: Includes efficient power conversion and low stand-by power, energy-saving lighting and back-lighting, energy conservation through demand side management, electric/lighter vehicles, and intelligent traffic management.

Connected mobile devices: Includes proliferation of mobile data usage, wireless infra build-out, smart mobile devices: always-on, multimedia, location-based, connected car, many broadcast and connectivity standards, and new user interfaces (e.g., touch, joystick).

Security: Includes secure mobile transactions and secure identity, authentication, tagging and tracking, car and home access, security and remote diagnostics, and radar and (body) scanning installations.

Health: Includes personal healthcare and portable emergency devices, connected hearing aids and implantable devices, car safety and comfort, and electronic diagnostics.

Key application areas include:
Wireless infrastructure: Wireless base stations, satellite, CATV infrastructure and radar.

Lighting: Lighting, LED, backlightingIndustrial: Smart metering, white goods and home appliances, Pachinko, medical, industrial and ATE.

Mobile: Mobile handset, portable power supplies and hearing aids.Automotive: Car access and immobilizers, in vehicle networking, car entertainment, telematics, ABS, transmission and throttle control, and lighting.

Identification: Secure identity, secure transactions, tagging and authentication.Consumerr: TV, satellite, cable, terrestrial and IP set-top boxes, and satellite outdoor units.

Computing: Monitor, power supplies, personal computer TV.

Round-up 2010: Best of electronics, telecom and technology

Year 2010 has been a good year for the global electronics industry, rather, the technology industry, coming right after a couple of years of recession. Well, it is time to look back on 2010 and see the good, bad and ugly sides, if any, of electronics, telecom and technology.

Presenting my list of top posts for 2010 from these three segments.

ELECTRONICS

Electronics for energy efficient powertrain

Photonics rocks in India @ APW 2010, Cochin!

Plastic Logic’s QUE proReader looks to mean business!

Growing Indian power electronics market provides host of opportunities

Philips focuses on how interoperability, content sharing drive CE devices!

Apple never ceases to amaze!

Is this a war of tablets, or Apple OS vs. Google Android?

India needs to become major hardware player!

Roundup of day 2 @ Electronica India 2010

Strategic roadmap for electronics enabling energy efficient usage: Venkat Rajaraman, Su-Kam

NI stresses on innovation, launches LabVIEW 2010!

What’s Farnell (element14) up to? And, semicon equipment bubble burst? Whoa!!

Bluetooth set as short range wireless standard for smart energy!

View 3D TV, without glasses, today!

Indian medical electronics equipment industry to grow at 17 percent CAGR over next five years: ISA

Top 10 electronics industry trends for 2011

TELECOMMUNICATIONS

LTE will see larger deployments, higher volumes than WiMAX!

LTE should benefit from WiMAX beachhead!

Context-aware traffic mediation software could help telcos manage data tsunami: Openwave

Mobile WiMAX deployment and migration/upgrade strategies

Upgrade to WiMAX 2 uncertain as TD-LTE gains in momentum!

Tejas celebrates 10 years with new products for 3G/BWA backhaul

Focus on gyroscopes for mobile phone apps: Yole

Bluetooth low energy should contribute to WSN via remote monitoring

INSIDE Contactless unveils SecuRead NFC solution for mobile handset market

How are femtocells enhancing CDMA networks?

Top 10 telecom industry trends for 2011

TECHNOLOGY

Symantec’s Internet threat security report on India has few surprises!

Epic — first ever web browser for India, from India!

Norton cybercrime report: Time to take back your Internet from cybercriminals!

NComputing bets big on desktop virtualization

Brocade launches VDX switches for virtualized, cloud-optimized data centers

It isn’t an easy job tracking so many different segments! 🙂 I will try and do better than this next year!

Best wishes for a very, very happy and prosperous 2011! 🙂

Norton cybercrime report: Time to take back your Internet from cybercriminals!

Do you possess sound Internet etiquette? Are you careful while using social networking sites? Do you trust others and share your online details? How many of you think cybercrimes are ‘usual’ going to ‘critical’? Are you even aware of any cybercrime? Who would you turn to for help, if you were attacked online?

Norton from Symantec today released the Norton Cybercrime Report: The Human Impact in India. It covers 14 countries: Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom, USA, covering 7,066 adults. This report tries to answer some (or most) of the questions above!

Norton collaborated with Anne Collier, independent expert advisor on Internet safety.

