You probably hear the term “smartphone” tossed around a lot. But if you’ve ever wondered exactly what a smartphone is, well, you’re not alone. How is a smartphone different than a cell phone, and what makes it so smart?In a nutshell, a smartphone is a device that lets you make telephone calls, but also adds in features that, in the past, you would have found only on a personal digital assistant or a computer — such as the ability to send and receive e-mail and edit Office documents, for example.
If you take a look around any public space, a good percentage of those assembled there will likely have their heads down, buried in a smartphone. People love their smartphones. A lot! The number of smartphone “super users” is climbing rapidly, so much so that last year worldwide mobile data traffic was nearly 18 times the size of the entire Internet in 2000.
The crankier Luddites might call this a sign of the downfall of society. And maybe they’re right, but it’s a fact of today’s world that we are just plain addicted to our tech. Young and old, male and female, we need to be connected in order to get through the day. Below are some signs.

• You get slightly panicky when your phone is out of your line of sight.
• You ridiculously panicked when you accidentally leave it at home. It’s like you’re missing a limb.
• You sleep with your phone on your nightstand, or worse, in your bed next to you.

• You justify being on your phone all the time because you “might miss a work email.”
• A cracked screen would never stand in YOUR way.
• You prune and manage your apps like it’s the Parliament building lawn.
• You maintain three to five text threads/Snapchat chains going throughout most days.
• At least once a week you freak out that you can’t find your phone, and then realise it’s in your hand.
• Turning your phone off during a flight gives you horrendous FOMO…but also makes you excited, because you know when you turn it on, you’ll have tons of notifications to go through.
• You insist that you can do two things at once — text AND walk, text AND listen! — but we all know that you cannot.
• You feel kind of dejected when you sneak a peek at your phone after a long dinner or meeting and you have no new notifications.

Hackers who stole info from Facebook, Apple, Twitter revealed

A hacking group best known for breaking into top-tier technology companies Apple Inc, Facebook Inc and Twitter Inc more than two years ago is now believed to be one of a handful of highly skilled independent gangs pursuing corporate secrets for profit.

According to new research from the largest US security software vendor, Symantec Corp, the group appears to be among the few that display significant talent without backing from a national government. The group stays below the radar with a small number of carefully targeted attacks.

“They are very focused, wanting everything valuable from the top companies of the world,” FIN4 has less technical skill but uses knowledge of the investment banking world and strong social engineering, or trickery, to harvest email credentials and discover material financial information.
Symantec said its group, which it calls Morpho, dropped out of sight for months after press accounts of the Silicon Valley breaches shone a light on their techniques, which included use of a previously unknown “zero-day” flaw in Oracle’s Java platform.

Morpho also used a “watering hole” approach, infecting websites that were likely to attract employees of its targets as visitors. In the best-known case, a website frequented by iPhone developers was infected.
Some had suspected China or another country in the Silicon Valley attacks. Some of the companies breached, including Apple, said they found no evidence of data being stolen. In a paper being released, Symantec said Morpho came back from its absence to breach a small number of additional technology companies. It has also gone after the pharmaceutical industry and airlines, typically hitting multiple competitors in a sector and infecting a very few machines, usually in the research departments. Be careful my fellow Guyanese…don’t allow you system to be hacked, protect yourself and you device!