Posts tagged attack
Google Is Prepping A Sneak Attack On Microsoft Office
May 17th
Google’s alternative to Microsoft Office, Google Apps, has always suffered from the fact that it offers a sort of “good enough” compatibility — fine for most basic document and spreadsheet tasks, but not enough to match certain Office features.
Now Google is preparing to use technology from a recent acquisition, QuickOffice, to close that gap.
In recent weeks, Google sources have told me that Google has been internally testing, or “dogfooding,” QuickOffice, which began life as a standalone productivity app that offers better compatibility with Office than Google’s own Apps. Now, however, Google is testing QuickOffice as a cloud-based service in its own Chrome browser.
(Google already provides QuickOffice as part of its Google Apps subscription, specifically as an app for customers with Android tablets or iPads.)
Why QuickOffice?
QuickOffice uses the same .DOCX file format that Office does, allowing users to quickly edit and share the same files as Office users. QuickOffice compatibility probably means that more businesses and users will see Google Apps as a viable alternative to Office, wounding Microsoft’s Office cash cow.
Google sources also say they’re confident that Microsoft won’t be able to block QuickOffice with licensing issues or other legal threats. Eventually, these individuals say, QuickOffice will become the foundation of Google Apps, although that’s still a ways off.
The target, Google sources said, isn’t the full PC-based version of Office itself – although that might be a bit of spin. Instead, Google claims to think of QuickOffice as a competitor to Microsoft’s own Web-based versions of Word, PowerPoint, and Excel – which often deliberately fall short of full Office functionality. For now, that means running QuickOffice as a browser app, probably using Google’s Native Client technology, until Google’s engineers can integrate it directly with Apps.
It’s another example of the growing tension between Microsoft and Google, evidenced by the Microsoft’s “rule-breaking” YouTube Windows Phone app and its use of an open API to talk to Google+ users via its Outlook.com Web site.
Google chief executive Larry Page, for example, used his Google I/O keynote to call out Microsoft’s behavior as “really sad,” and said that Microsoft took advantage of the open API. “Being negative is not how we make progress,” Page said. “And most important things are not zero-sum. There’s a lot of opportunity out there.”
Google Tipped QuickOffice Plans At Pixel Launch
Google acquired QuickOffice last year for an undisclosed sum, and the team went quiet. But we know that Google plans to add QuickOffice to the Pixel, because Google said so.
At the launch of the Pixel a few months ago, Google’s Chrome chief, Sundar Pichai, said that it would take two to three months to add QuickOffice to the Pixel, but that it would be included with it. Since it wasn’t available when Google handed out thousands of Pixels to developers Wednesday, it must be coming soon.
Looking back, Pichai actually spoke quite a bit about QuickOffice’s role within Google at the Pixel launch- but the media (probably correctly) focused on the Pixel hardware itself. Pichai set the stage for the Pixel handout by emphasizing, again and again, that the Pixel represented the best Chromebook experience for developers and early adopters: “if you’re living in the cloud, this is the best experience you can use,” Pichai said then.
Microsoft Strikes… Too Soon
Microsoft clearly anticipated a QuickOffice launch at Google I/O. On May 10, it published a blog post that directly attacked the compatibility of Google Apps as well as QuickOffice. Jake Zborowski, a senior product manager at Microsoft, wrote:
Productivity software is built to help people communicate. It’s more than just the words in a document or presentation; it’s about the tone, style and format you use to convey an overall message. People often entrust important information in these documents — from board presentations to financial analyses to book reports. You should be able to trust that what you intend to communicate is what is being seen.
Zborowski’s post included several sample documents that users could download themselves for comparison’s sake, as well as a funny YouTube video that included Rob Schenider and Pete Rose, poking fun at the “gamble” that is Google Apps. In a supporting comment, Zborowski pointed out that Google doesn’t support the Open Document Format, suggesting that Microsoft is more open than Google.
Google representatives shrugged off the post, noting that the example documents relied on Office functions typical users rarely touch, such as watermarks and odd text spacing.
