2015 technology industry graveyard

2015 technology industry graveyard
Cisco, Microsoft, Google and others bury outdated technologies to move ahead with new ones.

Ba-bye
The Technology Industry Graveyard is pretty darn full in 2015, and we’re not even including the near-dead such as RadioShack and Microsoft’s IE browser. Pay your respects here…

GrooveShark
The self-described “World’s Music Library” is no more after shutting down in April in the wake of serious legal pressure by music companies whose songs GrooveShark allowed to be shared but had never licensed. Apple and Google had each kicked GrooveShark out of their app stores years ago due to complaints from music labels. Much more sadly than the 9-year-old company’s demise, however, was the death of co-founder Josh Greenberg in July at the age of just 28.

Typo iPhone keyboard
Not even the glamor of being co-founded by American Idol host Ryan Seacrest could help Typo Innovations save its iPhone keyboard, which BlackBerry said infringed on its patents. So instead, Typo bailed on the iPhone model and settled for selling ones for devices with screens 7.9-inches or larger (like iPads).

Amazon Fire Phone
With a product name like Fire, you’re just asking for colorful headlines if it bombs. And indeed, Amazon has stopped making its Fire Phone about a year after introducing it and media outlets were quick to highlight the company “extinguishing” it or remarking on the phone being “burnt out.” Amazon has had some success on the hardware front, namely with its Kindle line, but the Fire just didn’t distinguish itself and was going for free with a carrier contract by the end.

Interop New York
Interop Las Vegas carries on as one of the network industry’s top trade shows next May, but little sibling Interop New York is no more this year. The Fall show, traditionally held at the Javits Center since 2005, was always smaller and was discontinued for 2015 despite lively marketing material last year touting “More Than 30 Interop New York Exhibitors and Sponsors to Make Announcements in Anticipation of the Event.”

GTalk
Google ditched so many things in 2015 that we devoted an entire slideshow to Google’s Graveyard. So to choose just one representative item here, we remember Google Talk, which had a good run, starting up in 2005. But it’s never good when Google pulls out the term “deprecated” as it did in February in reference to this chat service’s Windows App. Google said it was pulling the plug on GTalk in part to focus on Google Hangouts in a world where people have plenty of other ways to chat online. However, Google Talk does live on via third-party apps.

Cisco Invicta storage products
Cisco has a good touch when it comes to acquisitions, but its $415 mlllion WHIPTAIL buyout from 2013 didn’t work out. The company in July revealed it had pulled the plug on its Invicta flash storage appliances acquired via that deal. It’s not unthinkable though that Cisco could go after another storage company, especially in light of the Dell-EMC union.

RapidShare
The once-popular file hosting system, begun in 2002, couldn’t withstand the onslaught of competition from all sides, including Google and Dropbox. Back in 2009, the Switzerland-based operation ran one of the Internet’s 20 most visited websites, according to Wikipedia. It shut down on March 31, and users’ leftover files went away with it.

Windows RT devices
This locked-down Microsoft OS for tablets and convertible laptops fared about as well as Windows 8, after being introduced as a prototype in 2011 at the big CES event in Las Vegas. Microsoft’s software for the 32-bit ARM architecture was intended to enable devices to exploit that architecture’s power efficiency, but overall, the offering proved to be a funky fit with existing Windows software. Production of RT devices stopped earlier in 2015 as Microsoft focuses on Win10 and more professional-focused Surface devices.

OpenStack vendor Nebula
As Network World’s Brandon Butler wrote in April, Nebula became one of the first casualties of the open source OpenStack cloud computing movement when it shuttered its doors. The company, whose founder was CIO for IT at NASA before starting Nebula in 2011, suggested in its farewell letter that it was a bit ahead of its time, unable to convert its $38 million in funding and hardware/software appliances into a sustainable business.

FriendFeed
Facebook bought this social news and information feed aggregator in 2009, two years after the smaller business started, and then killed it off in April. People have moved on to other means of gathering and discovering info online, so FriendFeed died from lack of use. It did inspire the very singular website, Is FriendFeed Dead Yet, however, so its legacy lives on.

Apple Aperture
Apple put the final nails in its Aperture photo editing app in 2015, ending the professional-quality post-production app’s 10-year run at Version 3.6. In its place, Apple introduced its Photos app for users of both its OS X Mac and iOS devices.

Secret
One of the co-founders of anonymous sharing app shared this in April: The company was shutting down and returning whatever part of its $35 million in funding was left. The company’s reality was just not going to meet up with his vision for it, said co-founder David Byttow. The company faced criticism that it, like other anonymous apps such as Yik Yak, allowed for cyberbullying.

