Less than three weeks later, on August 18, the healthcare agency of the Tuscany region was also targeted by criminals who were able to penetrate its online defenses and destroy some statistical and epidemiological data. Previously, ransomware campaigns had hit big corporations such as the energy company Enel Group, Campari, Geox, Tiscali, Luxottica, and hospitals such as the Spallanzani in Rome and the San Raffaele in Milan – albeit with limited results....

The Digital Ready Assessment Tool is a questionnaire-based tool that, once completed, provides businesses a digital competency rating in comparison to peer businesses and recommendations for what actions and initiatives can be taken to improve digital maturity. The recommendations are focused on the categories of customer, data and analytics, digital capability and culture, digital strategy and innovation, operations, risk and cybersecurity, and technology. Minister for Science and Technology Melissa Price said the tool is part of the government’s efforts to strengthen the digital economy and aims to provide considerable benefit to many businesses....

Such a mandate was requested in a submission [PDF] the body representing Australia’s finance technology industry made to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Corporations and Financial Services as part of its inquiry into mobile payment and digital wallet financial services. “The growth of digital payments encourages greater business competition and innovation, leading to the creation of more tailored products for consumers,” it wrote. “However, competition in the sector is currently at risk due to the limited number of competing mobile device manufacturers and operating system developers....

Enroll in career-tailored courses that educate, assess, and apply real-world problems for effective results. Learn from over 362 courses on Python, SQL, Excel, Tableau, Power BI, and more. Each course spans from two hours to six. Receive a professional data scientist certification upon track completion and career services.Build data skills online without needing to download any software. You can learn more about the terms and conditions of the offer here. Also: Best online master’s in data analytics: Top schools to enroll

While Apple’s motto is “It just works.”, sometimes you may wish that their products worked just a little bit better. If you happen to be thinking about looking for a more user-friendly alternative to Apple’s Siri Remote, then the Function101 Button Remote for Apple TV/Apple TV 4K could be exactly what you need. It requires no voice input because all of the buttons that you might need are at your fingertips....

While the price of everything seems to be skyrocketing, a lot of workers are scrambling to find higher-paying work, starting side hustles, training to switch careers, and more. But they’re also looking for ways to both save money and make dollars stretch further, and now you can do both at once by getting a Sam’s Club Plus Membership while it’s 50% off for new members. There’s no question that a Sam’s Club membership is an incredible money-saver at any time....

Once you connect to IPVanish, all of your online activities will be routed through an encrypted tunnel, ensuring your privacy remains absolute. The entire time you browse the web, stream video, send messages, and everything else, your IP address is thoroughly concealed, even from the company itself. IPVanish guarantees a zero-logs policy on all of your apps. In fact, even automatic diagnostics won’t be performed. In addition to keeping your online presence private, IPVanish offers 256-bit AES encryption to keep your data perfectly safe....

If you feel like your home – or your life – could use a little extra sparkle, then think about how nice it would be to come home to your own personal light show every evening. That’s exactly what Lamp Depot’s chic Minimalist LED Corner Floor Lamp can deliver. It can transform any room in your home with a wide variety of dramatic illuminations, and it’s on sale until May 31 for only $59....

This range extender employs cutting-edge software technology to connect to your existing WiFi network via Ethernet and enhance the internet signal to increase your speed all the way up to 300mbps. It is universally compatible, so you can use it with all standard 802.11b/g/n/a wireless internet routers. The signal booster has a long range with a reach of 2,640 square feet. You just have to place each one where it can take a signal and broadcast it to where your original router couldn’t reach....

On the mobile front, GoDaddy says GoCentral allows users to create a complete website from a mobile device in under an hour. The platform can also be used on a computer, but GoDaddy touts the mobile aspect as a key differentiator in the market. Like other drag-and-drop website builders, GoDaddy’s GoCentral is geared toward the tech and design novice, and its set of business features also cater to someone who may not have much experience with email marketing or other ecommerce basics....

