Meta is extending the useful life of its servers to five and a half years – a decision that will save it approximately $2.9 billion in 2025 alone. Meta previously extended the expected life of its servers by six months in Q2, 2022 – from four years. Two quarters later, Meta...
Major SAP overhaul started, digitalisation of paper processes also underway as auditors praise recent work to improve processes – but modernisation funding set to run out...
An attacker would need to craft a malicious container and run it "either directly (for example in services allowing shared GPU resources) or indirectly through a supply chain or social engineering attack"
"The sector can now expect greater support in recovering from and anticipating critical incidents, giving the industry greater reassurance when setting up business."
"A technology organisation that's very focused on applying core technology capabilities to business challenges and business opportunities… is starting to unlock applications that, frankly, in the past wouldn't have been identified"
When Virgin Media O2 was facing scalability issues and demand peaked during its pre-sale ticketing events, it shifted to a cloud native paradigm with a focus on managed solutions.
On-demand pricing for AWS Mainframe Modernization Micro Focus Runtime using a M2.m6i.8xlarge instance clocks in at $88.80/hour, for what it's worth. Cheaper options are available.
EAMs require at least a Microsoft Entra ID P1 license but will let customers plug a wider range of third-party identity providers directly into Microsoft's backbone identity systems.
"We did not detect… lateral movement into our VMware infrastructure. At the time we believed we took all the necessary actions to mitigate the vulnerability, but these actions were clearly insufficient.”
“We are pretty tightly aligned with the MongoDB product team. That allowed us to scale up and attack use cases where we're scanning petabytes of data, and solving really hard problems for customers.”
Overprovisioning CPU and memory will keep the lights on, but it is costly. Underprovisioning them risks CPU throttling and out-of-memory kills, which cause applications to perform poorly or even crash."
A UK net zero target and fossil fuel vehicle ban are likely to result in as many as 1,600 connections to the grid each day. Current application processes are inadequate.
"The executable in question was built using the LockBit 3 ransomware builder tool leaked in 2022, so this particular sample may not have originated with the actual LockBit developers"
Google says "we've taken several steps to reduce the risk of users making authorization errors with the Kubernetes built-in users and groups, including..."
"Any time you spend on building that software to operate is time taken away from building the services that customers really want and will pay for. Open source software helps companies get to their goals faster..."
Another arguably more potent example and one actively exploited in the wild is CVE-2023-46604 – a CVSS 10 RCE vulnerability in Apache ActiveMQ; an open source message broker written in Java.
"Risks have also been identified in relation to data centre customer access to sites and facilities, and access by contractors or those providing supply chain services..."
"Administrators can also configure allowed topics and blocked topics and words so that the responses are controlled. In addition, administrators can enable or disable the upload file feature for their end users..."
OpenAI has pushed out a flurry of updates at its first developer conference – including the release of its new GPT-4 Turbo which can fit the “equivalent of more than 300 pages of text in a single prompt” – and the ability to train and run LLMs powered by proprietary datasets. Calling...
The investment comes as a Google DeepMind paper poured some cold water on the AI hype, finding "various failure modes of transformers and degradation of their generalization for even simple extrapolation tasks" if these are out of its training data domain.
'Do not state anything that is subjective and avoid adjectives (e.g., "state of the art," "mature," "advanced," "appropriate," "comprehensive," or "reasonable")' say experts.
Both blunt and more advanced social engineering approaches used for initial access; the group also has sophisticated hands-on-keyboards capabilities and a diverse toolset.
The shift has teed it up for the ongoing cloud migration with autoscaling and efficiency efforts and says the new platform means “service teams are largely distanced from the infrastructure detail of this transition.”
Enterprises running – or looking to run – SAP HANA in the cloud have got an improved proposition from AWS, with AWS Systems Manager for SAP generally available (GA) this week and offering new capabilities to operate, manage, and backup SAP applications on AWS more efficiently. AWS Systems Manager for SAP is...
Fire-fighting was not helped by Global Switch’s fire suppression system “running out of water”. The incident also introduced water and soot contamination. Google Cloud’s affected racks had to be taken apart, thoroughly cleaned and reassembled before they could be restarted.
"HSBC’s processes, systems and staff were not capable of detecting and reporting these breaches until December 2022. The inability for HSBC to determine the scale of these breaches due to the inadequacy of its systems and processes is a further concern."
