Ransom is the top motivation behind cyber attacks, according to a report from Radware, and IT professionals are most concerned about data loss. Here’s what you need to know.

Nearly half of businesses report that they were the subject of a cyber-ransom campaign in 2016, according to Radware’s, Global Application and Network Security Report 2016-2017.

Data loss topped the list of IT professionals’ cyber attack concerns, the report found, with 27% of tech leaders reporting this as their greatest worry. It was followed by service outage (19%), reputation loss (16%), and customer or partner loss (9%).

Malware or bot attacks hit half of all organizations surveyed in the last year. One reason for the pervasive attacks? The Internet of Things (IoT). Some 55% of respondents reported that IoT ecosystems had complicated their cybersecurity detection measures, as they create more vulnerabilities.

Ransomware attacks in particular continue to increase rapidly: 41% of respondents reported that ransom was the top motivator behind the cyber attacks they experienced in 2016. Meanwhile, 27% of respondents cited insider threats, 26% said political hacktivism, and 26% said competition.

While large-scale DDoS attacks dominated the headlines of 2016, this report found that only 4% of all attacks were more than 50 Gbps, while more than 83% of DDoS attacks reported were under 1 Gbps.

“One thing is clear: Money is the top motivator in the threat landscape today,” said Carl Herberger, vice president of security solutions at Radware, in a press release. “Attackers employ an ever-increasing number of tactics to steal valuable information, from ransom attacks that can lock up a company’s data, to DDoS attacks that act as a smoke screen for information theft, to direct brute force or injection attacks that grant direct access to internal data.”

Despite the growth in attacks, some 40% of organizations reported that they do not have an incident response plan in place, the survey found.

The report listed five cybersecurity predictions for 2017:

1. IoT will become an even larger risk. The Mirai IoT Botnet code is available to the public, making it more likely that cyber criminals of all experience levels are already strengthening their capabilities. “In 2017, exponentially more devices are expected to become targeted and enslaved into IoT botnets,” the press release stated. “IoT device manufacturers will have to face the issue of securing their devices before they are brought to market, as botnet attacks from these devices can generate large-scale attacks that easily exceed 1 Tbps.”

2. Ransomware attacks will continue to grow. These attacks will target phones, laptops, and company computers, and will likely take aim at healthcare devices such as defibrillators in the future, the press release stated.

3. Permanent Denial of Service (PDoS) attacks on data centers and IoT operations will rise. PDoS attacks, sometimes called “phlashing,” damage a system to the degree that it requires hardware replacement or reinstallation. These attacks are not new, but Radware predicts they are likely to become more pervasive in 2017 with the plethora of personal devices on the market.

4. Telephony DoS (TDoS) will become more sophisticated. These attacks, which cut off communications in a crisis, “could impede first responders’ situational awareness, exacerbate suffering and pain, and potentially increase loss of life,” the press release stated.

5. Public transportation system attacks will rise. As cars, trains, and planes become more automated, they also become more vulnerable to hackers, Radware stated.

You help your business avoid ransomware attacks and other cyber threats by keeping software up to date, backing up all information every day to a secure, offsite location, segmenting your network, performing penetration testing, and training staff on cyber security practices.

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How to turn hibernation on and off:

When your PC goes to sleep, it enters a low-power state, ready to spring back into action when Windows detects a tap on the keyboard or determines that it’s time to run a scheduled task. If you’re planning to be away from the PC for a while, you might prefer to save the current state so that you can restore it quickly, without the chance that the computer will wake up on its own.

There’s an option that lets you save the contents of memory to a hibernation file and then shuts down the PC, so it uses no power at all. When you restart, Windows restores the system state from the hibernation file.

To enable or disable hibernation, open a Command Prompt window and enter the powercfg command with the -h switch. Type powercfg -h on to enable hibernation; substitute the word off to disable it.

Normally, the Hibernate option is hidden from the Shutdown menu. To make it visible, open Power Options in Control Panel and then click Choose What The Power Buttons Do. Under the Shutdown Settings heading, select the Hibernate checkbox to display it in the Power menu.

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Wipe a disk clean:

If you’re planning to dispose of a PC by giving it away, selling it, or discarding it, your top priority should be making sure that no personal information is left on the device. The same is true if you’re recycling a hard disk drive or USB flash drive.

