Russians gunning for Tesla, CenturyLink goes down, Nutanix making changes, and more on this episode of the Gestalt IT Rundown!
Gogo Inflight Sold to Intelsat
Gogo Inflight, one of the most popular airline Wi-Fi services, announced it is being sold to Intelsat for $400 million in cash. The timing is rather odd considering that Intelsat filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy back in May. There are rumors that the bankruptcy is a way for Intelsat to pay down their $15 billion in debt while still being able to work with the FCC in some upcoming spectrum allocations. Gogo Inflight will remain independent from Intelsat according to reports.
Cisco IOS-XR boxes are open to expoit thanks to a new bug. Cisco announced that there is a bug in the Distance Vector Multicast Routing Protocol (DVMRP) that could lead to an attack that exahusts memory and crashing of device processes. The announcement disclosed that this bug has exploits in the wild and has they have been detected on support cases already. Patches are still incoming and Cisco is racing to help users figure out if they’re going to be exploited.
Ex-Cisco Engineer Wipes WebEx VMs
A former Cisco employee pled guilty last week to a charge of unlawfully accessing AWS infrastructure to do some damage to Cisco. The employee worked at Cisco for two years, from 2016 to 2018, and after being let go used his former credentials to log into AWS five months after his termination. He then proceeded to delete around 450 WebEx virtual machines, which caused a two-week outage for over 16,000 WebEx accounts. The plea deal was sealed with no mention of jail time or restitution.
Russian “Tourist” Tries to Wreck Tesla
A recent report from the FBI details a plan by a Russian hacking organization to infect a major US company with malware. The Russian attempted to subvert an employee of a Nevada company to install malware in their system in excahnge for a reported $1 million dollars. The Russian tourist was contacted by the FBI and arrested as he attempted to leave the country. At the time of the report, the company was not named. However, this week Elon Musk announced that the employee worked at the Tesla Gigafactory, which means Tesla was the target of the attempt.
Nutanix Gets $750 Million, CEO to Exit
In the recent Nutanix yearly earnings announcement, two big pieces of information came out. The first is that Nutanix is getting a $750 million invement from Bain Capital in the form of convertable notes designed to support the company’s growth. This comes along with news that CEO Dheeraj Pandey is stepping down as soon as a replacement is selected and appointed by the board. Pandey has been a very visible figure in the rise of Nutanix, often clashing with larger companies and detractors from the startup’s hyper converged infrastrcture messaging. A search committee from the Nutaix Board is leading a global effort to find his successor.
CenturyLink Drops 3.5% of the Internet
Sunday was a bad day for the people carrying pages for CenturyLink. A misconfiguration in BGP in a Canadian arm of the compnay caused traffic to be blackholed across their network. The outage spread as BGP happily passed the bad data along to other providers. A reported 3.5% drop in global Internet traffic was recorded on a Sunday. The post-mortem said that a BGP firewall rule sharing extension ultimatley led to the issue. The issue took seven hours to resolve completely as engineers raced to contain the falling dominos.
Intel Moves on Mobile with Tiger Lake
Intel strikes back? Today Intel is announcing their next-generation Tiger Lake platform for thin and light laptops. Just as their Ultrabook specification from last decade was considered to be a reaction to the MacBook Air, Tiger Lake looks like a strike against the iPad Pro and Apple Silicon. Intel is promising best-in-class CPU and GPU performance, even beating descrete GPU designs, along with an integrated ML engine thanks to the new Xe graphics architecture.
The Gestalt IT Rundown is a live weekly look at the IT news of the week. It broadcasts live on YouTube every Wednesday at 12:30pm ET. Be sure to subscribe to Gestalt IT on YouTube for the show each week.
