E-Business
Study Identifies Latest Trends in Computing Usage, Spending

The latest International Data Corporation (IDC) worldwide study of high performance computing (HPC) end-user sites, now fully available, provides a wealth of new information on trends in HPC usage, purchasing criteria, and budgets.
The 2013 study included sites representing 905 HPC systems, nearly double the 488 systems profiled in the previous version of the study.
Highlights from the study’s six reports include that the proportion of sites employing co-processors or accelerators in their HPC systems jumped from 28.2% in the 2011 version of the study to 76.9% in 2013. Co-processors/accelerators advanced from slightly more than 1% of all processor parts in 2011 to 3.4% in 2013, with Intel Xeon Phi co-processors and NVIDIA GPUs running neck and neck for leadership, and FPGAs in a respectable third-place position.
The use of co-processors and accelerators is still wider than it is deep, meaning that these newer devices have entered many more sites but are often still used for exploratory purposes rather than production computing. Industrial/commercial firms tend to buy fewer of these devices but use more of them in production environments.
On High Performance Data Analysis Report, IDC identified that 67% of the sites in the 2013 study said they perform Big Data analysis on their HPC systems, with 30% of the available computing cycles devoted on average to Big Data analysis work.
IDC forecasts that revenue for high performance data analysis (HPDA) servers will grow robustly during the 2012–2017 forecast period, increasing from $743.8 million in 2012 to nearly $1.4 billion in 2017. HPDA storage revenue will near $1 billion by 2017.
The study also showed that on Storage/Interconnects Report, the 2013 end-user study also confirmed IDC supply-side research finding that storage is the fastest-growing technology area at HPC sites. By 2017, IDC expects HPC storage revenue to increase to a record $6.0 billion.
That $6 billion figure would equal the value of the worldwide HPC server market in the year 2000. Within the surveyed sites’ primary HPC systems, Ethernet variants predominated and InfiniBand was a strong second. The percentages of each varied in the sites’ other HPC systems.
On Cloud Computing Report, the proportion of sites exploiting cloud computing to address parts of their HPC workloads rose from 13.8% in 2011 to 23.5% in 2013, with public and private cloud use about equally represented among the 2013 sites.
Applications Software Report has it that 64.4% of the respondents’ codes are running on one node or less, 13.3% of the codes run on just a single core, only 5.2% of the applications are being run on more than 1,000 cores, and just 0.9% scale to 10,000 or more cores.
IDC forecasts that HPC application software spending will reach $4.8 billion by 2017 and will command a higher percentage of HPC budgets.
On the other hand, Systems Software Report, the study confirms that the expanding sizes and complexity of HPC systems, along with their need to operate in new environments, poses substantial challenges for HPC management software (middleware). IDC forecasts that spending on HPC systems software will expand to exceed $1.5 billion by 2017.
“The most surprising findings of the 2013 study are the substantially increased penetration of co-processors and accelerators at HPC sites around the world, along with the large proportion of sites that are applying Big Data technologies and methods to their problems, and the steady growth in cloud computing for HPC,” said Earl Joseph, Program Vice President for Technical Computing at IDC.
IDC uses the term high performance computing (HPC) to refer to all technical computing servers and clusters used to solve problems that are computationally intensive or data intensive. The term also refers to the market for these systems and the activities within this market. It includes technical servers but excludes desktop computers used for technical computing.
E-Business
Domain of Deception as Attackers Deploy Spyware Under Guise of Legal Threats