"We sit on data of over 400,000 customers and their material flows, financial flows, employee customer data. We are taking this data… to benchmark and give business process recommendations"
Financial transactions, medical records, and national security secrets. The cornerstones of our digital world are closely safeguarded by intricate cryptographic systems. These systems, which have been the backbone of our digital security for decades, are integrated into every aspect of our lives. However, as we inch towards the era of...
Even with ‘traditional’ configuration of resources in the cloud - and Kubernetes becomes a more extreme example of this – what is crystal clear is that security cannot stay outside of the development and DevOps teams."
Databricks has agreed the deal just weeks after releasing Dolly 2.0, a 12 billion parameter open source language model, as a battle begins for dominance of open source generative AI workflows and platforms.
The idea of ‘data-centric AI’, posits that we must focus on data quality over quantity. As our algorithms have progressed, and we have access to incredible open-source LLMs to train our own models, it’s time to focus on how we engineer the data to build cost-efficient models...
"The risk is mainly with multi-tenant applications where this misconfiguration could result [in] account and privilege escalation" -- here's what you need to do.
New metrics for Operational Technology exposure include whether the "consequences of the vulnerability meet definition of IEC 61508 consequence categories of "marginal," "critical," or "catastrophic."
AWS admitted that “customers may also have experienced issues when attempting to initiate a Call or Chat to AWS Support” during the incident. What happened to recent architectural changes designed to avoid this?
The company is emphasising the simplicity of its pricing versus peers, saying it bills just from the GBs from hosts each hour; pricing all telemetry sources at the same rate, compared with...
From London to Tokyo, Washington to Berlin, policy makers are scrambling to rethink semiconductor supply chains, in no small part lest (and few put it this bluntly) China invades Taiwan – gaining access to the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, which produces 90% of the world’s leading-edge semiconductors. Some are that...
Google this week launched a new Top Level Domain of .zip and it has cybersecurity professionals worried. Here’s why. The way that modern browsers treat URLs – considering everything after @ as the host name, rather than the “user information” before it – means that it is easy to create a convincing...
As the 26th UN Climate Change Conference will take place in November 2021, at the Scottish Event Campus (SEC) in Glasgow. Q&A - Amanda Brock, CEO, OpenUK / Ali Fenn, President, ITRenew / Lucy Yu, CEO at Octopus Centre for Net Zero 1.) In the run up to COP26, what...
The retail banking market has heated up hugely in the UK in recent years, with the rise of digital-native banks like Monzo and Starling winning awards and customers – over seven million, three million respectively.) They hit the market with minimal technology debt, having built new stacks from the ground up,...
European regulators may be gearing up for an antitrust investigation over Microsoft’s Teams bundling with Office software but it was hardly a talking point on Microsoft’s latest earnings call – with Redmond reporting net income of $18.3 billion for its fiscal Q3, up 9%, and Teams itself hitting...
Profit warnings by UK-listed companies in the tech and telco sectors almost tripled in the first quarter. EY-Parthenon’s latest Profit Warnings report found 69% citing contract delays or cancellations as a cause of profit warnings, as CIOs continue to delay major spending decisions and consolidate vendor relationships. Since the...
Private wireless networks are growing in popularity and its stands out in Nokia's Q1 2023 earnings. Nokia sets up private wireless networks as a fairly plug-and-play set of modular hardware and software components that let users spin up both 4G and 5G private networks, often to support industrial...
Microsoft has urged users to patch a zero day in the Windows Common Log File System (CLFS) that allows elevation by a local attacker to SYSTEM privileges and which is being exploited in the wild. CVE-2023-28252 was reported by a member of China’s DBAPPSecurity WeBin Lab and as that...
Canonical, sponsor of the widely used Ubuntu Linux distribution, is looking for a new Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) with the role advertised as fully remote. The Stack is making it our latest Job of the Week*. We are doing so with the caveat that the privately held company is...
The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has graduated six new open source software projects to “Top Level” status in Q1 of 2023. (Getting Top-Level Project status is essentially a vote of confidence in a project’s community and product governance.) Perhaps interestingly to some, more than half (four of the six)...
Synthetic data specialist Hazy has raised $9 million in a Series A round that will be used to scale the British startup. Funding was led by Conviction VC, with strategic investors including Nationwide and Wells Fargo. Originally a UCL AI spin out, London-based Hazy uses AI-generated synthetic data that preserves...
