cloud

By now, you have probably heard about the digital exposure, so to speak, of nude photos of as many as 100 celebrities, taken from their Apple iCloud backups and posted to the “b” forum on 4Chan. Over the last day, an alleged perpetrator has been exposed by redditors, although the man has declared his innocence. The mainstream media have leapt on the story and have gotten reactions from affected celebrities including Oscar winner Jennifer Lawrence and model Kate Upton.

On August 18, starting just before 2 p.m. ET/11 a.m. PT, users across the globe began reporting problems with Microsoft's Azure virtual machines, web sites and other cloud services.

"Starting at 18 Aug 2014 17:49 UTC we are experiencing an interruption to Cloud Services and Virtual Machines in multiple regions," noted Microsoft officials on the Azure staus page.

Earlier this week, we reported that Google had reported an individual to the police after discovering a large quantity of child abuse images on his Gmail account. After the police obtained a search warrant, they found a considerable stash of similar content on his home computer, and the person was arrested.

Threat actors are actively exploiting a vulnerability in an older version of Elasticsearch software in order to add distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) malware in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) services.

Elasticsearch is an open source search server that can be used to look for various types of documents; its advantages include scalability, almost real-time search and support for multi-latency.

Cockroaches are some of the most resilient creatures on earth. They can live for 45 minutes without air and over a month without food. Cutting their heads off won’t even kill them—at least not immediately. Their bodies can live on for several days without their heads.

Microsoft channel partners need to urgently redefine and evolve their businesses so that they can resell the company's cloud computing products, according to Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner.

Just as Microsoft has embarked on a sometimes painful reinvention, its partners need to follow suit, because the alternative is to miss a massive opportunity in cloud computing, a vehement Turner said Monday at the company's Worldwide Partner Conference.

If you manage a cloud or a datacenter, chances are you run CentOS, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES), or Ubuntu. These are all great server Linux distributions, but none of them were designed to be deployed over hundreds or thousands of servers at once. Now there is such a distribution: CoreOS.

In the wake of last year's National Security Agency spying revelations and after the discovery of the high-profile "Heartbleed" vulnerability, security has become a top priority for cloud services providers.

Microsoft, for its part, is hardening its Azure Web Sites service with support for Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), announced Erez Benari, an Azure Web Sites program manager. Azure Web Sites is a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering that enables customers to quickly spin up and scale Websites and applications.

At the Hack in the Box security conference in Amsterdam, ERNW security researchers Enno Rey, Felix Wilhelm, and Matthias Luft presented Compromise-as-a-Service: Our PleAZURE (pdf).

While there’s certainly no shortage of cloud storage solutions to choose from, Norton Zone’s appeal -- on paper at least -- is the security it offers users. Content is encrypted when uploaded and stored in Symantec’s own secure data center, and the service automatically scans files for malware before they can be downloaded. As is fairly typical, you get 5GB of storage for free.

Or rather you did. Symantec has made the decision to discontinue Norton Zone and wind down support of the service over the next 30 to 60 days.