Interesting Tech News from January 2021
This is a monthly column of curated tech news, highlighting interesting and/or valuable tech developments from the past month, which are impacting our society directly or indirectly. It also gives some vague sense of the trajectory that the technology as a whole is taking. The aim is to share the information concisely, in an easy-to-understand manner, help you fill some gaps on what you might have missed & learn something new.
SLACK OUTAGE ON JANUARY 4 - A SHORT SUMMARY OF WHAT HAPPENED
On January 4 - first Monday of the year - Slack users experienced issues accessing Slack services, for more than 3 hours. The outage was quite widespread. To understand what caused the outage, let’s first quickly understand Slack’s architecture.
AN OVER SIMPLIFIED VIEW OF SLACK’S ARCHITECTURE DESIGN:
Slack logically separates its services with the help of VPC (Virtual Private Clouds). Slack manages these VPCs on AWS.
These VPCs talk to each other with the help of AWS Transit Gateway (TGW). Think of it as a cloud router. It simplifies deployment. Amazon manages TGWs.
SO, WHAT HAPPENED?
January 4, being the first Monday after a long holiday, was quite busy day for Slack in terms of network traffic and the TGWs got overloaded, as they did not scale fast enough. Because of this overload, TGWs started to drop packets. Once the TGW’s capacity was increased, problem seemed to have resolved.
DID SLACK NOT GET ANY ALERTS?
Like any other big enterprise, Slack also monitors its networks, so that engineers can be alerted before the issue starts to affect the service. However, in this case Slack monitoring and alerting system failed as well. It failed because the system itself was not in the same VPC as its backend database. This means the monitoring system was also dependent on the Amazon’s managed TGW.
WHAT AWS/SLACK ARE DOING AS A RESULT OF THIS OUTAGE?
AWS is going to review its auto scaling algorithms for TGWs. Slack might also request a pre-emptive upscaling of TGWs at the end of next holiday season.
Slack wrote a nice piece on the RCA, which you can read here.
2 GUESSES TO UNLOCK BITCOIN WORTH $240M
More than a decade ago Stefan Thomas received 7002 bitcoins. He stored them in an IronKey digital wallet on a hard drive. He seems to have lost the password, which he wrote on a piece of paper. The digital wallet allows only 10 attempts, after that the wallet is not accessible. Stefan is left with only 2 attempts, to unlock his fortunes, worth over $240m now.
ELON MUSK’S TWEET “USE SIGNAL” SENDS SHARE PRICE OF SIGNAL ADVANCE UP MORE THAN 1,500%
Investing in Privacy vs. Investing in Signal Advance
Since WhatsApp is updating its privacy policy and will require a WhatsApp user to share some data with Facebook, that might be the context or reason behind Elon Musk’s tweet. Signal App is a non-profit encrypted messaging app, which is privacy focused. It has got nothing in common with Signal Advance, except a similar name.
TESLA UNVEILS REDESIGNED MODEL S WITH ESTIMATED DELIVERIES STARTING IN MARCH
Tesla Model S will come in 3 main configurations. A Long-Range dual motor and 2 high performance, 3-electric-motor Plaid and Plaid+ models. The interior has been upgraded with F1 inspired steering wheel without any stalks. It has a 10 teraflops powerful gaming computer in it. More details you can find on Tesla’s website.
MAJOR CYBER ATTACKS, BREACHES DISCOVERED IN JANUARY 2021
Cloudflare shared in its blogpost, how its Magic Transit service might have protected a Fortune Global 500 company, which wish to remain anonymous, from a Ransom DDoS attack. Initially the company utilized an on-demand DDoS service (not provided by Cloudflare), when they were under attack. This caused network failures upon activation in addition to the DDoS attack. Once, Magic Transit (always-on) was activated after the 1st attack, the 2nd attack never happened. Did Magic Transit deter the attackers, it’s anybody’s guess.
A Trojanized version of Android Apps that look identical to legitimate apps available on Google Store, is being used to target Pakistani population according to SophosLabs. The data is being exfiltrated through these apps and sent to command-and-control domains hosted in eastern Europe.
Google uncovered a “novel social engineering method”, which targets security researchers. The attackers set up their own websites, blogs, twitter accounts etc. posting material regarding different security vulnerabilities. This makes them look credible. The attackers then contact the security researchers through LinkedIn, Discord, Telegram and ask the researchers to collaborate. Once agreed, hackers then try to infect their computers using malware through Visual Studio Project.
Sonicwall, provider of cyber security solutions, became victim of the cyber attack this month. One of its products, called SMA (Secure Mobile Access), which is used to provide remote access to internal company’s resources, were exploited with the help of zero-day vulnerabilities. Sonicwall, instructed its customers to use firewall to allow only known connections to prevent attackers from exploiting the vulnerability.
NOTABLE TECH ACQUISITIONS IN JANUARY 2021
f5 which specializes in application security and load-balancing solutions, will acquire Volterra for half a billion dollars. This acquisition will enable f5 and Volterra integrate their solutions into robust cloud and security offerings, such as integration of f5’s Shape Security Bot Defence solution into VoltMesh service and use of Volterra’s global ADN to simplify Big-IP deployments.
Qualcomm will acquire NUVIA for roughly $1.4 billion. This will enable Qualcomm to build more power efficient, high performing processors for its customers.
Sensor giant Teledyne is buying another sensor manufacturer FLIR for $8b. FLIR system is best known for forward-looking Infrared (FLIR) cameras.
Juniper buys Apstra. Apstra’s operating System (AOS), allows networks to automatically configure, deploy, monitor and validate data centre networks. This will enable Juniper to provide more robust IBN (Intent Based Network) solutions.
OTHER TECH NEWS FROM JANUARY 2021
Tesla has been asked to recall 158,000 Model S and Model X over a failing touchscreen safety defect.
Google Cloud and Nokia will work together to build 5G solutions for Communication Service Providers and enterprises.
Ring doorbells will now have end-to-end video encryption.
Nio announced ET7 with solid state battery technology.
SpaceX’s Falcon rocket carried 143 satellites of different sizes to space. This is a record.
DarkMarket, the world’s largest dark web marketplace hosting close to 500,000 users, has been taken down.
Xpeng releases NGP (Navigation Guided Pilot), an autonomous driving feature, which will be competing with Tesla’s Autopilot. The feature will be available on premium version of P7, company’s flagship sedan.
Tesla launches its own solar power inverter.
Bitcoin node numbers have reached a new all-time high. There are 11,627 reachable nodes, which are currently active.
Ericsson, Qualcomm and Australian mobile operator ran a test, which delivered 5 Gbps download speed, which is a record, on a 5G mmWave spectrum.
Automakers will now be able to make use of Alexa’s advanced AI to build their own in-car intelligent assistants.
Emotet botnet, which is responsible for internet’s most successful and dangerous malware campaigns has been taken down. It was a collective effort by law enforcement from different countries including Canada, USA, France, UK etc.
GM to go all electric by 2035
Google Maps rolled out some new features for EVs with built in google maps. For example, Google Maps will be able to find you the most efficient route, if your trip requires two or more recharge stops. It will tell you how long each charge will take, so that you know exactly how long your ETA is going to be.
Tesla surpassed 3 GWH of battery deployments in 2020, an 83% increase from the previous year.
Thanks. See you next month.