Today’s topics include Trend Micro reporting that cryptojacking attacks are growing rapidly, and Pivot3 unveiling hyperconverged infrastructure for the rugged edge.
Trend Micro released its 2018 midyear security roundup on Aug. 28, revealing slowing growth of ransomware attacks, while cryptojacking attacks are surging.
According to the 40-page report, there was a 956 percent increase in cryptojacking attacks in the first half of 2018 compared to the first half of 2017. Cryptojacking refers to unauthorized cryptocurrency mining, which can end up consuming a victim’s system resources.
According to John Clay, director of global threat communications for Trend Micro, “It does appear that this trend will continue for the foreseeable future, but with crypto-currency values changing quite wildly, we could see a decrease in this threat.
We do think we’ll see an increase in targeting of owners of crypto-currencies or the exchanges themselves, as the opportunity to steal more coins is higher there than the prospect of mining coins.”
Pivot3, a smaller vendor in the crowded hyperconverged infrastructure market, unveiled on Aug. 28 its Intelligent Edge Command and Control solution, which enables organizations that operate in extreme environments to collect, store, process and analyze data immediately in the field, rather than having to send the data back to a central data center or a public cloud.
While the ruggedized hyperconverged infrastructure solution can be used for a broad range of situations, from oil and gas exploration to mining operations, it is designed with the military in mind.
According to Bruce Milne, chief marketing officer at Pivot3, its purpose is “to take mission packages and drop them in as a node … that includes the entire mission package for not just a particular vehicle, but an entire … convoy.
The idea is that four Marines can batten that thing up and run it to whatever environment they need to and they have an instant data center.”