However, Microsoft’s post also noted that Office Web Apps can now be used within Android, leaving the Microsoft-Google competition within the Android tablet space as an app – Google’s QuickOffice – versus a cloud solution, Microsoft’s Office Web apps.
The whole point of the Pixel, according to Pichai, is to show off the power of the cloud. Microsoft, for its part, is still largely wedded to the desktop application, and the $23 billion or so that its Business Division pulls in on an annual basis. (Office 365 doesn’t live in the cloud, although it has cloud hooks in SkyDrive and its subscription delivery system.) That’s a target that Google has attacked for several years now, with dueling customer announcements from both sides marking the ebb and flow of the battle.
Micosoft may be right that Google Apps and QuickOffice don’t offer the full capabilities of Office. But they come close – and “close” has been the selling point behind Apps all along. QuickOffice looks like it could close the gap.
Image Source: Google
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Scroogled Rises: Microsoft Back on Attack as Google Faces New Antitrust Complaint
Apr 10th
Microsoft is on the attack again, this time slamming Google Play for the information it shares when users buy apps. The attack ads coincide with another European antitrust complaint orchestrated by Microsoft relating to Google’s Android software.
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
Racing Penguin: How to Attack Unnatural Links Before Penguin Hits [Case Study]
Apr 10th
Most Penguin work is reactive, where companies work to recover from a massive drop in Google traffic. This case study explains how one business owner uncovered a serious unnatural links situation, and had to race Penguin to the update line.
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
Yes, This Week’s DDoS Attack Was Huge, And Part Of An Ominous Trend
Mar 29th
Depending on who you believe, the week long Spamhaus-Cyberbunker cyberattack we covered Wednesday was either a threat to the Internet itself or hyped up by an overzealous security vendor. Either way, it was still serious business.
While much of the Internet disruption may have in fact been localized to Europe, and also potentially caused by tampering with underwater telecom cables in the Mediterranean, big DDoS attacks — that is, distributed denial-of-service assaults that aim to knock target computers off the Internet — are real, and have been on the rise since 2010.
Dan Holden, the director of ASERT, Arbor Networks‘ security engineering and response team, has been monitoring DDoS attacks for more than 12 years. In 2012 his company released a Worldwide Infrastructure Report that reports attack sizes have been peaking at around 100Gbps (check out this detailed look at the report here). This week’s attack was more than 300Gbps — way above the norm, in other words.
That’s because the attackers actually co-opted part of the Internet’s basic infrastructure — the Domain Name System, or DNS — in such a way as to greatly amplify the firehose stream of data they were directing at target computers.
Here’s how they work, according to Carlos Morales, Arbor Networks’ vice president of global sales engineering and operations:
Attackers send DNS queries to a [DNS server] on the Internet but use the victim address as the source of the query. When the response goes back, a response that is usually multiple times the size of the initial query, the response goes to the victim. Multiple this by hundreds of thousands of requests from bots on the Internet spoofing the one victim address and you get a very large flood of traffic to the victim machine.
Holden says DNS is becoming an increasingly popular target for DDoS. As many as 27 million DNS servers across the Internet are “open” in a way that allows them to be hijacked this way.
That means that while this week’s attack may not have knocked us Americans off of the Web, the amount of localized disruption overseas was definitely large enough to cause serious reverberations. This may not have been the Web’s D-Day, but these could definitely be the opening salvo of a hacker blitzkrieg. Let’s hope the ISPs and powers that be don’t Neville Chamberlain it.
Photo courtesy of Shutterstock
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Microsoft “Research” Discovers The Obvious In Renewed Anti-Trust Attack On Google
Mar 26th
Did you know that the higher a site is listed in search results, the more traffic that site is likely to receive? If you’re a search marketer, or anyone with a dose of common sense, you do. But Microsoft had research conducted to yet again prove this point, in an attempt to influence the…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
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South Korea Cyber Attack Heightens Tensions In Hair-Trigger Region
Mar 20th
No one is at all clear at all about the origins of a purported cyber attack against South Korean media and financial organizations yesterday, which left broadcaster and bank networks paralyzed for hours. The obvious culprit is a state-sponsored attack from North Korea, but even if that nation isn’t directly responsible, it may not make a difference, given the heightened tensions in the region.
