Monthly Archives: June 2021

“You can’t always get what you want…so try … to get what you need ‘

When it comes to setting up a software development center, what Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones wrote in 1969 is quite tellingly applicable to the global hunt for these skilled workers. There were around 5.5 million developers in Europe in 2020, and there was a shortfall of 500,000 according to statistics from the European Commission. But the shortage is more acute now that Europe is emerging from the pandemic. Today, 53% of tech executives surveyed by Infoworld say recruiting developers is one of the most daunting challenges they face. This is why Invest Cyprus asked the Cyprus Mail to create this publication dedicated to thought leadership in our country to find, attract and bring in developers to help build the growing technology hub here. Developer salaries around the world have increased steadily since 2016, with only a short hiatus in 2020 as many projects have been canceled.

In Switzerland, experienced developers earn $ 95,394, Norway $ 64,202 and Denmark $ 72,151 per year, according to Payscale. The average salary for software developers per country in Europe is $ 60,162 for Germany, while in the Netherlands the salary drops to $ 54,025 per year. The average salary for a computer engineer in Sweden, Finland and France ranges from $ 46,000 to $ 54,000 per year. The average salary for a software engineer in UK is $ 42,000 and is the lowest among other countries.

In Cyprus, where there are 2,000 jobs available for developers at almost any time, salaries are around € 6,000 for experienced developers with the most in-demand skills, and sometimes developers with soft skills can win at this level. But a host of perks must be attached to these salaries in order to attract the kind of skilled developers that businesses need here.

Consider that in the United States, the average salary for a top developer is $ 110,000 per year, and the package includes a car, free meals, and many other extras. The generic ad below shows a typical Cyprus offer for a developer. How can Cyprus compete?

Fortunately, Cypriot tech companies are preparing their recruiting strategies, offering more perks and more money to bring developers here. And these companies are refining their recruitment techniques, to reach more developers abroad. In this post, we take a detailed look at these strategies and the thinking behind them. We also show what the life of developers is like in a number of large Cypriot companies. The generic advertisement below is exactly the type of developer that many companies in Cyprus are trying to find. We show how they increase their success rates. Because, “If you try sometimes you might find, you get what you need. “

Full Stack Developer

NICOSIA, CYPRUS

We are looking for a Full Stack Developer to join our client’s growing team. You will be part of a cross-functional group responsible for the entire software development lifecycle from design to implementation for a variety of customers and industries. Your role within the team will be primarily focused on developing mobile applications in React Native on new and existing projects.

job description

• Collaborate with other team members and stakeholders
• Create, customize and integrate software applications
• Software systems troubleshooting and support
• Configure, monitor and administer software systems
• Develop fast and secure apps from a list of requirements
• Translate UI / UX designs into responsive interfaces
• Develop and use APIs
• Collect and analyze the needs of the company and write the technical documentation if necessary
• Work independently with little supervision
• Spirit of growth and the ability to quickly acquire new programming skills when needed
• View projects throughout the lifecycle

Your profile

• 1+ year of solid development experience with React Native
• Proven experience as a Full Stack Developer or similar role
• Familiar with Agile and Waterfall methodologies
• 3+ years of experience developing back-end languages ​​with PHP frameworks, preferably Laravel
• More than 3 years of experience in the development of several frontend languages ​​and libraries such as HTML / CSS, JavaScript, XML, jQuery, JSON
• 2+ years of experience developing JavaScript frameworks (e.g. Angular, React, Node.js)
• More than 2 years of experience in the development of APIs and Restful services
• Demonstrated knowledge of the use of databases
• Familiar with JIRA, Git or similar
• Fluency in English, essential; additional languages ​​a plus
• Lots of remote working flexibility
• Contingency fund
• 22 days of annual leave
• 13th salary
• Breakfast offered and contribution to gym membership

By coordinating efforts to improve the stability of early exascale hardware at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF), computer scientist Servesh Muralidharan strives to make it easier for application developers to use Joint Aurora test beds. Laboratory for System Evaluation (JLSE) of Argonne. His work will facilitate a faster transition to the Aurora system upon delivery and help activate science from day one.

