Security News
Kali Linux, the popular open source Linux distribution specialized for penetration testing, ethical hacking and security auditing, can now be used by Linode customers. A bare-install verson in the form of an official Kali distribution that can be deployed on any Linode compute instance and used via a command line interface.
The global cloud migration continues to fuel a market expected to hit the $1 trillion milestone in 2028. A recent report of Forrester Consulting, commissioned by Quali, found that 63% of surveyed IT and decision-makers say their organizations lack the support for a variety of cloud resources.
Microsoft has fixed a known issue causing Office applications like Word and Excel to crash when working with cloud documents. The complete list of affected Office apps includes Excel for Microsoft 365, Word for Microsoft 365, and PowerPoint for Microsoft 365.
Enterprises often forget that SLAs with cloud providers cover access to the service, but not necessarily protection for the data. The platform includes DataProtect - a backup as a service offering that delivers enterprise grade security protection for data stored both on-prem and in the cloud, including in-flight and at rest encryption, immutability and built-in machine learning to improve efficiency and bolster ransomware protection.
How do organizations make sure that cyber security and backup/recovery processes keep up with the evolution to multi-cloud? In addition, how do they ensure that the data which is being stored, accessed, and transferred between multiple clouds and on-premises data center locations meets increasingly stringent data protection and regulatory requirements? 63% believed the emergence of cloud native applications, Kubernetes containers and SaaS workloads posed a risk to data protection, primarily because they lacked adequate tools to manage data protection in so many different environments.
A new piece of research from academics at ETH Zurich has identified a number of critical security issues in the MEGA cloud storage service that could be leveraged to break the confidentiality and integrity of user data. In a paper titled "MEGA: Malleable Encryption Goes Awry," the researchers point out how MEGA's system does not protect its users against a malicious server, thereby enabling a rogue actor to fully compromise the privacy of the uploaded files.
A "Dangerous piece of functionality" has been discovered in Microsoft 365 suite that could be potentially abused by a malicious actor to ransom files stored on SharePoint and OneDrive and launch attacks on cloud infrastructure. The cloud ransomware attack makes it possible to launch file-encrypting malware to "Encrypt files stored on SharePoint and OneDrive in a way that makes them unrecoverable without dedicated backups or a decryption key from the attacker," Proofpoint said in a report published today.
50% of respondents cited efficiency as the top motivator for cloud investments. Increased security is the second most important business driver for organizations investing in cloud computing, with 48% of respondents citing it as a key factor in their investment.
Microsoft has announced today the general availability of Microsoft Defender for Individuals, the company's new security solution for personal phones and computers. This new cross-device security solution is available for all Microsoft 365 customers with Personal or Family subscriptions starting today.
Security researchers are warning that threat actors could hijack Office 365 accounts to encrypt for a ransom the files stored in SharePoint and OneDrive services that companies use for cloud-based collaboration, document management and storage. A ransomware attack targeting files on these services could have severe consequences if backups aren't available, rendering important data inaccessible to owners and working groups.