E-Business
IBM’s Cognitive Exploration to Drive Better Business Outcomes
IBM has announced the availability of a cognitive-infused Watson Explorer, a powerful combination of data exploration and content analytics capabilities.
Typical organizations only use 12 percent of their dataˡ, leaving a wealth of untapped information across the enterprise that could be leveraged to make smarter decisions.
Watson Explorer equips users with the information and analytics capabilities which can help them to deliver better performance and real-time results.
Watson Explorer has enabled hundreds of customers to connect with their data, build information-centric applications and helped them to improve the quality and speed of their decision making.
With the announcement, Watson Explorer advances core cognitive components by providing organizations the ability to quickly use natural language processing capabilities and data exploration to discover valuable business information in both structured and unstructured data.
Watson Explorer advances data exploration by bringing cognitive capabilities, providing users with a 360-degree view of contextually relevant information to offer deeper levels of insight, showing what is happening and why.
Unlike traditional search solutions that fail to provide context, trends and relationships, Watson Explorer can help professionals find and understand the information they need to work more efficiently, gain more insights from their unstructured content and realize their objectives of improving business outcomes.
New Watson Explorer features include advanced content analytics capabilities giving users a view into structured and unstructured data. Watson Explorer provides the bridge between cloud-based services and on-premise proprietary information, making it the logical first step in a Watson journey.
Today’s business environment demands an ability to make high quality decisions more quickly than ever before, against a rapidly expanding set of inputs. Enterprise data and applications are typically siloed and lack the information sharing capacity to facilitate better employee performance. Take, for example, a customer service representative at a global retailer.
Hundreds of billions of customer service calls are handled annually, during which an average customer service representative interfaces with over ten different systems per call, requiring them to move between different applications, run multiple searches, mentally correlate the information and respond to the customer all in real-time – a monumental undertaking.
When a customer calls with questions, representatives face a struggle to create a consistently excellent experience for their customer due to challenges finding, organizing, analyzing and correlating the right information for that specific customer at that moment.
Cognitive exploration can enhance a user’s ability to use information to make more informed, evidence based decisions. It does this by providing information and understanding from relevant sources, much like a human would.
With Watson Explorer, for example, a representative is able to ask a question in natural language and instantly retrieve relevant content, expertly culled from a variety of data sources, both structured and unstructured.
Watson Explorer’s content analytics feature leverages the power of natural language processing to enable organizations to extract meaning from content such as customer comments, messages, social media, legal documents and research reports
“Exploration of data is part of a journey toward discovery of valuable information to help organizations make critical business decisions,” said Stephen Gold, vice president, IBM Watson Group.
“We are continually looking for ways to provide enterprise customers with tools that will make a difference to their employees and drive results for their bottom line. Watson Explorer brings cognitive capabilities to users at every level, giving them real-time access to the valuable information often locked in structured and unstructured data.”
The Power of Cognitive Exploration
Exploration enables users to uncover new possibilities. But exploration in complex, heterogeneous environments present unique challenges with massive volumes of data spread across a variety of sources and a limited ability to understand the connections that exist in the data.
To speed the time, Watson Explorer connects information from a range of internal and external sources, analyzes that content and looks for underlying relationships or patterns that help interpret information.
Explore – Watson Explorer combines content and data from many different systems throughout the enterprise and public sources and presents it to users based on their role and current activities, which can dramatically reduce the amount of time spent looking for information, and increasing their ability to work smarter.
In today’s information-rich environment, few important tasks can be completed with information from a single source—whether the task is to assist a customer, plan a marketing strategy for a new product or investigate a security breach.
Watson Explorer brings data and analytics from many sources, as well as relevant cognitive insights to a user’s desktop or mobile device, in a context-appropriate manner to enable them work with confidence.
Analyze – For many organizations, the growing volume of unstructured data represents untapped business opportunities.
Documents, e-mail messages, call center transcripts and social media are examples of the kinds of content that may yield a wealth of insights that can help improve business performance if gathered and analyzed by the right tools.
Watson Explorer’s content analytics capabilities enable users to uncover trends, patterns and correlations from unstructured information using natural language processing technology, delivering insights in hours or days rather than or weeks or months. Those insights are then available to users in real-time as a 360-degree view.
Interpret – Watson Explorer provides the ability to integrate a growing list of IBM Watson Developer Cloud services for an enhanced experience leveraging the combined strength of exploration, analytic and cognitive capabilities.
