Amazon has revealed that its online cloud fended off what’s considered to be one the largest distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks in history.

The incident happened in February, hitting 2.3 Tbits/sec at its peak, according to a report from AWS Shield, smashing the previous peak record of 1.7 Tbits/sec.

The peak of the attack was 44% larger than anything the services had seen before and led to three-days of «elevated threat» status. Amazon Web Services provides the infrastructure for many websites, but the report doesn’t identify which websites had been targeted by the attack.

«In Q1 2020, a known UDP reflection vector, CLDAP reflection, was observed with a previously unseen volume of 2.3 Tbps,» the report stated. «This is approximately 44% larger than any network volumetric event previously detected on AWS.»

«CLDAP reflection attacks of this magnitude caused 3 days of elevated threat during a single week in February 2020 before subsiding. Despite this observation, smaller network volumetric events are far more common. The 99th percentile event in Q1 2020 was 43 Gbps.»

The attack in February was called a «reflection attack», which is thought to be an attempt to use a vulnerable third-party server to amplify the amount of data being sent to a victim’s IP address. It relies on exploiting the Connectionless Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (CLDAP), which is often exposed due to configuration issues – though AWS doesn’t suggest this to be the case for the February attack.

Downtime caused by DDoS accounts can have large financial implications. According to a 2019 report from Netscout, the size and scale of DDoS attacks in the UK could cost the country almost £1 billion per year. Part of the problem is that DDoS attacks are cheap and easy to deploy, according to Netscout.

In Q1 of 2020, there was a significant increase in both the quantity and Quality of DDoS attacks, according to Kaspersky. Not only have the number of attacks almost doubled, up by 80% against Q1 2019, these attacks have also become longer, the firm suggests.

Slack has reportedly invested in a US-based recruitment startup without ever meeting its CEO.

Crosschq, a California-based startup founded in 2015, managed to raise $5.5 million in funding during the coronavirus pandemic, according to CNBC, all via video conferencing.

The company’s CEO, Mike Fitzsimmons, held a virtual meeting in early March, where he told the board of directors he was going to make an unexpected call to Slack.

At the time, with the global economy on the verge of shutting down due to the outbreak of COVID-19, Fitzsimmons wanted to make sure his business had enough money to see it through.

Slack had previously shown an interest in the firm, with its head of investment, Jason Spinell, having already made contact with the company at the start of the year, although Crosschq rejected financial-backing at that time. However, following the economic disruption caused by the coronavirus lockdown, Slack’s offer was ultimately reconsidered.

Fitzsimmons began an email correspondence with Spinell to see if they were still interested in Crosschq, despite having never met face-to-face and knowing they would be unable to for some time. Over the next two months, via four video conferencing calls, Slack joined a $5.5 million financing round, alongside other Crosschq investors.

«Having been in the start-up world and having been through this enough times, the mechanics of this process were all different,» Fitzsimmons said, according to CNBC. «You’re accustomed to doing investor presentations and PowerPoints in front of the room and it’s intimidating and you get peppered with questions. It’s a very different game when you’re attacking it this way.»

Speaking to CNBC, Spinell said that Slack has done a number of investments via Zoom, which he said required «extreme conviction in the product and team».

«What has changed slightly for us due to the pandemic, is that we’re even hungrier for investments that fulfil obvious ‘future of work’ needs that are even more pronounced in our newly remote world,» Spinell said.

The lockdown has forced companies to adapt the way they operate. In May, Norwegian video conferencing startup Pexip was forced to debut on the stock market entirely virtually, using its own software. It’s now said to be valued at $942 million.

Oracle shares fell by 5% on Tuesday after the cloud giant reported mixed fourth-quarter results. 

The company reported that revenues were down 6% from a year ago, missing analysts estimates, due to the impact of COVID-19. 

«Our overall business did remarkably well considering the pandemic, but our results would have been even better except for customers in the hardest-hit industries that we serve such as hospitality, retail, and transportation postponing some of their purchases,» said Oracle CEO, Safra Catz. 

«Still, for the third year in a row, we delivered double-digit constant currency earnings per share growth in FY20.»