Effendy Ibrahim, Internet safety advocate and consumer business lead, Asia, highlighted the key points of yhe Norton Cybercrime Report. These include:

* A silent digital epidemic — of victims who feel powerless.
* People feel ripped off and pissed off — and lacking confidence that criminals will be brought to justice.
* Moral compasses not pointing true north — a grey area when it comes to online morals and ethics.
* People trying to protect themselves, but coming up short —  Common sense is not the best defence.

The silent epidemic

Cybercrime -- the silent epidemic!

Globally, 65 percent of the people have fallen victim to cybercrime! However, nobody seems to be talking about it! In India, 76 percent have fallen victim to cybercrimals. Only 3 percent of the global poplulation do not expect to fall victim. In India, this number is only 8 percent!

Also, 79 percent globally do not expect cybercriminals to be brought to justice. And, 57 percent Indians do not expect cybercriminals to be brought to justice either! Not very encouraging figures!

Falling victim to cybercrime can leave people feeling angry, annoyed, frustrated, violated, cheated, upset, helpless, and so on and so forth. I’ve experienced this feeling, and it was definitely similar!

Some other interesting findings from Norton’s report. Indian adults feel highly responsible for phishing — 85 percent, online scams — 81 percent, and computer viruses/malware attacks — 88 percent. It seems that Indians practice bad Internet etiquette!

And, when in trouble, who do the victims contact in India? The survey says, 46 percent call their bank, 40 percent contact the website, and 37 percent call the police!

Around a quarter of victims take a DIY approach to sorting cybercrime. Unfortunately for them, the Norton experts say that the actions they are taking won’t necessarily help them, and may not even be safe.

For instance in India, 53 percent restrict the websites they visit. This only limits people’s enjoyment of the Internet. Security software, with a search advisor tool, will let you know if a site is safe.

Next, 38 percent get a family member or a friend to sort things out. Well, many threats go undetected by out-of-date or incomplete security solutions. So unless your friends are security experts, chances are that you will still be vulnerable. Finally, 32 percent try to identify the criminal and seek justice. This is not easy. Therefore, it is always advisable to work with law enforcement agencies, rather than go it alone.

Intel's McAfee buy: Too few answers to too many questions, for now!

Yes I know I am a little late with this due to various reasons, but better late than never! On August 19th, Intel literally shocked the IT and information security world with its acquisition of McAfee for a whopping $7.68 billion approximately! Startled, a lot of folks started asking around as to why Intel did such a thing! Is Intel even doing the right thing in the first place?

The world boasts of several magnificent gadgets and devices — mobile phones and smartphones, Internet connected TVs, Wi-Fi enabled eReaders, the iPads, portable navigation devices with wireless interfaces, and so on and so forth! Now, how many of these devices actually boast of great security? Aren’t most of those unprotected?

With so many devices, besides smartphones, getting connected to the Internet every day, and with little or no on-board or ‘in-house’ security in place, this move is perhaps a masterstroke on Intel’s part!

But then, not all of such devices would run on Intel’s chips either! So? How will Intel control the hardware security market and create a monopoly — as some have been pointing out? Or, is there a much larger, hidden picture, which will get revealed over time?

Or, has this been done with the intention to rule the mobile security market, or well, security within the chip, or even device security or hardware security? Also, will this signal the end of malware?

And what about McAfee itself? Will this signal an end to all of its wonderful product development now that it will be part of Intel? What about its customers? Will some of its top executives march out? Intel says that McAfee will continue to run as is, and one hopes that it is maintained.

Personally, I was keen to know what Symantec thought of this acquisition. The company stated: The announcement by Intel to acquire McAfee emphasizes the growing relevance and need for security protection that extends beyond the PC and acknowledges Symantec’s ongoing strategy.

However, Symantec believes it is important to focus security on identities and the information people need to access, independent of the device they may be using. That will require security to work seamlessly across multiple platforms as users switch devices to use, store and transmit information anytime and anywhere. Symantec offers a broad portfolio of security and management solutions that protects customers from the largest enterprises to SMBs to consumers.

Epic — first ever web browser for India, from India!

Indians are highly skillful and innovative, and the recently released Epic web browser provides an excellent example. The Epic browser is said to be the first-ever web browser for India. It is also the first product from Bangalore-based Hidden Reflex, a software company. Hidden Reflex is a software product start-up founded by Alok Bhardwaj in 2007.

