Today’s topics include Verizon’s adoption of Cisco’s iWANSD-WAN services suite, Seagate issuing patches for vulnerabilities in its wireless hard drives, hackers now using the victim’s own software to breach networks, and Google’s announcing general availability for its Pre-emptible virtual machines.
Verizon is adopting Cisco’s iWAN as the foundation of its software-defined WAN suite of services as part of the carrier’s larger initiative to bring network virtualization to its infrastructure.
The new managed service, announced Sept. 8, will help organizations that increasingly are using the cloud to deliver applications and services because they are dealing with a workforce that is becoming more mobile and demanding better wireless Internet access.
Seagate issued patches for vulnerabilities in its wireless hard drives and is advising users to update the embedded firmware in the drives to fix the flaws.
Although wireless hard drives provide a convenient, untethered way to back up data, Seagate says it’s still critically important to keep the firmware on the wireless drives up-to-date.
Seagate is advising users of its Wireless Mobile Storage and LaCie FUEL hard drives to update the embedded firmware to patch for multiple known vulnerabilities that could potentially enable a remote attacker to gain unauthorized access to a user’s information.
Sophisticated attackers increasingly use little or no malware to compromise and steal data from target networks, according to an alert issued by managed security services firm Dell Secureworks.
Instead, in nearly every intrusion investigated by security analysts at the company in the past year, the attackers used compromised credentials to gain entry into the network along with legitimate administrator tools to move from system to system, the alert stated.
Dell Secureworks advises companies to implement two-factor authentication to make user login credentials less useful to network attackers.
Google today announced general availability of its Compute Engine Pre-emptible Virtual Machine option for customers of its cloud computing platform.
The option is designed for enterprises that need extra infrastructure capacity occasionally to run seasonal and batch processing jobs, but don’t want to spend money on installing extra hardware capacity.
With the Pre-emptible VM option, Google has said it will make available any idle cloud processing capacity it might have at a particular time to businesses that need the compute power on a temporary basis.
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