How to Respond to a Cyber Attack? Now that you are aware of the right tools to detect a threat, it’s time to plan your response strategy. Response must not be delayed, and must be a super fast counter action on the treat is spotted instantaneously. Why?

Huawei Technologies stopped the launching of a new laptop following its ban by the US government from doing business with American suppliers.

Amazon leader Jeff Bezos pledged on Thursday to make the US technology and retail giant carbon neutral by 2040 as well as encourage other firms to do also, in a bid to help meet the goals of the Paris climate accord 10 years early. ''We want to use our scope and our scale to lead the way,'' Mr Bezos informed a news conference in the US capital, aiming to shake off the firm's reputation as a laggard on environmental issues.

Impressive changes in retail can be seen with the lens of large and small technology companies. Retailers are bracing for an urgent need to augment shopping experiences and no retail technology is more pleasant than autonomous checkout.

NEC Corp claims that their face recognition technology gained the highest matching accuracy in the Face Recognition Vendor Test (FRVT) 2018 executed by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), with an error rate of 0.5% when registering 12 million people.

How to Detect a Cyber Attack Against Your Company? But if your manufacturing facility was targeted by a cyber criminal, will you be able to recognize the threat? Or maybe, if an employee was doing something vicious, like diverting payments into their personal account, would you be capable of find the activity? Fast detection is key to successfully containing any fallout from an information breach. To respond quickly to a cyber attack, you must first have the perfect mechanisms in place to uncover the threat.

How will you response if, whenever you had to send very sensitive information somewhere, you relied on a chain of people playing the telephone game to have that information to where it needs to go? Appears like a terrible idea, right? Well, too bad, because that is how the Internet works.

The United States will soon issue licenses authorizing some U.S. companies to supply non-sensitive goods to China’s Huawei, the New York Times said on Wednesday, as high-level officials from the two countries meet this week to continue trade talks.

Samsung Electronics, a global leader in advanced semiconductor technology, today reported that it has developed the industry’s first 12-layer 3D-TSV (Through Silicon Via) technology. Samsung’s new innovation is regarded as one of the most challenging packaging technologies for mass production of high-performance chips, as it involves pinpoint accuracy to vertically interconnect 12 DRAM chips thru a three-dimensional configuration of a little over 60,000 TSV holes, each of which is one-twentieth the thickness of a single strand of human hair.

How to guard your business from Cyber Attacks? Mitigating these threats takes above and beyond a single anti-virus upgrade; it involves ongoing vigilance. But shielding your systems doesn’t have to be complicated. Here is how to get started.

Google has commenced test production of a 5G smartphone that it will probably bring out as soon as next week as part of its intense expansion into branded hardware that aims to steal a march on Apple and tie in consumers to its search and cloud-computing services. It is further learned that as well as working on the new 5G smartphone, which Google might announce at its launch event for new products on Oct. 15, the search giant will display two new 4G Pixel smartphones, as forecasted, and possibly a new smart watch and notebook too.

The European Union’s finance commissioner pledged on Tuesday to advise new rules to regulate virtual currencies, in a reaction to Facebook’s (FB.O) plans to introduce Libra, which the EU considers a risk to financial stability. France and Germany have said that Libra, whose size would midget cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, could control their monetary sovereignty.

All over the United States, small and medium-sized manufacturers (SMMs) are seriously considering integrating industrial robots into their facilities. There's a growing awareness that progressively flexible and affordable robotics systems can help present workers in numerous different ways, taking on repetitive tasks and freeing up staff for higher level work and improving productivity overall.

Amongst the biggest challenges for any successful business is understanding when it’s time to change.  All in all, conventional wisdom says “if it’s not broke, don’t fix it.” But with technology updating at such a swift pace, those who stand still will soon be left behind. The last time the world saw technological advancements at this pace, Henry Ford was just figuring out the assembly line.  But it is fairly possible that by looking back at Ford’s adoption of the ‘new’ technology of his time we may be able to know how to correctly read the signs of today’s technological trends so we can be ready to invest in AI and automation at the most advantageous time for our manufacturing, warehousing, and distribution systems.

Global tablet shipments are likely to slip vastly on year in 2019 amid decreasing demand for brand and education tablets. Sales of white-box models have been drastically undermined by brand-name devices, while demand for small-size white-box tablets will remain to slide in the next five years, according to Digitimes Research's 5-year forecast report on tablets.

As higher education costs remain to rise, students bear the ultimate burden of finding the right school, major, and delivery format to maximize post-graduation success. As opposed to previous generations, millennials and adult learners are searching for alternatives to full-time, on-campus programs, and universities are eager to offer non-traditional routes to a degree. 

Imagine if a robot could automatically adjust its grip based on the size and shape of the object? Put simply, a robot that could fine-tune how it is holding an item so as not to drop it, much just as humans do. According to Siemens, it’s truly possible, and it all comes down to artificial intelligence (AI) based on neural networks.

It’s not far-fetched to claim that the existing cybersecurity landscape is relatively tumultuous, and that is true in every single industry from retail to finance. Cyber strikes are on the rise, primarily in the manufacturing sector.
 
One of the popular motives why manufacturing has come under fire is simply because cyber threats have grown much more sophisticated in recent years. Things have advanced beyond just a software standpoint to hardware — processor vulnerabilities being a perfect example.
 
