There’s strength in numbers, which is why so many techies enjoy working with collaborative, open-source systems like Linux. Bouncing a good idea between several people can usually improve it more quickly than if one person had to refine it on their own. The same can be true for a company that’s looking to enhance its offering. Sometimes getting to the next level means developing an alliance that will allow the company to leapfrog what they otherwise would have had to spend time and resources developing independently. Recently, CloudLinux found it was ready to take another big step to improve its offerings and determined that the right partner could add even more value. Let’s take a look.

On December 26, 2017, the Necurs botnet delivered a late Christmas gift – the new version of GlobeImposter ransomware. Attached to spam messages as zip archives, the zip archive contains a JavaScript that downloads and installs ransomware on a victim’s computer.

The ancient Greeks once warned about “the cure being worse than the disease.” Unfortunately, that’s exactly what’s happened when Microsoft released its patches for the Meltdown-Spectre vulnerabilities. Microsoft’s fix is bricking some computers, proving once again that creating a backup before installing any system update is critical.

New security research has been made public revealing the Meltdown (CVE-2017-5754) and Spectre (CVE-2017-5753 and CVE-2017-5715) vulnerabilities in modern processors. These vulnerabilities allow programs to break the isolation between applications, which means malicious applications could access the memory of another program running on the same machine. (For a detailed attack description, please visit https://spectreattack.com/ or https://meltdownattack.com/.)