Office Document Strategies Blog

Anyone who spends any time at all listening to what happens in the technology and retail fields will know by now that Amazon experienced intermittent outages with the launch of their 2018 Prime Day on Monday afternoon this week.  For anyone who is not up to what is happening at the world's most aggressive online retailer each year they launch a roughly 36 hour promotion day which makes Black Friday in the US and Boxing Day in Canada look tiny.  Estimates are that over 3.4 billion dollars in sales will be produced this year on Prime Day in spite of the glitches which occurred. 

It is over twenty five years ago that our company started to actively work in the field of document management.  In the early days it was called document imaging as the primary technology involved using high speed scanners to scan and capture images of paper documents for long term storage and retrieval. 

The Canadian Federal Government has introduced revisions to the Canada Elections Act designed to address concerns about how electronic interference affects future voting.  Given all the controversy about US, European and other jurisdictions being affected by both individual and country sponsored hacking during elections this is a timely and important topic for Canada given the numbers of elections coming over the next couple of years,

Anyone watching the political situation in the US knows that cybercrime has become more than just an economic tool.  The political use of cybercrime is potentially even more critical to the world than the economic impacts but understanding this should not have any of us forget how critical the dollar costs are. 

Until the development of 3D Printing when someone talked about printing we all understood it was a two dimensional output, black or coloured toner on a flat piece of paper.  

With the development of 3D printing and its rapid advancement into using many different types of raw product for the printing of three dimensional objects the technology has been pretty revolutionary for all kinds of fields.  One of these is the automobile field, especially for the production of one off parts.

In a recent video I saw produced in Jay Leno's garage a famous place to anyone who has an interest in automobiles he describes how they have used 3D printing to produce parts for cars at the extremes of his collection.  In one case it is product for a 100 year old early generation electric car and in another parts for a special one off concept car that they created.

All of the controversy around the issues of the Russian intervention in the US and other country's elections sometimes covers how important cyber security and the ability of IT networks to be secure is to everyday activity.  If the general media was only focused on the political consequences of hacking of IT systems we would not hear about how some of the daily things we do are affected. 

Some headlines which show Canada is not immune to the issues:

Canadian SMBs hit by ransomware paid out $5.7 million over 12 months: Survey

Interac outlines how it plans to secure Canada's digital identity service

Cyber security a focus of UN Internet governance conference

Canadian firm pays $425,000 to recover from ransomware attack

The costs associated with building systems, acquiring protection software and spending time to keep on top of current threats are all things which we as consumers end up paying for as they get incorporated into the costs of the goods and services which we use.

A recent CNN summary itemizes some of the biggest stories which have occurred including the 145 million accounts from the Equifax hack, the announcement the total of 3 billion Yahoo accounts were hacked in 2013 and closer to home the fact an Ancaster hacker connected to Russians has now pleaded guilty to hacking up to 500 million Yahoo accounts from 2014.

These kinds of events kind of make use glaze over as we figure there is nothing we can do to protect ourselves but we do know that Canadian organizations are forced to spend large amounts to attempt to build protections for us.

We end up having to deal with less convenient systems as things like double authentication security start being applied to our online accounts.  Cumbersome conventions which force us to not be able to directly connect to some financial activity without using fairly difficult security procedures frustrate people and lead them to avoid using electronic systems.

Of course the convenience provided by electronic communications including credit and debit transactions hook most of us into continuing to stay connected and to hope that our information will be held secure by the organizations we buy from.  Every effort which can be made to help secure online transactions (which include most cash register systems) will pay dividends in consumer confidence hopefully.

Looking ahead to 2018 we can only hope that cyber security will remain a high priority for the legitimate IT industry and that break throughs can occur which will frustrate those who seek to illegitimately use electronic data.

Lee K

Photo credit: By ITSveronica (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Since its creation in 2009/10 bitcoin crypto currency has always had a kind of unreal story.  The concept of a globally exchanged currency without a nation as a sponsor or guarantor which is traded by person to person or company to company transactions without a banking system regulator was unreal until it happened.

Since it became the defacto norm for WIFI network security the WPA2 security setting has been the standard for almost every WIFI network setup. 

When first invented and popularized fax machines were seen as a wondrous invention.  After all being able to send a piece of paper or even a whole document to someone in another office or even across the world over a phone line was pretty different than the norm at the time.

Again the world has had to deal with a range of attacks which involved ransomware but this time with a new twist.  

According to an article published by CNET this latest attack included some action which was very poor as ransomware but which really held some serious threat as it ended in an attack which encrypted specific target computers.