Andy Jassy is stepping up as Amazon’s CEO, AfriNIC has been caught illegally reselling IP addresses and DriveNets catches a big Series B. We discuss these stories and much more on this week’s Rundown.
Andy Jassy Steps Up as Amazon CEO
After the market close yesterday during their earnings call, amateur astronaut and current Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announced that he will be stepping down from that role effective in Q3 of 2021. He will maintain the chairperson of the board role along with engagement in special projects along with his side hustles of being a media baron and philanthropist. Succeeding him in the role of CEO is current Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy. He was long considered the dark horse in the race, with Amazon consumer CEO Jeff Wilke the likely successor before the announcement of Wilke’s retirement lat last year. Jassy has grown AWS to unbelievable levels of success, with the small cloud computer organization being responsible for most of the profit of the little online bookstore that could. The company posted their first $100 billion quarter, with AWS posting a 28% revenue growth for Q4. 52% of the operating income for Amazon as a whole came from AWS.
AfriNIC Caught Illegally Reselling IP Addresses
What’s the fastest way to steal $50 million? For some executives of regional Internet registrar AfriNIC, the answer was IPv4 address space. A security research named Ron Guilmette has been tracking the fraudulent use of addresses assigned by AfriNIC by some unsavory users and after publishing his findings managed to get an internal investigation started. AfriNIC announced that a single worker sold off the scarce address space for between $15 and $25 per address. Over a million of the illegally sold addresses have been recovered but there are still more out there.
DriveNets Catches a Big Series B
Israel-based networking company DriveNets announced last week that they have received a new $208 million Series B funding round. The Tech Field Day presenter is doing big things in the service provider and hyperscale networking space by using their software to build white-box switches into virtual hardware chassis systems. Along with the announcement comes news that AT&T is a published customer of DriveNets. The new funding round pushes the valuation of the company over the $1 billion unicorn mark.
MicroStrategy is All About the Bitcoin
Business intelligence company MicroStrategy has become the leading Bitcoin fund on the Nasdaq, purchasing over a billion dollars of “digital gold” and seeing its stock price rise even faster than the value of that hoard. CEO Michael Saylor is hosting a “Bitcoin for Corporations” event this week, encouraging others to use Bitcoin as a treasury reserve asset.
No doubt you’ve heard of Emotet, the menacing ransomeware collective that has been extoring users for hte past five years by stealing their data and ransoming it back to them. It’s a particularly nasty strain that constantly evolves and develops to evade countermeasures. Last week, it couldn’t evade all of them. A global coalition of police forces moved on the creators of the malware in Operation Ladybird, sweeping up command and control functions and arresting two of the leaders of the gang in Ukraine. The group is responsible for causing upwards of $2.5 billion in damages and during their arrest social media videos showed off cash and gold bars being seized during the raid.
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