Epic incidentally comes with a built-in anti-virus scanner. Some privacy features include one-click private data deletion, one-click private browsing, and flash cookie deletion built-in (Epic claims to be the first browser ever to kill them!).

The Epic web browser.

Quite nice and easy to use and surf the web, Epic has loads of sidebar applications — a huge plus point! You can type in any Indian language. Next, you can skin your Epic browser.

I selected Sunil Gavaskar, the famous Indian cricketer, as my skin (see top of image) for multiple reasons. One, I feel that he’s the one man who changed the way India plays cricket today, starting from his epic performances in the West Indies in 1971! Two, whatever anyone wishes to say, he is India’s greatest test cricket batsman ever! The other choice was Bruce Lee, but I could not locate him!

Next, there’s an application that lets you edit and save as text or HTML. There’s another application called Snippets, which lets you highlight text, images, etc., and drag and drop into the sidebar to create a snippet. I tried developing one and it works quite well.

Users would be interested to know about a video sidebar. You can perform a YouTube search while working, and find and watch the video you like! The My Computer application opens all folders you’d like to see. So, you can open any folder and directly open any file or files, while surfing on the browser. Another application lets you create a To Do list, to remind you of the chores you need to do! Yet another interesting application has a timer, alerts and stopwatch.

There are direct links to social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Orkut, as well as to Gmail and Yahoo — all on the browser’s sidebar. Okay, there’s a Maps application as well. You can use the built in Google Map to locate places, find directions, etc.

There’s a travel application, which allows you to book air tickets via Yatra, Cleartrip, etc. I clicked on the Trains, which showed up Cleartrip. Wish that Epic can add the IRCTC website as well at the earliest.

There’s a sidebar application on Jobs as well! I tried it out, and again, it works well! Games is yet another application of interest! I didn’t try that out, lest I get sidetracked!

Symantec's Internet threat security report on India has few surprises!

Actually, no surprise, really! India is definitely shooting up — in the wrong direction — as far as Internet threats are concerned! The India edition of Symantec’s Internet threat security report, presented by Vishal Dhupar, managing director, Symantec India, has several key findings that will make you sit up and think! Let’s start!!

Vishal Dhupar, managing director, Symantec India, presenting the Internet threat security report, India edition.

Here are just two among the many data points. One, India, Brazil and Poland — all witnessed growth in malicious activity. In 2009, India accounted for 15 percent of all malicious activity in the APJ region, an increase from 10 percent in 2008. Also, 19 percent of the attacks targeting India, originated in India itself in 2009. So, India is rising — both as the country of origin and a target for attacks! Wonderful!

Another one: after the US, Brazil and India are prominent among the countries where Web-based attacks originate. Okay, India was also one of the highest ranked countries for Zeus infections in 2009!

So, the key findiings of the threat landscape are as follows: The underground economy remains unaffected by the global economy. Hence, users are still plagued by Web-based attacks. Targeted attacks focus on enterprises — no surprise! Next, attack kits make it easier for novices to indulge in information theft. Finally, malicious activity takes place in emerging countries (read India, among them). I will deal with all of these a bit later.

Dhupar elaborated on some best practices as well that we all — enterprises and end users need to follow. These include:
* Defense-in-depth strategies
* Proactive policy based approach to security
* Test security, and update definitions and patches.
* Educate management on security.
* Emergency response procedures with backup and restore.

As for the way ahead, cybercriminals will continue to innovate to fuel the underground economy. New age Internet technologies and usage will encourage novel propagation vectors. The global scale and origin of attacks requires international co-operation.

Reputation based security protects you from malware

(L-R): Shantanu Ghosh, VP, India Product Operations, Symantec and Joe Pasqua, VP, Research, Symantec.

Information is everything in today’s connected world! According to Joe Pasqua, VP, Research, Symantec Corp., there are 487 exabytes of data globally, growing at 51 percent annually.

Speaking about the innovative work being done at Symantec Research Labs, he said, it was the Labs’ endeavor to bring together technologies and products in new and interesting ways and help solve problems. “We have a customer centric approach to innovation,” he said.

Symantec Research Labs develops cutting edge technologies to solve real-world customer challenges in security, storage and systems management. It does core research, advanced concepts and collaboratve research.

According to Pasqua, reputation based security changes the manner in which you can protect yourself from malware. It was noticed a number of years ago that there were more of malware. “So, we decided to create a reputation score for every piece of software.”

