Panasonic Disagrees With IOactive Claims About IFE System Flaws

Security Flaws Detected in Panasonic Airline Entertainment System

Daily Briefing 1221B
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eWEEK Staff
eWEEK Staff
Dec 21, 2016
2 minute read
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Today’s topics include the discovery of security vulnerabilities in Panasonic’s Avionic In-Flight Entertainment system, Akamai’s acquisition of bot detection vendor Cyberfend, the start of Microsoft Azure Cloud Services delivery from new UK-based data centers and DDN’s new content management system that runs on a microservices architecture.

Security firm IOactive on Dec. 20 publicly announced that it has found security flaws in Panasonic Avionic In-Flight Entertainment (IFE) systems used on multiple airlines around the world.

The flaws were first reported to Panasonic by IOactive in March 2015 and were not publicly discussed until today, in an effort to give Panasonic and airlines time to fix the issues.

The vulnerabilities discovered by IOactive could have potentially enabled an attacker to take over in-flight displays used by passengers, turn the lighting system on or off as well as steal credit card information that may be stored in the system.

There also is the potential risk that that vulnerabilities found by IOactive could be chained together and enable an attacker to get wider access to an aircraft’s in-flight systems.

Akamai is acquiring privately-held bot detection vendor Cyberfend in an all-cash transaction.9. The acquisition, announced on Dec. 19, will bring new security capabilities to Akamai, complementing its existing Bot Manager technology.

Josh Shaul, vice president, web security product management at Akamai, told eWEEK that the full financial terms of the deal are not being publicly disclosed and Cyberfend staff will be re-locating to Akamai’s Santa Clara, Calif., offices. Cyberfend was started in 2014 with the goal of helping to improve the state of cyber-bot detection.

In September, Microsoft began delivering Azure cloud services to the United Kingdom from its data centers in London, Durham and Cardiff. Initially, the company offered Office 365 along with select number of services.

Motivated in part by growing data privacy and residency concerns among U.K. customers, Microsoft decided to open new Azure data centers in the region in late-2015.

As 2016 rapidly draws to a close, Microsoft announced today that businesses in the U.K. now have regional access to a growing set of Azure-backed services, including the company’s cloud-based business intelligence (BI) and data visualization product, Power BI. Also available is Power BI Embedded, the DocumentDB NoSQL database service and Azure Functions.

DNN has launched the latest edition of its web content management system Evoq 9, which provides omnichannel publishing inside a microservices architecture.

This allows text and images to be created once then deployed wherever they need to go, with no other editing or file-modification needed.

Released on Dec. 13, Evoq 9 includes a key technology called Liquid Content, a new content-as-a-service platform delivered as a microservice via DNN’s Liquid Content Cloud, which, in turn, runs on Microsoft Azure’s public cloud.

Included in Liquid Content are a content analytics application to measure and analyze the impact of content along with a stateless API to access and retrieve content.

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