Heena Sharma Blog

  The hour-long Fastly Inc. outage was a reminder of how exposed the world’s biggest websites are to the impact of disruptions ranging from simple human error to coordinated cyberattack . The failure at Fastly, which helps websites load their pages faster, sent vast swaths of the web offline on Tuesday. News websites including CNN, the New York Times and Bloomberg News, services such as Amazon.com Inc., Shopify Inc. and Stripe Inc., plus sites as large as Spotify and Reddit all went offline. U.K. government digital services were also unavailable for a period. Major sites began reporting problems around 10:30 a.m. U.K. time on Tuesday, according to Downdetector, which tracks service interruptions. In a summary of the events that unfolded, the company said a valid software configuration change by one of its customers triggered a previously undiscovered bug, introduced during a May 12 software deployment. Fastly quickly identified an issue with its content delivery network and a...

Microsoft has said that it obtained a court order allowing it to seize web domains used by North Korean hacking groups to launch cyberattacks on human rights activists, researchers and others. The US technology giant said on Monday that a federal court allowed it to take control of 50 domains operated by a group dubbed Thallium, which tricked online users by fraudulently using Microsoft brands and trademarks. "This network was used to target victims and then compromise their online accounts, infect their computers, compromise the security of their networks and steal sensitive information," said Tom Burt, Microsoft's vice president for customer security and trust. "Based on victim information, the targets included government employees, think tanks, university staff members, members of organizations focused on world peace and human rights, and individuals that work on nuclear proliferation issues. Most targets were based in the US, as well as Japan and Sou...