As the digitization of business accelerates the move of critical applications and content to the cloud, the network has never been as critical to business success. Consuming everything ‘as-a-service’ requires new levels of network automation, agility and security.
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The good news: your organisation has finally gotten around to installing some top of the range cloud security tools. The bad news: malware has been developed which can evade detection from them.
The nefarious discovery from threat actor Rocke was made by Palo Alto Networks Unit 42, with the security researchers noting that it was ‘to the best of [their] knowledge the first malware family that developed the unique capability to target and remove cloud security products.’
The Rocke group was first spotted in August by Cisco’s threat intelligent group, Talos, noting at the time it was an actor which ‘must be followed as they continue to add new features to their malware and are actively exploring new attack vectors.’
The malware mines Monero cryptocurrency in compromised Linux machines – cryptojacking being cited by this publication in July as ‘on the way to replacing ransomware as the biggest threat for consumers and enterprises.’ Vulnerabilities are exploited in Apache Struts 2, Oracle WebLogic, and Adobe ColdFusion. Once that is achieved, and the link established, the malware exhibits various behaviours such as persistence, killing and blocking other crypto mining software and, crucially, uninstalling agent-based cloud security products.
The cloud security products tested were both China-based, in the shape of Alibaba Threat Detection Service and Tencent Cloud Host Security – with the researchers fearing a wider spread of this variant if steps aren’t taken now.
“Public cloud infrastructure is one of the main targets for this cybercrime group,” Unit 42 added. “Realising the existing cloud monitor and security products may detect the possible malware intrusion, malware authors continue to create new evasion technologies to avoid being detected by cloud security products.
“The variant of the malware used by the Rocke group is an example that demonstrates the agent-based cloud security solution may not be enough to prevent evasive malware targeted at public cloud infrastructure.”
You can read the full analysis here.
Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.
92% of enterprises are using the public cloud today. As a result, simply being in the cloud is no longer enough to remain competitive. The benefit of reduced costs has normalized while the market forces are demanding more innovation at faster release cycles. Enter Cloud Native! Cloud Native enables a microservices driven architecture. The shift from monolithic to microservices yields a lot of benefits – but if not done right – can quickly outweigh the benefits. The effort required in monitoring, tracing, circuit breakers, routing, load balancing, etc. for thousands of microservices can become overwhelming. This talk will address strategies to run & manage microservices from 0 to 60 using Istio and other tools in a cloud native world.
Artificial intelligence will be seamlessly integrated into all cloud apps by 2025 rather than being introduced as an afterthought, according to Oracle CEO Mark Hurd.
During the same time frame, as the world of business shifts further towards this increased use of AI and automation, there will be mass job creation rather than annihilation. Indeed, claims Hurd, some 60% of the IT jobs that will be required come 2025 don’t actually exist today.
“The reality is cloud adoption is moving faster than predicted. Cloud is not just a technology. Cloud is a strategy, cloud is a business model,” Hurd told delegates in attendance at the firm’s Oracle OpenWorld event in London.
What’s more, AI and robots will need to be managed and monitored in a way not too dissimilar to current, human employee/employer relationships.
“There will be a supervisor for these robots. Just like we all have bosses, the robot will have a boss,” Hurd said.
Hurd also made other predictions about where things are headed, with a particular focus on data and security.
“The economy is a little less than $80 trillion. IT is a very small percentage of that – about 3%. IT then splits into two sections. One is consumer IT and the other is B2B IT. This is the first year I think we will see that consumer IT is bigger.
“One of the big battlegrounds going forward is going to be about data, about AI, about security… The disruption is constant. Most of the data in the world is owned by two companies: Facebook and Google,” he added, suggesting people would want greater ownership in the future and stressing that cloud would be both fundamental and foundational as the shift occurs.
Leo Johnson, disruption lead for PwC and co-presenter of Radio 4’s FutureProofing served as the warm-up act for Hurd – who joined the conference by video link from the US as a lack of passport and inability to get a temp one due to the gov shutdown had prevented him from flying – also gave us a peek as to what the future of work could look like.
“Are we moving to a new wave of technology? Not just a set of innovative technologies, but to the deployment of it?” he said.
Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning show the potential to reduce the most time-consuming, manual tasks that keep sales teams away from spending more time with customers. Automating account-based marketing support with predictive analytics and supporting account-centered research, forecasting, reporting, and recommending which customers to upsell first are all techniques freeing sales teams from manually intensive tasks.
CRM and Configure, Price & Quote (CPQ) providers continue to develop and fine-tune their digital assistants, which are specifically designed to help the sales team get the most value from AI and machine learning. Salesforces’ Einstein supports voice-activation commands from Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, and Google.
Salesforce and other enterprise software companies continue to aggressively invest in research & development (R&D). For the nine months ended October 31, 2018, Salesforce spent $1.3bn or 14% of total revenues compared to $1.1B or 15% of total revenues, during the same period a year ago, an increase of $211M according to the company’s 10Q filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The race for AI and machine learning patents that streamline selling is getting more competitive every month. Expect to see the race of sales-focused AI and machine learning patents flourish in 2019. The National Bureau of Economic Research published a study last July from the Stanford Institute For Economic Policy Research titled Some Facts On High Tech Patenting. The study finds that patenting in machine learning has seen exponential growth since 2010 and Microsoft had the greatest number of patents in the 2000 to 2015 timeframe. Using patent analytics from PatentSight and ipsearch, IAM published an analysis last month showing Microsoft as the global leader in machine learning patents with 2,075. The study relied on PatentSight’s Patent Asset Index to rank machine learning patent creators and owners, revealing Microsoft and Alphabet are dominating today. Salesforce investing over $1B a year in R&D reflects how competitive the race for patents and intellectual property is.
Fueled by the proliferation of patents and the integration of AI and machine learning code into CRM, CPQ, Customer Service, Predictive Analytics and a wide variety of Sales Enablement applications, use cases are flourishing today. Presented below are the ten ways machine learning is most revolutionising selling today:
Nearly all AI-enabled CRM applications are providing the ability to define a series of attributes, characteristics and their specific values that pinpoint the highest potential prospects. Selecting and prioritising new prospects using this approach saves sales teams thousands of hours a year.
One of the most important areas of collaboration between sales and marketing is lead nurturing strategies that move prospects through the pipeline. AI and machine learning are enriching the collaboration with insights from third-party data, prospect’s activity at events and on the website, and from previous conversations with salespeople. Lead scoring and nurturing relies heavily on natural language generation (NLG) and natural-language processing (NLP) to help improve each lead’s score.
Factoring in differences inherent in every account given their previous history and product and service purchasing cycles is invaluable in accurately predicting their future buying levels. AI and machine learning algorithms integrated into CRM, sales management and sales planning applications can explain variations in forecasts, provided they have the data available. Forecasting demand for new products and services is an area where AI and machine learning are reducing the risk of investing in entirely new selling strategies for new products.
Analysing a diverse series of factors to see which customers are going to churn or leave versus those that will renew is among the most valuable insights AI and machine learning is delivering today. Being able to complete a Customer Lifetime Value Analysis for every customer a company has provides a prioritised roadmap of where the health of client relationships are excellent versus those that need attention. Many companies are using Customer Lifetime Value Analysis as a proxy for a customer health score that gets reviewed monthly.
All sales managers and leaders think about this often, especially in sales teams where performance levels vary widely. Knowing the capabilities of the highest-achieving salespeople, then selectively recruiting those sales team candidates who have comparable capabilities delivers solid results. Leaders in the field of applying AI to talent management include Eightfold whose approach to talent management is refining recruiting and every phase of managing an employee’s potential. Please see the recent New York Times feature of them here.
AI- and machine learning-based guided selling is based on prescriptive analytics that provides recommendations to salespeople of which products, services, and bundles to offer at which price. 62% of highest performing salespeople predict guided selling adoption will accelerate based on its ability rank potential opportunities by value and suggest next steps according to Salesforces’ latest State of Sales research study.
AI and machine learning-based sales contact and customer predictive analytics take into account all sources of contacts with customers and determine which are the most effective. Knowing which actions and behaviors are correlated with the highest close rates, sales managers can use these insights to scale their sales teams to higher performance.
Pricing continues to be an area the majority of sales and marketing teams learn to do through trial and error. Being able to analyse pricing data, purchasing history, discounts are taken, promotional programs participated in and many other factors, AI and machine learning can calculate the price elasticity for a given customer, making an optimised price more achievable.
