Tag Archive for: joins

4Tbps milestone as TikTok joins NAPAfrica


Increased investment by global cloud providers is driving wider availability of internet-based digital services across Africa with content providers and enterprises looking to expand into the continent and businesses committing to moving more of their functions to the cloud. As a result, firms are busy looking to find regional infrastructure providers and the latest example of this phenomenon is the arrival of global social media platform TikTok to the growing community of NAPAfrica.

Established in 2012, NAPAfrica has over 560 members from more than 50 countries actively peering and claims to be Africa’s leading internet exchange point (IXP), the continent’s largest aggregation point and the sixth largest exchange globally by number of members. NAPAfrica operates IXPs within the Cape Town, Durban, and Johannesburg datacentres of carrier-neutral colocation provider Teraco, the first provider of highly resilient, vendor-neutral data environments in sub-Saharan Africa.

With a stated founding goal of helping to improve internet access for Africa, the company sees itself as playing a pivotal role in transforming Africa’s internet access and interconnection market.

Home to global carriers, cloud providers, content delivery networks, ISPs, internet security, and gaming platforms, the company claims that in a world where ease of interconnection, seamless peering arrangements, and platform reliability are essential, its internet exchange delivers. It says enterprises are taking advantage of the benefits of peering by connecting with cloud deployments, networks, security providers, and content providers within the company’s ecosystem to move to a digital economy.

NAPAfrica says increased network demand to service remote users has driven the adoption of key cloud and security applications. These include Akamai, Amazon, Cloudflare, Microsoft and Zscaler.

NAPAfrica also announced a significant milestone in its growth by surpassing the 4Tbps traffic milestone, representing a 33% growth in traffic volumes in under a year. NAPAfrica reached the 3Tbps traffic threshold in March 2023.

“The presence of over 250 carriers and networks is the drawcard for content providers like TikTok

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GoDaddy joins the dots and realizes it’s been under attack for three years • The Register


In brief Web hosting and domain name concern GoDaddy has disclosed a fresh attack on its infrastructure, and concluded that it is one of a series of linked incidents dating back to 2020.

The business took the unusual step of detailing the attacks in its Form 10-K – the formal annual report listed entities are required to file in the US.

The filing details a March 2020 attack that “compromised the hosting login credentials of approximately 28,000 hosting customers to their hosting accounts as well as the login credentials of a small number of our personnel” and a November 2021 breach of its hosted WordPress service.

The latest attack came in December 2022, when boffins detected “an unauthorized third party gained access to and installed malware on our cPanel hosting servers,” the filing states. “The malware intermittently redirected random customer websites to malicious sites.”

GoDaddy is unsure of the root cause of the incident, but believes it could be the result of “a multi-year campaign by a sophisticated threat actor group that, among other things, installed malware on our systems and obtained pieces of code related to some services within GoDaddy.”

“To date, these incidents as well as other cyber threats and attacks have not resulted in any material adverse impact to our business or operations,” the filing states – showing enormous empathy for customers whose sites were redirected in the most recent attack, or impacted by the earlier incidents.

In a brief statement on the incident, GoDaddy hypothesized that the goal of the December 2022 attacks “is to infect websites and servers with malware for phishing campaigns, malware distribution and other malicious activities.”

– Simon Sharwood

Moscow considers legalizing hacking – but only for the glory of Mother Russia

The Russian government is working on changes to its criminal code that would legalize hacking in the Federation – provided it’s being done in the service of Russian interests, of course. 

According to Russian news service TASS, Alexander Khinshtein, head of the state Duma committee on information policy, wants exemptions from liability given to hackers, but aside from tossing the idea…

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Retired U.S. Army Cyber Command Leader Stephen Fogarty Joins Booz Allen Hamilton


MCLEAN, Va.–()–Booz Allen Hamilton (NYSE: BAH) announced today that Stephen Fogarty—a retired lieutenant general with extensive cyber, intelligence, and information technology (IT) experience—has joined Booz Allen as a senior executive advisor. In this role, Fogarty will help lead the development of threat-informed defensive and offensive cyber strategies and solutions to expand the firm’s National Cyber capabilities in support of U.S. government and international mission partners.

Fogarty brings 38 years of active duty leadership to this position having most recently served as commanding general of the U.S. Army Cyber Command (ARCYBER). In this role, he was responsible for conducting complex defensive and offensive cyber and information warfare operations worldwide. During his tenure, he led a skilled workforce of 16,500 soldiers, Department of the Army civilians, and contractors collaborating with other U.S. government, commercial, and international mission partners. Fogarty’s team conducted IT operations for 1.1 million soldiers and civilians at 188 bases, in addition to persistent defensive and offensive cyber and information warfare operations 24/7 worldwide.

“Stephen has proven experience in building and leading teams to solve complex problems—all with the urgency and collaboration today’s cyber threat landscape demands,” said Brad Medairy, executive vice president and leader of the firm’s National Cyber business. “To our adversaries, the cyber ecosystem is one connected battlespace, putting U.S. government and private infrastructure at risk. In this increasingly connected environment, Stephen’s expertise will be invaluable as we expand our National Cyber capabilities in support of our nation’s most critical missions.”

Fogarty spearheaded Army and Joint cyber, intelligence, and communications operations in a series of leadership positions, including commanding the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command, commanding the Cyber Center of Excellence, and serving as chief of staff for the U.S. Cyber Command. In these roles, he successfully trained, equipped, deployed, and supported soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines,…

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Amit Serper joins Sternum as Director of Security Research


Sternum welcomes Amit Serper, an international cybersecurity expert, as its new Director of Security Research. As a veteran cybersecurity professional with a record of excellence in the field, Amit bolsters Sternum’s vast research capabilities with his decades of expertise in reverse engineering, vulnerability exploitation, and ethical hacking.

The global total of cyberattacks is surging year on year as hackers exploit the ever-growing trend toward digitalization. An uptick in international tensions is further exacerbating the trend as Russia allegedly unleashed its cyber-arsenal on Ukraine in the run-up to its ground incursion. Previously, the U.S. intelligence community blamed Moscow for NotPetya malware attacks on Ukrainian networks, which destroyed sensitive data on a variety of servers and spilled out beyond Ukraine to wreak havoc on businesses.

Amit Serper, who found a “vaccine” for NotPetya, now joins Sternum’s leadership team to lend the company his vast expertise in cybersecurity. Amit will be in charge of Sternum’s security research, leading its team of cybersecurity experts as they work to transform the IoT defense paradigm.

Before joining Sternum, Amit worked as the Director of Security Research for Akamai Technologies, a U.S. cloud and cybersecurity giant, where he focused on enterprise network protection. Prior to that, he held the offices of North American VP of Security Research for Guardicore, a network segmentation company, ahead of its acquisition by Akamai. Amit also held a number of positions in Cybereason, working his way up from Senior Security Researcher to VP for Security Strategy. His private sector career followed years of service in the Israeli military and intelligence, where he took on a variety of security roles and projects.

Sternum’s single-click security solution gives any connected device the ability to protect itself against hacking attempts in real-time. It seeks out the generic fingerprints of various attack types such as command injection and buffer overflow to strike the attempted attack down and protect the runtime integrity of the secured device against both zero-day and one-day attacks. Its design fosters a proactive…

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