According to reports, three South Korean TV networks, KBS, MBS and YTN, as well as Shinhan Bank and Nonghyup Bank, reported that their networks had suddenly been shut down on Wednesday afternoon, local time. The takedown was apparently not from a distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack, but a virus that has apparently infected machines in these organizations and delivered its payload simultaneously. There were scattered reports of users seeing skulls on the screens of the affected machines before they shut down, anecdotal evidence that malware was indeed the cause.
South Korea has been the victim of cyber attacks before, of course, just like any other computerized nation. And many of these coordinated efforts have been ultimately traced back to North Korea.
No broadcasts were interrupted by the crashed computers, which apparently only hit the workstations of the television stations’ staff. Some banking services, such as ATM and online banking, were adversely affected by the shutdowns, though the banks are reporting that those services have been restored.
North Korea is suspected of being the source of these attacks, just as they have done in the past. North Korea has increased its saber-rattling following new UN sanctions and joint US-South Korean military exercises being conducted in the region, and even accused the U.S. and South Korea of similar cyber attacks against its Internet servers on March 15.
(See World War III Is Already Here – And We’re Losing.)
No proof has been offered yet on the source of these latest attacks, but it ultimately may not matter. This kind of attack could have been launched by anyone, since malware can be easy to deliver to unsuspecting computer users. Anyone from sophisticated cyber criminals to script kiddies could have started this, and until there is detailed analysis of the malware, conclusions should be approached with caution.
The problem is, it may not matter. Malware attacks within such an increasingly tense political and military situation are the equivalent of yelling “fire!” in a movie theater or – more appropriately – throwing a lit match into a barrel of fuel.
No matter what the source of this attack, tensions have been ratcheted up, the South Korean armed forces on a state of higher alert. If things go sideways on the Korean peninsula, this could be the first major confrontation preceded by cyber attacks. And when the dust settles, no one may care who actually wrote the code.
Image courtesy of Shutterstock.
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Google On Bing Attack Ads: “Others Should Focus On Building Good Products”
Mar 10th
Google has largely ignored Bing’s Scroogled campaign, the one attacking it over the pay-for-play change to Google Shoppping & Gmail privacy. But today, Google search chief Amit Singhal pushed back a bit, saying Bing perhaps should focus on making better products rather than attacking…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
View full post on Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Google Under Attack for Ads Promoting Sales of Elephant, Whale Products
Mar 6th
Accused by the Environmental Investigation Agency of promoting online sales of elephant and whale products, Google says that it moves quickly to remove material advertising ivory and products that contain it, despite what the EIA has claimed.
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
The Syrian Expatriates Organization (SEO) Condemns Bomb Attack that Killed … – PR Web (press release)
Feb 22nd
 PR Web (press release) |
The Syrian Expatriates Organization (SEO) Condemns Bomb Attack that Killed …
PR Web (press release) The Syrian Expatriates Organization (SEO) strongly condemns the car bombings that took place in Damascus today, killing at least 50 people. According to Reuters, the target was likely meant to be the Baath Party headquarters and the Russian Embassy in … |
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Cisco Gets Sleazy In Microsoft Attack
Feb 20th
In 2010, Cisco Chief Executive John Chambers told reporters at the company’s reseller conference in San Francisco, “We don’t focus on other companies. We focus on market transitions.”
The statement was a half-truth. Chambers should have said companies other than Microsoft.
On Monday, the eve of Microsoft’s first Lync User Conference, Rowan Trollope, general manager of Cisco’s Collaboration Technology Group, posted a blog that that explained why Lync was inferior to Cisco’s platform for unified communications and collaboration.