Symantec Research Labs has an extensive and successful track record. These include core security technologies such as reputation-based security and Browser Defender. Other areas include consumer cloud services, infrastructure software, etc. Pasqua provided a sneak peak of the Symantec Mobile Reputation Security (SMRS) research prototype as well.

More details in a while.

Top trends in cyber crimes you need to watch out for!

Here’s part two of my conversation with Gaurav Kanwal, Country Sales Manager – India, Consumer Products & Solutions, Symantec. Here, we discussed trends in cyber crimes, how users can protect themselves against malware, phishing and other attacks, and some India based statistics.

Top trends in cyber crimes
What are the trends that Symantec has been seeing in cyber crimes today? Are any new trends appearing?

According to Kanwal, today’s online thieves will stop at nothing to steal anything you’ve got: your money, your identity, even your good name. Their methods are getting more devious and sophisticated every day. Cyber criminals then sell the information on the online black market. Some trends that Symantec has recently witnessed include:

Explosion of malware variants: Significant changes in the threat landscape over the last few years have dramatically altered the distribution profile for new malware. Today, instead of a single malware strain infecting millions of machines, it is much more common to see many millions of malware strains, each targeting a handful of machines.

Advanced Web Threats: Threats are becoming increasingly sneaky and complex. New scams, such as drive-by downloads, or exploits that come from seemingly legitimate sites, can be almost impossible for the average user to detect. Before the user knows it, malicious content has been downloaded onto their computer.

Social Networks: Online social networking continues to rise in popularity due to the numerous opportunities it provides. Social networking also provides phishers with a lot more bait than they used to have. Threats can come from all sorts of avenues within a networking site. Games, links and notifications are easy starting points for phishers. As society picks up one end of the social networking stick, it inevitably picks up the security problems on the other end.

Rising Spam Levels: We may not want it, but it still keeps coming. In October 2009, about 90 percent of all email messages were spam. The overall amount does fluctuate, but on average, the levels of spam have primarily risen rather than fallen. Big headlines almost always lead to more spam, and major headlines from 2009, such as the death of Michael Jackson, the H1N1 flu outbreak and the Diwali festival are examples of this. Furthermore, according to a recent Symantec report, spam and phishing information was the 2nd most requested item on the cyber mafia’s underground economy.

Malvertisements and scareware: Cybercriminals have figured out how to deceive people by presenting counterfeit messages. Examples of this include malicious advertisements or “malvertisments,” which redirect people to malicious sites, or “scareware,” which parade as antivirus scanners and scare people into thinking that their computer is infected when that’s not the case.

To encourage users to install rogue software, cybercriminals place website ads that prey on users’ fears of security threats. These ads typically include false claims such as “If this ad is flashing, your computer may be at risk or infected,” urging the user to follow a link to scan their computer or get software to remove the threat.

According to a recent Symantec study, 93 percent of software installations for the top 50 rogue security software scams were intentionally downloaded by the user.

As of June 2009, Symantec has detected more than 250 distinct rogue security software programs. To make matters worse, some rogue software installs malicious code that puts users at risk of attack from additional threats.

Symantec's Norton 2010 products use cloud based intelligence

Recently, Symantec brought a completely unique approach to online security with Norton 2010. The Norton Internet Security 2010 and Norton AntiVirus 2010 leverage a new model of security, codenamed Quorum, to attain unmatched detection of new malware and advance far beyond traditional signature and behaviour-based detection.

I managed to catch up with Gaurav Kanwal, Country Sales Manager – India, Consumer Products & Solutions, Symantec, to find out more about this release. Of course, Symantec was kind enough to share a copy of the software.

Norton 2010 products and their unique approach
Cybercrime has surpassed illegal drug trafficking as a criminal money maker. Cybercriminals use phony emails, fake websites and online ads to steal everything you’ve got. Your money, your identity, even your reputation.

To do that, cybercriminals are furiously writing and then rewriting new and unique pieces of malware, hoping to stay under the radar of threat signatures for as long as possible. Symantec security researchers see more than 200 million attacks on average every month, the vast majority of which are never-seen-before threats and delivered via the web.

Kanwal said: “The reality is, the signature approach and other traditional methods of security are not keeping pace with the sheer number of these threats being created by online criminals. Traditional security solutions are obsolete today.

