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Apache Finally Goes To The Cloud
The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has announced Hadoop 1.0.
The open source software project has reached the milestone of its first full release after six years of development. Hadoop is a software framework for reliable, scalable and distributed computing under a free licence. Apache describes it as “a foundation of cloud computing”.
“This release is the culmination of a lot of hard work and cooperation from a vibrant Apache community group of dedicated software developers and committers that has brought new levels of stability and production expertise to the Hadoop project,” said Arun Murthy, VP of Apache Hadoop.
“Hadoop is becoming the de facto data platform that enables organizations to store, process and query vast torrents of data, and the new release represents an important step forward in performance, stability and security,” he added.
Apache Hadoop allows for the distributed processing of large data sets, often Petabytes, across clusters of computers using a simple programming model.
The Hadoop framework is used by some big name organisations including Amazon, Ebay, IBM, Apple, Facebook and Yahoo.
Yahoo has significantly contributed to the project and hosts the largest Hadoop production environment with more than 42,000 nodes.
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The Linux Kernel Got Hacked
Servers that are part of the Linux kernel.org infrastructure were affected during a recent intrusion where attackers managed to gain root access and plant Trojan scripts.
According to an email sent out to the community by kernel.org chief administrator John Hawley, known as warthog9, the incident started with the compromise of a server referred to as Hera. The personal colocated machine of Linux developer H Peter Anvin (HPA) and additional kernel.org systems were also affected.
“Upon some investigation there are a couple of kernel.org boxes, specifically hera and odin1, with potential pre-cursors on demeter2, zeus1 and zeus2, that have been hit by this,” Hawley wrote.
The intrusion was discovered on 28 August and according to preliminary findings attackers gained access by using a set of compromised credentials. They then elevated their privileges to root by exploiting a zero-day vulnerability that the kernel.org administrators have yet to identify.
Fortunately, logs and parts of the exploit code were retained and will help the investigation. A Trojan was added to the startup scripts of affected systems, but gave itself away through Xnest /dev/mem error messages.
According to the kernel.org admins, these error messages have been seen on other systems as well, but it’s not clear if those machines are vulnerable or compromised. “If developers see this, and you don’t have Xnest installed, please investigate,” the administrators advised.
The good news is that the exploit failed on systems running the latest Linux kernel version, 3.1-rc2, which was released two weeks ago. This is possibly the fortunate consequence of one of the bugfixes it contains.
Microsoft Delivers Massive Security Updates
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Microsoft today patched a whopping 64 vulnerabilities in Windows, Office, Internet Explorer (IE), and other software, including 30 bugs in the Windows kernel device driver and one in IE that was exploited at the Pwn2Own hacking contest last month.
The company also delivered a long-discussed “backport” to Office 2003 and Office 2007 that brings one of the newer security features in Office 2010 to the older editions.
The 17 updates, which Microsoft dubs “bulletins,” tied a record set late last year, but easily beat the October 2010 mark for the total number of flaws they fixed. Altogether, today’s updates patched 64 vulnerabilities, 15 more than in October and 24 more than in the former second-place collection of December 2010.
Nine of the 17 bulletins were pegged “critical,” Microsoft’s highest threat ranking, while the remainder were marked “important,” the next-most-serious label.
Microsoft and virtually every security expert pegged several updates that users should download and install immediately.
“There are three we think are top priorities,” said Jerry Bryant, group manager with the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC), in an interview earlier today. Bryant tagged MS11-018, MS11-019 and MS11-020 as the ASAP updates.