Oracle had previously suggested in March that it was expecting flat revenue for the quarter. Its largest category, cloud services and license support delivered $6.85 billion in revenue, with revenue from cloud and on-premises licenses coming in at $1.96 billion.

Oracle also recently announced new cloud business from video communications firms Zoom and 8×8, which has helped to keep the firm in double figures for the quarter and also get one over its fiercest rival. 

«8×8 was very surprised by the extent of their performance gains by moving out of AWS, moving part of their system out of AWS and into OCI [Oracle cloud infrastructure],» Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, said, according to CNBC. 

«They were so surprised by the performance gains they achieved and the cost savings they achieved that they decided to move all of their services out of AWS and into Oracle.»

While the tech industry has done better than most during the pandemic, it hasn’t managed to entirely avoid some financial impact from COVID-19. Last week, the top five firms – Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook – lost a combined $260 billion in value.

Four of those firms had a combined value of over $5 trillion before the outbreak. Bellow them, the likes of IBM and Cisco all lost significant value with drops in share price. 

Google has partnered with Parallels to bring native Windows applications to Chromebook Enterprise.

Chrome OS already supports Windows desktop apps, but only when streamed through a Parallels Remote Application Server. With the new partnership, apps will now be natively run on Chromebook devices.

A variation of Parallels Desktop will be integrated into Chrome OS, which should improve performance and also enable offline access to applications such as Microsoft Office. The feature will be available later in the year for Chrome Enterprise customers.

The move will likely entice more businesses to consider Chromebooks as alternatives to Windows laptops, particularly as it will now mean they won’t need to invest in services to stream business apps to the devices. 

«Remote work is a new reality, making efficiency, connectivity, speed, reliability, security and undisrupted access essential elements of a successful organisation,» Parallels wrote.

«At this key moment, our two organisations have formed a landmark partnership to equip enterprises with solutions that optimise their businesses and teams to meet the evolving challenges of modern work environments.»

For Google, the post-coronavirus economy will put greater strain on business expenditure, which could become challenging when workforces will need to be equipped for remote working.

The tech giant said it had seen 109% growth in commercial Chromebooks in Q1 2020 compared to the previous year, fueled in part by the cost benefits of deploying these low-cost laptops.  

«The Chrome OS team is working on new ways to make sure every company can benefit from the velocity created by supporting a cloud workforce,» John Solomon, VP of Chrome OS, wrote in a blog post.

«For example, our new partnership with Parallels brings legacy application support – which includes Microsoft Office desktop apps – to Chromebooks, with more to come on this over the coming months.»

Mozilla and the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) have published an open letter to Zoom that urges it to make end-to-end encryption available for all users.

The letter, addressed to Zoom CEO Eric Yuan, criticises the company’s decision to offer end-to-end encryption only to paying users. 

It has been signed by 19,000 internet users and backed by tech organisations and advocacy groups including Fight for the Future and MPower Change.

Earlier this month, the video conferencing platform announced plans to roll out stronger encryption for businesses and institutions that pay for its service. 

Zoom’s security consultant Alex Stamos suggested that stronger security measures may also be rolled out for non-profit organisations or users in need of an extra layer of protection, such as political dissidents, but added that “the current plan is paid customers plus enterprise accounts where the company knows who they are”. 

The decision has garnered criticism from many tech companies and organisations, including Mozilla and the EFF. In the open letter to Yuan, they argued that «best-in-class security should not be something that only the wealthy or businesses can afford».

«Around the world, end-to-end encryption is already an important tool for journalists and activists that are living under repressive regimes and fighting censorship,» wrote Mozilla’s Advocacy and Engagement VP Ashley Boyd and EFF’s associate director of Research Gennie Gebhart.

Boyd and Gebhert also criticised Zoom’s recent decision to suspend three user accounts at the request of the Chinese government for hosting meetings to commemorate the 21st anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

“Tools like Zoom can be critical to help protesters organize and communicate their message widely,” they wrote. “Activists should be able to plan and conduct protest-related activities without fear that these meetings, and the information they include, may be subject to interception. 