The first step with a PC is to reinstall Windows, using the option to delete the existing partitions on the device and then do a clean install. For a secondary disk, you can use the Format command to erase any existing content. But that still leaves the possibility that some data will still be available in the erased space, where a determined spy could recover it using a disk utility.

The solution? Encrypt the disk before formatting it. Without a recovery key, any recovered data will be unreadable. The easiest way to accomplish this on the system drive is to open an elevated command prompt and run the following command:

cipher /w:c:

If you’re working with a secondary disk, substitute the drive letter for that drive.

The /w switch stands for wipe, and the result is the effective obliteration of every bit of data in unused disk space, leaving existing files untouched.

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Now that Apple’s introduced the first major update to its MacBook Pro lineup in years, it’s time to square off the best of the best in Mac and PC laptops to see who currently prevails in this age-old rivalry. 

The contenders

The newest Surface Book is a top-of-the-line model with a Core i7-6600U, a GeForce GTX 965M, 16GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD. The updated product line varies from $2,400 to $3,300 (our model) in price. All three net you a 6th-gen Skylake dual-core Core i7 chip, and all three get you the same Performance Base with a GeForce GTX 965M. The only differences are in the size of the SSD and how much RAM you get. Only the SSD would affect performance significantly.

On the Apple side, the contender is a $2,400 MacBook Pro 15 with a quad-core Core i7-6700HQ, 16GB of LPDDR/2133, and a 256GB SSD. I also had partial access to two MacBook Pro 13’s. The first was the non-touch bar model with a Core i5-6360U, 8GB of LPDDR/1866, and a 256GB SSD ($1,500). The second was the Touch Bar version with a Core i5-6267U, 8GB of LPDDR/2133, and a 256GB SSD ($1,800).

Why this contest isn’t rigged

Let’s make it clear from the outset: This isn’t a direct comparison of the laptops based on cost, but an attempt to compare the performance of the new MacBook Pros to that of similar PC laptops.

For those who’ve noticed the considerable price delta between the Surface Book i7 and the 15-inch MacBook Pro, the stack of other PCs used in this comparison will help smooth out that line. You might argue that it’s silly to compare a $3,300 Surface Book i7 against an $1,800 MacBook Pro 13, or a $1,100 Dell XPS 13 against an $1,800 MacBook Pro 13, or a $1,400 Dell XPS 15 against a $2,400 MacBook Pro 15. But these are all real-world models that you’ll find in a store, rather than configurations contrived to hit a number. Price differences are just part of the comparison puzzle.

For the same reason, we’re not loading the same OS on all the laptops—no OSX on PCs, no Windows on Macs. Real people wouldn’t do that, and neither will we.

Cinebench R15 multi-threaded performance

Our first test is Cinebench R15. This is a 3D rendering test based on Maxon’s Cinema4D engine. The test is heavily multi-threaded, and the more cores or threads you can throw at it, the better the performance. The test is is a pretty harsh reminder that if your tasks demand a quad-core, listen to them.

Between the two quad-cores, the Dell XPS 15 crosses the finish line first—but not by much. Let’s just call it mostly a tie.

Among the dual-cores, the Core i5-based MacBook Pro 13 is last, but not by much. It’s basically the same as the last-gen XPS 13 with a similar Core i7-6560U.

The surprise is where the Surface Book i7 finishes. Its 6th-gen CPU is hanging right with the 7th-generation Kaby Lake CPUs in the new HP Spectre x360 13 and the new Dell XPS 13.

Cinebench R15 single-threaded performance

Cinebench R15 has an optional test that lets you measure the single-threaded performance. It’s a valuable way to gauge how fast a laptop will be in applications or tasks that don’t use all the cores available.

The surprise to many will be the result from the Dell XPS 13. Its 7th-generation Core i5 CPU could hang with the Core i7 chips on heavier loads, but on lighter loads, it ends up being last. That’s because Core i7 chips in laptops excel at short, “bursty” loads. Once you heat them up, the clock speeds crank back. When running a test in single-threaded mode, the Core i7’s advantage with short burst loads shows up big-time.

The real shocker is how the HP Spectre x360 with a 7th-gen CPU comes out the clear winner. The quad-core MacBook Pro 15 or Dell XPS 15 were expected to lead the pack, but nope. That Kaby Lake CPU is indeed pulling its weight.

