So you’re sick of Zoom. Maybe it’s the privacy issues, the security issues, or just the whole misrepresenting its encryption thing. Regardless of the specific reason, you know that there has to be a better video-conferencing tool out there, and you’re determined to find it. Enter Jitsi Meet.
[Source: Mashable]
Microsoft published this week details about a new project the company has been working for the Linux kernel. Named Integrity Policy Enforcement — or IPE — the project is a Linux security module (LSM). LSMs are optional add-ons for the Linux kernel that enable additional security features.
According to a documentation page published on Monday, IPE is Microsoft’s attempt to solve the code integrity problem for Linux — an operating system the company broadly uses in its Azure cloud service.
On Linux systems where IPE is enabled, system administrators can create a list of binaries that are allowed to execute and then add the verification attributes the kernel needs to check for each binary before allowing it to run. If binaries have been altered by an attacker, IPE can block the execution of the malicious code.
[Source: ZDNet]
When the Linux kernel 5.6 is released, the Wireguard VPN will be built in. Distributions like Ubuntu 20.04 will be adding this service into their platform even earlier (with kernel 5.4). If you’re looking to get a head start on the WireGuard experience, I want to walk you through the process of getting it up and running.
I’ll be demonstrating on Ubuntu 20.04 daily. As of this writing, WireGuard has yet to make it into the daily release. Fortunately, the developers have made WireGuard available to the standard Universe repository, so installation is simple.
[Source: TechRepublic]
The Linux Foundation will be hosting seL4 Foundation, the nonprofit organization established by Data61 (the digital specialist arm for Australia’s national science agency CSIRO). The seL4 microkernel is designed to ensure the security, safety and reliability of real-world critical computer systems.
The new Foundation aims to accelerate the commercial development of seL4 and related technologies, and under the Linux Foundation will provide a global, independent and neutral organization for funding and steering the future evolution of seL4. Founding members include Data61, UNSW Sydney, HENSOLDT Cyber GmbH, Ghost Locomotion Inc, Cog Systems, Inc, and DornerWorks Ltd.
[Source: TFiR]
A quarter of organizations have suffered a breach related to their application development process over the past year, with most of these coming via open source components, according to Sonatype. The DevOps automation firm’s 2020 DevSecOps Community Survey is based on responses from 5045 software professionals around the world.
It revealed that 21% of the 24% of responding organizations that reported a breach over the past 12 months linked it to use of third-party components. These are incredibly popular among DevOps practitioners as they help to speed the release of new products, although they can also contain vulnerabilities and sometimes malware.
[Source: Infosecurity Magazine]
In the early 2000s, when open source was just starting to pick up, there was a lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt cast around it by some proprietary software suppliers. But in the last decade or so, there has been wide adoption of open source software and it is now powering much of the world’s cloud infrastructure, as well as tools and methodologies that continue to shape the way software is developed.
In an interview with Computer Weekly, Sam Hunt, vice-president of GitHub in the Asia-Pacific region, offers insights on what top corporate executives, or CXOs, are thinking about open source software, the defining characteristics of open source culture and what enterprises should consider when contributing to the open source community.
[Source: ComputerWeekly.com]
CIOs have many challenges today (to say the least), but one of the biggest is enabling the constant development and delivery of new applications — no longer a “nice to have” but a “must have” in today’s ever-changing business and global environments. There are many tools that can help CIOs provide this support, but one of the most important is Linux containers.
In a recent Smarter with Gartner report, Gartner Distinguished VP Analyst Gene Alvarez named “enabling and balancing product and project management of applications to focus on delivering business outcomes while maintaining highly reliable core business operations” as being one of the key challenges CIOs face in 2020.
[Source: CIO Dive]
Hacking campaigns linked to China have been exploiting vulnerabilities in Linux servers in an operation which successfully stayed under the radar for almost a decade.
Detailed by researchers at BlackBerry, the operation, linked to the interests of the Chinese government, is conducting hacking and cyber espionage against a wide array of industries for the purposes of intellectual property theft and data collection. While the overall campaign is multi-platform, a newly uncovered part of it has been exploiting vulnerabilities in Linux since at least 2012 – and without the attackers having to update their offensive capabilities in that time.
[Source: ZDNet]
Open-source security and license compliance management platform provider WhiteSource has released a complete guide for understanding and learning about open source licenses.
According to the guide, open-source licenses can be categorized under copyleft or permissive. Under a copyleft license, users who use a component of the open-source software must make their code available to others. Under a permissive open-source license, the open-source software can be free to use, modify or redistribute, but it also permits proprietary derivative works.
In addition, the guide reveals permissive open-source licenses are on the rise.
[Source: SDTimes.com]
As with many new software implementations, there’s a build-or-buy choice when getting started with Robotic Process Automation (RPA).
On the build side, you can write your own bots from scratch, provided you’ve got the right people and budget in place. On the buy side, there’s a burgeoning marketplace of commercial software vendors offering RPA in various flavors, as well as overlapping technologies. (Some market themselves under different but related terms like “intelligent automation.”)
In fact, Gartner previously called RPA the fastest-growing enterprise software segment of 2018, with 63 percent growth in worldwide revenues. It’s a competitive market, too – you’ve got options.
[Source: The Enterprisers Project]