JLSE, a collaboration between Argonne’s IT divisions, has enabled researchers to refine several generations of Intel GPU test beds as the arrival of Aurora approaches. These test beds consist of preproduction GPU / CPU samples often designed for verification and validation of key architectural features.

JLSE test benches

Muralidharan test benches are used to develop applications that can optionally run on the Intel X^e GPU and CPU Sapphire Rapids targeted for Aurora.

As with any old hardware, making these parts usable (i.e. ensuring that they can run applications well) is a difficult process. Intel provides specialized driver components and software development kits (SDKs), including compilers, to run applications on early graphics processors. These components and SDKs require customization to work in the JLSE environment and be usable by application developers participating in the ALCF Early Science Program and the US Department of Energy (DOE) Exascale Computing Project. This is accomplished by working with multiple teams at Intel.

Through his background in computer science, Muralidharan has past experience in processing a variety of early hardware, including characterizing its stability and performance, in order to validate its intended behavior. His work throughout the last year with several revisions of the Intel GPU test bed hardware silicon has resulted in a better understanding of the system components and their interactions, so that he is able to maintain them and, if necessary, to reconfigure them.

Coordinate hardware and software deployment

Argonne Computer Scientist Servesh Muralidharan

Muralidharan’s role with regards to packaging and initial hardware, in which he coordinates efforts to deploy early hardware and software with JLSE’s system operating teams, is twofold.

Part one includes creating custom driver stacks and validating hardware behavior after systems operations teams install and configure a server, followed by the challenge of creating usable software stacks on top of the hardware. . Muralidharan works through different components until it reaches the SDK, where the compilers reside.

Second, once a usable test bed is in place, Muralidharan helps diagnose low-level issues resulting from day-to-day use of the system. These problems range from specific code causing a hardware failure to unexpected degradation in performance resulting from driver issues. Once the problematic hardware is identified, Muralidharan works with the corresponding Intel team to sort out the problem and assess the appropriate fixes in the JLSE benchmark hardware.

source: Nils Heinonen, scientific editor / editor-in-chief, Laboratoire national d’Argonne

Data leaks and theft are an integral part of digital commerce, even more so in the age of agile software development.

Related: GraphQL APIs spark new exposures

Most of the high-profile breaches that make headlines today are the byproduct of hackers preying on application programming interfaces (APIs) until they find a fold that brings them in. the pathways of data flowing between an individual user and a myriad of cloud resources.

It’s important to understand the nuances of these full-stack attacks if we ever want to slow them down. I had a few in-depth discussions about this with Doug Dooley, COO at Data Theorem, a software security provider based in Palo Alto, Calif., Specializing in API data protection. Here are some key points to remember:

Target the fruits at your fingertips

Today, massive database breaches typically follow a distinctive pattern: hacking into a customer-centric application; manipulate an API; follow the flow of data to access an overly permissive database or S3 bucket (cloud storage). A classic example of this type of intrusion is the Capital One data breach.

Capital One’s alleged hacker Paige Thompson has been charged with her alleged data breach and the theft of more than 100 million people, including 140,000 social security numbers and 80,000 linked bank accounts. The 33-year-old Amazon Web Services (AWS) software engineer has also been accused of stealing cloud computing power from Capital One’s account to “mine” the cryptocurrency for his own profit, a practice known as name of “cryptojacking”.

Thompson began attacking Capital One’s public applications purported to be protected by their open source Web Application Firewall (WAF) and successfully carried out a Server Side Request Forgery (SSRF) attack. By successfully hacking the client-side application, it was then able to relay commands to a legacy AWS metadata service for credentials.

Harvesting passwords and tokens is one of the most common hacking techniques. Using valid credentials, Thompson was able to access using APIs and Command Line Interfaces (CLI) to a wide variety of handy fruits stored in S3 buckets with valuable data. She then pulled the data to her local machine and openly bragged about her escapades in hacker forums, Twitter, and even posts in her Github repositories, which led to her arrest by the FBI.