The fact is, a recent security report from SonicWall Capture Labs shown there were over 74,000 “never-before-seen” complex strikes in 2019. They were so fresh that most of those threats were without even a signature at the time of discovery.
 
This alarming information suggests that cyberattacks on manufacturers are going to grow more frequent, more advanced and more successful. There is a very clear need to protect not just for conventional manufacturing operations, but also all networks, systems and resulting data — especially as the manufacturing industry evolves into a more digital-centric ecosystem.
 
Fortunately, there are cybersecurity tips available to help manufacturers of all sizes protect themselves from cyber threats and prepare themselves for the brave new world of Industry 4.0.
 
Introducing the NIST Cybersecurity Framework
 
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has developed a cybersecurity framework that includes some directions and best practices for coping with potential cybersecurity threats. Most importantly, it's attainable to all organizations, including small to medium-sized manufacturers.
 
Representatives of the MEP National NetworkTM, just like the Michigan Manufacturing Technology Center, offer flexible, cost-effective approaches to implementing cybersecurity programs that align with the NIST framework, making these protections accessible to even a cost-prohibited company.
 
The framework lays out five practical activities, or functions, that can be used to achieve a more secure operation. They include:
 
1. Identify
 
This first function expressly deals with understanding potential cybersecurity risks to an organization, including its systems, people, assets, data, capabilities and networks. The primary question is: What must be done to manage existing risks and mitigate the potential for damage?
 
Actions the framework recommends in this category include:

• Controlling who has access to your information
• Conducting background and security checks for all employees
• Requiring individual user accounts for each employee
• Creating cybersecurity policies and procedures

 
2. Protect
 
Commonly, learning about leads to taking action — which is the protection aspect of the framework. This is where a manufacturer must develop and implement safeguards for its operations or services. Actions you can take include to protect your operation include:

• Limiting access to your user data and information
• Installing surge protector and uninterruptible power supplies
• Patching your operating systems and software regularly
• Installing and activating software and hardware firewalls
• Securing all wireless access points and network
• Setting up web and email filters
• Using encryption for sensitive business information
• Disposing of old computers and media safely
• Training your employees

 
3. Detect
 
A suitable monitoring system must be applied to determine either a recent cybersecurity event or one that’s ongoing. The well timed discovery of these attacks is necessary to an effective security strategy. Activities for detecting cyber attacks include:
 

• Installing and updating anti-virus and other cybersecurity programs
• Running anti-virus and anti-spyware programs daily
• Conducting full system scans daily
• Maintaining and monitoring detection logs

 
4. Respond
 
Upon discovery, every manufacturer must have controls available to respond accordingly to an attack. These include functionality to block them, together with to regain access to a system.
 
This functionality is somehow distinct for manufacturers as most providers use only limited networks or wireless connectivity. Industrial-quality access controls are crucial to monitor not merely internal processes and systems, but also that of vendors and involved partners. Dynamic, real-time policy enforcement is essential across all of the network, and not just for local operations.
 
A response program should include:
 

• Developing a plan for information security incidents by determining:

• Who to call in case of an incident
• What to do with your data in case of an incident
• When to alert senior management, emergency personnel, and others
• The types of activities that constitute an information security incident

• Know your notification obligations

 
5. Recover
 
Generally the same as data or systems recovery, this function deals with the restoration of impaired or damaged services and content. It should include:
 

• Making full backups of essential business data
• Incremental backups of important business information
• Assessing and improving your procedures and technologies

 
One other aspect of this is opening up communications with clients or customers to reveal the impact of an event. Essentially, it would also include follow-up measures to stop future attacks.
 
How to Secure Your Company
 
At last, companies should focus on adhering to NIST’s volunteer framework not merely to prevent severe threats, but likewise to understand how they and their team can better deal with them. For many organizations — big and small — it is not a question of whether or not they will experience a cyberattack but when. Being prepared for when that happens is the best way to mitigate prospective damage and any operational impact.
 
The best course of action to secure your company — or to find out just how vulnerable it is — is to work alongside experts in manufacturing cybersecurity and the NIST Cybersecurity Framework. Manufacturers ready to take this critical step in their digital evolution should contact their local Manufacturing Extension Partnership Program (MEP) Center. They are really part of the MEP National Network, which includes hundreds of specialists who know how to address the cybersecurity concerns of small and medium-sized manufacturers, and who are well-versed in the NIST Cybersecurity Framework.
 
INDUSTRYWEEK

Immediately after it was reported in September that NTT Docomo, Japan's biggest mobile carrier, would not offer phones from Huawei Technologies for use on its 5G network, the Chinese corporation announced its new products would ship without Google applications. These actions really point to the coming of a technologically divided world. The U.S. in May blacklisted Huawei due to national security concerns, imposing restrictions on sales of U.S. technologies, including Google's Android operation system, to the Chinese company.

A big pastime of economists in the 1980s and 1990s was attempting to estimate how much corporate and industrial productivity would certainly benefit from the then-novel phenomena of personal computers, workgroup servers, and computer networking. In the early stages it was hard to see, but over time, economists did indeed find evidence that information technology contributed to boosting economic productivity.