Data, says Mohammed ‘Khal’ Khalid, “behaves a bit like sugar.” It’s an unusual simile, but the DXC Technology advisory director says his team’s conversations with Chief Information Officers and Chief Data Officers show that organisations are “experiencing a crisis in decision making exacerbated by an inability to metabolise...
Microsoft has released the private preview of a tool called Security Copilot it says was “shaped by the power of OpenAI’s GPT-4 generative AI” – with Azure CTO Mark Russinovich dubbing it a “new era in cybersecurity.” Microsoft said Security Copilot furnishes “critical step-by-step guidance and context through a natural...
Amazon has open-sourced a new file client for S3 called Mountpoint for Amazon S3 that makes it “easy” for Linux-based applications to connect directly to Amazon S3 buckets and access objects using file APIs – not something that has always been easy or indeed possible for Linux-based large-scale analytics applications. Mountpoint...
Security experts are warning that a critical Microsoft Outlook exploit is trivial to deploy and “will likely be leveraged imminently by actors for espionage purposes or financial gain” – after Ukrainian cybersecurity authorities disclosed CVE-2023-23397, a critical vulnerability that requires no user interaction to exploit. As The Stack reported, the critical...
Failed Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) UK has been sold to HSBC for £1 in a major reprieve for the UK's tech startups who faced losing their deposits (over the insured threshold) after its parent company collapsed. "Customers of SVB UK will be able to access their deposits...
UK plans to relax some protections under Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in its revised Data Protection and Digital Information Bill, after a round of external consultations. The proposed changes reduce requirements around the processing of personal data where it is used for “legitimate interests”, aim to clarify...
A recent attack tracked by researchers at cloud security company Sysdig saw the attackers use an exposed Kubernetes container to move laterally to the victim’s AWS account – gaining initial access by exploiting a public-facing service in a self-managed Kubernetes cluster hosted inside an AWS cloud account. The company'...
A unique new Venture Science Doctorate (VSD) has started taking candidate applications. The unique doctorate was set up by UK venture creator Deep Science Ventures – which has already generated a portfolio of 35 science-based companies, worth upwards of £250 million – and is explicitly venture-focused. The three-year doctorate is fully funded...
Hackers appear to be increasingly adopting the Havoc command and control (C2) framework, security researchers say. The open source framework, developed by C5pider, supports the building of offensive agents in several formats including Windows PE executable, PE DLL and shellcode and is an alternative to the paid for (or cracked)...
“Even at a depth of five metres, our fibre optic cables are not safe from concrete drills” lamented Deutsche Telekom AG on February 14, sharing pictures of damage caused by construction workers in Frankfurt. Needless to say, the telco was not the only company wringing its hands, as downstream customer...
The “Skynet Service Delivery Wrap (SDW)” contract is one of the four main components of MOD’s £6 billion Skynet 6 Programme, which deliver the next generation of defence connectivity and satellite communications. “This new contract will support the continued delivery of new SATCOM technologies and enable the MOD to...
February’s Patch Tuesday brings the post-Valentine’s Day hangover of 75 bug fixes from Microsoft including three for CVEs known to be exploited in the wild: CVE-2023-21715, CVE-2023-23376 , and CVE-2023-21823. Strikingly, more than half of the bugs fixed this month are remote code execution (RCE) vulnerabilities. (A record 26,...
In early 2021 a successful attack by hackers on Accellion, a file transfer service provider, resulted in significant repercussions downstream: Energy supermajor Shell, global law firm Goodwin Procter, and investment bank Morgan Stanley were among the blue chips that saw data stolen as a result. Now a critical vulnerability in...
This story has been updated here on February 8. Security researchers are reporting an explosion in the compromise of VMware ESXi hypervisors with over 500 machines hit by ransomware this weekend, with the automated attacks likely exploiting CVE-2021-21974. As The Stack published, some 20 ESXi machines were reportedly being ransomed...
Security researchers regularly chafe at the deafening silence when they report a critical vulnerability in software: White Hats simply wanting to help organisations fix their cybersecurity all too often still find themselves being ignored – or worse, threatened with legal action when trying to help publicly exposed organisations that have not...
Security researchers have published a proof-of-concept (POC) exploit that lets remote and unauthenticated attackers take over VMware vRealize Log Insight as root user by chaining three recent vulnerabilities. vRealize Log Insight is VMware’s log management tool for infrastructure and applications which boasts “actionable dashboards… and broad third-party extensibility across...
