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Today’s topics include Salesforce introducing a new custom learning option within Trailhead; Microsoft unveiling its cost-cutting Azure Archive Blob cloud storage option; Zerodium paying up to $500,000 for mobile messaging app vulnerabilities; and Versive using new funding to advance its AI-driven intelligence threat detection system.
Looking to expand the appeal of its Trailhead learning system, Salesforce.com is now offering users and trainers a way to customize the learning experience by creating a kind of mixtape or Spotify-type playlist of selected modules. So, for example, if a user was interested in specific aspects of becoming a Salesforce administrator, they could create a “Trailmix” of what the company calls trails and other modules they’re interested in.
The free Trailhead system that lets users learn at their own pace offers micro-credentials in specific areas of Salesforce, including “Superbadges” that users can highlight on their resume or bring to the attention of managers come review time.
Trailmix was also developed with employers and managers in mind by giving them the ability to create their own “things you need to know” Trailmixes for particular jobs within their company, according to Salesforce.
Microsoft has kicked off a public preview of its Azure Archive Blob Storage service, offering customers a lower-cost cloud storage solution for rarely accessed data.
This adds a lower-cost option to last year’s release of Microsoft’s Azure Cool Blob, which cost customers a penny per gigabyte per month.
Kumail Hussain, a senior program manager at Azure, said, “Azure Archive Blob storage is designed to provide organizations with a low cost means of delivering durable, highly available, secure cloud storage for rarely accessed data with flexible latency requirements.” Azure Archive Blob costs 0.18 cents per gigabyte per month when the service is delivered through its cloud data center in the Eastern U.S.
Zerodium, an independent, privately held company in the business of acquiring zero-day exploits, updated its exploit acquisition payout schedule on Aug. 23, adding new targets and prices for zero-day exploits.
Among the new targets are mobile messaging apps including WhatsApp, iMessage and Signal, for which Zerodium will pay up to $500,000 for a remote code exploit with local privilege escalation zero-day vulnerability. This new payout is being driven by demand from Zerodium’s customers that pay for access to the company’s security vulnerability information.
“Signal, Telegram and other messaging apps are very popular among legitimate users but also among criminals,” Chaouki Bekrar, founder of Zerodium, told eWEEK. “Our government customers are in need of advanced capabilities and zero-day exploits that would allow them to track and monitor terrorists and criminals relying on these apps.”
Cyber-security vendor Versive announced on Aug. 22 that it has raised $12.7 million in a new round of funding that will be used to help the company build out its go-to-market and technical efforts.
Versive CEO Joe Polverari said that for the first three years of the company’s existence, the technology that it built was for very sophisticated customers and wasn’t built or targeted at mainstream enterprise customers. That has now changed with the Versive Security Engine, which provides artificial intelligence-powered user anomaly and threat detection, and helps organizations understand who is using a network, what they are doing and how to forecast potential risks and data breach incidents.
Versive is “looking across the entirety of a company’s internal networks to detect and mitigate advanced adversary campaigns,” Polverari said. “Those adversaries can be external or internal in origin, or even a combination of both.”