Schools can also offer students access to streaming 3D learning experiences on low-bandwidth devices through ASU Prep Learning Cloud. The technology was developed with and is powered by Google Cloud. ASU Prep Digital is an accredited online K-12 school that’s part of Arizona State University. Google Public Sector is a recently created division of Google. The division focuses on helping schools and governments with digital transformation. “We’re turning students into explorers by embedding learning into the digital formats that students love,” said David Sudarma, ASU Prep’s chief technology officer, in an announcement shared with ZDNet....

Cryptocurrency mining is by far the main malicious activity conducted by attackers after taking advantage of misconfigured instances hosted on GCP, making up 86% of all actions carried out after compromise. And in many cases, the attackers move extremely quickly after compromising an instance and installing cryptomining malware to free-ride off others’ CPU and GPU resources to turn a profit for themselves. “Analysis of the systems used to perform unauthorized cryptocurrency mining, where timeline information was available, revealed that in 58% of situations the cryptocurrency mining software was downloaded to the system within 22 seconds of being compromised,” Google says in its first Cloud Threat Intelligence report....

According to a post on the Google Workspace Update blog, Google Workspace customers will be able to add custom watermarks in a Google Doc and create their own background text identifiers. The “Watermark” tab in the “Insert” drop-down now lets you either choose an image as a watermark or type in your own in the new “Text” tab. “Text watermarks will repeat on every page on your document, making it useful for indicating file status, such as ‘Confidential’ or ‘Draft’ before sharing more broadly, no matter the application you use,” Google detailed in the blog post....

The tech giant said Google.org and Google employees are contributing $15 million in donations to aid relief efforts in Ukraine, with $5 million coming from the company’s employee matching campaign and another $5 million coming from grants. The company is also offering advertising credits for humanitarian and intergovernmental organizations working on aid and resettlement efforts. “We’ve launched an SOS alert on Search across Ukraine. When people search for refugee and evacuation information, they will see an alert pointing them to United Nations resources for refugees and asylum seekers....

On Wednesday, Google added new features to its flood and wildfire tracking services that expand the scope of who can use it and what it does. Google’s wildfire tracking system has already covered more than 30 big wildfire events in the US and Canada in real time, helping alert both community members and firefighting teams, with over seven million views, according to a blog post. Google has expanded its wildfire tracking systems to identify and track wildfires in real time and predict how they will evolve and spread....

The Alphabet ISP hasn’t revealed pricing yet, but the new plans will sit on top of its existing 1 Gig plan for $70 a month, and the 2 Gig plan at $100 a month. Both of those offer symmetrical download and upload speeds and come with 1 TB of free cloud storage. I’m happy with my 300 Mbps broadband service in Paris, but Google Fiber thinks its super-fast plans will be sought after by creatives, scientists working with lots of data, finance analysts, and households with a lot of people working or studying from home....

The new immersive view feature gives users a detailed, close-up look at places, including indoor locations like restaurants or event venues. With Google Maps information layered on top, a user can use the time slider to check out what an area looks like at different times of day and in various weather conditions. It can provide insight into how busy a place could be during certain times of the day or what nearby traffic looks like....

On Monday, head of solutions strategy Anoosh Saboori said that following a successful public preview announcement in October, the company has observed a “tremendous” reception from the market, as well as many “innovative use cases for the service.” Google CAS is a scalable service for managing and deploying private certificates via automation, as well as manage public key infrastructure (PKI). The tech giant says the platform was created to “address the unprecedented growth in certificates in the digital world” prompted by the popularity of cloud services, Internet of Things (IoT), containers, microservices, smart devices, and next-generation connectivity....

The funding round was led by Sequoia Capital, Coatue, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Lead Edge Capital and GIC. As part of the latest funding round Sequoia Capital partner Carl Eschenbach will join the company’s board alongside Coatue general partner David Schneider. Eschenbach is a former president of VMware and Schneider previously served as president of ServiceNow. Grafana Labs added a free tier in January and a month earlier became the first open source provider to enter a joint development and go to market deal with AWS....

A series of letters were sent to a total of six crypto mining companies: Riot Blockchain, Marathon Digital Holdings, Stronghold Digital Mining, Bitdeer, Bitfury Group, and Bit Digital. While the letters are personalized to each operation, their content is primarily the same list of queries: How much electricity is consumed by your operations and how much carbon is generated as a result?Do you have any special agreements in place with local power utility providers?...