Cinebench R15 OpenGL performance

Our last Cinebench R15 test measures performance with OpenGL, a popular graphics API used for rendering professional CAD/CAM applications and a few games.

The results here break down into three bands. At the bottom is the new MacBook Pro 13 and an older Dell XPS 13 model. Both use Intel’s Skylake CPU and include “faster” Iris 540 graphics with 64MB of embedded DRAM inside the CPU. Both are nearly dead-even, which validates this test for comparing OSX to Windows 10 performance.

The second band up is a shocker to me. The pair of 7th-gen Kaby Lake laptops from Dell and HP are a good 25 percent faster than the 6th-gen Skylake laptops in OpenGL. The Iris 540 laptops were expected to come out in front. The results made us wonder whether this isn’t some driver optimization that Intel put into Kaby Lake but not Skylake.

The last band is the graphics performance of the discrete-GPU laptops. Unexpectedly, the GeForce GTX 960M in the XPS 15 finishes just ahead of the GTX 965M in the Surface Book i7. The MacBook Pro 15, with its Radeon Pro 450, finishes in a firm third place. Some MacBook Pro reviews have said the graphics don’t measure up in games, while in “work”-related tasks, they rules. So far, no one has seen that to be true.

GeekBench 4.01 multi-threaded performance

Another popular cross-platform benchmark is Primate Lab’s GeekBench. Experts may disdain its cross-platform results between ARM and x86. Within the same micro-architecture, however, it’s pretty kosher, especially when running the newest 4.01 version of the popular test. There is  also a score to report for the MacBook Pro 13 with Touch Bar

The first result we’ll look at is the multi-threaded performance. Like Cinebench R15, you can see the quad-core XPS 15 and MacBook Pro 15 step away from the dual-core laptops. It’s just more proof that if your tasks really need a quad-core chip, pay for it.

On the dual-cores, the redesigned HP Spectre x360 13 again shows the newest 7th-gen Core i7’s clock speed advantage over the Skylake models. The Surface Book i7 and MacBook Pro are pretty much dead-even. For MacBook Pro 13 fans that might be something to crow about, because we’re talking about a Core i5 MacBook Pro 13 vs. a Core i7 Surface Book.

GeekBench 4.01 single-threaded performance

Moving on to the single-threaded performance in GeekBench 4.01, there are a few patterns we can discern. First, that 7th-gen Core i7 in the HP Spectre x360 13 is indeed faster in lighter loads, outpacing the Surface Book i7 and the Core i5-equipped MacBook Pro 13 with Touch Bar.

The Dell XPS 15 inches over the MacBook Pro 15, but the real takeaway is this: If you don’t do many multi-threaded tasks on your laptop, you don’t need a quad-core CPU.

GeekBench 4.01 OpenCL performance

GeekBench also has an OpenCL test that simulates popular Computer Language tasks on a GPU that would normally be handled by the CPU.

The first takeaway: Unlike in the OpenGL performance tests, the older Iris 540 in the Skylake dual-cores is faster than the Kaby Lake integrated graphics for whatever tasks Prime Labs thinks best represent OpenCL.

The second takeaway: OpenCL loves fast GPUs. The Surface Book i7 and its GTX 965M run away with this test, and trash the MacBook Pro 13. For those who didn’t pony up for the MacBook Pro’s faster Radeon Pro 455 or 460 GPU, it’s hard to watch how thoroughly the the Surface Book i7 smokes the 450-equipped MacBook Pro. The Surface Book’s GTX 965M even makes a mockery of the GTX 960M in the XPS 15.

LuxMark 3.1 OpenCL GPU Render Performance

When you play the benchmarketing game, one truth that’s often overlooked is that no one test defines the entire category. You can’t take the results from Geek Bench 4.01 OpenCL and declare it representative of all OpenCL performance.

To balance Geek Bench 4.01, I also ran the free LuxMark 3.1 OpenCL test. This takes a scene and renders it using the LuxRender engine on the GPU (or CPU if you ask it to.)

The results put these GPUs a lot closer than the OpenCL numbers from Geek Bench 4.01 would have you believe. In the end, both the XPS 15 and Surface Book i7 again both clearly win. But would this be true if it were a Radeon 460 in the MacBook Pro 15? Probably not.