The US Department of Defense has started user testing for a new “Office 365 classified cloud”, days after Microsoft took its new Office 365 Government Secret cloud to general availability (GA). Tests at this high classification level coms months after the US Army decommissioned a legacy email system with four...
Days after laying off over 10,000 people, Microsoft has invested a reported $10 billion in OpenAI -- a company with just 375 staff -- as Artificial Intelligence applications start to go mainstream Microsoft said it would move to “deploy OpenAI’s models across our consumer and enterprise products and...
A serious IT outage at the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) which forced it to halt all US departing flights on Wednesday 11 has been attributed by the transportation agency to a “damaged database file” “At this time, there is no evidence of a cyber attack. The FAA is working diligently...
IT admins were left scrambling to detect if they had been hit by an unknown virus on Friday 13, after Windows applications vanished from the Start menu and taskbar on computers globally following what appears to have been a botched Windows Defender rule triggering chaos for thousands of users globally....
It’s that time of the month again: Microsoft has pushed out 98 security patches for January’s Patch Tuesday: 11 are critical, one CVE-2023-21674 is being actively exploited and another gives unauthenticated remote access to your SharePoint Server – and requires not just the patch but a “SharePoint upgrade action”...
Analysis by The Stack of over 90,000 vulnerabilities revealed a sharp growth in bugs associated with widely known “CWEs” – or potentially exploitable weaknesses that can occur in architecture, design, code, or implementation and which could potentially have been caught upstream in a secure development process. One control is to...
Failure to invest in modernising its IT estate contributed to what Southwest Airlines anticipates will be a colossal $825 million writedown in Q4, after it cancelled 6,700 flights between December 21 to December 31. The airline exposed the losses in an SEC filing ahead of its Q4 earnings, saying...
Updated January 6, 11:00 BST: CircleCI has updated its advisory which deserves revisiting. CircleCI is calling on customers to “immediately rotate any and all secrets” after a security incident. The breach appears to have occurred around December 21 and to have gone unnoticed over the Christmas period. Credentials stolen...
Amazon is cutting over 18,000 jobs, CEO Andy Jassy has confirmed – saying he was pressed into revealing the news before contacting employees “as one of our teammates leaked this information externally.” The majority of the 18,000 Amazon job cuts will be concentrated in Amazon Stores and HR, including...
As The Stack’s article on digital forensics challenges emphasised, both the opportunity for technology to transform policing and the headwinds – restrictive budgets, organisational sclerosis, change fatigue, technology debt, siloes – against it are significant. For those keen on a genuinely meaningful challenge at the highest level, however, there are few...
Whether you work with technology as a CIO or developer, at a software provider, in government, defence, pharmaceuticals, or at a bank, we are all swimming in the waters of the same global macroeconomic environment; the conditions of local tributaries may vary, but the outlook for tech in 2023 will...
The UK’s Ministry of Defence (MOD) has signed a £75 million deal with Palantir to help it “exploit data at scale and speed to make faster, better decisions” in a three-year partnership led by Defence Digital. (Led by CIO Charles Forte, Defence Digital is "responsible for making sure...
Micron is cutting spending on memory chip fabrication by 50% in 2023 and slashing 10% of its workforce, or some 5,000 jobs, with the semiconductor firm’s CEO Sanjay Mehrotra warning the memory market is facing “the most severe imbalance between supply and demand in both DRAM and NAND...
Lloyds has hired ING CTO Ron van Kemenade as COO. Starting June 2023 he will lead a new technology and data strategy at Britain’s biggest domestic bank, under new CEO Charlie Nunn – who joined from HSBC in 2021. The hire comes as Lloyds said that it is exploring the...
Two new cybersecurity tools “OSV-Scanner” and “Peach” that landed this week deserve attention – whether you are a CISO, Blue Team, or just trying to tighten up your application development or cloud practices. OSV-Scanner was released under an Apache 2.0 licence by Google. Peach is an open framework from Wiz...
Security researchers at Juniper Threat Labs say they have identified previously undocumented malware targeting VMware ESXi servers that is notable for its “simplicity, persistence and capabilities.” VMware’s ESXi is a bare metal hypervisor that is widely deployed in large enterprises to run software virtually, from applications to fully emulated...
