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Today’s topics include Kaspersky Lab’s discovery of a new strain of malware, Microsoft’s offer to protect Azure cloud computing customers from patent trolls, Microsoft’s announcement that it will release Visual Studio 2017 on March 7 and the launch of a mobile live streaming feature for YouTube videos.
A new breed of malware found by Kaspersky Lab is a potential nightmare for system administrators and IT managers. This is malware that uses legitimate—frequently open-source—software to infect a system, then uses commonly used Windows services for implementation and operation.
Once the malware is running inside of Windows it erases all traces of its existence and resides in the memory of the server it’s infected only long enough to exfiltrate the information it’s been sent to steal and then it erases itself.
Because the new malware examples reside in memory, they can’t be found by standard antivirus packages that scan a computer’s hard disk.
Kaspersky Lab principal security researcher Kurt Baumgartner said that while AV programs that look for signatures on a computer’s hard disk won’t find this malware, it can still be found. An updated anti-malware package should find it by its activities, such as creating tunnels or starting services.
Microsoft is offering to protect Azure cloud computing customers from patent trolls amid a rise in cloud-based intellectual property lawsuits.
Over the past five years, there has been a 22 percent increase in the number of cloud-based IP lawsuits filed in the U.S., noted Brad Smith, president and chief legal officer at Microsoft, in a Feb. 8 blog post, based on research from Boston Consulting Group.
Meanwhile, non-practicing entities, or patent trolls as they are sometimes called, have been growing their troves of cloud patents by 35 percent.
To help shield its growing cloud customer base from patent litigation, Smith unveiled the new Microsoft Azure IP Advantage program. It provides uncapped indemnification coverage that encompasses open-source technologies used in Azure services.
Microsoft recently announced plans to release Visual Studio 2017, the company’s cross-platform IDE, on Tuesday, March 7 during a two-day launch event.
The event, featuring interactive demonstrations and training sessions, will be live-streamed from the Visual Studio website. The news comes as the software giant celebrates Visual Studio’s 20th anniversary.
Earlier this week, Microsoft released an update to the Visual Studio 2017 Release Candidate, which contains a new templating engine that streamlines the creation of new projects using the “dotnet new” command. Also new is a feature that enables intelligent code completion while writing SQL called Redgate SQL Prompt.
YouTube creators now have a new way to interact with the viewers of their videos. Google has launched a new mobile live streaming capability that gives publishers of YouTube videos the ability to instantly reach audiences via their smartphones and tablets.
Initially, at least, the feature is available only to creators with more than 10,000 subscribers for their YouTube channels. Starting this week, people who fall into the category will see a new feature in their YouTube mobile app that allows them to stream their video live simply by clicking on the capture button.
Google will soon make the same capability available to all YouTube creators, but the company has not specified by what date it hopes to do so.