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  The new offerings are aimed at helping service providers get the most out of their 5G infrastructure investments. Cisco on Tuesday announced a  series of new software and hardware products  aimed at helping service providers get the most out of their 5G infrastructure investments. The new offerings include new Cloud Services stacks for mobility, residential and content delivery. The introduction of 5G services puts pressure on service providers to prepare for significant increases in mobile traffic, Cisco noted. According to the Cisco Annual Internet Report, there will be nearly 30 billion connected devices by 2023, and nearly half of those will be mobile.  First, Cisco is introducing the Cisco Cloud Services Stack for Mobility, a cloud-based mobile packet core solution. Cisco claims it should speed up the implementation of 4G and 5G mobility services while reducing overall network complexity. It offers a carrier-grade NFVI (Network Functions Virtualization Infrastructure) platform t

  WordPress site owners who use commercial themes provided by ThemeGrill are advised to update one of the plugins that come installed with these themes in order to patch a critical bug that can let attackers wipe their sites. The vulnerability resides in ThemeGrill Demo Importer, a plugin that ships with themes sold by ThemeGrill, a web development company that sells commercial WordPress themes. The plugin, which is installed on more than 200,000 sites, allows site owners to import demo content inside their ThemeGrill themes so they'll have examples and a starting point on which they can build their own sites. However, in a report published yesterday, WordPress security firm WebARX says that older versions of the ThemeGrill Demo Importer are vulnerable to remote attacks from unauthenticated attackers. Remote hackers can send a specially crafted payload to vulnerable sites and trigger a function inside the plugin.

  Exclusive: FBI alerts US private sectors about attacks aimed at their supply chain software providers. The FBI has sent a security alert to the US private sector about an ongoing hacking campaign that's targeting supply chain software providers has learned. The FBI says hackers are attempting to infect companies with the Kwampirs malware, a remote access trojan (RAT). "Software supply chain companies are believed to be targeted in order to gain access to the victim's strategic partners and/or customers, including entities supporting Industrial Control Systems (ICS) for global energy generation, transmission, and distribution," the FBI said in a private industry notification sent out last week. Besides attacks against supply chain software providers, the FBI said the same malware was also deployed in attacks against companies in the healthcare, energy, and financial sectors. The alert did not identify the targeted software providers, nor any other victims. Instead, t

  Shortly after Microsoft ended support for Windows 7 some users have started facing a bug that prevents their systems from shutting down. Microsoft Windows 7 has a bug which is preventing users from shutting down their PCs. Multiple Windows 7 users have reported this issue which can only be fixed with some tiresome workarounds. There's also no update on how the bug came up. Windows 7  systems affected by this bug are unable to shut down or reboot their PCs. Whenever users try to turn off their PC a message is flashed saying, "You don't have permission to shut down this computer." According to a report,  Windows 7 users  have been facing this issue for two days now. Some users on  Reddit  have shared workarounds on turning off PCs. One way is to create another admin account, log into that account and log back into the default admin account. Users should be able to shut down or reboot their systems after this. There's another workaround which is supposed to be a fi

  Newsrooms, political campaigns, and PR agencies panic as they lose access to one of their crucial media monitoring tools. A ransomware infection has brought down  TVEyes , a company that manages a popular platform for monitoring TV and radio news broadcasts, broadly used by newsrooms and PR agencies across the globe. TVEyes CEO David Ives told the ransomware attack took place after midnight on Thursday, January 30. The ransomware hit core server & engineering workstations inside TVEyes' network, primarily in the US, but also some systems located abroad. Ives told they have not yet identified the ransomware strain that infected the company's network, but they have already began recovery efforts. The TVEyes CEO says they don't intend to pay the ransom demand and are currently restoring from backups and rebuilding impacted infrastructure. In the meantime, the company's main product, the TVEyes Media Monitoring Suite (MMS), has been down for the past two days, sources

  Hackers exploited a Trend Micro OfficeScan zero-day to plant malicious files on Mitsubishi Electric servers. Chinese hackers have used a zero-day in the  Trend Micro OfficeScan antivirus  during their attacks on Mitsubishi Electric, Tech News has learned from sources close to the investigation. Trend Micro has now patched the vulnerability, but the company did not comment if the zero-day was used in other attacks beyond Mitsubishi Electric. MITSUBISHI ELECTRIC HACK News of the Mitsubishi Electric hack became public on Monday, this week.  In a press release  published on its website, the Japanese electronics vendor and defense contractor said it was hacked last year. The company said it detected an intrusion on its network on June 28, 2019. Following a months-long investigation, Mitsubishi said it discovered that hackers gained access to its internal network from where they stole roughly 200 MB of files. While initially the company didn't reveal the content of these documents,  in

  A number of leading Chinese tech companies have started utilising green energy but the scale remains limited compared to foreign peers, according to a recently released paper. Chinese tech companies are expected to continue growing exponentially in the era of 5G, cloud computing, and internet of things, but their investment in green energy has lagged behind comparative to foreign competitors, according to a  paper  released by Greenpeace and North China Electric Power University. Although China's electricity consumption from the data centre industry is forecast to expand by 66% between 2019 and 2023, coal remains the primary source for electricity, said the paper.  Data centres in China consume nearly 2% of the entire electricity consumption in the country, as nearly 300,000 data centres in China ran non-stop as of the end of 2017, an  earlier news report  suggested. Many Chinese companies have also moved their data centre facilities to the Guizhou province, one of China's mo

  Technology professionals shouldn't be distracted by the big TVs and robots at CES; the real innovation happens behind the curtain with the enterprise tech powering all those 'smart' consumer gadgets. Each January, over 150,000 people from all over the world converge on Las Vegas for the year's biggest show in tech...CES. And today's CES is as much a showcase for the latest business technology as it is for new consumer electronics. Enterprise technologies like AI, data analytics, IoT, and 5G underpin all the gadgets, smart devices, and autonomous vehicles that are on display during the show. So as always, will have CES covered from all the angles that matter for businesses and professionals. At CES 2020, there are three big trends that tech pros and CIOs should pay attention to: 1. 5G 5G has been a hot topic for the last two years and has rolled out in limited areas. 2020 will be the year we begin to see 5G come to consumer devices at scale and become a force for d

  As we become ever-more reliant on GPS, the prospect of it going down seems increasingly worrying. Almost half a century ago, the US Department of Defense started working on an experimental project to launch a series of satellites into space to make it possible to pinpoint any location on Earth. Fast-forward 47 years, and the Global Positioning System (GPS) is everywhere and in everything from the activity-tracking applications in our smartphones to the navigation systems found in airplanes. Ahead of receiving the £1 million Queen Elizabeth Award for Engineering last week, the chief architect of GPS, Bradford Parkinson, told that making the tool accessible to all was part of his plan from the earliest stages of the project. And it became part of the US government’s plan, too:  in 1983, the Reagan administration declared that it would effectively guarantee and provide GPS for both military and civilian purposes . “President Reagan established that reliable knowledge of your position is

  RuNet disconnection tests were successful, according to the Russian government. The Russian government announced on Monday that it concluded a series of tests during which it successfully disconnected the country from the worldwide internet. The tests were carried out over multiple days, starting last week, and involved Russian government agencies, local internet service providers, and local Russian internet companies. The goal was to test if the country's national internet infrastructure -- known inside Russia as RuNet -- could function without access to the global DNS system and the external internet. Internet traffic was re-routed internally, effectively making Russia's RuNet the world's largest intranet. The government did not reveal any technical details about the tests and what exactly they consisted of. It only said that the government tested several disconnection scenarios, including a scenario that simulated a hostile cyber-attack from a foreign country. The expe