May 12
[Some Interesting] Cloud ‘n Sec news: 13th May 22
What’s worth your reading time
Cloud
GCP
New Super powered Cluster for GCP
Public preview announced for GCP’s full cluster of Google Cloud’s new Cloud TPU v4 Pods.
According to Techcrunch’s report:
Google’s fourth iteration of its Tensor Processing Units launched at last year’s I/O and a single TPU pod consists of 4,096 of these chips. Each chip has a peak performance of 275 teraflops and each pod promises a combined compute power of up to 1.1 exaflops of compute power. Google now operates a full cluster of eight of these pods in its Oklahoma data center with up to 9 exaflops of peak aggregate performance. Google believes this makes this “the world’s largest publicly available ML hub in terms of cumulative computing power, while operating at 90% carbon-free energy.”
New fully managed PostgreSQL database service for GCP
A new Fully managed PostgreSQL dabase service for GCP, rivaling AWS’s Aurora has been released. Techcrunch reports:
The company, after all, already offers CloudSQL for PostgreSQL and Spanner, Google Cloud’s fully managed relational database service also offers a PostgreSQL interface. But these are services that offer an interface that is compatible with PostgreSQL to allow developers with these skills to use these services. AlloyDB is the standard PostgreSQL database at its core, though the team did modify the kernel to allow it to use Google’s infrastructure to its fullest, all while allowing the team to stay up to date with new versions as they launch.
Security
Industry
Microsoft’s Cybersecurity Architect Exam SC-100 learning path now available to everyone
That’s it, go check it out.
New Managed services from Microsoft
As announced by Microsoft this week and reported in many outlets, including securitybrief.
Three managed services were announced by Microsoft under one Managed Services branding: “Microsoft Security Experts”.
The 3 types include: Microsoft Defender Experts for Hunting, Microsoft Defender Experts for XDR, Microsoft Security Services for Enterprise.
You can read more in the article above.
Attacks
Costa Rica announces state of Emergency after Cyber attack
A ransomware attack has crippled Costa Rica’s ability to manage the nation. So it was announced by the government, as reported by MSN.com:
Costa Rica has declared a state of emergency after ransomware hackers crippled computer networks across multiple government agencies, including the Ministry of Finance.
The official declaration, published to a government website Wednesday, called the attack “unprecedented in the country” and said that it interrupted the country’s tax collection and exposed citizens’ personal information.
The hackers initially broke into the country’s Ministry of Finance on April 12, it said. They were able to spread to other agencies, including the Ministry of Science, Technology and Telecommunications and National Meteorological Institute.
Ukraine and Russia’s own cyberwar — Reuters
No news for any cybersec professional, really, but this made Reuters’ headlines this week with its own article.
This article is derived from Microsoft’s report on the matter, as highlighted in the article.
UK’s NCSC reports of Russia cyber aggression towards EU services
The original report by NCSC reports on:
New UK and US intelligence suggests Russia was behind an operation targeting commercial communications company Viasat in Ukraine.