“The faster, safer and smarter Norton 2010 is anything but traditional. Norton 2010 harnesses the power of millions of users united against cybercrime and gives consumers the power to ‘deny’ digital dangers and ‘allow’ a safe online experience.

“Norton 2010 achieves this by leveraging a new and unique model of reputation-based security, codenamed Quorum, to attain unmatched detection of new malware and advance far beyond traditional signature and behaviour-based detection.

“In short, the code name Quorum takes the greatest weapon cyber criminals have in their arsenal – their ability to generate unique pieces of malware at an alarming rate – and turns that very weapon against them.”

The other key and unique feature in the Norton 2010 products is the Norton Insight family of technologies, which uses extensive online intelligence systems to proactively protect the PC and keep users informed of the security and performance impact of files and applications that they encounter in their everyday online experience. The suite consists of:

Norton Download Insight – Uses extensive online intelligence systems leveraging reputation to proactively protect your PC. Analyses and reports on the safety of new files and applications before users install and run them.

Norton System Insight – Provides features and easy-to-understand system information to help keep PCs performing at top speed. Automatic and on-demand application optimisation rejuvenates application performance. Provides a view of recent events on the computer, providing the information required to research and analyze PC issues. Performance graphs help pinpoint what’s causing a computer to slow down.

Norton Threat Insight – Provides details on threats that have been detected on your PC – including useful information on where it came from (the URL) and when it was initially encountered.

Norton Insight Network – Leverages a cloud-based approach unique to Symantec. Based on the technology codenamed Quorum, it takes cloud-based security beyond traditional blacklists and whitelists. It uses a statistical analysis of file attributes based on billions of scans on millions of computers to identify the trust level of a file. This way Norton can identify files to be trustworthy or untrustworthy that would otherwise fall into the grey area of the unknown with only traditional security methods.

Additional key technologies:

SONAR 2 – Sophisticated second-generation behavioural security technology that detects entirely new threats based on their suspicious actions, without the need for traditional fingerprints. Leverages data from the reputation cloud, firewall, network communications (IPS), and file attributes such as location on the PC, origin information, etc., to decide when to detect a program as a threat.

New Antispam (Norton Internet Security only) – Powerful Enterprise-grade spam blocking engine helps keep you clear of unwanted email and safe from email-based scams and infections. 20 percent more effective than the previous engine and requires no training.

Norton Safe Web (Norton Internet Security only) – Website rating service that annotates Google, Yahoo! and Bing.com search results with site safety ratings to warn users about sites that may pose a danger to them. It also includes ecommerce safety ratings to help users make safer online shopping decisions.

OnlineFamily.Norton (Norton Internet Security only) – Norton Internet Security 2010 users can opt to try a subscription to OnlineFamily.Norton, a new Web-based service that keeps parents in the loop on their kids online lives and fosters communication about what’s appropriate and inappropriate behaviour on the Internet.

Cogs in the wheel

In engineering, it is imperative that all cogs of the wheel come together, so that the wheel rolls smoothly. Similarly, it is imperative that all key IT processes in an organization gel together and work as one.

Imagine the nightmare that enterprises, small and large, would have to go through should this did not happen!

The first basic IT asset is your company’s network, or the intranet. We have seen several times that a company’s network’s down for some reason and mails can’t be sent or received.

In such cases, the organizations or the enterprises who are ‘stuck’ with this situation, are literally crippled. Mails can’t be received, mails can’t be sent out, important mails are missed, business-critical processes are waylaid, and so on and so forth. I’ve been part of this nightmare several times.

Once, the undersea cable snapped during my stay in a company. I don’t need to add the problem we had to face for at least half a day, as service providers worked furiously to rectify the cable and restore normal service.

Some advocate satellite as the best medium for managing data transmission. Maybe! Some others cite wireless. Perhaps!! Then, I hear from many that there are issues related with security and storage. However, those would only come into play once your basic network is operational smoothly.

In telecom, they have something called five nines, or 99.9999, which means the network is up and running for this percentage of time! You’ve noticed how people go beserk and start cursing their phones or the network, should they fail to receive a network, or are unable to connect to the network!

What they don’t know or realize is the hard work that’s involved in setting up, maintaining and operating a network! It’s similar to what sometimes happens in offices when the network breaks down and we are unable to send/receive mails.

Maybe, it would be prudent to first manage the internal network as best as possible, before moving on to bigger, better things. The cogs in the wheel got to move smoothly.