Merriam-Webster defines an influencer as someone who inspires or guides the actions of others, and throughout this year, we have covered a multitude of them on IT World Canada, IT Business, Channel Daily News and Direction Informatique.

One of the joys of being a journalist is the opportunity to speak with and write about these interesting and inspiring people. We asked the writers who produce the content for all four of our sites to each choose a couple of folks who are having an impact on the Canadian tech world. It was hard to select just a few, but here are their picks, in alphabetical order.

Jim Balsillie

Jim Balsillie – co-founder of BlackBerry (formerly Research in Motion): Among his many projects since having retired as co-CEO of BlackBerry, Balsillie has devoted a great deal of time and energy to one that may never be a household

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To begin, the Apple Shopping Event is still going strong and will be going right up until Cyber Monday. Specials are still being offered at big shops like Amazon and Walmart. The fact that Apple is selling so many gadgets from previous generations makes the Cyber Monday sales it is offering this year particularly noteworthy.

Cyber Monday Deal at Apple

In addition to the two new iPhone 14 models that were released in September, we also saw new releases in the Air Pods Pro 2nd Generation, the Apple Watch Series 8, and the Apple Watch Ultra. Because of these new releases, a large number of older Apple Watch and Air Pods models are currently being discounted to levels. That have never been seen before. Consider for instance this unbelievable offer on the Air Pods Pro 1st Generation, which can be purchased at Walmart for the price of $159 right now.

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Linux administrators are being warned to address five new vulnerabilities, one of which is rated 10 on the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) severity ranking.

The vulnerabilities are listed by Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative (ZDI), a project that pays security researchers for finding vulnerabilities.

The most serious of the five, designated ZDI-22-1690, allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary code on affected installations of Linux Kernel. Authentication is not required to exploit this vulnerability, but only systems with ksmbd enabled are vulnerable.

The specific flaw exists within the processing of SMB2_TREE_DISCONNECT commands. The issue results from the lack of validating the existence of an object prior to performing operations on the object. An attacker can leverage this vulnerability to execute code in the context of the kernel.

An update has been issued to correct this vulnerability. More details can be found here.

Almost as serious is a vulnerability in

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Business and personal users of the LassPass password management solution are being warned to take defensive action after the company acknowledged customer information and encrypted data they had stored in the service’s digital vault were copied by a hacker in a supply chain attack.

“Users should beware of sophisticated phishing attacks aimed at stealing their master password,” said  Mike Walters, vice-president of vulnerability and threat research at Action1, a provider of patch management solutions. “An attacker can pretend to be LastPass, regulatory authorities, and other organizations and trick users into sharing their credentials. Remember, modern phishing can go beyond average emails and combine different communication channels, such as phone calls, SMS, messengers, and others.

“I recommend that all users change their master passwords and enforce password security best practices. It includes creating a strong master password at least 30 characters long, re-encrypting the password vault, and enabling multi-factor authentication

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Welcome to Cyber Security Today. This is the Week in Review edition for Friday, December 23rd, 2022. From Toronto, I’m Howard Solomon, contributing reporter on cybersecurity for ITWorldCanada.com.

 

In a few minutes Terry Cutler of Cyology Labs will be here to talk about some of what happened in the past seven days. First, a recap of the headlines:

The U.S. Justice Department seized 48 internet domains of crooks offering DDoS-for-hire services. Terry and I will talk about that. We’ll also look at the Samba project, which issued four patches to plug vulnerabilities, and at how trying to save money is getting government departments in Ukraine hacked, a group is attacking Russia

Canadian supermarket chain Empire Co. said may have to take a charge of $25 million to its finances for costs not covered by cyber insurance after the cyber attack it suffered last month.

Personal information of customers who dined

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