Friday, May 20, 2011

Sony Corp has been hacked again

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/20/us-sony-hacker-idUSTRE74J3Z820110520

Sony Corp has been hacked again, exposing more security issues for the company less than a month after intruders stole personal information from more than 100 million online user accounts.

A hacked page on a Sony website in Thailand directed users to a fake site posing as an Italian credit card company. The site was designed to steal information from customers, Internet security firm F-Secure disclosed on Friday.

Software glitch caused Exchange Online to trip up

http://www.infoworld.com/d/applications/software-glitch-caused-exchange-online-trip-772

A software bug caused email queues of some Exchange Online customers in the Americas to clog up on Thursday, leading to delivery delays that lasted in some cases almost seven hours.

The problem, which began at close to noon U.S. Eastern Time and wasn't fully resolved until past 6:30 p.m., initially caused 30 percent of Exchange Online hub servers in the Americas to experience backed-up mail queues.

Most of those affected servers returned to normal queue levels after about an hour, but one server required more extensive repair work, according to a Microsoft explanation posted to a company discussion forum on Friday.

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Dropbox Drops the Ball on Data Security

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/228018/dropbox_drops_the_ball_on_data_security.html

Dropbox, a provider of cloud-based data storage services, is in hot water with the Federal Trade Commission over claims that it lied and intentionally deceived customers into believing that their data is more private and secure than it really is. Whether Dropbox was deliberately misleading, or just failed to clearly communicate policy changes, the complaint filed with the FTC illustrates concerns over online data security.

PlayStation Network Hackers Used Amazon's Cloud Services To Launch Their Attack, Report Says

http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2011-05/playstation-network-hackers-used-amazons-cloud-services-launch-their-attack-report-says

Hackers used Amazon’s Elastic Cloud Computing service to wage an attack on Sony’s PlayStation network last month, according to a report by Bloomberg News. If it’s true, it’s the first acknowledgement that a cloud service — billed as a cheap, dynamic solution for safely storing data and ramping up processing power — has been used as a platform for a cyber attack.

Bloomberg cites “a person with knowledge of the matter,” who said a hacker used a fake name to set up a bogus Amazon EC2 account. Amazon’s servers were not hacked; rather, someone purchased computing power and used it to attack Sony’s network, compromising the personal information of 100 million users.

Sunday, May 15, 2011

Google revives Blogger after outage: 20 Hours

http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-20062657-245.html
Google got Blogger back online late this morning following a maintenance-related glitch that kept blogs dark for more than 20 hours.

"We're nearly back to normal -- you can publish again, and in the coming hours posts and comments that were temporarily removed should be restored," Eddie Kessler, tech lead/manager at Blogger, wrote in a post on the Blogger Buzz site around 10:30 a.m. PT.

Sony’s Playstation Network Is Back.

http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/20110514/sonys-playstation-network-is-back-up-will-anyone-be-back
Sony just announced that over the next several hours it will be flipping the lights back on in its Playstation Network that has been since hackers attacked it nearly a month ago.

Microsoft BPOS Exchange Restored

http://blogs.technet.com/b/msonline/archive/2011/05/13/update-on-bpos-standard-email-issues.aspx

"On Tuesday at 9:30am PDT, the BPOS-S Exchange service experienced an   issue with one of the hub components due to malformed email traffic on   the service. Exchange has the built-in capability to handle such   traffic, but encountered an obscure case where that capability did not   work correctly. The result was a growing backlog of email. By 12:00am   PDT, the malformed traffic was isolated and the mail queues cleared. The delays encountered by customers varied, on the order of 6-9 hours. Short term mitigation was implemented and a fix was under development."


"At 9:10am PDT today, service monitoring again detected malformed   email traffic on the service. The problem was resolved at 10:03am, but   users experienced up to 45 minute email delays during this time. A   second, but related issue was detected via monitoring at 11:35am PDT,   resulting in email stuck in some end users' outboxes. The issue was   remediated at 12:04pm PDT. During this time, more than 1.5 million   messages had queued on the service awaiting delivery. The backlog was   90% clear by 4:12 PM, but because of this large backlog of email,   customers may have experienced delays of as long as 3 hours. We are   implementing a comprehensive fix to both problems." 

Monday, May 2, 2011

Rackspace to shutdown Slicehost

http://thenextweb.com/dd/2011/05/03/rackspace-to-shut-down-slicehost/

In a letter to its customers, Rackspace VP of Product Mark Interrante has announced that Slicehost, the IT hosting company Rackspace acquired in 2008, will be shut down within 12 months.

Interrante gives the complexities of managing “two brands, two control panels and two sets of Support, Engineering and Operations teams” as the underlying driver behind the move. Managing one product will give the company a greater chance of succesfully coordinating the shift from IPv4 to IPv6 as well as the development of OpenStack Technology.