HACKER HACKS INTO LINKEDIN AND SELLS PEOPLES INFORMATION

According to a report on Motherboard, a hacker known as “Peace” is selling account information of about 117 million LinkedIn users. This information includes login data like emails and passwords. According to Motherboard, Peace confirmed this information was stolen during the 2012 LinkedIn security breach where Russian hackers leaked 6.5 million passwords online. At the time, LinkedIn tried to downplay the gravity of the situation but this shows it was a big, serious issue. Right now, the stolen details are on sale on illegal dark web marketplace, The Real Deal for 5 bitcoin (about $2,200). So far, 90% of the encrypted passwords have been cracked and this took 72 hours. Cybersecurity is a big issue with social media and email accounts being under threat on a regular basis, and it doesn’t just happen on a personal level. Businesses also get hacked resulting in confidential information being leaked and customers losing a ton of money. Must be why most sites have outrageous standards for passwords to be approved. LinkedIn has 433 million registered users meaning this breach affects approximately 27% of its users. You may be thinking you don’t have anything to lose, but it’d be wise to change your password now to prevent identity theft.

Nigeria’s AppZone, U.S. tech firm in smart card alliance

Nigerian software company, AppZone says it is combining strength with Prime Factors, a U.S. developer to provide smart card solutions for the Nigerian market. AppZone says the partnership will enhance its card issuance platform to ensure that potentially functional cards that are not yet linked to customer accounts are transported between personalisation companies and banks According to Nigeria’s AppZone, the card issuance module will take card issuance to “a whole new level” by enabling the entire spectrum of card production and personalisation activities to be automated and occur instantly upon customer requests in bank branches. Under the plan, Prime Factors will provide AppZone with a core component used for the creation and management of cryptographic elements required during the secure personalisation of integrated chips found on modern payment cards. Appzone further says that with this development, banks on the platform can instantly issue fully functional cards to requesting customers in branches instead of having same customers wait for days or weeks to collect their requested cards. The introduction of its instant personalisation solution eliminates all the manual processes involved during card issuance and replaces them with complete automation, according to AppZone. Traditional card issuance requires customers to visit branches twice to get a card i.e. to make card request and to collect the card a few days or weeks sit uncollected at bank branches”, the Nigerian technology company says. “AppZone’s card issuance platform automates relevant card operations thereby reducing the need for banks to develop or outsource expertise required to manage EMV data preparation and card personalisation.” According to AppZone, “key features of our instant in-branch card personalisation solution include generation of Magnetic stripe and EMV chip data, instant personalisation of physical cards, instant PIN selection and instant linking of cards to customer accounts. There is also support for card blocking requests initiated at branches.”

Tech+ 2016, Nigeria’s top tech showcase event registration now open

Organisers of Tech+, Nigeria’s top technology showcase say registration is now open for interested exhibitors for this year’s editionscheduled to hold July 22-23, this year in Lagos. According to Connect Marketing Limited, organisers of Tech+, over 10,000 participants are expected at the conference ranging from top level government officials, policymakers, innovators, developers, young and adult consumers, among others. “Expectedly, the outlook, attendance and engagement for TechPlus2016 are sure to be advanced and topnotch, providing extensive value for exhibitors including access to over 10,000 event participants, top level government officials and policymakers, customers and consumers alike”, the event organisers announced. Exhibition booths are available for small, medium and large scale organizations and multinationals interested in leveraging the power of technology to project their brand value as well as connect with a vast array of tech and non-tech audience, with potential clients drawn from governments, policymakers, innovators, developers, global and local brands, young and adult consumers amongst others,” the statement adds. TechPlus2016 exhibition booths are categorized into Small (3m x 3m) and Medium (3m x 6m), and exhibitors can have their booths customised based on request and conditions. TechPlus, in its second year, has evolved to become one of the most authoritative gathering of everything tech in Nigeria and Africa at large, convening over 6,000 participants, 300 exhibitors and 1,000 gamers at its maiden edition last year. MTN, Samsung, Beat FM, Huawei, Ferarri, FCMB “and a host of other multi-sectorial brands” are already listed as parts of the exhibitors from TechPlus last year. To book your exhibition stand at the tech event, you can contact Michael on +234 703 359 4090 or michael@techplus.com.ng. You can also visit the website www.techplus.ng for more details or download the 2016 Brochure

NCS wants Nigeria’s young IT professionals ‘recognised’

The Nigeria Computer Society (NCS) has called for the recognition of young Information Technology (IT) professionals to enable them to attain higher heights in their career. Mr Mike Olajide, the Publicity Chairman of the NCS recently made the call in a statement made available in Lagos where he urged young IT professionals to key into the programme of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) to enhance their potential. Olajide noted that IFIP had instituted an award for 2016 to adequately encourage the young professionals at global level in recognition for their achievements. He however explained that the award which was being organized by InterYIT, the International Young IT Group of IFIP, would be a recognition scheme for IT industry. He listed the categories of the award to include; IFIP International Young IT Professional of the Year, IFIP International Young IT Entrepreneur of the Year and IFIP International Best Student IT Project of the Year and he urged interested applicants to send in their forms before June 30 to info@ifipinteryit.org

DATA MINING

Data mining is about looking for patterns in data. In data mining, the data is stored electronically and the search is automated by a computer. There is a huge amount of data available in the Information industry. This data is of no use until it is converted into useful information. It is necessary to analyze this huge amount of data and extract useful information form it. Extraction of information is not the only process we need to perform. Data Mining also involves other processes sush as data cleaning, data integration, data transformation, pattern evaluation and data presentation. Once all these processes are over, we would be able to use this information in many applications such as fraud detection, market analysis, production control, science exploration, e.t.c.

