IBM deepens move into computer defense

SAN FRANCISCO: IBM on Monday moved deeper into defending business computers with a new service aimed at thwarting hackers before they do damage.

"The need for security to become part of our strategy has been natural," IBM vice president of security strategy Marc van Zadelhoff told AFP.

The century-old business technology titan made a priority of defending computer networks about two years ago, unifying resources from more than a dozen security firms it acquired.

IBM's computer security unit has been "growing like gangbusters," according to van Zadelhoff.

According to industry tracker IDC, IBM significantly outpaced overall computer protection company market growth and last year was the third largest seller of cyber defense software.

IBM on Monday ramped up its offerings with a Threat Protection System and a Critical Data Protection Program.

Introduction of the new cyber security weapons came with the release of IBM-funded Ponemon Institute studies showing that the number of hacker attacks is climbing along with the cost.

The average cost of a hack to a business has risen 15 percent to $6.2 million including lost revenue and productivity, according to Ponemon findings released by IBM.

The Critical Data Protection program uses an array of techniques to safeguard the data equivalent of a company's "crown jewels," according to van Zadelhoff.

IBM has tapped into intelligence about threats and hacker tactics from computer networks it cares for around the world.

Defensive technics go beyond maintaining watch-lists for known malicious codes to identifying when applications in networks act unusually and then pouncing to see whether hacker mischief is the cause.

“Traditional methods of prevention have often failed, leaving many to believe detection is the only way forward," IBM security systems general manager Brendan Hannigan said in a release.

"You must be able to prevent exploitations of known and unknown vulnerabilities

IBM physicist wins tech 'Nobel' for 'big data' discoveries

HELSINKI: British physicist Stuart Parkin, one of the brains behind the global "big data" revolution, on Wednesday won Finland's answer to the Nobel Prize, which is awarded by Technology Academy Finland.

"Prof. Parkin receives the 2014 Millennium Technology Prize in recognition of his discoveries, which have enabled a thousand-fold increase in the storage capacity of magnetic disk drives," the independent foundation said in a statement, adding that his innovations paved the way for streaming movies and other media via the Internet.

"Our contemporary online world is largely possible because of these atomically-thin magnetic structures."

Parkin, 58, is an IBM research fellow, a consulting professor at Stanford University and director of the experimental department of Germany's Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics.

His work on spintronics -- which uses the magnetic spin of electrons to save data -- has contributed to an explosion in memory capacity around the world allowing information to be stored in magnetic disk drives accessed online via the "cloud".

"I am extremely happy and excited to have won the Millennium Technology Prize because of course it’s one of the most important prizes in the scientific community," Parkin said in a statement.

"I am very humbled and proud to have been awarded the prize, which is a tremendous validation by the scientific community of my work and its impact on the world as a whole."

The prize -- worth one million euros ($1.38 million) -- was founded in 2004 and aims to be a technological equivalent of Sweden's Nobel Prizes for the sciences (worth $1.22 million each) which have been criticised for focusing too much on traditional, decades-old scientific research.

The Millennium Technology Prize is awarded every second year and singles out recent innovations that have already been applied in practice and which "enhance the quality of people's lives in a sustainable manner".

Previous laureates include the creator of the World Wide Web Sir Tim Berners-Lee and ethical stem cell pioneer Shinya Yamanaka.

Technology Academy Finland, which will award the prize on May 7, 2014, is a foundation formed by the Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences in Finland and the national Industry Council.