The dinner bell rings

Regardless of her motivation, when Thompson decided to leverage Capital One’s application and cloud security stack, she resorted to proven tactics used by ethics researchers, as well as hackers. The former spend their time flushing out application security flaws and correcting them, the latter search for vulnerabilities – and exploit them – for malicious reasons. Both simply take the easier route to reap the rewards at hand.

And in today’s open, decentralized software development environment, there are countless paths to vast orchards of ripe fruit. Indeed, companies do everything they can to quickly deploy minimally viable software. They ask the best and brightest developers to tinker with modular snippets, i.e. microservices, which are then stored in software containers residing in cloud storage. This collaboration is done by members of distant teams working remotely.

The idea is to learn as quickly as possible whether something works or fails. Then the developers iterate and patch on the fly, resulting in dramatic innovations, but also the need to continually update and release patches. And all of this frenetic activity is made possible by a growing reliance on APIs that serve as conduits for two software applications to exchange information.

This is the essence of digital agility. An extremely nimble and dominant media streaming company like Netflix makes hundreds of software changes every day in this way. In any industry, any organization of any size that hopes to stay competitive must innovate and remedy in much the same way.

However, anytime a business deploys a new application, releases a service pack update, or requires a security patch to be installed, it’s like a bell that rings for both ethical researchers and business people. hackers, Dooley told me.

Dooley

“When a company rolls out a new service or says, ‘Hey, my app has some issues that need to be fixed, please put these things into your codebase,’ that’s a signal for hackers to go and review these features. and these features. to see what’s in there that they might be able to compromise, ”he says.

This makes perfect sense. The newer the code, the less likely it is to be hardened in terms of security, especially given how agile software development is designed to be continuously iterated.

In a sense, software updates and security patches help hackers overcome the growing complexities of a sprawling software system. A single API can allow connections for 1,000 or even 10,000 operations. So a software update or security patch directs the hacker to the most recent eight or 10 operations that are likely to be the least enforced, Dooley says.

A few steps behind

This logic is repeated over and over again. When Microsoft rolled out a new Bing mobile app for Android and iOS, it attracted ethical researchers and threat actors. Shortly after, WizCase analysts discovered that someone had successfully removed the password protecting the underlying Elasticsearch database supporting the new Bing app.

This meant that Bing servers running on Azure Cloud had been left unprotected for several days with some 6.5 terabytes of research data accessible to anyone with modest computing skills. This exposed data included search terms, GPS coordinates, lists of URLs visited, and unique device identifiers for users of the Bing mobile app.

More recently, WizCase revealed a massive data breach in the underlying database of the popular mobile game Battle for the Galaxy. In this case, a weakly protected Elasticsearch server owned by AMT Games exposed 1.47 terabytes of data, including player email addresses, IP addresses, and Facebook data. Someone actually circulated a link making this unencrypted data available to anyone who had the link, without needing a password or login credentials.

The abstract image of the hacker runs his hand through a laptop screen to steal the data in the form of binary code. the concept of cyberattack, virus, malware, illegality and cybersecurity.

The work of ethical hacking groups, like WizCase, is commendable. However, let’s not overlook the fact that the good guys are often a short walk away from the bad guys to answer the dinner bell every time it rings. In breaches of the Bing mobile app and AMT games, massive caches of sensitive personal data were very quickly located and exposed by malicious hackers – exploits which were later discovered and disclosed by the White Hats of WizCase after a few steps back.

What is happening is that companies are coming up with new features and software fixes without automating security analysis and remediation before it goes into production. As part of the pursuit of data monetization, organizations are paving the way for new orchards of highly profitable information stores for customers and business partners.

“They say to hackers, ‘Hey, I just showed you a bunch of new features running on new databases and new storage compartments on API-based cloud services that probably aren’t fully locked down yet. Says Dooley. “And it would be good to assume that the authentication and authorization components are probably not fully verified either.”

Obviously, the pursuit of digital agility expands the attack surface deeper than one might have imagined. More proactive management of this highly dynamic attack surface must happen, and soon. I will monitor and continue to report.