Amazon Wallet
Amazon started the year by announcing its Wallet app, the company’s 6-month-old attempt to get into mobile payments, was a bust. The app, which had been in beta, allowed users to store their gift/loyalty/rewards cards, but not debit or credit cards as they can with Apple and Google mobile payment services.

Circa News app
Expired apps could easily fill an entire tech graveyard, so we won’t document all of their deaths here. But among them not making it through 2015 was Circa, which reportedly garnered some $4 million in venture funding since starting in 2012 but didn’t get enough takers for its app-y brand of journalism.

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Can anti-virus technology morph into breach detection systems?

Can anti-virus technology morph into breach detection systems?
Such breach detection systems would need a centralized management reporting system and cloud-based analysis of gathered threat data.

Anti-virus software is still often considered a "checkbox" item for enterprise deployments, especially on Microsoft Windows, but over the decades, anti-virus software changed to do far more than just signature-based virus blocking. Today, the question is whether the type of anti-malware product that evolved from virus checking can transform again to be a part of a "breach detection system," or BDS

“The premise of breach detection is things will get through all your defenses and you need to contain it as soon as possible,” says Randy Abrams, research director at NSS Labs, which has begun testing what it calls BDS products that can identify evidence of stealthy cyberattacks, track down what corporate computers and networks were hit and quickly mitigate against any malware dropped in that attack which would be used to spy and exfiltrate sensitive data. BDS products, however they do it — through sandboxing, an endpoint agent or other approach -- should be able to at least catch the breach within 48 hours, he says.
The premise of threat detection is things will get through your defenses and you need to contain it as soon as possible.
— Randy Abrams, research director at NSS Labs

BDS products are largely immature, Abrams acknowledges, but enterprise customers are keenly interested in them and asking to have them independently tested. NSS Labs started doing that last year with products from AhnLab as well as FireEye and Fidelis Security, which was acquired by General Dynamics. These three did fairly well in that first round of basic testing, Abrams says. But the main limitations appeared to be there needs to be more protocol analysis done in to ensure attackers don’t have “a hidden tunnel out of the enterprise,” he adds. The next round of BDS tests anticipated for later this year will be tougher, he says.

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The vendors that NSS Labs consider to be part of the emerging BDS market today include Cisco, FireEye, Symantec, McAfee, Palo Alto Networks, Damballa, Fidelis and AhnLab. The security industry itself is abuzz with the utterances of “indicators of compromise,” the “IOC” clues such as anomalous outbound traffic that might indicate an attacker successfully broke in. Abrams thinks any BDS will need a centralized management reporting system and probably a lot of cloud-based analysis of gathered threat data.

Where this will all go is uncertain. The term BDS isn’t universally applied as a description. One research firm, IDC, last year started tracking what it calls “Specialized Threat Analysis and Protection” as a new segment that seems similar to BDS.

The question is whether the established vendors in the traditional antivirus industry, particularly Symantec and McAfee which lead in market share, can transition over to anything close to the NSS Labs’ view of BDS. Abrams notes the problem with any anti-malware product, however good, is that criminals determined to break into corporations are testing the attack and espionage code they’ve developed for that against existing antivirus products to find something that will get through and not be noticed, at least for a while.

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Cisco fixes remote access vulnerabilities in Cisco Secure Access Control System

Flaws in the network access control product can give attackers access to administrative functions, Cisco said

Cisco Systems has released software updates for its Cisco Secure Access Control System (ACS) in order to patch three vulnerabilities that could give remote attackers administrative access to the platform and allow them to execute OS-level commands without authorization.

Cisco ACS is a server appliance that enforces access control policies for both wireless and wired network clients. It's managed through a Web-based user interface and supports the RADIUS (Remote Access Dial In User Service) and TACACS+ (Terminal Access Controller Access-Control System Plus) protocols.

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Versions of the Cisco Secure ACS software older than 5.5 contain two vulnerabilities in the RMI (Remote Method Invocation) interface that's used for communication between different ACS deployments and listens on TCP ports 2020 and 2030.

One of the vulnerabilities, identified as CVE-2014-0648, stems from insufficient authentication and authorization enforcement and allows remote unauthenticated attackers to perform administrative actions on the system through the RMI interface.

The other vulnerability, identified as CVE-2014-0649, allows remote attackers with access to restricted user accounts to escalate their privileges and perform superadmin functions via the RMI interface.

A third vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2014-0650, was discovered in the system's Web-based interface and is the result of insufficient input validation. An unauthenticated remote attacker can exploit this vulnerability to inject and execute OS-level commands without shell access, Cisco said in a security advisory. This vulnerability affects Cisco Secure ACS software older than 5.4 patch 3.

There are no configuration workarounds available to mitigate these vulnerabilities, so updating the software to the new versions released by Cisco is recommended.

"The Cisco Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) is not aware of any public announcements or malicious use of the vulnerabilities that are described in this advisory," the company said.

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