“I’m quite sure some of it will generate controversy but that’s OK – it’s a conversation worth having in our opinion,” Trollope writes.
But as sometimes happens when brands or political campaigns “go negative,” the whole thing is blowing up in Cisco’s face, as analysts point out the weaknesses in Cisco’s arguments.
The real takeaway, in fact, is that Cisco seems to be scared of what Microsoft is selling.
Cisco’s Claims
Trollope’s post isn’t super nasty, at least not by Apple-v-Android standards. But he takes some shots at Microsoft Lync, calling it “a solution that’s primarily been developed for a desktop PC user experience” and thus “less able to meet these wider post-PC requirements than one that has been designed and optimized for them from the outset.”
An example of the latter, Trollope says, would be Cisco’s UC&C, which is a set of integrated products, such as messaging, Internet telephony, video conferencing and data sharing. All the products are accessed through a single user interface.
Another of Trollope’s criticism is that with Microsoft, customers need to go out and buy all sorts of different devices instead of getting everything from a single vendor. “And, in our opinion, that could lead to increased complexity, cost and risk, not to mention the hours spent trying to figure out `who’s on first’ when troubleshooting an issue.”
And finally this:
“There are other important topics that we think should also be discussed. Does your collaboration vendor have any conflict of interest with other BYOD device vendors? Can you move from an in-house deployment to a cloud-based service and get the same functionality? We would encourage you to explore these points with us and any other vendors you are considering.”
This is all pretty garden-variety competitive marketing, and certainly far less aggressive than what Microsoft does with its anti-Google “Scroogled” campaigns.
Nevertheless, analysts were quick to cry foul and to point out flaws in Cisco’s arguments.
Cisco’s Hypocrisy
A large part of what Trollope called a “frank and direct conversation” was a “little far fetched and hypocritical,” Gartner analyst Steve Blood says.
Cisco claims Microsoft’s Surface tablet represented a conflict of interest, since Lync would also support competing tablets from Apple and Google. Cisco seems to have forgotten its own entry into the tablet market with Cius, which failed miserably and was pulled last year. “It wasn’t worried about a conflict of interest then,” Blood says.
Cisco also has other conflicts when it comes to hardware. While its UC&C products work on other vendor’s systems, they run best on Cisco’s Unified Computing System. And when it comes to partners offering Cisco UC&C in the cloud, its UCS server is the only hardware option, Blood says.
Trollope claims Lync is more complex and expensive because customers need to get phones, video equipment, voice and video gateways and networking gear through hardware partners since Microsoft doesn’t make those products, while Cisco sells its own integrated hardware and software.
Art Schoeller, analyst for Forrester Research, isn’t buying Trollope’s argument. “Each account is different in what they have, what they want, and what capabilities are important to them and what model appeals to them more,” he says.
While Cisco arguably has a stronger hosted platform than Microsoft, Cisco’s biggest resellers are also selling hosted Lync and Office 365, which is “a recognition by Cisco’s partners that in some instances, the Microsoft solution is something they would want to propose in place of Cisco,” Blood says.
The biggest problem Microsoft has in offering Lync in the cloud is with voice communications. In many countries, as soon as voice hits the cloud, it becomes a regulated service, much like that of a carrier. Microsoft and Cisco are solving the problem by partnering with carriers. “Currently, Microsoft promotes Lync on premise, if a customer wants deeper voice capabilities like conferencing,” Schoeller says.
Cisco Feels The Competition
Cisco is going on the offensive because Microsoft is becoming a serious competitor, which is good for companies in the market for unified communications products. However, Cisco would do better to focus on customers, rather than spend time attacking the competition with “ill-prepared, and weak arguments such as this,” Blood says.
In a recent interview with AllThingsD, Chambers said, “We love to compete, and we try to always compete with class.”
If Chambers believes Trollope’s blog is class, then he needs to look up the definition.
Image courtesy of Shutterstock.View full post on ReadWrite
