Today’s topics include Uber admitting it hid a massive data breach last year; Microsoft adding dozens of new locations to its Bird’s Eye feature in Bing Maps; and Microsoft’s release of Azure Migrate for guiding VMware users to the cloud.
Uber publicly admitted on Nov. 21 that in late 2016 it became aware that it had been the victim of a massive data breach that exposed personally identifiable information on 56 million users and 600,000 drivers.
Among the stolen information were names, email addresses and mobile phone numbers of Uber users as well as the names and license numbers of approximately 600,000 United States Uber drivers.
There is no indication that credit card numbers, Social Security numbers or dates of birth information were stolen. According to a Bloomberg report, Uber did not publicly report the breach in 2016, nor did it alert the regulatory authorities.
Instead, Uber paid the hackers $100,000 to delete the data and keep the matter quiet, at the direction of Chief Security Officer Joe Sullivan, who has since been fired. Dara Khosrowshahi, who was name CEO of Uber this past summer, emphasized that, “While [Uber has] not seen evidence of fraud or misuse tied to the incident, [it is] monitoring the affected accounts.”
Microsoft has added dozens of new locations to the Bird’s Eye feature in Bing Maps. Bird’s Eye uses oblique imagery processing technology to provide detail-packed views that can help travelers navigate their surroundings by sight.
“Oblique imagery is a great complement to Aerial 2D imagery because it has much more depth and provides a view of your destination that is more familiar and in line with what people expect,” stated Microsoft Bing staffers.
“You can see Bird’s Eye imagery in Bing Maps, and this view can offer a better context for navigation because building facades can be used as landmarks.” New areas include Austin, Texas; San Francisco County; Niagara Falls; and Orlando, FL., to name a few, nudging the total number of Bird’s Eye areas past the 450 locations mark.
Microsoft released on Nov. 27 Azure Migrate, a new service to guide VMware users on how to quickly and cost-effectively move their workloads to Microsoft’s cloud.
Azure Migrate will help users assess their on-premises VMware environments and migrate to the cloud in a guided and semi-automated manner. The service’s discovery tool can be used to visualize the dependencies in applications comprised of multiple virtual machines and detect CPU, memory, storage and network utilization.
This data is then used to inform its cost and virtual machine sizing guidance. Then, Azure Migrate enlists Microsoft’s cloud-based disaster recovery solution to transfer VMware workloads. “Azure Site Recovery enables customers to migrate VMware-virtualized Windows Server and Linux workloads with minimal downtime.
ASR offers application-centric migration, allowing you to sequence your application servers as they migrate,” explained Corey Sanders, director of Compute at Microsoft Azure.