In a digital world, print shows it still matters

In a digital world, print shows it still matters
The sheer durability of print — it's tangible, something you see on a newsstand and can hold in your hand, something you can hang on your bulletin board or save in a scrapbook — lends it a gravitas digital just doesn't have. World Series champions …
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Redskins plastering 'bulletin board' material in meeting rooms, locker room
Inside the Washington Redskins locker room, there was bulletin board material taped up near the doorway entrance on Thursday. A few of the printed stories were from a New York Post article prior to the Redskins' 20-14 victory over the New York Giants …
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Harbaugh's message to Buckeyes is bulletin board material 30 years later
Ohio State players never require bulletin-board material to motivate them when they are preparing to meet their biggest rival. They have some, anyway. And the bulletin board is almost 30 years old. The Buckeyes will play at Michigan on Saturday …
Read more on San Jose Mercury News

Initiative shows total traffic deaths on digital message boards

Initiative shows total traffic deaths on digital message boards
This increase of over 18 percent has inspired the Ohio State Highway Patrol and the Ohio Department of Transportation to join forces with a new initiative using ODOT digital message boards to spread traffic safety messages. The messages will be …
Read more on Wooster Daily Record

The Rinspeed Etos is a hybrid autonomous car with its own personal drone
If we were to reach into the fabric of spacetime and pull out a car from the year 2050, it might very well resemble the lemon-shaded concept you see above. Dubbed the Etos (Σtos), the vehicle comes from Swiss think tank and mobility lab Rinspeed, a …
Read more on Digital Trends

Targets of Opportunity Still Hackers Best Friends, With Some New Twists, Mid-Year 2013 ENISA Report Shows

New York, NY (PRWEB) September 25, 2013

One thing is proven relentlessly in this digital age, cyber crime has no borders. So even though the Threat Landscape, Mid-year 2013 report published last week is the work of the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA), “The finding are just as relative to organizations here in the US,” says Joe Caruso, founder and CEO/CTO of Global Digital Forensics (GDF), a premier cyber security solutions provider based out of New York, “ and failing to stay up-to-date and informed about all the current trends in cyber threats and delivery methods is one sure way to put any organization’s digital assets at risk. That’s exactly what network vulnerability assessments conducted by knowledgeable and competent professionals are designed to do, but doing them regularly is also paramount in the fluid and ever-evolving world of cyber crime.”

Oldies still topping the charts.

“One thing that should catch everyone’s eye is the fact that almost every type of threat trended up compared to last year, with the exception of spam, which has slowly but steadily been being replaced with much more effective phishing and spear phishing campaigns. But holding the “king of the hill” title is still the Drive-by-exploit, which you can think of as taking advantage of a target of opportunity. A Drive-by can take many forms, but they usually involve misdirection, like fake pop-up ads that prompt you to click on an ad or a fake error message that make you think you’re getting one thing while delivering quite another when you navigate to a site which has been injected with malicious code. The bad news is that many of the sites hosting the malicious code may be legitimate and are often not even aware that they have been infected, and that they are facilitating the spread of malware to others. But once the injected code is happened upon, it can take advantage of weaknesses in popular applications like Adobe Reader and Air, Flash and Java, browser exploits, or even unpatched operating system vulnerabilities. And from there the hacker responsible is free to wreak havoc with their newly found access to the victim and their network.”

Easier access to exploits and harder to follow their tracks.

“One of the constants across the board is that hackers are getting better at covering their tracks by using delivery methods which are much harder to track, from leveraging cloud and mobile technology, to an increased focus on using malicious URLs. The most frightening aspect though, is that these days almost anyone with the desire to hack others and a few dollars to invest can gain access to powerful malware that is almost as easy as a point and shoot camera, for everything from code injection, to DDoS attacks (Distributed Denial of Service), because black market exploits are increasingly easy to find on numerous hacker boards, and anonymous digital currencies like Bitcoins are making those kinds of transactions that much harder to trace.”

Don’t try this at home.