«Unfortunately, recent actions from law enforcement – and a long history of discriminatory policing – have legitimized such fears, making end-to-end encryption all the more critical.”

The letter acknowledged Stamos’s argument that full encryption for every meeting would leave Zoom’s trust and safety team unable to tackle child sexual abuse material (CSAM), but added that “restricting end-to-end encryption to paid accounts is not the right solution”.

Organisations such as Fight for the Future, MPower Change, Daily Kos, Kairos, Media Alliance and Jewish Voice for Peace have also launched a petition targeted at the video conferencing platform, arguing that “people who can’t afford Zoom’s services are left vulnerable to cyber-criminals, stalkers, and hackers”. It has been co-signed by 42,000 internet users.

Lau Barrios, campaign manager at MPower Change, said that “end-to-end encryption has always been a racial justice issue”.

“It most directly protects Black, brown, Muslim and poor communities from the disproportionate risk of surveillance, policing, and criminalization,» she said. 

«Zoom has already misled the public once on whether or not they use end-to-end encryption. Openly defending their refusal to provide it to those not wealthy enough to pay to protect themselves and their communities is unconscionable. And it’s a direct refusal to protect activists and organizers from surveillance in this moment.»

Dropbox has unveiled several new features to help users stay organised while they work from home.

The updates include a password manager service called ‘Dropbox Passwords‘ and filing system called ‘Dropbox Vault’ that follows on from the companies acquisition of Valt last year.

As life has become more internet-based, with many people now working remotely, Dropbox suggests that employees’ life/work balance has become strained and «chaotic». As such, the company is looking to provide services that help organise workflows as well as life at home.

In addition to Dropbox Passwords and Dropbox Vault, the company is also launching an automatic backup service, ‘Computer backup’, which saves Mac and PC folders to Dropbox for secure access on the go. This can be retrieved even when the hardware fails, according to Dropbox.

«The lines between work and home are blurred, and we’re all being pulled in a million directions right now,» said Drew Houston, CEO of Dropbox. «It can feel chaotic and overwhelming.» 

«We’re working quickly to provide new features to help people stay better organised in all aspects of their lives so they can focus on what really matters – like health and family.»

The company also has some new services for businesses, with HelloSign eSignature becoming a native feature within Dropbox following the company’s acquisition of HelloSign last year. With this feature, users will be able to send, receive and sign documents without leaving Dropbox. 

The company is also launching a suite of integrations, which includes tools for Zoom, Slack and Google. The Dropbox App Center is available to a subset of users in beta with over 40 integrated partners and more coming soon.

«According to IDC survey data, 31% of workers are concerned about lost productivity due to shifting to work from home,» said IDC analyst, Holly Muscolino.

«However, a recent poll shows that 70% of organisations would be investing in content sharing and collaboration over the next 12 months to support at-home workers. With today’s announcement, Dropbox has created a single place to help users get better organised at work and at home, to help them stay productive.»

Cisco has unveiled a ‘business resiliency’ portfolio that offers enterprises the tools to cope with the realities of a post-COVID business landscape, including remote working technologies and workplace systems.

The portfolio combines industry-specific as well as general-purposes services to give customers the means to cope with the new reality of social distancing in the workplace and difficulties in engaging remote workers. 

Cisco is rolling out the portfolio as the effects of COVID-19 continue to take their toll, and challenges such as mass remote working and fragmented IT continue to loom. This is in addition to further updates to WebEx, Cisco’s video conferencing platform, and integration with collaboration platform WebEx Teams and Box.

Industry-specific tools released as part of the business resilience package including a remote learning system, as well as an IT infrastructure kit to allow governments to establish a temporary hospital, in the mould of the NHS Nightingale sites. The temporary connected field hospital, as it’s dubbed, includes wireless networking and the associated technology to establish a temporary facility within five days.  

«Over the past several months we’ve seen major disruption to many industries and organizations at a pace like never before. Businesses that once mapped digital strategy in one to three-year periods have been required to scale their initiatives essentially overnight,» said Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins. 