Blender 2.78 Performance

The last “work”-related graphics test we’ll run is Blender 2.78. This a free rendering application popular in a lot of indie movies. For a test render file, I used Mike Pan’s BMW Benchmark and set Blender to ray-trace the scene on the GPU rather than the CPU. The result is, frankly, beyond ugly. The Surface Book i7 finished in about eight minutes, and the XPS 15 took another two more minutes. The MacBook Pro 15 took more than an hour to complete the task.

This doesn’t mean the MacBook Pro 15’s Radeon Pro 450 is a dog. The other benchmarks should tell you that the Apple isn’t that bad in some tasks. Still, this kind of performance disparity indicates a serious problem at the OS or driver level, or something with this compile of Blender. Unless or until that mystery is solved, you’ll want to do your Blender renders on a PC laptop.

Tomb Raider performance

The last graphics test is Tomb Raider. It’s an older game available in both OSX and Windows and includes a built-in benchmark. While we could set the graphics settings the same on both platforms, we couldn’t quite sync the resolutions. Depending on the laptop, we could set the horizontal resolution at 1680-, 1650-, or 1600×1050 (the latter, for the Macs). The graphics setting on all of the laptops was Normal.

If you can’t bear to look, don’t: The Surface Book i7 and XPS 15 soundly thrashed the MacBook Pro 15. The Radeon Pro 460 would not make a difference here, either. If you want gaming performance at any decent levels, no surprise—buy a PC.

Battery life

The final test is for all-important battery life. The same 4K-resolution were used, open-source Tears of Steel short video, looping continuously. On the Windows laptops, we used the Movies & TV player, and on OSX Sierra, we used QuickTime.

All of the laptops had their screens set at 250 to 260 nits in brightness. All laptops had the adaptive brightness setting turned off. All were tested with Wi-Fi disabled and with earbuds plugged into the analog ports. One thing to note: The Windows laptops are left in their default power settings, which means they use their last bits of battery life to shut off unused apps and slightly dim the screen. OSX was set not to dim the display on battery—otherwise, it immediately dims the screen once unplugged.

Our results on the pair of MacBook Pros were amazingly similar. Started both early in the morning and watched until they died in the early evening. Both were minutes apart.

Apple claims about 10 hours of run time in iTunes. We were pretty close in QuickTime at nearly 9 hours. The variance can be attributed to the video file and the settings the company uses.

For the MacBook Pro 15, that’s pretty impressive. The battery life for 15-inch laptops with quad-core CPUs, discrete graphics, and high-resolution screens tends to be mediocre. For example, look at the XPS 15 and its six hours of run time. (Dell offers an XPS 15 battery with about 50 percent more capacity—but it’s also heavier.)

Even worse is the Samsung Notebook 9 Pro, another quad-core laptop with the addition of a 4K screen. Ouch. Overall, I’d say the MacBook Pro 15 has decent battery life for a quad-core.

Moving to the MacBook Pro 13, the result is a little more nuanced. With roughly nine hours of run time, it compares well to some laptops, such as the XPS 13 with a QHD+ touchscreen. But there are a lot more PCs ahead of it. You know, like the Surface Book i7, which sets the bar at an amazing 13 hours of video run time. Other laptops with better video stamina include the newest XPS 13, HP’s redesigned Spectre x360 13, and even the older Surface Book. When you consider that all three are also generally faster, it’s not good.

The cost equation

The most important question for users isn’t related to an obscure OpenCL benchmark but to how much these laptops cost. To help you understand just how much of a premium Apple and Microsoft are charging, I mapped out the cost of most of the laptops that appeared here, along with other configurations worth highlighting.

That top-spec Surface Book i7, formally known as Surface Book with Performance Base,  really pushes the boundaries of what people will pay for a dual-core laptop. To be fair, this is no ordinary laptop. It has a 1TB SSD and 16GB of RAM, plus pen support, a tablet mode, and probably class-leading GPU performance. But umm, yeah, 3,300 bucks.

