Cryptojacking malware gets past cloud security programs by uninstalling them

Why break through a barrier if you can just remove it? A piece of cryptojacking malware observed by Palo Alto Networks researchers is equipped to completely uninstall cloud security services from Linux-based servers before carrying out its malicious coin-mining. In a report published Thursday, Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 research team said the malware is spread by the cyberthreat group “Rocke,” whose cryptojacking activity was initially documented by Cisco Talos. A Chinese-speaking threat actor, the Rocke group is known for using the computing power of infected Linux-based systems to mine the cryptocurrency Monero. Whereas past versions of the Rocke group’s malware tried to evade detection by disabling only certain aspects of a cloud security service, the new variant simply removes the entire program, according to Palo Alto Networks. The researchers say Rocke added code that can gain administrative access on the infected server and uninstall five different cloud security and monitoring […]

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The Cloud Native Computing Foundation adds etcd to its open-source stable

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), the open-source home of projects like Kubernetes and Vitess, today announced that its technical committee has voted to bring a new project on board. That project is etcd, the distributed key-value store that was first developed by CoreOS (now owned by Red Hat, which in turn will soon be […] Continue reading The Cloud Native Computing Foundation adds etcd to its open-source stable

Google steps back from running the Kubernetes infrastructure

Google today announced that it is providing the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) with $9 million in Google Cloud credits to help further its work on the Kubernetes container orchestrator and that it is handing over operational control of the project to the community. These credits will be split over three years and are meant to cover the […] Continue reading Google steps back from running the Kubernetes infrastructure

Cloud Foundry Foundation looks east as Alibaba joins as a gold member

Cloud Foundry is among the most successful open source project in the enterprise right now. It’s a cloud-agnostic platform-as-a-service offering that helps businesses develop and run their software more efficiently. In many enterprises, it’s now the standard platform for writing new applications. Indeed, half of the Fortune 500 companies now use it in one form […] Continue reading Cloud Foundry Foundation looks east as Alibaba joins as a gold member

Tech Support Scammers Cast a Wider Net

Microsoft is warning of a wave of phishing campaigns pushing tech support scams via malicious links to phony Amazon, Alibaba and LinkedIn web pages. Continue reading Tech Support Scammers Cast a Wider Net

Hacking an Inspection Microscope

Sometimes I need to be able to take photographs of very small things, and the so-called macro mode on my point-and-shoot camera just won’t cut it. And it never hurts to have an inspection scope on hand for tiny soldering jobs, either, though I prefer a simple jeweler’s loupe in one eye for most tasks. So I sent just over $40 off to my close friend Alibaba, and a few weeks later was the proud owner of a halfway usable inspection scope that records stills or video to an SD card.

Unfortunately, it’s only halfway useable because of chintzy interface …read more

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The Long Tail of DIY Electronics

These are the Golden Years of electronics hacking. The home DIY hacker can get their hands on virtually any part that he or she could desire, and for not much money. Two economic factors underlie this Garden of Electronic Eden that we’re living in. Economies of scale make the parts cheap: when a factory turns out the same MEMS accelerometer chip for hundreds of millions of cell phones, their setup and other fixed costs are spread across all of these chips, and a $40 million factory ends up only costing $0.50 per unit sold.

But the unsung hero of the …read more

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Ambitious Alibaba takes aim at the kings of cloud computing

HANGZHOU, CHINA - OCTOBER 13:  (CHINA OUT) Jack Ma, chairman of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., speaks during the launching ceremony of the Alibaba's Tmall 11.11 Global Shopping Festival at the company's headquarters on October 13, 2015 in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province of China. Alibaba will open offices in three European countries and expand further in the U.S as it seeks to revive growth and reassure jittery investors. The 11.11 Global Shopping event this year will cover more than 200 countries throughout the world in large-scale businesses.  (Photo by VCG/VCG via Getty Images) When you think of the biggest cloud players in the world, one company you might not consider is Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce giant that held a record $25 billion U.S. IPO in 2014. Alibaba entered the cloud computing business in 2009, just three years after Amazon launched its cloud division, AWS — and Alibaba’s cloud computing efforts are among the ambitious projects that… Read More Continue reading Ambitious Alibaba takes aim at the kings of cloud computing