Batterie Store Blog

About 200 US businesses have been hit by a “colossal” ransomware attack, according to a cyber-security firm.

Huntress Labs said the hack targeted Florida-based IT company Kaseya before spreading through corporate networks that use its software.

Kaseya said in a statement on its own website that it was investigating a “potential attack”.

Huntress Labs said it believed the Russia-linked REvil ransomware gang was responsible.

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency, a federal agency, said in a statement that it was taking action to address the attack.

The cyber-breach emerged on Friday afternoon as companies across the US were clocking off for the long Independence Day weekend.

Kaseya said one of its applications that runs corporate servers, desktop computers and network devices might have been compromised.

The company said it was urging customers that use its VSA tool to immediately shut down their servers.

Kaseya said in its statement that a “small number” of companies had been affected, though Huntress Labs said the number is already about 200 and counting.

It is not clear what specific companies have been affected – a Kaseya representative contacted by the BBC declined to give details.

Kaseya’s website says it has a presence in over 10 countries and more than 10,000 customers.”This is a colossal and devastating supply chain attack,” Huntress Labs’ senior security researcher John Hammond said in an email to Reuters news agency.

At a summit in Geneva last month, US President Joe Biden said he told Russian President Vladimir Putin he had a responsibility to rein in such cyber-attacks.

Mr Biden said he gave Mr Putin a list of 16 critical infrastructure sectors, from energy to water, that should not be subject of hacking.

REvil – also known as Sodinokibi – is one of the most prolific and profitable cyber-criminal groups in the world.

The gang was blamed by the FBI for a hack in May that paralysed operations at JBS – the world’s largest meat supplier.

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The group sometimes threatens to post stolen documents on its website – known as the “Happy Blog” – if victims don’t comply with its demands.

REvil was also linked to a co-ordinated attack on nearly two dozen local governments in Texas in 2019.

Sir Richard Branson has named the date he’ll fly to the edge of space. It will be 11 July, or very soon after.

He’ll be a passenger in the back of the Unity rocket plane his Virgin Galactic company has been developing in the US for the better part of two decades.

The vehicle can climb to an altitude of 90km (295,000ft), giving those onboard a few minutes of weightlessness and a view of the curvature of the Earth.

Sir Richard’s intention is to introduce a commercial spaceflight service.

Some 600 individuals have already lodged deposits to take the ride.

Witnessing the British entrepreneur do it means those customers are now getting extremely close to having to hand over the full ticket price, which in some cases will be $250,000 (£180,000).

Sir Richard Branson said: “I truly believe that space belongs to all of us. After 17 years of research, engineering and innovation, the new commercial space industry is poised to open the Universe to humankind and change the world for good.

“It’s one thing to have a dream of making space more accessible to all; it’s another for an incredible team to collectively turn that dream into reality.”

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Absolutely key to Virgin Galactic moving forward with its business was the granting last week of a commercial spaceflight licence by the Federal Aviation Administration.

Sunday 11 July is the opening of what’s termed a flight “window”. The Galactic team will aim to make the ascent on that day, but it could of course be delayed because of unfavourable weather conditions or perhaps a technical issue.

If the mission does indeed go ahead on that Sunday, it would mean Sir Richard stealing a march on his rival in sub-orbital space tourism, fellow billionaire Jeff Bezos.

The founder of the online retail empire Amazon.com has sunk a fortune into his hobby of building rockets and has announced his own trip to the edge of space on 20 July.

He’s invited three individuals to join him in his New Shepard booster and capsule system: his brother Mark; a mystery person who paid $28m (£20m) at auction for a seat; and the famed female aviator Wally Funk.

Eighty-two-year old Funk trained to be an astronaut in the 1960s and will become the oldest ever spacefarer when she rockets to an altitude of 100km with Mr Bezos.

The Amazon man has yet to detail how he’ll sell tickets more generally for New Shepard, but this is his plan.