Apple is no stranger to nose-bleed altitudes. When you throw a Core i7, 1TB SSD, and 16GB of RAM into the MacBook Pro 13 with Touch Bar, you’re looking at  $2,900. And you don’t even get the discrete GPU, touch, and tablet or pen support of the Surface Book. Apple’s most powerful MacBook Pro 15 tilts the meter all the way to $4,300. Granted, that’s with one of Intel’s priciest mobile CPUs and a whopping 2TB SSD, but that’s also the price of a modest used car.

Compared to a “normal” PC, both Microsoft and Apple give you a lot less performance for your cash. The Dell XPS 15, which pretty much aces the new MacBook Pro 15 except in battery life, is $1,400.

Take that Dell XPS 15 and load it up with a 1TB M.2 SSD, 32GB of RAM (which isn’t available on the MacBook Pro 15), a GTX 960M, 4K touchscreen, and a larger battery: $2,600. That’s only $200 more than what Apple charges for a machine with 16GB of RAM, a 256GB SSD, and the slowest Radeon Pro GPU.

You can do the same with the new HP Spectre x360 or Dell’s current XPS 13. Both give you a lot more value than either the MacBook Pro 13 or the MacBook Pro 13 Touch Bar.

Conclusion

Ten tests and one price comparison later, the PC wins. Again.

That’s no surprise. The MacBooks are caught in a tough spot—even if they were running higher-performance configurations. They’re both ultra-expensive compared to most PCs, and at the top-end, outclassed in GPU performance by Microsoft’s comparably expensive Surface Book i7.

It’s not all bad news for the Mac, though. The MacBook Pro 15’s battery life is impressive for a 15-inch laptop with a quad-core CPU and discrete GPU. Comparably powerful quad-core laptops we’ve seen can’t touch it in battery life. Even the MacBook Pro 13s do relatively well in battery life compared to a similar PC.

The problem for Apple and Mac fans is PC makers just don’t ever stand still. And as we know, Apple seemingly does that now with its Macs.

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Microsoft’s massive $26.2 billion acquisition of LinkedIn finally closed, and CEO Satya Nadella explained how the companies will begin working together.

Microsoft’s $26.2 billion purchase of professional networking site LinkedIn officially came to a close on Thursday, after the deal was approved by regulators. Following the close, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella penned a blog post on LinkedIn detailing how the website would begin integrating with Microsoft’s products.

For starters, LinkedIn identity and network capabilities will be coming to Microsoft Outlook, and to the Office suite in general, the post stated. Additionally, LinkedIn notifications will be available to users in the Windows action center as well.

Since LinkedIn is known as a digital CV of sorts, Microsoft will enable LinkedIn members who draft a résumé in Word to directly update their LinkedIn profile page, and more easily search for and apply to relevant job postings, the post said.

One of the potentially troubling integrations is “extending the reach of Sponsored Content across Microsoft properties,” as Nadella wrote on his blog. Whether that means that users will begin seeing ads in their Office apps remains to be seen, but it sets the stage for a potentially tricky user experience.

Enterprise LinkedIn Lookup will soon be powered by Active Directory and Office 365, which could make it easier for employees to connect with one another. Nadella’s blog post also noted that LinkedIn Learning will be made available across the Office 365 and Windows ecosystem, giving Microsoft shops access to new forms of training and continued learning that could prove valuable to their employees.

Additionally, Nadella wrote that the two companies would begin developing a business news desk across their existing ecosystem of content, and for MSN.com. Sales Navigator and Dynamics 365 will also be integrated in hopes of improving social selling capabilities.

Since the acquisition was first announced, it’s been fairly clear that data was the driving force behind the deal. The two companies had non-overlapping, complementary data graphs, and these integrations show just the first steps that Microsoft is taking to leverage LinkedIn’s data, along with its own, to build out a more holistic ecosystem of business technologies and services.

Current LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner will continue to lead the company after the acquisition, and theNew York Times reported that roughly 10,000 LinkedIn employees will join Microsoft.

The 3 big takeaways for readers

1. Microsoft closed its $26.2 billion acquisition of social networking site LinkedIn on Thursday, with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella outlining how the two companies will merge.
2. LinkedIn features and services will be coming to Outlook, Office 365, Dynamics 365, and even MSN.com, with LinkedIn search getting a boost from Active Directory.
3. The deal has always been about data, and the integrations are just the start of how the two companies will merge their individual data graphs.

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