Fortinet has pushed out an emergency patch for a critical CVSS 9.3 vulnerability in numerous versions of its FortiOS operating system, which lets an unauthenticated, remote attacker (pre-auth RCE) take over systems. Critics would be forgiven for asking tough questions about QA and feeling like it was "deja...
Private Equity house Thoma Bravo will buy supply chain software company Coupa for $8 billion including debt, or $81 a share – moving in after the Nasdaq-listed company tumbled from its 2021 highs of over $360 per share. Not all shareholders will be happy. Morgan Stanley analysts led by Keith Weiss...
A year after a critical vulnerability in a ubiquitous piece of open source software, Log4J, set off what The Stack described at the time as an “internet cluster bomb”, nearly 40% of downloads of the popular open source java logging library are still of the vulnerable version – despite the high...
Rackspace has confirmed that it was hit by ransomware. The incident on December 2 affected its hosted Microsoft Exchange offering, leaving hundreds of thousands of customer email inboxes inaccessible. The scale of the attack is significant. Rackspace said its Hosted Exchange business generates $30 million in annual revenue – but has...
Defra legacy IT issues mean department is running some 2,000 applications, 30% of them unsupported. The UK’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) is running 600+ applications that are end of life (EOL), or no longer supported with software updates by their suppliers; a severe potential...
HSBC is looking for a Chief Information Officer (CIO) responsible for improving the internal digital experience of the approximately 200,000 staff that use over 800 different “internally facing colleague systems”. The recruitment effort will be welcomed by the banking multinational’s staff who face a challenging and complex environment...
On the day Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine – February 24 — AWS officials met with representatives of Ukraine’s government in their London embassy to discuss how they could help save the government’s data. As AWS’s Liam Maxwell, Director of Government Transformation put it on November 30: “We sketched...
Amazon has released a new fully managed service called AWS SimSpace Weaver – designed to help customers create “dynamic, 3D experiments to understand possible real-world outcomes and visualize and train in immersive spaces” or conduct experiments that closely approximate real-world systems locally or in the cloud. By providing a dedicated compute...
Every data scientist would agree that there is no such thing as too much data and most would warmly welcome more when presented with the opportunity, writes Adam Lieberman, Head of AI and ML, Finastra. More data can potentially help create better models, but most projects face the problem of...
Analysts expecting European cloud provider OVHcloud to haemorrhage customers in the wake of a devastating 2021 data centre fire or recent price hikes look away: The company reported a net revenue retention rate of 114% for its fiscal 2022 and has now clinched a €200 million credit facility from the...
The UK Infrastructure Bank – launched by the Chancellor of the Exchequer in June 2021 to provide £22 billion in infrastructure finance – is looking for a Chief Operating Officer (COO), who will also be responsible for IT. The UK Infrastructure Bank is currently operating without its full suite of staff and...
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York settled cross-border FX spot trades in under 10 seconds using distributed ledger technology (DLT) under tests as part of its “Project Cedar” it revealed today. Critically, the trades were conducted across a "multi-ledger ecosystem" it added. The New York Fed conducted...
Microsoft has been warned that “Google and Oracle… will likely match and even exceed Azure’s capabilities on some dimensions in time” in Gartner’s 2022 Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services.” AWS, meanwhile, “AWS often optimizes for the short term when dealing with customers.. This, along with...
AWS customers are prioritising cutting their bills, Amazon executives confirmed on a Q3 earnings call – with growth falling back to a “mid-20%” rate towards the end of the quarter. That’s down from 37% in Q1. That figure has “ informed how we're thinking about the guidance ranges” heading...
SAP is gearing up to launch a new business process automation (BPA) layer “delivered by SAP out-of-the-box” in the wake of its 2021 acquisition of process mining company Signavio, CEO Christian Klein says. Speaking on an earnings call as the German ERP heavyweight reported cloud revenue growth of 25% and...
Security researchers at Sysdig say that they have identified a previously unreported threat actor “using some of the largest cloud and continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) service providers” in a massive “freejacking” campaign that makes use of trial accounts’ free compute to power cryptomining campaigns. Dubbing it PURPLEURCHIN, Sysdig...
Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has torn up plans to abolish the unpopular “IR35” tax rules that affected many IT contractors, as part of a bonfire of Liz Truss government’s planned economic reforms delivered this morning. The Chancellor today announced what government channels themselves freely described as “a reversal of almost...
