This is extremely useful for those times when the system is unable to get to the stage where sshd is running, or there are network-related issues which prevent a normal ssh connection from working. This is akin to the console view of a VM through the hypervisor.
… EC2 Serial Console, a simple and secure way to troubleshoot boot and network connectivity issues by establishing a serial connection to your Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances.
This is serious. If you have Ubiquiti equipment do change your credentials immediately and check for signs of compromise.
Adam says the attacker(s) had access to privileged credentials that were previously stored in the LastPass account of a Ubiquiti IT employee, and gained root administrator access to all Ubiquiti AWS accounts, including all S3 data buckets, all application logs, all databases, all user database credentials, and secrets required to forge single sign-on (SSO) cookies.
Source: Whistleblower: Ubiquiti Breach “Catastrophic” — Krebs on Security
This is why you should secure your endpoints, especially if you are operating a critical infrastructure. This seems to be one of those supervisory interface that is exposed over the internet. Thank goodness no real harm was done.
And this time, Gualtieri says, the hacker did more than just remote in. According to the sheriff, the hacker spent up to five minutes in the system and adjusted the amount of sodium hydroxide in the water from 100 parts per million to 11,100.
“This is obviously a significant and potentially dangerous increase. Sodium hydroxide, also known as lye, is the main ingredient in liquid drain cleaners,” Gualtieri added.
Source: ‘This is dangerous stuff’: Hacker increased chemical level at Oldsmar’s water system, sheriff says
Autodesk Forge has a nice feature known as section hatches. This feature fills out (or caps) parts of the model that is cut out by the section plane with a hatch pattern. You can see this in action below, when a z-plane cuts across the building:
The addition of hatches helps the viewer to see which parts of the model are cut out.
However, there is a problem with section hatches on some models, such as this:
The left part of the building is wrongly covered by the hatch and there are some weird triangulation problems on the right. This could happen when the meshes in the model is not 2-manifold.
Starting with Forge Viewer v7.35, there is a new option to turn off section hatches. It is located in the Configuration tab under Settings.
When you turn off section hatches, you still get the clipping, but without the potential artifacts:
You can also programmatically enable this behaviour by calling:
viewer.prefs.set(Autodesk.Viewing.Private.Prefs3D.DISPLAY_SECTION_HATCHES, false)
As a side benefit, performance is improved slightly with section hatching turned off.
If you are interested in the algorithms behind filling (or capping) of clipped mesh – though not necessarily the one implemented by Forge – you can refer to this and this.
We are all familiar with spearphishing attacks against high value targets. But this is bold. A group of hackers are apparently targetting cyber security researchers, whose main job is to study them (the hackers) and their works. It’s like the thief stealing from the police. And the thief succeeded – in some cases.
Depending on how widespread the compromises were, it could potentially taint some research and defensive strategies that threat intelligence firms share with businesses and other organizations.
Source: Google discloses spearphishing targeting security researchers | SC Media
ARM-based Graviton2 consistently outperforms Intel x86-based processors in PostgreSQL test by Percona, and it’s 25% cheaper. If your workload is not x86-specific there’s no reason not to switch.
The rise of ARM-based processor is gaining momentum and it seems like Intel is seriously playing catch-up here.
With the second gen of Graviton2 instances announced, we decided to take a look at the price/performance from the standpoint of running PostgreSQL.
Source: PostgreSQL on ARM-based AWS EC2 Instances: Is It Any Good? – Percona Database Performance Blog
Chaos engineering originated at Netflix with the creation of Chaos Monkey. The idea is that large-scale distributed systems require a different approach to test for failure, since there are so many moving parts. AWS is announcing a new service in 2021 that will help teams to implement chaos engineering to test their setup.
With Fault Injection Simulator, teams can quickly set up experiments using pre-built templates that generate the desired disruptions, such as server latency or database error.
One of the world’s leading cyber security companies was breached, likely through a state-sponsored attack. One of the side effects of this attack is that FireEye’s own red-team tools will now be effectively “useless” for pentesting.
FireEye was recently attacked by a nation-state adversary and here are the actions we are taking to protect the community.
…
Consistent with a nation-state cyber-espionage effort, the attacker primarily sought information related to certain government customers. While the attacker was able to access some of our internal systems, at this point in our investigation, we have seen no evidence that the attacker exfiltrated data from our primary systems that store customer information from our incident response or consulting engagements, or the metadata collected by our products in our dynamic threat intelligence systems. If we discover that customer information was taken, we will contact them directly.
Source: FireEye Shares Details of Recent Cyber Attack, Actions to Protect Community
Update (2020-12-10): FireEye shares (NASDAQ: FEYE) is down more than 13% after news broke.
This is great news for individuals and enterprises that develop mobile and desktop apps for the Apple ecosystem. This could make CI/CD for iOS and macOS apps much more convenient. And yes, it’s available in the Singapore region today.
Also,
Apple M1 Chip – EC2 Mac instances with the Apple M1 chip are already in the works, and planned for 2021.
You can start using Mac instances in the US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Singapore) Regions today, and check out this video for more information!
Another impressive hack from Samy. In this article, he introduces a novel technique to gain remote connection to any TCP/UDP service on your machine simply by having you visit a malicious website (with some conditions). To be clear, this isn’t remote code execution or remote shell – the exploit is at the networking level – but it could serve as a first step towards that. For example, the hacker could connect to the victim’s RDP port and start password brute-forcing.
exploit NAT/firewalls to access TCP/UDP services bound on a victim machine
Source: Samy Kamkar – NAT Slipstreaming