Hot Topics: Free ebook, Windows 8 Security and the growth of cybercrime

Free ebook: Introducing Windows 8: An Overview for IT

Who likes free stuff? Of course you do. Who wouldn’t?

Thankfully for great IT professionals like yourself, Microsoft Press has released a FREE ebook. Yay!

It is a FREE ebook Introducing Windows 8, primarily as an overview for IT Professionals. 

This ebook is written exclusively for IT Pros and focuses on the new features of Windows 8 from an IT Pro’s perspective (Windows to Go, faster disk encryption, as well as the great things from Windows 7 that are still there (security features, keyboard shortcuts, etc.) 

For those of you who haven’t experienced Windows 8, it’s like a faster version of Windows 7 with a bunch of new features IT Pros will certainly appreciate. 

The link to the blog post where you can download this FREE ebook is here. The direct ebook download is here.

Windows 8 raises the bar for PC security

Windows 8 raises the bar for pretty much everything. However, it was highlighted in some quarters that Windows 8 didn’t talk much about security and the new
features in Windows 8 that will keep your PC and data safe.

Many experts in the field have seen UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) as a main reason. UEFI is an open standard used to replace the archaic BIOS typically found on PC Software. Windows 8 (along with Windows Server 2012) are the first to take advantage of the feature.

Windows Defender is another key feature of Windows 8, and it’s enabled by default so you get protection right out of the box. However, Microsoft does allow for OEMs to disable and replace the Windows Defender protection with third-party tools.

With Windows 8, Microsoft takes the SmartScreen protection—which has been a very effective tool for guarding against malicious downloads when using Internet Explorer—and extends it to the entire operating system. Now, SmartScreen will warn and protect you even if you’re using an alternate browser, such as Firefox or Chrome, or just downloading a file across the network.

For organizations deploying Windows 8, Dynamic Access Control is also greatly enhanced. The current Dynamic Access Control lets IT admins restrict access to files and folders based on users and groups. The new Dynamic Access Control gives IT admins much more granular control—enabling access to be defined by virtually any Active Directory attribute.

With this and so much more available, look out at blog later in the week to find out more.

The amazing growth of cybercrime

The cybercrime represents today one of the primary concerns on global scale, it is a growing industry that is impacting every sector of the society in serious way causing relevant financial damage and it needs to be stopped!

More scarily, the crime is exploring more channels and it is implementing new sophisticated fraud schemas to increase its earnings.

“Most of the vulnerabilities you see in the corporate space today for this type of an attack to work are the same vulnerabilities you’re going to find in the cloud,” McClure said.

The impressive growth of cyber criminal activities is targeting mainly new social media platforms and mobile due their wide audience and the lack of awareness on cyber threats, the phenomena are impacting private sectors such as financial, and public.

Quite a scary world out there, isn’t?

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