A critical vulnerability in an Azure tool that lets users manage Kubernetes clusters can be exploited remotely without authentication to gain administrative control over Kubernetes clusters, as well as Azure edge devices. The vulnerability, allocated a maximum possible CVSS (severity rating) score of 10 has been allocated CVE-2022-37968. It is...
Deutsche Bank has extended a contract with Kyndryl (previously IBM Infrastructure Services) to run its continental European core banking and mission critical IT infrastructures, in what the two described as one of the “largest and longest-running vendor contracts in the financial industry” at nearly 20 years together. Kyndryl will also...
A vulnerability in multiple Fortinet products gives an unauthenticated remote attackers root access to its core product’s administrative interface – and the vulnerability has been exploited in the wild the company warned. Given exploitation the company has warned customers to check for Indicators of Compromise. https://twitter.com/Horizon3Attack/status/...
Intel late Sunday confirmed that proprietary UEFI code had been leaked in a potential serious security breach. The Intel Alder Lake source code was leaked to 4chan and Github – as first reported by Tom’s Hardware – as a 6GB file containing sensitive tools and code for building and optimising BIOS/...
The US Department of State has appointed Dr Kelly Fletcher as its new Chief Information Officer (CIO). She will lead a team of 2,700 IT professionals and oversee $2.5 billion of digital transformation programmes. Among those programmes is a recently signed $1.58 billion contract with Verizon to...
Google Cloud has pledged to build a cloud region in South Africa – joining AWS, Azure and Oracle on the continent for the first time – and pledged to deliver dedicated cloud interconnect sites in Nigeria and Kenya. The South African plans alone – which will see Google Cloud add regions in Cape...
Google is shutting down its game streaming service Stadia after just 34 months. “It hasn't gained the traction with users that we expected so we’ve made the difficult decision to begin winding down our Stadia streaming service” said Google Stadia VP and General Manager Phil Harrison. Google...
Over 90 videos of a development build of Grand Theft Auto 6 have been leaked after an apparent major breach at game developer Rockstar Games, with the culprit also threatening to leak GTA 6 source code. The GTA 6 leak includes footage of open-world gameplay and was confirmed as real...
Uber has confirmed that it is investigating a cybersecurity incident. After an initial breach the Uber hacker claims to have found an internal network share that contained Powershell scripts with privileged credentials that let them easily pivot to compromising Uber’s Duo (authentication), OneLogin, AWS, and GSuite environments. "One...
Twilio is the latest technology company to aggressively cut staff – culling up to 900 jobs in what CEO Jeff Lawson described in a letter to employees as a “wise and necessary” move following undisciplined growth. “We’ve made the extremely difficult decision to restructure and reduce Twilio’s workforce by...
AllianceBernstein is seeking a Chief Data Officer (CDO) to act as a "change agent" at the asset management colossus, with a mandate to "re-engineer" how the firm uses data and information. Created as a new strategic leadership role by AllianceBernstein -- which has $735 billion in...
Microsoft has joined Oracle and Google in now offering Ampere Altra Arm-based VMs to customers. Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines (VMs) running on Arm-based processors are Generally Available (GA) as of September 1, with the VMs "engineered to efficiently run scale-out, cloud-native workloads" Microsoft said. Pricing varies depending on...
Monzo and Starling, the two British fintech rivals, have topped a new survey of 16,000 people for best current accounts (by overall customer satisfaction) with Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) performing worst. The best current accounts survey reflects the extent to which digital-only fintechs with responsive and slick front-end...
The UK’s Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is seeking a provider of emergency payment infrastructure to help make sure it can continue making 2.5 million payments daily worth some £3.7 billion per week. The new infrastructure should ensure it can continue making the payments to a...
Amazon reported a $2 billion net loss in Q2. That was due to a collapse in the value of its stake in electric vehicle maker Rivian – which cost Amazon $3.9 billion in non-operating expense. That’s a painful figure. A $79 billion sales run rate at a robustly growing...
SAP CEO Christian Klein has confirmed to investors that the company will put up prices within the coming months, possibly sooner, as it reacts to broader inflationary pressures. He made the comments in the Q&A on a Q2 earnings call, as SAP confirmed that cloud had become its...
Lloyds Banking Group is seeking a Head of Core Infrastructure to "own all facets of designing, building, migrating, running and evolving the distributed estate" -- we're making it The Stack's latest Job of the Week. "Our technology, our culture, and our mind-set is...