Sir Richard has clearly moved his first flight up in response to Mr Bezos naming the date for his inaugural mission.

The original schedule for the next Unity flight called for four Virgin Galactic employees to ride as passengers to test the cabin experience for future tourists. Only after that outing was Sir Richard supposed to strap himself in.

He’ll now be one of the four testers – alongside Beth Moses, Galactic’s chief astronaut instructor; Colin Bennett, lead operations engineer; and Sirisha Bandla, vice president of government affairs.

The two pilots up front will be Dave Mackay and Michael “Sooch” Masucci.

Space tourism is a sector being rekindled after a decade’s hiatus.

Throughout the 2000s, seven wealthy individuals paid to visit the International Space Station (ISS). But this adventurism, organised under the patronage of the Russian space agency, ceased in 2009.

Now, new initiatives abound, and some of these will be aiming much higher than the sub-orbital flights from Sir Richard and Jeff Bezos.

California tech entrepreneur Elon Musk has already lined up several private missions in his Dragon capsules. These vehicles reach several hundred km above the Earth and will stay up for days.

The Russians, too, are reprising their commercial flights to the ISS, and there are even those who want to launch private space stations for people to visit. Among these is Axiom, a company started by a former Nasa ISS programme manager.

UK-based space start-up OneWeb has received a cash injection of $500m (£361m) from Indian firm Bharti Global.

The deal means Bharti will now take a 39% stake, making it the biggest shareholder in the satellite provider.

The UK government is also a major shareholder after it and Bharti put in $1bn to buy OneWeb out of bankruptcy last year.

The new investment will help OneWeb launch more commercial satellites into space later this year.

OneWeb is building a network of low Earth orbit satellites to deliver broadband connections around the world.

The deal is expected to complete in the second half of this year.

“In just a year and during a global pandemic, together we have transformed OneWeb, bringing the operation back to full-scale. With this round of financing, we complete the funding requirements,” Bharti Global’s Managing Director Shravin Mittal said in a statement.

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In total, the company has secured $2.4bn of funding to deliver on its ambitions. Paris-based Eutelsat took a stake in OneWeb with a $550m investment in April.

Japanese technology giant SoftBank is also a major investor.

Under the deal, the UK government, Eutelsat and SoftBank will each own 19.3% of the firm.

UK Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng said the deal is a vote of confidence in the company: “It’s clear that investors see a strong future for this incredible, cutting-edge company and a robust commercial case for investment.”

The British government had been criticised for using UK taxpayer money to rescue a bankrupt company at the time of the bailout.

Earlier this week, OneWeb signed a deal with BT to explore ways to provide broadband internet to remote parts of the UK and people at sea.

The two companies said they will look at how to improve the speed that people can access data in remote areas, and how to improve the signal people can get on their phone, including how to stop it cutting out so much.

The UK government has also launched ‘Project Gigabit’, which aims to improve rural broadband coverage across the country.

OneWeb competes with providers such as Jeff Bezos’ Project Kuiper as well as Elon Musk’s Starlink, which was recently granted a license by the UK regulator to operate.

Starlink began a UK trial of its services in January after Ofcom granted it a licence in November.

OneWeb says it currently has 218 satellites, and is due to launch a further 36 on Thursday.

Three council workers have been suspended over “insensitive and disrespectful” TikTok videos filmed at a cemetery.

Derby City Council said it was “extremely disappointed” by the videos, filmed at Nottingham Road Cemetery.

The clips, viewed thousands of times, show two men dancing while carrying a coffin and another joking around near an open grave.

The council has apologised “for the offence caused”.

In one of the clips, a man can be heard jokingly singing in a graveyard, before the camera pans to reveal a recently dug grave with a casket and flowers inside.

Another clip shows two men dancing while carrying a coffin on their shoulders.

‘Acted swiftly’
The videos – which have since been deleted – dated back to 2020.