«Cisco’s new business resiliency portfolio will help customers reevaluate their business strategies and implement solutions more quickly and easily than ever before.»

The remote workforce systems include a remote contact centre system, enabling contact centre agents to work from home using cloud-based systems or the capabilities to securely access their on-premise tech remotely. 

Flexible remote access gives employees the expertise and tools to access the network, endpoints and applications remotely, while the final prong, secure remote worker, offers businesses tools to analyse the effectiveness and security of their VPNs.

Among the workplace technologies being rolled out is remote office connectivity that extends a corporate network to adjacent and remote locations so workers can benefit from increased bandwidth and faster connectivity. 

Finally, social density monitoring and insights gives workplaces a view on how busy their workplace environments might be at any one time. This is in order for facilities teams to plan return-to-work strategies with social distancing in mind.

The WebEx integration with Box, meanwhile, allows workers to use the content management platform’s secure file-sharing capabilities to share documents with colleagues. With regards to WebEx, Cisco has tripled the video conferencing platform’s capacity in light of the surge in users as a result of the pandemic. 

WebEx will also introduce a fully-fledge voice-activated virtual assistant, building on Cisco’s intentions to use voice tools to explore the ‘next frontier’ of data insights, outlined in January this year.   

Dell Technologies has unveiled Dell EMC PowerScale, a new family of storage appliances designed to deal with the «onslaught of data» being faced by organisations today.

The product range is designed for object storage and is underpinned by the company’s OneFS operating system, which is best known from its Isilon range. 

The family forms part of Dell Technologies’ «edge-to-core» strategy, where it seeks to have hardware that can be deployed across an organisation’s estate, whether that’s at remote locations such as commercial or industrial sites or branch offices, as well as primary the data centre.

As such, PowerScale currently features two appliances, the all-flash f200 and the f600, which is an NVMe appliance.

As well as allowing customers to have high-performance storage appliances available at the edge, this diversity allows Dell Technologies to access a new type of client that it couldn’t with the previous Dell EMC Isilon range, the company claims.

Speaking to IT Pro, Stephen Gilderdale, senior director of EMEA presales, said: «In the past, the way in which Isilon started it simply couldn’t start small enough for some of our small-to-medium customers, so therefore they may have needed to take advantage of the services that Isilon would offer, however the starting point was a little bit too high.

«That’s why we’ve got the introduction of the f200, which really helps that smaller starting point. The f600 we expect the media houses, for example, to be using to create the blockbuster movies that we all hope to be able to get to the cinema and watch one day, and the large Isilon all-flash nodes have been used for that in the past.”

PowerScale also features CloudIQ, which can help organisations connect multiple cloud environments to their on-premise systems, be that in the data centre or at the edge, and DataIQ, which offers intelligent data management.

The launch follows on from another big storage announcement from the company in May, PowerStore.

Indeed, this is normally the time of year when CEO Michael Dell would be making all sorts of product announcements live from a stage in Las Vegas during the company’s annual Dell Technologies World conference.

As with so many other organisations, however, the company has turned this into a virtual conference and rescheduled it for this autumn.

HPE has launched a new product to help communications services providers (CSPs) get more value from 5G by offering edge services to enterprises.

Edge Orchestrator is a SaaS-based offering that focuses on situations where low latency is key.

During a press conference, Phil Mottram, vice president and general manager of the HPE’s Communications and Media Solutions business, told reporters that the company believes «the value proposition for 5G will all be firmly rooted in the enterprise space».

«We believe that consumer customers won’t be paying any more for [telcos’] services just to get a faster download of a video – there’s only so fast you can watch a video,» Mottram said. «But all of the revenue opportunities and upside opportunities for  carriers will firmly come in the enterprise new services space.»

This is far from a unique position – indeed, even before 5G standards were set, many future-gazers predicted it would be more useful in Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios in particular where low latency is key, such as in fully-autonomous cars.

While we wait for such futuristic technology to arrive, however, HPE has decided to make use of existing and emerging technology and needs. Edge Orchestrator, the company says, allows telcos to deliver new services in the form of apps at the edge of the network to enterprise customers and in doing so effectively monetise apps.