Kaspersky has detected a rapidly escalating malicious campaign that has targeted over 1,100 corporate users since June 2025. The attackers pose as a legal firm and in their emails threaten recipients with lawsuits over alleged domain name patent violations, aiming to deploy malware.
Victims who opened and launched the attached files – that mimicked legal documents – had a Trojan installed on their devices, and the attackers could spy on the content of their screens. Organisations across healthcare, finance, and education sectors have been targeted.
The campaign began with 95 emails on June 11 and has since continued to escalate. Apart from claiming that the recipient’s domain name violates patented combinations of a major brand and threatening litigation, in the email the fake legal bureau also expresses the patent holders’ interest in acquiring the domain and offers getting acquainted with the details of the alleged violations by opening the attached archive with “documents”.
It is worth noting that the attackers, likely to avoid detection, attach an archive that is not password protected, and inside it includes another archive that is password protected and a file containing the password along with it.
After the user entered the archive password and clicked on the alleged legal document inside, a Trojan was installed on the device. The user saw a message displayed that read, “This document cannot be opened on this device. Try opening it on another windows device,” and simultaneously the Tor Browser was covertly downloaded and installed in the background.
Through it, the malware regularly sent snapshots of the user’s screen to the attackers over the Tor network. The malware also autostarts whenever the computer is restarted.
“This campaign is a sophisticated blend of psychological manipulation and technical deception, leveraging fear of legal action to coerce businesses into executing harmful files hidden in attached archives. Its rapid growth since June 11 underscores the urgency for organisations to bolster defenses.
Victims face the risk of losing their private data. Robust email security, employee training, and swift incident reporting are essential to counter this evolving threat,” comments Anna Lazaricheva, spam analyst at Kaspersky.
E-Business
Global Crypto Heists Surge to $2.1Bn in H1 2025 as Digital Assets is Weaponised

In a sobering revelation of the evolving threat landscape facing the digital asset ecosystem, blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs has disclosed that over $2.1 billion worth of cryptocurrency was stolen in the first half of 2025 alone, spanning at least 75 high-profile hacks and exploits.
This staggering figure marks a 10 per cent surge over the previous first-half record set in 2022 and nearly eclipses the total stolen in all of 2024.
But beyond the monetary scale, the report reveals a deeper concern: a growing trend of state-sponsored cyber aggression weaponising crypto assets for strategic and geopolitical purposes.
The most devastating breach to date occurred in February when Dubai-based exchange Bybit lost $1.5 billion—the largest crypto heist in history.
TRM Labs attributes the attack to North Korean state actors, noting that the incident alone accounted for nearly 70 percent of total losses during the period and doubled the average hack size to $30 million.
“The Bybit hack redefined the threat landscape,” the report stated.
“It exemplifies how digital asset theft has transcended criminal opportunism and morphed into a tool of statecraft.”
Indeed, North Korea-linked entities were responsible for an estimated $1.6 billion of the total stolen, further entrenching Pyongyang’s status as the most prolific nation-state threat actor in the crypto sphere.
Yet the menace is diversifying. On June 18, Iranian crypto exchange Nobitex was breached for over $90 million by a group reportedly linked to Israel, Gonjeshke Darande (Predatory Sparrow).
Unusually, the stolen funds were routed to unusable vanity addresses, underscoring symbolic and political motives rather than financial gain.
TRM Labs flagged this as a “disturbing shift,” with digital asset theft increasingly deployed as a weapon in asymmetric geopolitical conflict.
The report also found that more than 80 percent of losses stemmed from infrastructure breaches, including private key theft, seed phrase leaks, and front-end compromises— attacks typically ten times costlier than other vectors.
Meanwhile, DeFi exploits such as flash loan manipulations accounted for 12 percent of losses, reflecting persistent smart contract vulnerabilities despite years of scrutiny.
As digital currencies become enmeshed in global rivalries, TRM Labs warns that conventional cybersecurity approaches are now inadequate.
“Massive breaches, often tied to nation-state operations, require a new defence paradigm,” the firm asserted, urging industrywide adoption of advanced safeguards and cross-border collaboration among regulators and law enforcement.
E-Business
CAC Launches AI-powered Business Registration Portal

Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) has inaugurated the pilot take-off of its new Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered registration portal.
A statement issued by the commission explained that Malam Hussaini Magaji, registrar-general of the CAC, made the announcement during the 2025 Stakeholders Forum in Port Harcourt.
According to him, “the initiative is a major milestone in Nigeria’s business facilitation drive.”
The Registrar further explained that the upgraded portal marks a complete overhaul of the Company Registration Portal (CRP), saying that it comes with advanced features designed to simplify and speed up business registration.
The new system, according to him, allows for instant name reservation approvals, likening the ease to creating an email account, and stressing that the AI-powered platform could suggest available alternatives to business names and approve them immediately.
Another innovation, he stated, is the ability to register a business using only the National Identification Number (NIN) of a director or proprietor, pointing out that there is an ambitious target of completing business registration and certificate generation within 30 minutes, subject to real-time NIN validation.
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