Hackers proxied the Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) sign-in pages of thousands of organisations to steal credentials and bypass multi-factor authentication (MFA), Microsoft has warned, saying it tracked attempts against 10,000 organisations since September 2021 – many attacks resulting in successful follow-up business email compromise (BEC) campaigns (sophisticated phishing that...
BT is hiring a further 2,800 staff for its resurgent BT Digital arm -- with the aim of growing its team to 6,300 people, from 3,500 at the start of the financial year. It plans for the majority to join by April 2024. The recruitment drive will...
Semiconductor firm Micron has slashed its outlook for the rest of the year, saying it expects to see 130 million fewer smartphones and 30 million fewer PCs shipped than it predicted earlier in 2022. The memory specialist vowed “immediate action” to trim supply amid an economic slowdown and pledged to...
Vodafone has agreed a multi-year deal with Oracle that will see it migrate a large number of its systems to OCI Dedicated Region -- Oracle's "cloud-in-your-data-centre" managed service that puts the same tools, APIs, and SLAs available in its public cloud on-premises under a pay-per-use model....
Goldman Sachs may have over $2 trillion in assets under supervision. But in its IT engine room, like many large organisations, the investment bank relies heavily on free and open source software (OSS) as well as some aging yet still widely deployed commercial databases -- including to help it serve...
Microsoft warned that a malicious campaign targeting SQL Servers is using an "uncommon living-off-the-land binary" that to achieve persistence on compromised systems -- saying that defenders need to pay increased attention to abuse of the sqlps.exe which ships with SQL Server as standard. Without naming the attackers...
Updated 16:58 May 10 with comment from Pega, court document. Low code firm Appian has been awarded $2 billion in damages from rival Pegasystems after a jury found the latter’s “misappropriation of Appian’s trade secrets” to be willful and malicious – following a seven-week trial. The court heard...
Thames Water is planning to outsource customer services and back office operations under a trio of contract opportunities worth up to £63 million. The water company, which serves 15 million customers, hopes that slicker digital services and improved levels of automation will help it support a turnaround programme amid a...
The CIO of Williams -- one of the world's leading Formula 1 teams -- is stepping down in June. Graeme Hackland, who joined Williams as IT Director eight years ago, has spent 25 years in F1 including at Lotus and is moving on. That leaves what he described...
Material from a horrific data breach earlier this year at a UK company holding the details of thousands of IT contractors revealed that staff were routinely storing credentials in clearly flagged Word or Excel documents -- titled, among other examples, “useful links and passwords”, “passwords”, and “useful passwords”. The Stack&...
Digital bank Monzo, which has over five million customers, is looking for a "passionate, experienced Engineering Director to lead security engineering." We're making the role The Stack's latest "Job of the Week". Monzo says the successful applicant will "partner closely with...
A group tracked by Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG), dubbed "EXOTIC LILY" has been sending up to 5,000 phishing emails each day with a comparatively unusual attention to detail-- including using domain and identity spoofing and creating fake personas with AI generated faces to pose...
The insurance industry continues to throw up some intriguing job opportunities for ambitious IT professionals. The Stack's latest job of the week is at insurer Aviva, which is looking for a Head of IT Procurement. Aviva is a leading UK provider of insurance, wealth and retirement solutions, with...
A severe new Linux kernel vulnerability dubbed "Dirty Pipe" allows an attacker with read-only access mode to escalate privileges and gain root. The vulnerability exists in all Linux kernel versions from 5.8 forward. Exploitation is not challenging and although the attack requires local access the impact is...
Google has agreed to buy Mandiant for $5.4 billion in cash -- a move that startled many market watchers after months of speculation that Microsoft was close to acquiring the cybersecurity company. The move comes just one year after Mandiant regained its independence, with FireEye in October 2021 selling...
Elon Musk has warned that the Starlink terminals in Ukraine could be targeted by Russia, days after re-routing satellites over the embattled country and promising delivery of more receiver terminals. He said on Twitter: "Starlink is the only non-Russian communications system still working in some parts of Ukraine, so...
Ukraine's reputation as a vibrant hub for IT talent has, along with its democracy, been hit hard this week. Over 100 startups that have raised capital in the past year alone have offices for developer teams in Ukraine, PitchBook data shows. Almost all of them are technology companies....
