Cloud, Security and Technology

While doing a bit of reading recently I ran across this interesting story about Teamghostshell an active hacking group that has come back to life on June 29th after a couple of years of silence. The groups recent exploited an extensive list of sites, which they disclosed on pastbin .  If you read the hacker team's extensively long diatribe you will get an impression that their motives are pure and for the benefits of society, but like all disclosures the only people that suffer are the victims found in the data drop. You can also distill from the dialog that they probably used several COTS exploit kits, and it seems that these involved extensive use of cross site scripting attacks. What interested me in particular is that in 2012 when the team supposed 'peace treaty' and extensive hiatus they included a data dump of a host that they compromised.  The host information was listed as -    Server Type: Apache/2.2.3 (Red Hat) What is noteworthy to me is...

Who says that the hypervisor is 100% secure. Looks like thanks to the security flaw in a virtual floppy disk  VENOM, CVE-2015-3456 has become a reality and can in fact be used to possibly escape from a virtual client into adjacent VM systems. At the time of this release the QEMU Virtual floppy disk controller (FDC) affects Xen but does not affect VMware, or Hyper-V.  This vuln is a doozy, and especially for organizations that rely heavily on Xen. This March I read a great article that had described that if a vulnerability was to be discovered in Xen that Amazon's  Steve Schmidt would 'gets busy' , which I would take is today!. Of course this lead's the the next question on my mind. Has Venom been used to successfully exploit Amazon, and would we know about it? If you're running any of these - consider the posted workaround asap! A list of affected Linux distros RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) version 5.x, 6.x and 7.x CentOS Linux version...