As new capabilities are developed by IBM and exposed in the Watson Developer Cloud, they will be made available to qualified Watson Explorer users who license the Watson Developer Cloud services.
The available services for integration with Watson Explorer at the time of release are: Question Answer, User Modeling, Relationship Extraction, Message Resonance, Concept Expansion, Language Identification and Machine Translation.
“We’ve put Watson Explorer in the hands of our call center agents to equip them with a 360-degree view of the information they need, including self-performance reports and other analytics,” said Farouk Ferchichi, Corporate Manger, Toyota Financial Services.
“With over four million customers, we recognize the importance of top-notch service and are committed to actively maintaining customer satisfaction. Watson Explorer gives agents the ability to get detailed metrics on their performance to identify strengths and focus areas to improve.”
Watson Explorer will enable customers like Toyota Financial Services to maximize business opportunities by providing frontline workers with a more holistic view of their information landscape.
Watson Explorer is currently available as two principal offerings:
Enterprise Edition provides search and 360-degree information applications across multiple sources, as well as the ability of qualified customers to license cognitive services from the Watson Developer Cloud to help enhance, scale, and accelerate human expertise.
Advanced Edition includes all of the capabilities of Enterprise Edition plus advanced content mining and content analytics to help organizations take the next step with advanced content mining and analytics capabilities to aggregate, analyze and visualize massive amounts of unstructured content to expose new insights.
IBM Watson: Pioneering a New Era of Computing
IBM Watson represents a new era of computing in which apps and systems interact with human users more naturally, augment our knowledge with Big Data insights, and learn to improve how they assist us.
Fueled by innovation from a mission to transform industries and professions, Watson is uniquely positioned at the forefront of the new era of computing, evidenced by an unmatched demonstration of what cognitive systems can bring to transform decision-making. IBM is delivering a range of cloud-based products and services to clients in industries such as banking, healthcare, insurance, retail and education.
In January, 2014, IBM launched the IBM Watson Group, a new business unit dedicated to developing and commercializing cloud-delivered cognitive advisors. The move signifies a strategic shift by IBM to deliver a new class of software, services and apps that think, improve by learning, and discover insights from massive amounts of Big Data.
IBM is investing $1 billion into the Watson Group, focusing on development and research and bringing cloud-delivered cognitive applications and services to market. This includes $100 million available for venture investments to support IBM’s ecosystem of start-ups and businesses building cognitive apps made with Watson
National Office for Technology Acquisition and Transfer (NOTAP), has commenced the process of patenting and commercialisation of research works by universities and other research institutions in the country.
Dr. Obiageli Amadiobi, director general of NOTAP
Dr. Obiageli Amadiobi, director general of NOTAP, stated this in Abuja, during an interaction with journalists on her achievements since assuming office.
Speaking on the theme, “Strengthening Indigenous Capacity: NOTAP’s Drive for Technology Transfer, Local Content Development, and Innovative activities,” Amadiobi said the agency had involved both the academia and industry so that researchers can work on topics brought forward for commercialisation purpose.
“My minister is very intentional about this– very intentional about commercialisation of research results, which we have already submitted to him. They are meaningful researches, which we need to commercialise.
“We have established 69 intellectual property technology transfer offices in 69 universities that we are still counting. We have informed the vice chancellors of Nigerian universities to set up such offices and we will come and educate them on intellectual property and technology transfers.
“As we are doing this, we are also taking record of all the researchers of these universities and research centres and documenting them in a compendium.
“So, we have compendiums from the universities to us and we put them in a database. If you will recall, recently, the ministry, our supervising ministry, which is the Federal Ministry of Innovation, Science, and Technology, launched a programme titled Energise Commercialisation. This entirely was for commercialisation of all R&Ds,” she said.
On research Institutions carrying out research on areas of industry needs, she said, “NOTAP is bridging the gap between research and development with industry needs, “it is on our programme called the NITDF, NOTAP Industry Technology Transfer Fellowship. By this programme, we engage the universities and the industries, in what we call the triple helix. We liaise with the universities and the industries to sponsor, the industries will sponsor a Ph.D candidate in a Nigerian university to conduct relevant researches.
“They will provide the topics that they want researches for and such students will research on that with the assistance of the industries, because they wear the shoes, so they know where it pinches them. But usually, there are Ph.D candidates already established. This year alone, we certified about 15 of them to enter into this programme and they have gone into the various universities.
