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Microsoft Goes Quantum Computing
Software giant Microsoft is focusing a lot of its R&D money on quantum computing.
Peter Lee, the corporate vice president of Microsoft Research said that Quantum computing is “stupendously exciting right now.”
Apparently it is Microsoft Research’s largest area of investment and Lee is pretty certain it is on the verge of some major scientific achievements.
“There’s just hope and optimism those scientific achievements will lead to practical outcomes. It’s hard to know when and where,” Lee said.
This is the first we have heard about Redmond’s quantum ambitions for a while. In 2014 the company revealed its “Station Q” group located on the University of California, Santa Barbara, campus, which has focused on quantum computing since its establishment a decade ago.
We sort of assumed that Microsoft would not get much work done on Quantum states because faced with a choice most cats would rather die in a box rather than listen to Steve Ballmer. But we guess with a more cat friendly CEO it is moving ahead.
Lee said that he has explained quantum computing research to Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella by comparing it with speech processing. In that field, Microsoft researchers worked “so hard for a decade with no practical improvement,” he said. Then deep learning brought about considerable leaps forward in speech recognition and Microsoft was in on the ground floor.
“With quantum, we’ve made just gigantic advancements making semiconductor interfacing, allowing semiconductor materials to operate as though they were superconducting. What that means is the possibility of semiconductors that can operate at extremely high clock rates with very, very little or no heat dissipation. It’s just really spectacular.”
Courtesy-Fud
Will The Drupal Flaw Be Catastrophic?
Comments Off on Will The Drupal Flaw Be Catastrophic?
The Drupal web content management system has been exposed as having backdoor access that could deliver your site to hackers.
The problem is not particularly new. Drupal warned about it earlier this month, but it still needs tackling as millions of websites may be at risk.
Drupal said that sites running version 7 really ought to have upgraded to 7.32 by now, because not doing so leaves them as open as a torn tea bag.
Initially the alert was about the threat, but the firm has updated its earlier advice and is now warning of in-the-wild attacks.
That earlier advice was about a problem in a database API. “A vulnerability in this API allows an attacker to send specially crafted requests resulting in arbitrary SQL execution,” warned Drupal in a security alert.
“Depending on the content of the requests this can lead to privilege escalation, arbitrary PHP execution, or other attacks. This vulnerability can be exploited by anonymous users.”
More recent information from the firm points users toward the released upgrade, and informs them that attacks started not long after the initial announcement.
“You should proceed under the assumption that every Drupal 7 website was compromised unless updated or patched before Oct 15th, 11pm UTC, that is seven hours after the announcement,” it said, adding that, even when updated, sites will have some cleaning up to do.
“If you have not updated or applied this patch, do so immediately, then continue reading this announcement; updating to version 7.32 or applying the patch fixes the vulnerability but does not fix an already compromised website,” it explains.
“If you find that your site is already patched but you didn’t do it, that can be a symptom that the site was compromised – some attacks have applied the patch as a way to guarantee they are the only attacker in control of the site.”
Gavin Millard, EMEA technical director at Tenable Network Security, advised people to follow Drupal’s advice.
“The so-called ‘Drupageddon’ vulnerability could have easily led to exploitation of any systems running the vulnerable code. With such an easy to exploit flaw, the chance of exfiltration of data or further exploitation are high,” he said.
“For those who have good security controls, reviewing of logs and traffic directed at the sites following the vulnerability being announced and the patch applied is common sense and highly advisable, with appropriate action taken if indicators of compromise are found.
“For those who don’t have such a good level of security or visibility into the logs, the advice from the Drupal team should be heeded. If you don’t know if you were exploited you should assume that you have been.”