Regarding recent news of a 14 month long VPN crackdown campaign in China, SSBG would like to clarify the following: This crackdown is targeting 3rd party VPN Proxy Tools (Astril / ExpressVPN / SwitchVPN / etc) used by locals to get around the Great Firewall filtering of Youtube / Facebook / Google / etc. As…
China is cracking down on the hi-tech ways citizens avoid official scrutiny of what they do online. The nation’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has announced plans to “clean up” unauthorised internet connections. The 14-month campaign will target the VPNs and dedicated lines many use to go online. All these types of service must…
Get ready, Office 365 administrators: Microsoft is ending support for the Office 2013 client apps that it previously distributed through its cloud-based productivity service. Instead, administrators and users will be pushed to use Office 2016, the latest version of the productivity suite that includes Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Starting on Feb. 28, users won’t be…
China is implementing a new cybersecurity law due in mid-2017 and it has different requirements for businesses operating in China: data localization, reporting cyber incidents to the government, the usage and sharing of personal information, and constraints on the publishing of any content online. This means that almost every multinational operating in China will have…
Windows Server 2016 has finally been shoved out the door today, albeit only for evaluation purposes. Which is a very good thing because the software will cost a lot of users more than they paid for Windows Server 2012, especially if they’re slow to talk to Microsoft about their upgrade. Microsoft revealed its Windows Server…
It has not been a good few months for the health and consistency of airline information technology. Two huge outages within a couple of weeks of each other — caused by simple component failures — resulted in massive passenger disruptions and cost two U.S. airlines millions of dollars in lost revenue and customer compensation. See…
Dropbox, Google Drive, and other international cloud storage providers have long been blocked in China – and now a number of domestic storage services are facing a similar fate. Vdisk, KuaiPan, and UC net disk – run by Sina, Xunlei, and Alibaba, respectively – have filled the gap left by the government’s censoring of international…
A few strategic steps can ensure that limited IT budgets don’t increase cybersecurity risks. By Mark Lachniet Mark Lachniet manages CDW’s Solutions Practice for Information Security. As a security analyst and licensed private investigator, I have often performed computer forensics work in the aftermath of a security breach. The work provides up-close-and-personal views of…
A senior Chinese official known as the “gatekeeper” of the country’s internet has denied that the country censors online information.
Lu Wei, chief of the State Internet Information Office, said China does not censor but “manages” internet content in Zhejiang on Wednesday. Lu was answering a CNN reporter’s question in a press conference ahead of the Second World Internet Conference to be held in Zhejiang’s famous water town Wuzhen next week.
“It is a misuse of words if you say ‘content censorship.’ But no censorship does not mean there is no management. The Chinese government learnt how to manage the internet from Western developed countries, we have not learnt enough yet,”
If you have ever used one of your Chinese colleagues computers, you have probably encountered a web-browser that looked like Internet Explorer, but definitely was not. Developed in 2011, it quickly became a favorite among Chinese users and in Nov. 2012 surpassed Microsoft IE as the most used browser in China (57% of China Internet surfers). Advertised as a safer alternative to Internet Explorer, it comes bundled with a number of other free software (Anti-Virus, Chat, Etc) and advertising platforms (Adware).
While not intentionally malicious the software brings with it frequent advertising pop-ups, online activity trackers, and is very difficult to remove after it has been installed. For IT Professionals the software causes conflicts with Paid-for Anti-Virus Clients, and the bundled software can remove security features common to Corporate Networks (Active Directory)..
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