“It takes a full and focused commitment to stay on top of everything when it comes to cyber threats, with new tactics, vulnerabilities and malware hitting the scene all the time. So it only makes sense that trying to handle the task completely internally will come up far short most of the time. Having professional network vulnerability assessments regularly performed by seasoned experts like our teams at GDF really slides the effectiveness scale way up. We live and breathe this stuff, so it’s not an interruption of our job, which is what it typically turns into for organizations trying to trudge the cyber security path alone, it’s the purpose of our job. And our commitment to staying informed, educated, and fully competent in today’s threat landscape, while also keeping an eye on the trends developing for tomorrow, will not be rivaled by any client’s internal IT pros.”

The key is understanding how the threat landscape can affect a particular organization’s weak points and unique digital architecture.

“Every client’s needs are unique. A retailer and a financial institution will typically have very different vulnerabilities to worry about, not only from a technology standpoint, but also from a regulatory compliance standpoint. The same goes for health care organizations, universities, design firms, infrastructure entities and so on, and we’ve worked with them all. That broad expertise gives us a big leg up when it comes to identifying weaknesses with our comprehensive network vulnerability assessments and professional penetration testing. It allows us to streamline the process to make it the most effective and revealing for any type of client, while keeping costs in check by not chasing ghosts which are completely irrelevant to the client’s situation; one client may need an extreme focus put on mobile devices, another cloud services, another vulnerable applications. We look at the big picture first, then start focusing on the necessary details. In the end, the client’s cyber security posture is not only substantially improved, but the groundwork for regulatory compliance and emergency incident response are also developed and/or strengthened. And that can make a huge difference in both the devastating costs a successful cyber attack can have, as well as the lost client trust and business integrity that can suffer right along with it. In a nutshell, the advantages of professionally conducted network vulnerability assessments and penetration testing far outweigh the potentially sky-high costs of inaction.

*Global Digital Forensics is a recognized industry leader in the fields of computer forensics services, electronic discovery (eDiscovery), cyber security and emergency incident response, with years of experience assisting clients in the government, banking, healthcare, education and corporate arenas. For a free consultation with a Global Digital Forensics specialist, call 1-800-868-8189 about tailoring a plan which will meet your unique needs. Emergency responders are also standing by 24/7 to handle intrusion and data breach emergencies whenever and wherever they arise. Time is critical if a cyber-incident has occurred, so don’t hesitate to get help. For more information, visit http://www.evestigate.com.







The first Annual UK Banking Social Media Report Launched by DigitalMR Shows HSBC and Lloyds TSB are the Most Talked about UK Banks on the Internet

London, UK (PRWEB UK) 16 March 2012

social media research specialist DigitalMR releases first media report in the UK ever annual Social Banking on what customers are saying about the UK major banks online. DigitalMR analyzed over 200,000 customer comments on banks high street in January-December 2011 full report covers:

Share of votes for all banks.
The monthly trend of the top 10 banks.
Top 10 Topics by number of mentions.
The disruptive forces that users of social networks have on banks.
Individual focusing of the 10 largest banks.
Social media presence.
Strategy Recommendations for the use of media for social research.

For the first time, British banks will be able to assess customer perceptions of their performance against that of their competitors through a series of criteria for all of 2011

DigitalMR Group Managing Director, Michalis Michael commented: “This report provides a national reference point for how banking brands are perceived by customers online. Banks attracting criticism will be able to use the analysis to find out how they can improve their competitive position. “


Report Highlights

The five largest banks in the United Kingdom who receive the largest share of online mentions:

HSBC (14.4%)

Lloyds TSB (13.5%)

Halifax (10%)

RBS (9.6%)

Santander UK (9%)

There is a large difference in the positive and negative mentions that some banks attract. HSBC (9.5%), Halifax (9.5%) and Lloyds TSB (7.8%) received the largest share positive messages.

However, both HSBC (12.1%) and Lloyds TSB (10.8%) received a relatively higher proportion of negative comments. Conversely Halifax represented only 6.2% of negative comments over a much larger proportion (9.5%) of those positives.

The top 5 most discussed through January to December topics were:

loans

credit cards

Customer Service

Online Banking

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net sentiment score

The difference in the number of positive messages to each bank attracts negative, giving it a score of net sentiment (NSS). NSS is an overall percentage of net positive posts. Top 10 banks measured in 2011, the three best performances in terms of the highest NSS implementation were:

ING Direct 57.5%

Halifax 43.3%

Clydesdale Bank 41.7%

The Royal Bank of Scotland was the only bank in the Top 10, which achieved a NSS with negative (-2.1%). The next lowest was Bank of Ireland with a NSS of 0.5%.
The report
DigitalMR (powered by SociaNuggets ) analyzes thousands customer feedback posted by a range of relevant finance related and open access platforms of social media websites. It measures not only the number of comments posted by consumers on the Internet, but also the feeling – these posts are positive or negative.

