Catch up on this week’s round-up of the latest hosting and tech news. Here’s what we’ve uncovered since our last edition.
Times almost up for UK registered .eu domain holders
The UK’s withdrawal from the EU means UK citizens and organisations won’t be able to hold the registration of a .eu domain when the transition period ends on 31 December. Any .eu domains registered to UK entities will stop working on 1 Jan 2021 and will be revoked and made available to other registrants from 1 Jan 2022.
To be eligible to keep a .eu domain, registrants must be one of the following: a legally established entity in an EU or EEA country, a resident of an EU or EEA country or a citizen of an EU member state. If you are eligible, you will need to update your domain contact details before the deadline.
If you are going to lose your .eu domain on 1 Jan 2021 and wish to keep your website online, you may need to register a new domain and transfer your website to it. If you need help with this please get in touch. You can find and register a new domain on our Domains page.
‘ey up, Yorkshire’s got robot brickies
There’s a bit of a renaissance happening in God’s Own County. While Bielsa and Leeds United are making waves on Match of the Day, when it comes to Grand Designs, it’s the Automated Brick Laying Robot (ABLR) from York’s Construction Automation Ltd that’s stealing the show.
Long considered one of those manual tasks requiring too much skill for a machine, brick laying is a labour intensive job that is both expensive and time-consuming. The ABLR, however, can take a digital plan of a building and, using state of the art robotics engineering, lay bricks and mortar to the architect’s exact design. The robot works by following a track around the perimeter of the building’s footprint, building up the brickwork in layers and only needs the minimum of human input.
The technology provides numerous benefits. It decreases the cost of a build, speeds up construction, increases site safety, ensures build accuracy and uniformity, and even provides detailed analytics – all without drinking copious amounts of Yorkshire tea.
UK ransomware attacks surge 80% in last quarter
Cybercriminals selling Ransomware as a Service (RaaS) have contributed to an 80% increase in UK ransomware attacks over the last three months, according to security company, Check Point. It’s not just the UK which has been affected: globally, the figures are up by 50%, while the US has seen a 98% increase and Germany 145%.
The starting point in the rise coincided with the start of the pandemic and the major attacks have been against companies with remote workers, universities and healthcare organisations. The Maze and Ryuk forms of the malware have been the most commonly used, with the latter still being used to attack around 20 organisations each week. Researchers believe that the easy availability of ransomware, together with the growing numbers of organisations paying the ransom, particularly to stop stolen data being leaked, are the main drivers behind the rise.
Erm, that’s not the recycling we had in mind…
With hundreds of millions of old smart devices being replaced each year, recycling makes sense. Many contain rare earth metals which, if reused, could dramatically reduce the environmental damage done during their mining. Add to this the recycling of all the metal, plastics and reusable technology and it’s a task that benefits everyone.
That, it seems, is what Apple had intended when it began recycling its old gadgets. It wasn’t, however, what its Canadian recycling company, Geep Canada, had in mind. Instead of stripping down all the old technology, it discovered it could make more money by reselling some of the items second-hand. Indeed, Apple has now accused Geep Canada of stealing and reselling over 100,000 of its products.
Apple’s ability to keep track of its products led it to discover that of the half a million iPhones, iPads and Apple watches it sent to Geep Canada, at least 18% of them were still accessing the internet. Looks like Geep Canada are in Siri-ous trouble.
Only 27% of companies comply with PCI DSS
PCI DSS is an online payment security standard designed to ensure that payment card data is handled securely during online transactions. According to research by Verizon, however, only 27% of companies, globally, fully meet the standards.
Despite compliance being a fundamental responsibility of businesses in order to protect their customers and suppliers, Verizon’s findings showed that many companies lacked the resources or commitment to support data security long term, with the recent data showing a marked decline in compliance since 2017 when the figure was 55%.
The research also pointed out that the US has the highest failure rate for a country, with only 20% of businesses fully compliant, while across business sectors, hospitality fared the worst with only 25%. Though the finance sector came out on top, as expected, the compliance rate was still only 40%. Alarmingly, even there, 30% of financial organisations failed to maintain critical security perimeter controls.
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