Marketing Automation applications including HubSpot and many others have for years been able to define which content asset needs to be presented to a given prospect at a given time. What’s changed is the interactive, personalised nature of the content itself. Combining analytics, personalisation and machine learning, marketing automation applications are now able to tailor content and assets that move opportunities forward.
CRM applications including Salesforce can define a salesperson’s schedule based on the value of the potential sale combined with the strength of the sales lead, based on its lead score. AI and machine learning optimise a salesperson’s time so they can go from one customer meeting to the next, dedicating their time to the most valuable prospects.
Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their use-cases? Attend the co-located AI & Big Data Expo events with upcoming shows in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more. Co-located with the IoT Tech Expo, Blockchain Expo and Cyber Security & Cloud Expo so you can explore the future of enterprise technology in one place.
Unit 42, the global cyber threat intelligence arm of Palo Alto Networks, has discovered new forms of a Linux coin mining malware originally used by the Rocke group which attacks Linux servers, aka a large portion of all servers in the world.
The malware which is believed to be related to the Xbash malware detected in September 2018, will infect a server and then mutate, downloading new code which allows it to assume administrative control and delete cloud services installed on them.
The security products weren’t compromised specifically, instead, the threat actor was able to simply remove them from the server altogether in the same way a legitimate system administrator would be able to.
The samples analysed by Unit 42 targeted cloud services provided by two of China’s leading cloud providers: Tencent Cloud and Alibaba Cloud (Aliyun). It’s also believed by the threat intelligence team that the analysed samples are the first form of malware that can target and delete cloud services from servers.
The threat isn’t just presented to hosts of Linux servers, Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP), which are essentially built-in security services into cloud products tailored to stop malware intrusions, are also under threat.
The threat is worth taking seriously, considering Tencent Cloud and Alibaba Cloud (Aliyun) both have CWPPs included with their products which means they’re not doing enough to mitigate attacks, evidently with the latest one which attempted to mine Monero using Linux hardware.
The Xbash family of malware which was first discovered in Septemeber 2018 is devastating, with analysed samples infecting servers in worm-like fashion and destroying data on the server while posing as ransomware. Researchers found no evidence in the attack code that a provision was in place whereby data could be restored following the ransom’s payment.
Linux is more prevalent than one might think, Microsoft Azure is now predominantly run on Linux servers – it’s not just the Chinese cloud environments being hosted via Linux, it’s likely that your business is running at least one cloud service on a Linux server too.
Security researchers who discover flaws in Microsoft’s Azure DevOps platform could earn themselves up to $20,000, after the company announced its latest bug bounty programme.
The Microsoft Azure DevOps Services Bounty is the company’s tenth concurrent bug bounty programme and covers Redmond’s suite of cloud-based DevOps tools. Previously known as Visual Studio Team Services, these include continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) tools, Git repos, kanban boards, testing tools and more.
“Security has always been a passion of mine,” said Microsoft’s director of engineering for Azure DevOps, Buck Hodges, “and I see this program as a natural complement to our existing security framework. We’ll continue to employ careful code reviews and examine the security of our infrastructure. We’ll still run our security scanning and monitoring tools. And we’ll keep assembling a red team on a regular basis to attack our own systems to identify weaknesses.”
Rewards range from $500 all the way up to $20,000 at the top end, with payouts affected by a number of different factors. The quality of the report itself (meaning how easy the report makes it for Microsoft’s engineers to understand, reproduce and fix the problem) is graded as either high, medium or low, with different bounties for each.
Different levels of compensation are also awarded based on the severity of the bug, but only ‘critical’ or ‘important’ bugs will qualify for a reward – disclosures of any other category of bug will merely earn a public acknowledgement from Microsoft, should the report lead to a fix.
Finally, the impact of the bug itself will be taken into consideration too. Remote code execution flaws are, understandably, the most valuable, followed by privilege escalation and information leaking, while tampering flaws are eligible only for a limited payout, and denial of service vulnerabilities are not rewarded at all.
Bug bounties are becoming an increasingly common security measure among large companies, with the idea being to make it more valuable to responsibly disclose the flaw to the victim than to exploit it for personal gain.
Major organisations like Facebook, Apple, and Google all offer their own bug bounty programmes, and the practice is touted as a good way to ensure that fewer flaws and exploits appear in the wild.
