Daily Video: Contest Challenges Users to Bring Their Malware to RSA

Today’s topics include a malware challenge from security vendor SentinelOne, a new generation of Trident networking chips from Broadcom, high-speed fiber-based Internet from Comcast and a new report from security firm FireEye about Operation RussianDoll.

Many security companies will be making a lot of claims at the RSA Conference that runs April 20-24 in San Francisco, but one company in particular is putting its money behind its claims. Security vendor SentinelOne is running a Bring Your Own Malware Challenge at the conference, with the winner reaping a $1,000 prize.

The SentinelOne Bring Your Own Malware contest is not a free-for-all with an endless prize pool. Tomer Weingarten, CEO of SentinelOne, explained that the $1,000 prize is the total prize pool and if more than one person is able to defeat SentinelOne EDR, there will be a drawing among winning participants.

Broadcom introduced the next generation of its Trident networking switch silicon on April 20. The company said the StrataXGS Trident-II+ Series system-on-chip (SoC) offers greater bandwidth, scalability and energy efficiency that enterprises are demanding as they move to 10GbE virtualized data centers and beyond.

The new chips, which are currently sampling, also complement the silicon Broadcom offers for carriers and cloud services as well as hyperscale data centers.

Comcast is bringing high-speed, 2-gigabit fiber-based Internet services to the San Francisco Bay Area starting in June, as the cable provider raises the stakes in the broadband speed wars against competitors such as Google Fiber, AT&T and others.

This is the second launch this month for Comcast’s newly announced gigabit Internet services that it calls Gigabit Pro 2. Earlier in April, the company announced that it had chosen Atlanta as the first city in the nation to get the faster Internet services.

Security firm FireEye issued a report on April 18 alleging that Operation RussianDoll made use of two zero-day flaws—one in Adobe Flash and the other in Microsoft Windows—in a targeted attack.

FireEye has labeled the hacker group behind the attack as APT28, which is operating out of Russia and may have ties to the Russian government. The APT28 attack involved two vulnerabilities, both of which were zero-day issues that FireEye first discovered on April 13.