Google is looking to make their biggest acquisition ever. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal on Sunday, Alphabet will be making a bid to purchase Wiz for $23 billion. Wiz has spent the past four years developing a cloud security platform that has detected some big problems in a number of providers, including one in Microsoft Bing. Google is finding itself increasingly under fire from a varity of attackers. The move comes as Google is facing antitrust charges from the Department of Justice and could have even called off a potential purchase of HubSpot.
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1:18 – Cerabyte’s Laser Etched Petabyte-Scale Storage
On Monday, a new company called Cerebyte debuted, claiming that they will revolutionize secondary storage with ceramic, laser-etched storage. On glass. this startup was founded in 2022 and came with, out of the University of Vienna. It is leveraging silicon etching technology and visible laser light to create a petabyte scale storage system that doesn’t use magnetic media at all. The goal is to use common materials and components to make the technology cost effective. This sounds like some next-level storage stuff so let’s let the storage master take it from here.
Learn More: Store all data virtually forever
7:02 – Veeam a Target in Malware Attack
If I told you that a ransomware crew was exploiting a year-old patched vulnerability, woudl you call me crazy? Veeam customers wouldn’t because the EstateRansomware kids are taking advantage of something that Veeam fixed in 2023. A fun little bug that allows unauthenticated backup users to grab the encrypted backup credential database means that some people in the hacking-for-hire space are getting lucky.. It appears that EstateRansomware is using the exploit in combination with other remote access hacks to get as much data as possible.
Read More: You had a year to patch this Veeam flaw – and now it’s going to hurt some more
9:00 – Mirantis Updates its Kubernetes Platform
Mirantis is adding a dynamic scheduler to their OpenStack implementation. The goal is to better utilize infrastructure resources in Kubernetes by letting the scheduling algorithm sort everything out. The feature is seen as a way to bring the popular VMware Dynamic Resource Scheduler (DRS) functionality into OpenStack. This isn’t the first time someone has tried but Mirantis is taking a different look it by using kernel live migration tooling.
Read More: Mirantis Adds Resource Balancer to OpenStack for Kubernetes Platform
12:27 – Snowflake Says Yay to MFA
Regular listeners of the Rundown are no doubt familiar with the saga of the Snowflake issue that led to a number of customers being hacked, including Ticketmaster and AT&T. The culprit, according to Snowflake, was a lack of multifactor authentication (MFA) on accounts. You may also recall that Tom stated in his analysis of the exploits that the solution was to have Snowflake make MFA mandatory on all accounts, right? Guess what Snowflake did last week? Created a setting that allows admins to make MFA mandatory on all user accounts. In a stunning case of shutting the barn door after the horses are out, Snowflake is allowing this setting on local and SSO users, but doesn’t recommend it for service accounts. Users will be prompted to enable MFA the next time they log into the user interface.
Read More: Snowflake lets admins make MFA mandatory across all user accounts
15:29 – RAG Optimized by Qdrant BM42 Vector Search Algorithm
Retrieval-augmented generation or RAG has been touted as the solution to AI hallucination, but conventional databases aren’t well suited to being queried by LLMs. Vector search algorithms are a better way for LLMs to interact with database engines, but the common BM25 was designed for search, not AI. Now Qdrant has introduced the BM42 vector search algorithm, which promises to be more accurate and cost-efficient for LLMs.
Read More: Qdrant BM42 Vector Search Algorithm Optimizes RAG
18:56 – Google Looking to Make Magic with Wiz
Google is looking to make their biggest acquisition ever. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal on Sunday, Alphabet will be making a bid to purchase Wiz for $23 billion. Wiz has spent the past four years developing a cloud security platform that has detected some big problems in a number of providers, including one in Microsoft Bing. Google is finding itself increasingly under fire from a variety of attackers. The move comes as Google is facing antitrust charges from the Department of Justice and could have even called off a potential purchase of HubSpot.
Read More: Google Nears $23 Billion Purchase Of Wiz: Reports
Read More: Google Near $23 Billion Deal for Cybersecurity Startup Wiz
26:18 – The Weeks Ahead
Tech Field Day Experience at SHARE Kansas City 2024 – August 4 – 8
AI Field Day 5 – September 11 – 12
Edge Field Day 3 – September 18 – 19
Gestalt IT and Tech Field Day are now part of The Futurum Group.
The Gestalt IT Rundown is your look at the IT news of the week. Be sure to subscribe to Gestalt IT on YouTube for even more weekly video content.