Results are based on comments posted by consumers on the major UK banks, including Lloyds TSB, HSBC, Halifax, NatWest, Bank of Ireland, Santander, Barclays, RBS, ING Direct, Clydesdale Bank, Saxo Bank, American Express, First Direct, Bank of Scotland, Abbey, Northern Rock, Northern Bank and Alliance and Leicester.

For more information on the full report, content and other data click here

Contact

For further information on the UK Banking Social Media Report.

Michalis A. Michael

mmichael (at) digital-mr (dot) com

Tel: +44 751 571 0370

http://www.digital-mr.com

About DigitalMR

DigitalMR understands what people think and feel when they share views online. He is a specialist agency which provides a holistic approach to market research based on the Web. He specializes in the use of social media research, especially active web-listening, and online communities to enhance its business consulting approach. The agency has developed new methods in online focus groups as well as tools such as video diaries, bulletin boards and online ethnography. DigitalMR is headed by founder and Group MD, Michalis Michael and has offices in London UK, Nicosia Cyprus, and Columbus Ohio, in the United States.


About SocialNuggets

SocialNuggets technology provides real-time market intelligence for fast moving industries by analyzing data from various social media sources with a mission to liberate social media data and sentiment analysis for use in real-time research of brands, products and features. SocialNuggets delivered ready to use market intelligence for various industry sectors, including consumer electronics and banking. SocialNuggets data is delivered in bite size, ready-to-consume, infographics and is also available as full access to our data warehouse for analysis and integration with customer data . SocialNuggets, a company Serendio, was founded in 2011 and headquartered in Santa Clara, California For more information, please visit http://www.SociaNuggets.net

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Latest Online Research Shows American Express as Most Popular US Bank with a 35% Share of Positive Comments on the Web

Colombus, OH (PRWEB UK) 2 May 2012

DigitalMR analyzed tens of thousands of online customer comments regarding US banks for the month of January 2012. Two thirds of comments monitored were positive (67%) about their customer experiences, compared with 33% being negative about their customer experiences.

DigitalMR’s report (powered by SocialNuggets) analyzes tens of thousands of mentions and customer comments posted via open access social media platforms and relevant finance related websites. It measures not only the number of comments posted by consumers on the internet, but also sentiment – whether these posts are positive or negative.

Results are based on comments posted on the major US banks: CitiBank, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, US Bank, American Express, HSBC, Capital One, Barclays, JP Morgan Chase and US Bancorp.

The banking service brands with the highest share of overall mentions were: Amex (29%), Citibank (20%) and Bank of America (18%).

There was, however, a large difference between the positive and negative mentions that these banks generated. Amex achieves the highest share of positive comments (35%) more than twice its share of negative ones (16%). Conversely, Bank of America attracted more than twice the share of negative comments (28%) to positive ones (13%).

Taking each bank’s positive and negative scores into consideration, Amex achieves the highest Net Sentiment Score (NSS) with 63%, followed by US Bank with 61%. The only bank with a net negative score was Bank of America with a NSS of (-4%).

Ryan Rutan, President of DigitalMR USA commented: “Online sentiment continues to show contrasting pictures of two banks: Amex which is very positive and Bank of America where sentiment is highly negative. This represents a huge challenge for Bank of America to turn this around.”

Data analysis and customer comments

Contact

For regular reports and more information:

Ryan A. Rutan

rrutan(at)digital-mr(dot)com

tel: +1 (614) 638-0216

http://www.digital-mr.com

About DigitalMR

DigitalMR understands what people think and feel when they share views online. It is a specialist agency which provides a holistic approach to web based market research. It specialises in utilising social media research, especially active web-listening, and online communities to enhance its business consulting approach. The agency has pioneered new methods in online focus groups alongside tools such as video diaries, bulletin boards and online ethnography. DigitalMR is headed by founder and MD, Michalis Michael and has offices in London UK, Nicosia Cyprus, and Columbus Ohio, in the US.

About SocialNuggets