Some of the toughest challenges in IT can emerge around acquisitions. And insurance group Markerstudy has been acquisitive. In 2020, it bought the Co-op’s insurance underwriting business, making it the UK’s sixth largest motor insurance provider. In April 2021, it purchased Brightside Insurance. In January 2022, it acquired...
The number of jobs lost to automation will reach 12 million across Europe alone by 2040, according to Forrester. The research house said workers in the accommodation, food services, leisure and hospitality, retail, transport and wholesale sectors would be most affected across France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the UK. The...
The Stack’s latest job of the week is at investment bank Credit Suisse, which is looking for a CISO for its London office. The role’s advertised responsibilities include to “independently challenge, guide and support the leadership of the Enterprise Security Services department in delivering the best possible IT...
Hackers breached an organisation running on-premises Microsoft Exchange servers and after moving laterally proceeded to encrypt systems domain wide, using Microsoft's own BitLocker tool rather than malware associated with a Ransomware-as-a-Service group, analysts writing for The DFIR report said Monday. Dubbing it an "intrusion with almost no...
Europol has announced the arrests of seven REvil/GandCrab ransomware group "affiliates". The arrests came as part of a global effort called operation "GoldDust" intended to take the fight to cybercriminals. This involved 17 different countries and cybersecurity companies BitDefender, KPN and McAfee Enterprises. The REvil...
Today's Autumn budget has drawn a distinctly mixed reaction from across the business and technology worlds -- as organisations digest a flurry of new initiatives including the pledge to boost public R&D to $20 billion, quadruple places on "skills bootcamps" (free courses of up...
China’s Alibaba -- the $109 billion by annual revenue multinational – has revealed a new 5nm Arm-based server chip for use in its data centers in a major step towards more silicon self sufficiency. (While the company has designed the Yitian 710 CPU itself, it does not have 5nm fabbing...
The UK's Financial Ombudsman Service -- which handles complaints from consumers about financial services ranging from wedding insurance to business loans -- is in the market for a new managed IT services provider, as it continues a major modernisation project including the replacement of its on-premises data warehouse...
Cybersecurity company Secureworks has appointed Wendy K. Thomas, its current president of customer success, as the company’s next president and CEO effective September 3, 2021, as outgoing chief executive Michael R. Cote retires from the Nasdaq-listed business after nearly 20 years. “Wendy is a proven and respected leader who...
Adobe Reader users on Windows have been actively attacked by hackers abusing a vulnerability patched today (May 11), the software company said, pushing out "multiple critical and important vulnerabilities." The use-after-free 0day (CVE-2021-28550) was reported anonymously to Adobe, which said it has been "exploited in the wild...
Millions of servers globally are exposed to 21 new bugs in Exim -- a widely used mail server -- with several of the vulns able, when chained, to give an attacker full remote code execution (RCE) as an all-powerful root user. As The Stack first reported, April 22, "several&...
SPONSORED - In 2016, just 5,579 cybersecurity vulnerabilities (CVEs) were reported in software. By 2021 it took just 12 weeks to hit the 5,000 mark. This rampant growth in software vulnerabilities – many of which are now abused at scale and at blistering pace by an increasingly well-resourced and...
AWS has plumbed a turbocharger into its Redshift data lake with the addition of AQUA, a new distributed and hardware-accelerated cache that will come free with Redshift RA3 ra3.4xl and ra3.16xl node types. AQUA plonks AWS Nitro chips -- adapted to speed up data encryption and compression --...
VMware is giving vSphere 6.5 and vCenter 6.5 users 11 months' reprieve before ending support -- which was due to end in November 2021. The move follows June 2020's decision to also extend support for vSphere 6.7 through to October 15, 2022. VMware cited...
"We are going to see more changes in how capital markets function in the next 15 years than in the past 400 years.
A major fire that broke out at an OVHcloud data centre complex in Strasbourg, France at 00:47 on March 10, 2021 has destroyed its SBG2 data centre completely and severely damaged its SBG1 facility. The facility is home to four OVHcloud co-location data centres. After urging customers to activate...
"Organizations begin to adopt event streaming when they realise... The speed at which they must now operate to compete and how critical it is to collect and correlate massively distributed data at high speeds"
What was on Donald Trump's mind during his last days in office? BLM? QAnon? Fox News? Deutsche Bank? Impeachment? IaaS? As multiple choice questions go, your average pundit may not have picked the latter, but cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service was among the outgoing President's priorities as he left...
