Category: Uncategorized

Chartered surveyors see more gloom ahead for Singapore commercial property market

enant demand for commercial space fell at its fastest pace since the global financial crisis in 2009, as Singapore’s economic growth continues to slow, said the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) on Tuesday.

The sharp decline in occupier demand has taken its toll on investment activity as foreign buyers increasingly look beyond Singapore for better returns, said RICS in a survey report released on Tuesday (May 3).

According to its first quarter Global Cities Commercial Property Monitor, chartered surveyors anticipate a further drop in capital values and rents over the coming year against the weak economic outlook. Continue reading “Chartered surveyors see more gloom ahead for Singapore commercial property market”

Security startup Illumio raises $100m, extends Adaptive Security Platform

Security startup Illumio’s profile has steadily increased since it emerged from stealth mode in October last year with a seasoned executive team, $42.5 million of venture capital funding and an innovative Adaptive Security Platform (ASP) under its belt.

The company’s CEO and co-founder Andrew Rubin recently caught up with ZDNet while visiting London to bang the ASP drum and announce some new developments ahead of the RSA Conference in San Francisco next week.

Why is Illumio attracting attention and investment (one of today’s announcements is a cool $100m in series C funding)? According to the company, traditional perimeter- and network-centric security products are no longer sufficient in a world where applications and workloads increasingly need to work dynamically across on-premise data centres and public cloud services. Firewalls, intrusion protection systems and advanced threat protection appliances are widely deployed to secure interactions at the perimeter – but, says Illumio, these tools offer little protection within enterprise data centres and in the public cloud, where much of today’s traffic flow and data resides. Continue reading “Security startup Illumio raises $100m, extends Adaptive Security Platform”

PDPC takes action against 11 firms for data privacy breaches

The Personal Data Protection Commission fined karaoke chain K Box Entertainment S$50,000 for not having sufficient security measures during the 2014 database breach.

PDPC imposed a financial penalty of S$50,000 on karaoke chain, K Box Entertainment Group, for not having sufficient security measures to protect the personal data of 317,000 members. Details such as their contact number, email address, NRIC number and date of birth were leaked on a publicly accessible website after the company’s database was hacked.

The PDPC found that K Box did not update security patches to ensure its IT system security was sufficiently robust and it did not have a Data Protection Officer to develop or implement data protection policies. There was also weak control of access to personal data.

A financial penalty of S$10,000 was also imposed on the IT vendor in charge of K Box’s content management system, Finantech Holdings, for failing to implement proper and adequate protective measures for the personal data in the system it had built and managed for K Box, PDPC said. Continue reading “PDPC takes action against 11 firms for data privacy breaches”