Tag Archive for: cloud

HCLTech trades flat after ransomware attack on cloud project

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HCL Technologies said a detailed investigation is underway in consultation with relevant stakeholders to assess the root cause and take remedial action as necessary.

IT services major HCL Technologies traded flat at Rs 1,500 per share on December 20 morning deals after the company faced a ransomware incident within a restricted cloud environment associated with one of its projects.

“HCLTech has become aware of a ransomware incident in an isolated cloud environment for one of its projects. There has been no impact observed due to this incident on the overall HCLTech network,” the IT company said in a stock exchange filing on December 20.

Cybersecurity and data protection is a top priority for HCLTech. A detailed investigation is underway in consultation with relevant stakeholders to assess the root cause and take remedial action as necessary, it added.

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Following a significant 10 percent increase in the span of three trading sessions, HCL Technologies has been downgraded by Kotak Institutional Equities on December 19. The brokerage firm has taken this step due to its perception of limited potential for further gains. Furthermore, Kotak has revised its rating on HCL Technologies, downgrading it from ‘Buy’ to ‘Add’.

Last week, HCL Technologies, India’s No. 3 software-services exporter, entered an exclusive group of companies with a market capitalisation (market-cap) of Rs 4 lakh crore.

In a filing to the stock exchange on December 14, HCL Technologies announced that it has secured a contract from the Department of Transport and Planning in Victoria, Australia. The agreement involves the development and support of a Concessions Entitlement Validation Platform (CEVP).

The platform aims to automate the concession entitlement process for public transport users, providing instant proof of concession entitlement and a passenger interface for applying for and managing concession entitlement. The financial details of the deal were not disclosed.

HCL Technologies cut its revenue forecast for the current financial year in October, attributing the adjustment to weaker-than-expected…

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AI, Hybrid Cloud, Ransomware Detection, and the Enduring Role of Hard Disk Drives in Data Storage Evolution

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Scality, a global leader in reliable, secure, and sustainable data storage software, shared its annual data storage predictions for 2024. With the use of generative AI skyrocketing and cyberattacks continuing to infect organizations, ongoing demands to decrease IT complexity with secure, efficient solutions will dominate IT budgets into the new year. In addition, perennial data storage management challenges — growing data volumes, tight budgets, skills shortages, complicated IT installations, and increasing cyber threats — will persist.

While these are standard assumptions, this year, Scality focused its predictions on the ongoing conversations led by customers and thought leaders in the data storage industry.

Giorgio Regni, CTO at Scality, said, “We’ve had some interesting industry debates with thought leaders this past year, including the potential death of the hard disk drive (HDD), the role on-premises data storage can play to help advance data management and AI, and, finally, what it really takes to protect data from ransomware. This year’s predictions play off all of these themes.”

Recommended AI News: Riding on the Generative AI Hype, CDP Needs a New Definition in 2024

AIThority Predictions Series 2024 bannerHDDs will live on, despite predictions of a premature death
Some all-flash vendors prognosticate the end of spinning disk (HDD) media in the coming years. While flash media and solid state drives (SSDs) have clear benefits when it comes to latency, are making major strides in density, and the cost per GB is declining, we see HDDs holding a 3-5x density/cost advantage over high-density SSDs through 2028.

Therefore, the current call for HDD end-of-life is akin to the tape-is-dead arguments from 20 years ago. In a similar way, HDDs will likely survive for the foreseeable future as they continue to provide workload-specific value.  

End users will discover the value of unstructured data for AI
The meteoric rise of large language models (LLMs) over the past year highlights the incredible potential they hold for organizations of all sizes and industries. They primarily leverage structured, or text-based, training data. In the coming year, businesses will discover the value of their vast troves…

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US grid rules preclude reliability, security benefits of cloud computing, experts warn

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Cloud technologies could provide significant cost, security and reliability benefits to the U.S. electric grid but critical infrastructure rules do not allow them to be used for certain larger assets, multiple speakers said Thursday at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s annual reliability conference.

The Critical Infrastructure Protection rules, or CIP, are managed by the North American Electric Reliability Corp. and currently require grid asset owners to have certain control or knowledge of the devices operating their software. Cloud computing makes that difficult or impossible, experts agreed, in particular for what are known as high- or medium-impact grid assets.

Current NERC standards “do not provide clear guidance” on how regulated entities can implement new technologies that may not have been envisioned by the current CIP rules, Joseph Mosher, portfolio manager at EDF Renewables, told the commission. “Attempts to incorporate newer technology into the NERC CIP standards can be painful and time consuming,” he said.

Experts expressed concerns over the outdated CIP rules, at a time when grid officials say they face growing threats.

“One can definitely make the argument that the grid is less secure today than it would be” if cloud computing solutions were allowed, “and that gap is growing every day,” security consultant Tom Alrich said. “This is the biggest problem with NERC CIP today.”

A related problem — that important information about those systems can’t today be stored in the cloud — will be fixed beginning next year when two revised CIP standards come into effect, he said.

A sector under attack

The cyber threat to the electric power sector is growing, and grid officials say they must utilize new tools to counter it.

“The electricity sector is under constant attack by nation states and organized criminals. We see billions of attempts a day to survey our networks, identify vulnerabilities or gaps in protection, steal credentials or data, or exact a ransom,” Manny Cancel, senior vice president and CEO of the Electricity Information Sharing and Analysis Center, told regulators…

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Cloud gaming outfit Shadow warns hackers stole users’ personal info during a security breach

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Shadow, the French cloud gaming company that allows subscribers to run games via high-powered PCs over the internet, has emailed customers to warn them that it has suffered a security breach in which customer data was stolen. While Shadow hasn’t confirmed how many people were affected, it’s thought that around 530,000 users have had their information stolen.

In an email sent to customers and reported on by TechCrunch, Shadow said that it was the victim of a social engineering attack that targeted one of its employees at the end of September 2023. The attack apparently began on Discord and then resulted in the employee downloading a game on Steam at the suggestion of a third party. That third party was also a victim of the attack.

Cloud gaming outfit Shadow warns hackers stole users' personal info during a security breach 02

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The data itself was collected after the attacker was able to gain access to an as-yet-unnamed software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider.

TechCrunch reports that an individual on a popular hacking forum has already claimed responsibility for the attack, saying that they are now willing to sell the data after being ignored by Shadow. The post says that the data covers more than 530,000 people.

As for Shadow, it hasn’t confirmed how many people are impacted nor exactly which service the attacker was able to access. They did say which types of data were stolen, however, with full names, email addresses, dates of birth, billing addresses, and credit card expiry dates all swiped. Shadow does say that there were no passwords or sensitive banking data taken during the attack, however.

Shadow also warned customers to be on the lookout for any suspicious emails and to set up multi-factor authentication on their accounts.

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