Francis Scialabba
Cyberspace, meet actual space: The US government recently sponsored its first off-world hacking competition at DEF CON 31 in Las Vegas.
From Aug. 11 to 14, five teams of hackers competed to score points by breaking into Moonlighter, a Space Force CubeSat launched for the express purpose of testing the limits of cybersecurity in space. Those teams had beat out over 700 others in a qualifying round held in April for the right to compete in the first ever capture-the-flag (CTF) exercise in low Earth orbit (or anywhere higher).
Competitors were scored on various tasks, such as establishing a data link with Moonlighter’s onboard hacking sandbox, breaking past its restrictions on taking photos of certain regions of Earth, and downloading the photo to a ground station. Another challenge involved tricking Moonlighter—which does not have a propulsion system—into reporting it was over the North Pole by injecting bogus scripts into its GPS receiver. The teams also had to defend their own vulnerable operating system while attempting to sabotage their competitors.
“What’s important for us is bridging the gap between the cyber and space communities,” Rachel Mann, a deputy technology transfer program manager with the Air Force Research Laboratory, told IT Brew. “We feel that to have vulnerable systems going up into orbit is, of course, not ideal.”
Read more here.—TM
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Francis Scialabba
When Russian hackers attacked Dutch organizations this month, the government of the Netherlands warned that the attacks were part of an increased effort to use cybercrime to make a political point.
“Since the war in Ukraine, we have seen a resurgence in hacktivist groups carrying out DDoS attacks,” the Dutch National Cyber Security Centre wrote in an Aug. 8 news release.
Hacktivism is the hot new threat actor in the game, according to new research from cybersecurity analysis firm CloudSEK.
Coauthors Abhinav Pandey and Anirudh Batra found that attacks motivated by religion, politics, and the quest for fame surged from 1% of the global total in 2021 and 2022 to a high of 35% in April–May 2023.
Attackers overwhelmingly targeted India, with the world’s most populous country accounting for over 30% of all attacks. Israel was next, with 14.51%. The US only accounts for 1.1% of the global attacks, but leads North America.
According to CloudSEK’s research, attackers targeting India, Israel, Denmark, and Sweden were religiously motivated and came from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Poland, Ukraine, and Latvia were targeted for political reasons by hackers based in the Middle East and Russia. Traffic logs show that the main countries with IPs used by hacktivist groups are Indonesia, India, Germany, Colombia, the US, and the UK.
Read more here.—EH
Do you work in IT or have information about your IT department you want to share? Email [email protected].
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Francis Scialabba
It doesn’t take a fortune teller to discern that Oracle is in for a bumpy week.
The software giant is facing investor headwinds after a Monday quarterly earnings report revealed slightly under-target growth. The stock market reacted to the lackluster showing with a nearly 15% downturn on Tuesday.
The one-day drop nearly rivals Oracle’s dotcom-era losses in March 2002, when it hemorrhaged 15% of its share price, CNBC reported.
Overall, the company announced its quarterly revenue grew 9% year over year in US dollars, and it notched 13% growth in revenue from cloud services and license support. But first quarter 2024 revenue was still about $20 million short of projections. Analysts had forecast 8% revenue growth this quarter, compared with Oracle’s new 5% to 7% figure, according to CNBC.
Oracle CEO Safra Catz expressed optimism about the company’s position in the cloud services market, even if shareholders weren’t so enthusiastic.
“Oracle Cloud Infrastructure revenue grew 66% in Q1, much faster than our hyperscale cloud infrastructure competitors,” she said in a statement. “Total cloud services revenue, Infrastructure plus Applications, grew 30% to $4.6 billion in the quarter. Oracle Cloud Services plus License Support revenue now accounts for 77% of Oracle’s total revenue.”
Keep reading here.—KG
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Meet the new watchdog. You probably know all too well the challenges of implementing Zero Trust access with Okta. Fortunately, Kolide’s Device Trust can help. Wanna know how? Kolide’s holding an on-demand demo to show you how they keep untrusted devices from accessing your company’s apps. Tune in.
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Francis Scialabba
Today’s top IT reads.
Stat: $300 billion. That’s the value of corporate cloud commitments across 12 major cloud and cloud software providers that aren’t being utilized, according to an Infosys analysis. (CIO Dive)
Quote: “This case is about the future of the internet and whether Google’s search engine will ever face meaningful competition…The evidence will show they demanded default exclusivity to block rivals.”—Kenneth Dintzer, Department of Justice senior trial counsel, introducing the US government’s antitrust case against Google (Bloomberg)
Read: Should local governments ditch enterprise software? (The Register)
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