“And we are still looking for people to update some of the projects; the research topics we already have. But we are not getting enough persons to do the researches. So, we are going to do further advertisement to see if other candidates will come up.
Federal government has launched a drive to standardise operations across all Ministries, Departments, and Agencies (MDAs) through the nationwide adoption of the new National Digital Alphanumeric Postcode System.
Dr Bosun Tijani, minister of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy, launched the initiative at a high-level stakeholder workshop on Thursday in Abuja.
The conference, themed “Embedding the Nigerian Digital Postcode in Public Service Delivery,” brought together key stakeholders to discuss the adoption of the system across government institutions.
Represented by Nadungu Gagare, permanent secretary of the Ministry, declared that the initiative was a critical pillar for the country’s economic and security framework.
“The Nigerian Digital Postcode represents far more than an improvement to postal services. It is a strategic national asset. Without accurate location intelligence, governments struggle to plan effectively, emergency responders lose valuable time, and financial institutions face verification challenges,” he said.
Tijani said the Alphanumeric digital postcode system was a pathway and a defining moment for Nigeria’s digital transformation under the Renewed Hope Agenda of President Bola Tinubu.
He said an accurate national addressing system would enable government agencies to plan better, improve emergency response, support credible census and elections, expand financial inclusion and ensure citizens were not excluded from essential services because of poor location data.
The Minister commended NIPOST for leading the initiative and urged MDAs and state governments to integrate the system into their operations, stressing that its success would depend on collaboration, interoperability, and nationwide adoption.
Omotola Odeyemi, postmaster general and chief executive officer, Nigerian Postal Service (NIPOST), explained that the digital postcode system creates a “common language of location” for the entire government.
She urged federal and subnational entities to integrate the infrastructure into their daily operations to maximise its value.
“Just as digital identity has helped to establish who a citizen is, this National Digital Postcode helps us to determine where services, opportunities, and interventions should be delivered. Its success will not be measured by the number of postcodes that we generate but by the lives that we improve,” the NIPOST boss explained.
Mrs Didi Esther Walson-Jack, head of the Civil Service of the Federation, represented by Dr Abdul Sule Garba, permanent Secretary of the Service Welfare Office, pledged full administrative backing for the rollout.
She noted that the civil service would be properly equipped to adapt to the data-driven system.
“The operationalisation of the Nigerian digital postcode is a strategic initiative that has the potential to significantly improve public administration, service delivery, and digital governance across the country,” Mrs Walson-Jack added.
The workshop featured live demonstrations and technical panel sessions focused on linking the new digital postcode system directly into national healthcare, social protection, education, and electoral planning.
E-Business
Kaspersky Warns of a Large-scale Campaign using Fake Free Software to Deploy a RAT via ScreenConnect
A remote admin tool ScreenConnect is being distributed through fake websites designed to mimic the official pages of well-known software products.
In total, researchers identified more than 90 domains spanning 10 languages, including English, Arabic, Spanish, Chinese, German, Portuguese, and Russian, enabling the attackers to reach a wide range of victims worldwide. The campaign targets both individual users and organisations using Windows.
After detecting an incident through its Managed Detection and Response, Kaspersky uncovered a large-scale campaign in which attackers used fake websites to spread installer archives disguised as popular software, including OBS Studio, DNS Jumper, DS4Windows, Glary Utilities and Bandicam.
To drive traffic to these pages, the threat actor also used search engine optimisation techniques to place them high in search results.
Across more than 90 identified fraudulent software sites, the same tactic was observed: victims who downloaded what appeared to be legitimate software instead received a hidden ScreenConnect remote administration tool, which gave the attackers persistent access to compromised devices and allowed them to deploy AsyncRAT, an open-source trojan capable of giving them full control over infected systems.
Domain registrations linked to this campaign peaked in February 2026; in 2025, the same attacker had used fake websites to disguise malicious installers as games.
Infection occurs through malicious archives containing a legitimate, signed Microsoft file, install.exe, alongside the install.res.1033.dll library. The DLL is loaded onto the device via a DLL sideloading technique and deploys a ScreenConnect service that awaits further instructions from the attackers.
“The campaign targets both users downloading free utilities from the Internet and corporate networks, where remote access tools are often allowlisted and granted elevated privileges.
“Its danger lies in its potential to facilitate large-scale credential theft and unauthorised access to systems, with the stolen data typically later resold on dark web forums,” says Denis Kulik, lead SOC Analyst at Kaspersky.
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