A council spokesperson said: “Having viewed the footage, we were extremely disappointed to identify three members of our staff.

“We have acted swiftly and suspended them with immediate effect while we carry out a full investigation.

“No one currently working at the cemetery has been involved in these videos.

“We do not condone this kind of behaviour and we are sorry for the offence caused by these videos, which have now been deleted.”

Flows of personal data from the EU to the UK will continue, after the European Commission adopted two “data adequacy” decisions.

The decisions include a sunset clause, which runs out after four years.

They will be renewed only if the UK ensures an adequate level of data protection, the commission said.

UK firms had been facing making costly alternative plans with EU counterparts to keep data flowing once a post-Brexit transition period expires this month.

The agreement also covers data from countries in the wider European Economic Area.

Didier Reynders, Commissioner for Justice, said the adequacy agreement was, “important for smooth trade and the effective fight against crime”.

Welcoming the decision, the UK government said it “plans to promote the free flow of personal data globally and across borders”.

“All future decisions will be based on what maximises innovation and keeps up with evolving tech,” it added.

John Foster, CBI director of policy, called the agreement a breakthrough. “The free flow of data is the bedrock of the modern economy and essential for firms across all sectors,” he wrote.

No deviation
The commission said in a press release that it reached its decision in part because: “The UK’s data protection system continues to be based on the same rules that were applicable when the UK was a member state of the EU.”

However, it added that it would “intervene” at any point if the UK deviates from the level of protection presently in place.

Some UK politicians have recently argued for changes to UK data protection law.

A report, commissioned by the prime minister, from The Taskforce on Innovation, Growth and Regulatory Reform chaired by Sir Iain Duncan Smith, said: “GDPR is already out of date and needs to be revised for AI and growth sectors if we want to enable innovation in the UK.”

The EU excluded from the adequacy agreements transfers of data to be used for “immigration control”.

A recent Court of Appeal ruling found that some UK data rules relating to immigration were incompatible with GDPR.

Microsoft has officially announced Windows 11, its new operating system which will replace the current version over the next few years.

Among all the new features are two seemingly small but related things that jumped out.

First – Microsoft Teams, the video-calling app which saw a boom during 2020’s pandemic, will be integrated into Windows 11 by default.

And second – Skype will not be, for the first time in years.

That seems to suggest that Teams is the new favourite child, and many pundits think this is the beginning of the end for what was once the king of calling apps.

“Looks like Microsoft is killing off Skype,” wrote the Irish & Sunday Independent tech editor Adrian Weckler. “Bye bye Skype,” added Future Publishing’s content director Jeremy Kaplan. “RIP Skype,” was the immediate reaction from The Verge’s Tom Warren.

Yet the reality is that Skype has been losing relevance for a long time.

‘The future’
Microsoft bought Skype 10 years ago for $8.5bn (£6.1bn). At the time, it was the tech giant’s biggest-ever acquisition, and there were questions over whether it was over-paying.

But Microsoft was buying into an app that had been downloaded one billion times and had hundreds of millions of users.

“Together we will create the future of real-time communications,” Microsoft chief Steve Balmer projected.

It seemed to work – the app came bundled with every new computer, and user numbers were strong.

But by the middle of the decade, internet forums were full of posts asking “why is Skype so bad?” and complaining about updates. Many pointed to poor performance and questionable design choices.

At the same time, mobile messaging apps – such as WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger – were exploding in popularity and started to introduce video calls, one of Skype’s main attractions.

The first version of Skype was launched in 2003, and despite frequent updates, it was starting to show its age.

Meanwhile, Microsoft was cooking up its business chat app, Teams, based on more modern tech, which launched in 2017.

“Microsoft has been moving beyond Skype for several years now, with Teams being its strategic voice and video technology for the new era,” explained Angela Ashenden, an analyst at CCS Insight.

Teams for all
Under the hood, she said, Teams actually used Skype’s technology for a while. It was designed to compete with business app Slack, as a work tool.