Vodafone and IBM have announced a partnership that will see the pair delivering new opportunities to businesses looking for ways to harness the power of 5G in their cloud computing services.
The collaboration aims to provide companies with the technology to integrate multiple cloud environments and prepare for the next wave of digital transformation, with a focus on wide-scale AI adoption and 5G implementation.
According to Vodafone, more than 70% of organisations today use up to 15 different cloud environments and the technology that Vodafone and IBM provide will aid the interconnectivity of all those clouds.
IBM will provide managed services to Vodafone Business’ Cloud and hosting unit under an eight-year deal valued at around $550 million. Vodafone’s 5G and IoT tech will be integrated with IBM’s multicloud, which will enable use cases such as super-fast connectivity between factory-floor robots. The technology is predicted to be operational in the first half of 2019.
Another example would be the innovation of oil rigs. innovating on an oil rig would have been a challenge due to lack of connectivity and disparate IT systems, Vodafone highlighted: “Today, thanks to edge computing and IoT technologies from Vodafone working with the latest AI and augmented reality applications from IBM, engineers will be able to pinpoint and resolve faults on equipment in minutes rather than hours, potentially saving millions in lost productivity.”
“Vodafone has successfully established its cloud business to help our customers succeed in a digital world,” said Vodafone CEO Nick Read. “This strategic venture with IBM allows us to focus on our strengths in fixed and mobile technologies, whilst leveraging IBM’s expertise in multicloud, AI and services. Through this new venture, we’ll accelerate our growth and deepen engagement with our customers while driving radical simplification and efficiency in our business.”
In October 2018, Vodafone became the first telco in the UK to carry full 5G over a commercial network following its Salford site switch-on.
Using Massive MIMO technology, the 5G connectivity provided multiple data channels over a single antenna on a 3.4GHz spectrum. This was significant as previously companies had tested the technology either within a single location or using parts of the 4G network to complete the 5G service.
The mobile telco has invited local companies and organisations to join its 5G trial through its ‘Future Ready’ innovation centre, which is scheduled to open in spring 2019.
The centre will be equipped with 5G wireless routers, gigabit-capable optical-fibre links and Internet of Things (IoT) services, which can digitally connect “everything from office security systems, vehicles, and household appliances to livestock and pets”.
FinTech is a disruptive innovation that denotes the adoption of technologies that have changed how traditional financial services work. While FinTech is now embedded deeply into the financial services ecosystem, the rise of digital age has paved way to FinTech 2.0 – which is rolling out innovative solutions through emerging technologies at a disruptive pace while maintaining the tenets of security and compliances.
Blockchain as a technology has started seeing pilot adoption in FinTech around trade settlements, fraud detection and would need to sort out few of the technology challenges primarily around transaction time, interoperability with existing systems before being fully adopted into mainstream systems. While private blockchain adoption by Banks have taken shape, the challenge of real time transaction settlement, preventing double spend attacks need to be addressed.
A server that made its way into the public domain has revealed information about a whole host of FBI investigations from the last ten years.
The server, which once belonged to the State of Oklahoma, was storing 3TB worth of data about investigations it was working on with the FBI. The entire device was unsecured, according to reports, potentially exposing confidential data to the masses.
This mammoth data leak was uncovered by security firm Upguard, which reported the server had no security to protect the information from prying eyes.
As well as data about dealings with the FBI, the server also contained social security numbers, names, and addresses of 10,000 brokers, plus information needed to access remote desktops of government workers.
Other information found on the device included copies of communications with the Oklahoma Securities Commission and confidential personal information about AIDS patients residing in the state.
A press announcement was made to the public detailing the breach, saying the Oklahoma Department of Securities (ODS) had launched an extensive review into the leak, saying it was revealed following the installation of a firewall.
“An accidental vulnerability of limited duration to a server containing archived data was discovered and immediately secured,” the statement said.
“The ODS has notified law enforcement and OMES regarding the incident. A forensic team is currently conducting an analysis to determine the type and number of data files that may have been exposed and who may have accessed them.”
Upguard said that as soon as it discovered the security hole, it advised the ODS and the vulnerability was closed.
Oklahoma state officials are now communicating with individuals that may have been affected by the potential breach.
“The ODS is reviewing internal procedures, controls and security measures to ensure such incidents cannot occur in the future,” the statement continued.