Update 2019: We’ve been busy working on some great training content around security, check out the Cloud Academy library to prepare on all-things cloud security.
Welcome to issue #6 of the Cloud Technology and Security Alert News Digest. We’ve got good news and bad news. The bad news is really bad: major holes have been discovered in the NTP package. But the good news is really good: 2015 projections by IT leaders point to tons of growth in all cloud computing areas. Keep reading.
Significant NTP Vulnerability
This one should send chills through admins managing anything that uses the NTP time sync software… which means just about everyone! A couple of Google engineers have discovered major holes in the NTP protocol that can be used for DDoS attacks – and public exploits already exist! NTP has released a patched version (4.2.8), but it hasn’t necessarily made it into the upgrade streams of all operating systems. See ICS-CERT.
Learning from Security Breaches
Jon-Louis Heimerl at Security Week has a very useful article asking “Can We Learn from Big Breaches?” Even if Point of Sale breaches do seem to be occurring more and more frequently, they’re not inevitable and there’s plenty we should be doing to prevent more. Jon-Louis suggests focusing on network segregation, anti-malware software, system patching, monitoring, and event response planning. Read the whole thing.
Cloud Computing in 2015: Plenty of Opportunities
ZDNet reports on two separate surveys (one under ZDNet’s own “Stacking up Open Clouds” label, and the other by Intel) of business IT leaders and their 2015 plans for cloud computing. Coming as no surprise to Cloud Academy regulars, significant growth in cloud deployments – especially private clouds – is expected, with by far most of that growth in Linux and Linux containers (LXC/Docker). Cloud-based data management solutions are also getting a lot of attention in this sector.
LinkedIn Recruiters Want You!
Finally, Charlie Osborne at ZDNet notes that of the 25 most sought-after skills by recruiters on LinkedIn from 2014, storage systems and network and information security skills and experience with cloud technology rank really high. Stick with Cloud Academy and we’ll get you there!