Specifically, Edge Orchestrator brings together edge compute, edge communications and edge applications and allows carriers to offer them as a single, self-service proposition to enterprise customers and other service providers that might want to deploy them.

«HPE Edge Orchestrator will be the functionality which actually takes all these components, wraps it up together and makes it available to the enterprises,» said Rolf Eberhardt, head of orchestration at HPE.

«We want to make the CSP able to efficiently allow enterprises to deploy their own applications at their own locations and connect them over connectivity services provided by the CSP back to their … data centres and to deploy these applications close to the end customers,» he continued. 

«We believe there are two benefits to this. First of all, the CSPs have the trust of the customers [and] they provide also the connectivity at the location, and second for the enterprise customers, they are able to, on the one hand, deploy quickly and efficiently in the edge space without having to do a major investment on their own and they can being all the functionality together into a one-stop.»

As it stands, Edge Orchestrator, which will be available from 31 July,  is only being sold to telcos and only as a service – there are no plans to sell through the channel or direct to customers. And while it may be 5G-focused on the surface, for now HPE proposes telcos offer these additional services through more established network technologies like 4G, LTE and Wi-Fi, then introducing 5G later as part of its portfolio.

The announcement, which comes just before the start of the company’s virtual HPE Discover 2020 conference, builds on an earlier announcement, made in March, where the company added «5G as a service» to its GreenLake portfolio. 

It also follows an announcement from the company’s networking business, Aruba, that it’s pivoting towards a more edge-focused approach to business.

HPE has launched a new product to help communications services providers (CSPs) get more value from 5G by offering edge services to enterprises.

Edge Orchestrator is a SaaS-based offering that focuses on situations where low latency is key.

During a press conference, Phil Mottram, vice president and general manager of the HPE’s Communications and Media Solutions business, told reporters that the company believes «the value proposition for 5G will all be firmly rooted in the enterprise space».

«We believe that consumer customers won’t be paying any more for [telcos’] services just to get a faster download of a video – there’s only so fast you can watch a video,» Mottram said. «But all of the revenue opportunities and upside opportunities for  carriers will firmly come in the enterprise new services space.»

This is far from a unique position – indeed, even before 5G standards were set, many future-gazers predicted it would be more useful in Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios in particular where low latency is key, such as in fully-autonomous cars.

While we wait for such futuristic technology to arrive, however, HPE has decided to make use of existing and emerging technology and needs. Edge Orchestrator, the company says, allows telcos to deliver new services in the form of apps at the edge of the network to enterprise customers and in doing so effectively monetise apps.

Specifically, Edge Orchestrator brings together edge compute, edge communications and edge applications and allows carriers to offer them as a single, self-service proposition to enterprise customers and other service providers that might want to deploy them.

«HPE Edge Orchestrator will be the functionality which actually takes all these components, wraps it up together and makes it available to the enterprises,» said Rolf Eberhardt, head of orchestration at HPE.

«We want to make the CSP able to efficiently allow enterprises to deploy their own applications at their own locations and connect them over connectivity services provided by the CSP back to their … data centres and to deploy these applications close to the end customers,» he continued. 

«We believe there are two benefits to this. First of all, the CSPs have the trust of the customers [and] they provide also the connectivity at the location, and second for the enterprise customers, they are able to, on the one hand, deploy quickly and efficiently in the edge space without having to do a major investment on their own and they can being all the functionality together into a one-stop.»

As it stands, Edge Orchestrator, which will be available from 31 July,  is only being sold to telcos and only as a service – there are no plans to sell through the channel or direct to customers. And while it may be 5G-focused on the surface, for now HPE proposes telcos offer these additional services through more established network technologies like 4G, LTE and Wi-Fi, then introducing 5G later as part of its portfolio.

The announcement, which comes just before the start of the company’s virtual HPE Discover 2020 conference, builds on an earlier announcement, made in March, where the company added «5G as a service» to its GreenLake portfolio. 

It also follows an announcement from the company’s networking business, Aruba, that it’s pivoting towards a more edge-focused approach to business.