Category: News

News

Azure updates feed broken since June 2024

Post author By Luki
Post date 2024-06-21

Azure updates feed broken as seen by DALL-E

The new Azure updates went live around the end of November 2024 and has also enabled RSS feeds again.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates (2025-01-28)

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates

The rest of the article is outdated, showing the situation between June and November 2024 without proper update streams.

Microsoft is currently undergoing maintenance and is not providing RSS feeds for Azure updates. The last regular updates was on June 3rd, 2024. For me, this is a major inconvenience.

Azure Updates website is undergoing maintenance. During this time, you may notice limited functionality affecting RSS feeds and search features. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. Thank you for your patience and understanding.

Critical updates and retirements will also be communicated via emails and service health alerts.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates (2024-06-21)

The alternative fallback is here: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-updates/bg-p/AzureUpdates

But this is no longer easily machine readable.

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-updates/bg-p/AzureUpdates (2024-06-21)

This once more points out the importance of the service health alerts which should be monitored for every resource.

I still hope that this service limitation will end soon, but for now, I haven’t seen any plans for when the service will return to regular operation.

Offical Azure Updates Website (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/) as of October 2024 (2024-10-21)

azurecharts.com Latest Azure Updates

Despite months passing, Microsoft has yet to restore the update RSS feed that I use to stay current with Azure technologies. Fortunately, we have Azure charts websites that are stepping in to help.

https://azurecharts.com/updates

They offer both a website and an RSS feed with the updates. This is extremely valuable.

https://azurecharts.com/updates azurecharts.com Latest Azure Updates (2024-10-21)

My proposal for everyone who is waiting is to switch to the following URL: azurecharts.com updates RSS

News Security

DDoS in Switzerland in June 2024

Post author By Luki
Post date 2024-06-08

DDoS risk during the "Summit on Peace in Ukraine" at Bürgenstock in 2024 as seen by DALL-E.

There is ~~a high chance of a~~ Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack around and during the “Summit on Peace in Ukraine” conference at the Bürgenstock Switzerland on ~~the upcoming~~ weekend of June 15th and June 16th, 2024. Find a complete breakdown of technical details of what happened over the entire weekend in the article.

Attacks on Swiss web properties were seen during the World Economic Forum in January 2024, the visit of the Ukrainian President Wolodymyr Selenskyj to Switzerland in January 2024, and in June 2023 when the Ukrainian President Wolodymyr Selenskyj was speaking in front of the Swiss Parliament in the form of a remote conference.

News

Cloud Egress Costs & DDoS

Post author By Luki
Post date 2024-03-03

Cloud Egress Costs & DDoS as seen by DALL-E

I recently came across an article online that detailed how, following a DDoS attack, the invoice from the cloud provider skyrocketed. It is crucial to monitor how a volumetric attack can impact your costs, particularly in terms of egress traffic or the resources needed from engineers to combat it. Implementing automated solutions such as rate limiting and traffic signals is highly recommended for a more efficient response. Remember to consider the cloud egress prices when devising your strategy.

Please also take into account auto-scaling limits, alerts. Also cost alerts, and spending limits should be in place.

Azure News

Azure shared dashboard not found, February 2024

Post author By Luki
Post date 2024-02-19
4 Comments on Azure shared dashboard not found, February 2024

Azure shared dashboard not found

Today, February 19, 2024, at 07:30 CET, I discovered that my shared dashboards are no longer working on the Microsoft Azure Portal. This issue was observed across multiple tenants and subscriptions. I do not yet know the root cause, but I suspect that it is an incident on Azure’s side.

Dashboard not found

Dashboard ” no longer exists. It was previously published to resource group ‘dashboards’ in subscription ‘00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000’.
https://portal.azure.com/*** (2024-02-19 11:00 CET)

Azure News

Azure Incident on January 21, 2024

Post author By Luki
Post date 2024-01-21

A Global Azure Resource Manager Outage as Imagined by DALL-E

Azure was reporting an issue on their status page. I have found it to be impacting services.

https://azure.status.microsoft/en-us/status

The case was resolved. In 14 days (February 5th, 2024), we can expect a final report. The final report was posted.

News Security

NoName057(16) DDoS January 2024

Post author By Luki
Post date 2024-01-18

NoName057(16) DDoS Attack as Imagined by DALL-E

Before the World Economic Forum in January 2024 in Davos Switzerland, Chinese Premier Li Qiang arrived in Switzerland on Sunday and was officially received with military honors. On the same day, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited the Swiss Parliament Building in Bern. The World Economic Forum began in Davos on Monday. By Wednesday January 17th 2024, the first public reports appeared regarding DDoS attacks against websites in Switzerland, attributing them to the group NoName057(16).

News Security

Stay on top of Cyber Security Alerts

Post author By Luki
Post date 2024-01-09

It’s important to stay on top of new discoveries and vulnerabilities, following up on products. Knowing is the first step, evaluation and taking action is the second step.

Cyber Security Alerts

Vendors

Another crucial step is to sign up for security advisories with all your key vendors to significantly reduce the response time to newly released security advisories from the supplier.

For example like:

Atlassian
- If you are using Atlassian products, especially Data Center or perhaps an outdated server version, I recommend signing up for the Atlassian Security Advisory mailing list. They have recently started sending monthly updates and sometimes even more with crucial information regarding patching and vulnerabilities. In my opinion, it is an absolute must to follow. (2024-01-18)

News Security

Terrapin Attack, SSH protocol vulnerability

Post author By Luki
Post date 2023-12-27

I had to evaluate the risk of a potential Terrapin attack.

CVE-2023-48795: General Protocol Flaw
CVE-2023-46445: Rogue Extension Negotiation Attack in AsyncSSH
CVE-2023-46446: Rogue Session Attack in AsyncSSH

The Terrapin attack can target connections secured with ChaCha20-Poly1305 or CBC-mode ciphers with Encrypt-then-MAC. There is a theoretical vulnerability in CTR-mode ciphers combined with Encrypt-then-MAC, but it is not currently exploitable in real-world scenarios.

The attack requires an active Man-in-the-Middle.

OpenSSH and other vendors have implemented a strict key exchange countermeasure, but for it to be effective, both client and server must support it. Connecting a vulnerable client to a patched server, or vice versa, still results in a vulnerable connection.

News

This Week: Inspiration and Knowledge at 37C3

Post author By Luki
Post date 2023-12-26

Every year (when its possible) the Chaos Communication Congress is part of my last week of the year. I never had the chance to attend in person but some presentation are truly great. This year the 37 edition under the name 37C3 with the claim “unlocked” will take place over the course of 4 days.

ℹ This post will be updated multiple times over the next few days.

News Web

What is google-proxy-00-000-00-00.google.com?

Post author By Luki
Post date 2023-12-20

Recently, I noticed a significant increase in requests from the hostnames like this google-proxy-00-000-00-000.google.com in my log files. Upon investigation, I discovered that this hostname is commonly used for previews in Google Search. However, this explanation did not seem to apply to my situation. Additionally, the source of this information is 10 years old. The received requests from those proxy domains also contained a regular browser user agent string and not an official Google user agent to identify a specific product or service. Further research revealed that Google Chrome is experimenting with hiding the IP address through IP Protection.

I am concerned about this development because routing traffic through Google’s servers may complicate efforts to block DDoS attacks or identify fraudulent activity.

In response to these concerns, Google is considering measures such as requiring authentication with the proxy for users of this feature, preventing the linking of web requests to specific accounts by proxies, and implementing rate-limiting to safeguard against DDoS attacks.

Please share additional insights in the comments. The comment submission form will automatically disappear after some time.