Daily Tech Briefing: June 24, 2014

On June 22, the Reuters website was briefly impacted by an attack launched by the Syrian Electronic Army. The SEA is a Syrian activist group that is known to be loosely associated with the government of Bashar al-Assad, and has attacked other media outlets in the past to get its messages out.

The SEA utilized a third-party widget delivered by content discovery platform Taboola, which is embedded on reuters.com pages. The widget redirected users for one hour, between 7 a.m. to 8 a.m. Adam Singolda, CEO and founder of Taboola, admitted that the breach was not discovered until 7:25 a.m.

This is a particularly troubling breach, since Taboola uses a 2-step authentication process, which is often hailed as a cure-all for limiting the risk of phishing exploits.

For 25 years, IBM has partnered with the All England Lawn Tennis Club in support of the Wimbledon tournament. This year, IBM is offering an interactive mobile experience for those watching the tournament, with new analytics and social capabilities.

This includes redesigned and simplified SlamTracker analytics that encourages engagement and a new Social Command Centre powered by IBM SoftLayer cloud to allow tennis fans to follow the social media conversations about the Wimbledon championships.

U.S. Senators Cory Booker, D-N.J., and Marco Rubio, R-Fla. have proposed legislation that would require the Federal Communications Commission to expand the use of unlicensed spectrum so that more Americans might use it to get online with the goal of closing the WiFi gap in low-income areas.

This legislation was introduced on the same day FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler proposed an update to the 18-year-old E-Rate program that brings Internet connectivity to schools and libraries.

Rackspace hopes to shake up the cloud market with the launch of its new OnMetal OpenStack cloud service, which allows users to directly provision physical hardware.

Rackspace is aiming to provide users with the option and ability to directly deploy an OpenStack cloud onto physical hardware, solving the challenge of the fact that the shared physical infrastructure of the cloud does not provide power users with the control they might want over the hardware.