The Goldman Sachs tower in Jersey City, New Jersey. Image: Songquan Deng/Shutterstock
A top Goldman Sachs executive says reports the bank is planning to scrap its cryptocurrency trading ambitions are not true.
In enterprise news this week, CRM titan Salesforce announced some major changes to its cloud sales platform, including some nifty AI implementations.
Meanwhile, payments player Stripe warned that IT developers’ time is being wasted on the job and this could have a detrimental effect on the global economy.
Yet another Wi-Fi vulnerability reared its ugly head, while Google integrated the Ethereum blockchain with its BigQuery data analytics platform, creating a whole host of analytical possibilities.
Keep reading for a hand-picked selection of this week’s most notable enterprise stories.
Goldman Sachs executive clears the air about cryptocurrency ambition
Earlier this week, numerous reports circulated alleging that Goldman Sachs was abandoning its plans to open a cryptocurrency trading desk due to market wobbles. According to chief financial officer Martin Chavez, these stories were so-called ‘fake news’.
He said that Goldman Sachs is working on a type of derivative for bitcoin, and noted that demand from clients is high for this particular project. Bitcoin is still the most popular cryptocurrency, with ether in second place.
Chavez stressed that there was never a strict timeline in place for the plan anyway. “When we talked about exploring digital assets, [we agreed] that it was going to be exploration that would be evolving over time.”
US authorities charge man in connection with WannaCry and Sony cybercrimes
The US Department of Justice said it has charged Park Jin Hyok, a North Korean computer programmer, with one count of conspiracy to commit computer fraud and abuse, and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
The charges relate to the massive cyberattack against Sony Pictures in 2014 and the WannaCry ransomware attack as well as the $81m Bangladesh Bank heist in 2016. According to US authorities, Park was working on behalf of the North Korean government.
New research shows ransomware is on the decline
A new report from F-Secure shows that its honeypot decoy servers were hit less frequently by ransomware attack attempts in the first half of the year. Reasons for this include companies becoming more cybersecurity-aware and refusing to pay ransoms. The growing effectiveness of technology in blocking bulk threats is also a factor.
That doesn’t mean there are fewer attacks though, just that different vectors such as cryptojacking and IoT-based attacks are becoming popular.
Commercial spyware tool leaks more than 2m records
A commercial spyware solution called mSpy has leaked more than 2m records. According to TechCrunch, the data looks to have been gleaned from an unsecured database that allowed security researchers to pull out millions of users’ data. People use mSpy to track their children online or keep tabs on partners.
Researcher Brian Krebs said: “Before it was taken offline some time in the past 12 hours [6 September], the database contained millions of records, including the username, password and private encryption key of each mSpy customer who logged in to the mSpy site or purchased an mSpy licence over the past six months.”
Firefox finally pulls the plug on Windows XP
If you are still using the now obsolete Windows XP OS, you will no longer be able to use the Mozilla Firefox browser safely. This week, the company launched Firefox 62.
Mozilla said it was happy to have kept XP users safe for so long, and encouraged users to upgrade as soon as possible. It noted: “That’s millions of users we kept safe on the internet despite running a nearly 17-year-old operating system whose last patch was over four years ago. And now we’re wishing these users the very best of luck … and that they please oh please upgrade so we can go on protecting them into the future.”
The Goldman Sachs tower in Jersey City, New Jersey. Image: Songquan Deng/Shutterstock
