Information Technology Security

By Sergiu Gatlan,  Bleeping Computer ​Microsoft has mitigated an Azure outage that lasted more than two hours and took down multiple services for customers across North and Latin America. The company says the incident started around 18:22 UTC and impacted services that leverage Azure Front Door (AFD), its modern cloud Content Delivery Network (CDN). "This issue is impacting multiple geographies, mostly in North America and Latin America," Redmond explained when it first acknowledged the outage on the Azure status page, saying it was caused by what it described as a "configuration change." "We have rolled back this change and, from 19:25 UTC, the majority of services are seeing recovery. Many Microsoft services have failed away from AFD, in response to this issue." However, customers have also reported experiencing errors connecting to Azure services (including Azure DevOps) in the United Kingdom, with the Azure DevOps status page also tagging the issues ...

The notorious North Korean state-backed hacking group Lazarus uploaded four packages to the Python Package Index (PyPI) repository with the goal of infecting developer systems with malware. The packages, now taken down, are pycryptoenv, pycryptoconf, quasarlib, and swapmempool. They have been collectively downloaded 3,269 times, with pycryptoconf accounting for the most downloads at 1,351. "The package names pycryptoenv and pycryptoconf are similar to pycrypto, which is a Python package used for encryption algorithms in Python," JPCERT/CC researcher Shusei Tomonaga said. "Therefore, the attacker probably prepared the malware-containing malicious packages to target users' typos in installing Python packages." The disclosure comes days after Phylum uncovered several rogue packages on the npm registry that have been used to single out software developers as part of a campaign codenamed Contagious Interview. An interesting commonality between the two sets of attack...