This week, Pentagon awarded four giant cloud companies, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Oracle, for the Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability contract, reaching $9 billion. Also this week, Kali Linux 2022.4 was released with six new tools and some improvements. WordPress, on the other hand, is ceasing the support for versions 3.7 and 4.0 after releasing final updates.
Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Oracle share Pentagon’s $9 billion cloud contract
The U.S. department of defense has said Google, Oracle, Microsoft, and Amazon will share in the Pentagon’s $9 billion contract, the Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability, to build its cloud computing network. The Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability is intended to provide access to unclassified, secret, and top-secret data to military personnel all over the globe. The contract will be awarded in parts, with a total estimated completion date of June 2028.
Kali Linux 2022.4 released, available on Azure Marketplace
The Offensive Security team has released Kali Linux 2022.4 with new Azure Marketplace and QEMU images. The latest version of the popular Linux distribution comes with the latest versions of GNOME and KDE Plasma desktop environments, Linux kernel 6.0, along with six new tools: bloodhound.py, certipy, hak5-wifi-coconut, ldapdomaindump, peass-ng, and rizin-cutter.
WordPress is dropping support for versions 3.7-4.0
WordPress Security Team released the final releases for versions between 3.7 and 4.0, which are 3.7.41, 3.8.41, 3.9.40, and 4.0.38. After those versions, WordPress Security Team will no longer support WordPress versions between 3.7 and 4.0, which are used by less than 1% of the total installs. The team decides to focus on the newer versions since maintaining the older versions is a time-consuming process.
Equinix invests $40 million in data center in Malaysia
Equinix enters Malaysia with a $40 million data center investment which will bring new opportunities to local businesses as well as serve international companies in the region. The planned data center, which will be named JH1, will be located in Johor the Malaysian capital, which is home to more than 2.5 million people and 15 kilometers from Singapore. According to the announcement, the multi-million JH1 data center is planned to begin operations in 2024.
ODBC connections are broken after a Windows Update
Microsoft has disclosed that the Windows update which was released on November 8th has broken the ODBC connections. This issue might cause the SQL server and the applications that utilize ODBC SQL Server Driver to display error messages. This bug affects the client Windows versions starting from Windows 7 SP1 to the latest Windows 11 version as well as Server versions starting from Windows Server 2008 SP2, up to Windows Server 2022.
Hackers are using PRoot in BYOF to expand the scope of their operations
The Sysdig Threat Research Team warns users about the emerging threat of the PRoot tool. PRoot enables threat actors to bypass the system’s tools and the environment setup to avoid detection. The attack starts with creating a malicious filesystem to be deployed, including everything that the operation needs to be successful. The preparation in the early stages enables all of the tools to be downloaded, configured, or installed on the attacker’s system.
FreeBSD 12.4 is available for download
FreeBSD developers have announced the release of version 12.4 of the popular Unix-like operating system. This version is released approximately one year after the release of v12.3, and six months after the release of v13.1. The latest release of the operating system brings many package updates including the ENA kernel driver, OpenSSL, and OpenSSH.