Weekend Reads 082120

When a zero-day vulnerability is exploited in the wild, it’s essential to identify the bug at the root of the attack. This “root cause analysis” informs researchers how an attack unfolded.

The House Judiciary chairman was closing in on his Perry Mason moment with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Fortified with “hot” internal company documents, Rep. Jerrold Nadler was building his case at a hearing that seemed almost like a trial for Facebook and three other tech giants over alleged anti-competitive tactics.

While it’s true consumers have largely moved on, data centers are still looking for higher capacity hard drives. That’s why Western Digital (WD) developed new enterprise drives, which are packing what the company calls “ePMR” (energy-assisted perpendicular magnetic recording). For simplicity’s sake, we’ll stick with energy-assisted magnetic recording (EAMR).

Respondents to Tripwire’s survey revealed that they’re specifically worried about their employers’ cloud security. Indeed, 37% of participants indicated that risk management capabilities in the cloud were at least somewhat worse in the cloud than in other parts of the organization’s infrastructure.

In our previous blog about IcedID, we explored some of the changes in the malware and how it tries to evade detection. We also detailed how threat actors took advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic to phish their target victims. Recently, we discovered an evolution in their phishing methods, particularly how they attempt to evade detection by implementing a password protected attachment, keyword obfuscation and minimalist macro code in their trojanized documents.

Imagine a workplace in which all of the staff support the function of information security. Employees report suspicious events, are committed to data privacy and see the value in completing the regularly scheduled compliance trainings. How much easier life would be for security professionals!

When your kids are in high school or college, you tend to think about what the job market will have in store for them. That’s certainly true for Mike O’Malley, VP of strategy at Radware. As both a hiring manager in security and father of kids this age, the 20-year-plus industry veteran is often asked plenty of questions by fellow parents about promising jobs in his field.

Tiger Lake is Intel’s upcoming line of processors, and at its 2020 Architecture Day, the company made some bold claims about the performance gains in this latest generation.

As it turns out and as you can see from the roadmap above, one flavor of the ThunderX3 chip will have 60 cores and another will scale to 96 cores – but that latter chip is a dual-chip module, or DCM.

It has been a long time since Intel changed its manufacturing process – what it used to call a “tick” – and the microarchitecture and architecture of a processor design – what it used to call a “tock” – at the same time.