Pulitzer Prize-winning business journalist Byron V. Acohido is dedicated to educating the public on how to make the Internet as private and secure as it should be.

(LW provides consulting services to the suppliers we cover.)

*** This is a syndicated Security Bloggers Network blog from The Last Watchdog written by bacohido. Read the original post at: https://www.lastwatchdog.com/my-take-massive-data-breaches-persist-as-agile-software-development-fosters-full-stack-hacks/

Maryland software development companies seek the best engineering skills. According to recent job boards, there are more than 3,000 open positions in the Maryland software development industry. From entry-level application development to full-stack junior development, computer programming is booming statewide. As someone looking to jumpstart your career as a software engineer, you need to know which skills employers prioritize. This way you can tailor your CV and interview responses to meet the needs of employers. Read on to discover the best engineering skills that software development companies are looking for in Maryland.

Computer programming

First, many software development hiring managers in Maryland are looking for computer programming skills. In particular, employers expect software engineers to be familiar with a variety of different programming languages. According to recent reports, some of the fastest growing languages ​​include Kotlin, Python, and Go. JavaScript, Java, and C ++ are also some of the most popular. In fact, many development companies use JavaScript as the benchmark coding language for front-end web development. With the growth of libraries and frameworks, it is also on the rise for mobile development. Hence, it is a great language to learn as you are looking to start your career. Of course, familiarize yourself with other languages, especially if you want to develop for a specific platform. Certainly, computer programming is one of the best engineering skills for improve your performance at work.

Development tools and platforms

Then, develop basic knowledge using development tools and platforms. Notably, many leading software developers use a container registry to manage their repositories. For example, take advantage of JFrog’s Artifactory container registry to efficiently and securely manage your Helm repositories. Above all, a Helm repositoryin Artifactory offers massively scalable storage for your Helm cards. Indeed, these tools can accommodate repositories loaded with data to store your Helm charts. With unmatched stability and reliable support for users, build servers, and interactions, understanding these business tools can set you apart from the competition when looking for a job. Absolutely, Maryland software development companies are looking for engineers who know the best tools and platforms.

Operating systems

Additionally, software developers are looking for engineers with a solid understanding of operating systems. Ideally, you should be familiar with Windows, Mac, and Linux systems. Indeed, these are some of the most popular platforms. It is important to note that some applications rely on a specific operating system to run. For example, engineers often have to consider how different systems allocate memory to client software when building applications. In addition, they must also know how to resolve conflicts, such as interoperability with other Operating systems. Of course, they also need to be proficient in different mobile operating systems, such as Android and iOS. In short, having a solid operating systems experience is essential when entering the Maryland software development job market.

Data structures and algorithms

Additionally, Maryland software development companies are looking for engineers who know data structures and algorithms. It is almost impossible to write a real world application without knowing the basic data structures. Familiarize yourself with an array, linked list, and map to get started. Fortunately, many programming boot camps offer courses in data structure and algorithms where you can learn the basics. Notably, this is very beneficial for self-taught programmers. Indeed, many employers often ask questions about these skills during job interviews. Certainly, learn data structures and algorithms to set yourself apart when looking for software development jobs in Maryland.

Object oriented design

Additionally, familiarize yourself with object-oriented design. According to computer experts, there has recently been a strong push towards programming using object-oriented design. Often, this approach involves planning a system of interacting objects. Of course, they’re usually aimed at fixing a software problem. Notably, object-oriented design involves principles of abstraction, encapsulation, and inheritance. You also need to understand polymorphism. To start learning object-oriented design, you can take an online course through code-based learning platforms. If you are enrolled in a diploma program, you can also ask your instructor. Object-oriented design is definitely a major skill to learn when looking for a job in the Maryland software development industry.

Maryland software development companies seek the best engineering skills. First, computer programming is a fundamental skill for any development professional. Next, it is essential to learn development tools and platforms, such as the Helm repositories. Additionally, employers are looking for engineers with a solid understanding of operating systems. In addition, you should also learn data structures and algorithms. In addition, object-oriented design is also essential for developers. Consider these points to learn more about the best engineering skills Maryland software development companies are looking for.

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