          Data mining is about solving problems by analyzing data already present in databases. Suppose, to take a well-worn example, the problem is fickle customer loyalty in a highly competitive marketplace. A database of customer choices, along with customer profiles, holds the key to this problem. Patterns of behavior of former customers can be analyzed to identify distinguishing characteristics of those likely to switch products and those likely to remain loyal. Once such characteristics are found, they can be put to work to identify present customers who are likely to jump ship. This group can be targeted for special treatment, treatment too costly to apply to the customer base as a whole. More positively, the same techniques can be used to identify customers who might be attracted to another service the enterprise provides, one they are not presently enjoying, to target them for special offers that promote this service. In today’s highly competitive, customer-centered, service-oriented economy, data is the raw material that fuels business growth—if only it can be mined.

         

To be more precise, data mining can also be defined as the process of discovering patterns in data. The process is usually automatic or semiautomatics. The patterns discovered must be meaningful in that they lead to some advantage, usually an economic advantage. The data is invariably present in substantial quantities. The patterns generated from data minig allow us to make nontrivial predictions on new data.

BIOINFORMATICS: THE NEW TECHNOLOGY FOR THE 21ST CENTURY

BioInformatics is the emerging field that deals with the application of computers to the collection, organization and sharing of biological data to solve problems on the molecular level. More appropriately, bioinformatics is the mathematical, statistical and computing methods that aim to solve biological problems using DNA and amino acid sequence and related information.

          Over the past few decades, rapid developments in genomic and other molecular research technologies and developments in information technologies have combined to produce a tremendous amount of information related to molecular biology.  In developing countries like nigeria, it has a key role to play in arears like agriculture where It can be used for increasing the nutritional content and increasing the volume of the agricultural produce and implanting disease resistance. In the pharmaceutical sector, it can be used to reduce the time and cost involved in drug discovery process particularly for third world diseases, to custom design drugs and to develop personalized medicine.

          The huge increase in the scale of data being produced in this genomic era has seen a need to incorporate computers into this research process. Sequence generation, its subsequent storage, interpretation and analysis are entirely computer dependent tasks. One of the challenges facing bioinformatics is

1.     Efficient and Intelligent storage of this massive biological database

2.     Easy and reliable access to this data.

It is important to point out that this data itself is useless and meaningless before analysis and it is impossible for even a trained biologist to begin to interpret it manually. As a result, automated computer tools must be developed to allow the extraction of meaningful biological information. There are three central biological processes into which bioinformatics tools such as support vector machines, neural networks e.t.c can be applied

1.     DNA sequence which determines protein sequence

2.     Protein sequence which determines protein structure

3.     Protein structure which determines protein function

The important sub-disciplines of bioinformatics are:

1.     The development and implementation of tools that enable efficient access to, and use and management of various types of information.

2.     The development of new algorithms (mathematical formulas) and statistics with which to assess relationship among members of large data sets, such as methods to locate a gene within a sequence, predict protein structure and/or function, and cluster protein sequences into families of related sequences.

Biological databases

          Biological databases are huge data bases of mostly sequence data pouring in from many genome sequencing projects going on all over the world. They are an important tool in assisting scientist to understand and explain a host of biological phenomena. The information about DNA, proteins and the function of proteins must be stored in an intelligent fashion, so that scientists can solve problems quickly and easily using all available information. As a result, the information is stored in databanks, many of which are accessible to everyone on the internet. A few examples are a databank containing protein structures, a databank containing protein sequences and their function (Swiss-Prot), a databank with information about enzymes and their function (ENZYME) e.t.c.

The Advantage and Usefulnes of Databanks

Using databanks, one can perform all kinds of comparisons and search queries. If for example, you know a protein which causes a disease in humans, you might look into a databank to see if a similar protein has previously been described and what this protein does in the human body. Using this known information will make it easier and quicker to develop a drug against the disease or a test to detect the disorder in an early stage.

Computer Programming in Bioinformatics: JAVA in Bioinformatics

The geographical scattered research centres all around the globe ranging from private to academic settings are using Java to program most bioinformatics software. In fact, Java is emerging as a key player in bioinformatics. Phsyiome Sciences computer-based biological simulation technologies and Bionformatics Solutions PatternHunter are two examples of the growing adoption of Java in bioinformatics.

Perl in Bioinformatics

String manipulation, regular expression matching, file parsing, data format interconversion e.t.c are the common text-processing tasks performed in bioinformatics. Perl excels in such tasks and is being used by many developers. Yer, there are no standard modules designed in Perl specifically for the field of bioinformatics. However, developers normally designed several of their own individual modeules for any specific purpose, which have become quite popular and are coordinated by the BioPerl project.

BioInformatics in Agriculture

Bioinformatics can be used to produce stronger, more drought, disease and insect resistant crops and improve the quality of likestock making them healthier, more disease resistant and more productive.

Explanation:

          The most critical tasks in bioinformatics involves the finding of genes in the DNA sequences of various organisms, developing methods to predict the structure and function of newly discovered proteins and structural RNA sequences, clustering protein sequences into families of related sequences, development of protein models, aligning similar proteins and generating phylogenetic trees to examine evolutionary relationships. The sequencing of the genomes of microbes, plants and animals should have enormous benefits for the agricultural community. Computational analysis of these sequence data generated by genome sequencing, proteomics and array-based technologies is critically important. Bionformatics tools can be used to search for genes within these genomes and to elucidate their functions.