Security News > 2020 > October

Criminals quickly exploited the pandemic to attack vulnerable people; phishing, online scams and the spread of fake news became an ideal strategy for cybercriminals seeking to sell items they claim will prevent or cure COVID-19. The value of being able to access data of criminal communication on an encrypted network is perhaps the most effective illustration of how encrypted data can provide law enforcement with crucial leads beyond the area of cybercrime.

Microsoft on Tuesday shared the results of its three-month-long Azure Sphere Security Research Challenge and the company says it has paid out more than $374,000 to participants. The Azure Sphere Security Research Challenge, announced in May, invited security researchers to find vulnerabilities in Azure Sphere, Microsoft's IoT security solution, which the tech giant designed to provide end-to-end security across hardware, operating system and the cloud.

More than half of survey respondents increased mainframe platform data and transaction volume by 25% or more, signaling its ongoing importance in the digital business environment. "The Mainframe Survey validates that businesses see the mainframe as a critical component of the modern digital enterprise and an emerging hub for innovation," says Stephen Elliot, Program VP, Management Software and DevOps, IDC. "They're putting it to work more and more to support digital business demands as they strive to achieve greater agility and success across the enterprise."

The report combines a series of surveys conducted among nearly 1,500 employees amid the pandemic as many people were accelerating online usage due to remote work and stay-at-home orders. Risky online behaviors could compromise corporate data and devices.

Cybersecurity researchers have taken the wraps off a new botnet hijacking Internet-connected smart devices in the wild to perform nefarious tasks, mostly DDoS attacks, and illicit cryptocurrency coin mining. The researchers said the HEH botnet samples discovered so far support a wide variety of CPU architectures, including x86(32/64), ARM(32/64), MIPS(MIPS32/MIPS-III), and PowerPC. The botnet, despite being in its early stages of development, comes with three functional modules: a propagation module, a local HTTP service module, and a P2P module.

F5 introduced Shape AI Fraud Engine, a new SaaS solution that eliminates fraudulent online transactions that get past existing fraud tools. SAFE typically identifies twice as much fraud per month when compared to other current fraud tools.

Raytheon Intelligence & Space is launching a new hardware emulation and software analysis tool called DejaVM that provides a virtualized environment to evaluate and reduce cyber threats against mission-critical systems in a modern networked space. DejaVM enables system-level cyber testing without requiring access to the limited number of highly specialized physical hardware assets.

DigitalOcean announced DigitalOcean App Platform, a new platform as a service offering that automates infrastructure management so developers can deploy their code to production in just a few clicks. "With millions of businesses started in the cloud each year, developers need a simple, fast and scalable way to ship the apps that power their ideas," said Apurva Joshi, VP of Product, DigitalOcean.

Inspur unveiled its Cloud SmartNIC solution based on NVIDIA BlueField-2 data processing unit at GTC 2020. The Inspur Cloud SmartNIC solution deeply integrates the Inspur Server with NVIDIA DPU, enabling the combined capabilities of embedded processing, SmartNIC networking and high-performance PCIe 4.0 host interface, which can deliver hyper-performance network acceleration at a speed of up to 200Gb/s.

Armor G5 delivers the high efficiency, fast throughput, and excellent wireless range required to support the increased network performance and bandwidth demands of work-from-home and virtual learning environments. Designed to provide the high-performance network infrastructure to support video-intensive and IoT-heavy networks, Armor G5 combines a powerful 64-bit 2.2 GHz quad-core processor with WiFi 6 802.11AX technology to deliver wireless speeds up to 6000Mbps.