There were a lot of interesting things going on in the web performance world this week! New Google tools and developer news made headlines, as well as the Ocean’s Eleven of cyber crime.
Cyber criminals make out with one billion dollars from more than 100 banks
In possibly one of the greatest bank heists ever, hackers installed spyware on the computers of over 100 different financial institutions in 25 different countries, including the US. By mimicking the regular bank workflows, they were able to transfer between $2.5 and $10 million from each bank into their own accounts. The Ocean’s Eleven of cyber attacks is suspected to have gone on for ever two years and isn’t over yet. Kaspersky labs say the “attacks remain active”, naming the malware “Carbanak”.
Kaspersky Labs uncovers the most advanced malware publisher they’ve ever seen
Kaspersky Lab recently released a report on a highly sophisticated threat actor they named the Equation group. The group uses multiple techniques to infect victims, ranging from the internet to USB drives. Kaspersky noted the malware’s complexity as “the most advanced threat actor they have ever seen”, also able to infect hard drive firmware. Kaspersky also stated that they believed that the Equation group developers may be the same creators of Stuxnet, a worm discovered in 2010 believed to be the US government.
Google adds grace period for developers to fix security flaws
Project Zero, a Google team that aims to significantly reduce the number of people harmed by targeted attacks, gives vendors 90 days to patch security flaws. After that, the company automatically discloses the reported vulnerabilities, regardless of whether a fix is available. Project Zero has adhered to a 90-day deadline, but in order to enforce consistent deadlines for edge cases, a few changes have been added. Deadlines that end on weekends or holidays will move to the next normal work day, a 14-day grace period can be added, and CVE identifiers, an industry standard for identifying vulnerabilities, will be pre-assigned. The rest of Google will now be following the same policy.
Google announces a new way to evaluate cloud performance
How do you benchmark cloud providers? Google cloud users were having trouble evaluating the performance of cloud offerings too. One week ago today, Google released a free, open source cloud performance benchmarking framework called PerfKit to do just that. Working with over 30 different researchers, companies, and customers, the Perkit Explorer was made to help you interpret results. In addition to reporting on the most standard metrics of peak performance, it measures the end to end time to provision resources in the cloud. You can try this out new tool out yourself with a free Google Cloud Platform now. I definitely will be.
Also in Google news, this week Google Maps is celebrating their 10 year anniversary! Happy anniversary, Google Maps!
A look ahead : The FCC to vote on net neutrality
The FCC will vote on net neutrality regulations during it’s meeting on February 26th. Tom Wheeler has said he will circulate proposed new rules to preserve the internet as an open platform to the FCC, and the vote on whether or not to classify the internet as a public utility will commence at the February 26th meeting.
Hear of any other interesting web or tech news this week? Let us know in a comment!