But then the pandemic happened.

Zoom, previously a little-known business solution, became a household name overnight. And Microsoft Teams was one of only a handful of competitors ready to take it on.

“As Teams’ adoption skyrocketed in the last year, this really sealed Skype’s status as a legacy technology for Microsoft,” Ms Ashenden said. That has only been reinforced by the launch of a personal version, which could directly compete with Skype.

With that kind of sudden success, it was “inevitable” that Teams would be the Windows default, she added.

“The removal of Skype as a pre-installed app helps reinforce Teams as the preferred solution from Microsoft’s perspective, emphasising that this is where its investment will be moving forward.”

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The writing has been on the wall for a while.

Last September, Microsoft-owned LinkedIn announced it was bringing video meetings to its chat feature using Teams and not Skype, with Zoom and another popular system, BlueJeans, as other options.

In October, senior Microsoft executive Jim Gaynor told CNBC: “If Skype was going to become bigger, this year was the time for it.”

“What happened right now was the perfect storm, the perfect set of circumstances for any online communications product. If you cannot significantly grow and make your product flourish and thrive now, forget about it, you’re too late now.”

‘The right solution’
Skype did see growth during the pandemic – reportedly a 70% jump to about 40 million people a day.

But that is still not as big a growth as its competitors. At a time when the entire world needed a calling app, people chose other options.

“There is definitely an argument that the Teams experience is far too complicated for the less-technical non-business user,” Ms Ashenden said.

“But if Skype was the right solution for that, we certainly would have seen its usage soaring more over the last year, and we didn’t.”Instead, Teams is likely to evolve to make things simpler for personal users -particularly on mobile devices, she added.

But Skype is not being killed off entirely – it will continue to be offered as a download in the Microsoft Store for those who want it in Windows 11.

It won’t be alone.

Alongside the announcement of Skype’s relegation to the store, Microsoft also announced that some other much-maligned apps were being downplayed or removed.

Its ill-fated Cortana virtual assistant will no longer be pinned to the taskbar; Internet Explorer is disabled by default in favour of the more modern Edge browser; and tools such as OneNote, Paint 3D, and Windows’ 3D viewer app are getting the Skype treatment and becoming optional store downloads.

Microsoft has unveiled Windows 11, its “next generation” operating system, at a virtual event.

The new software will let Android apps run on the Windows desktop.

Product manager Panos Panay promised smaller, faster security updates – a common complaint for Windows users – and said they would happen in the background.

Windows 11 will also let users configure multiple desktops for work, home, and gaming, like on a Mac.

Microsoft says there are currently about 1.3 billion devices running Windows 10.

An early preview version of the new system will be released for app developers next week.

Windows 11 will be available as a free update to existing Windows 10 users – although some devices will not have the right specifications. These include a minimum of 64 gigabytes of storage and 4 gigabytes of RAM.

One cosmetic change is putting the “Start” button at the bottom-centre of the screen rather than left-hand side.

In addition, Windows 11 will feature tighter integration with Microsoft’s communications platform Teams. Xbox Games Pass, a subscription service offering access to hundreds of games, will also be pre-installed.

The tech giant said it would share more profits from its app store with creators and developers – as rival Apple continues to face challenges over its business model.

When Windows 10 launched in 2015, Microsoft said it would be the final version of the operating system. It has since announced Windows 10 will be retired in 2025.

Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella described the launch as “a major milestone in the history of Windows”, but analyst Geoff Blaber from CCS Insight said he did not consider it to be “a revolutionary step”.

“Windows 11 is an iterative release that pinpoints where Windows needs greater ambition, rather than introducing the sweeping changes seen with its predecessor,” he said.

“The end game for Microsoft is ensuring that the step up from Windows 10 to Windows 11 provides significant enough improvements to offset any complaints.”

Forrester’s principal analyst JP Gownder noted that the new operating system was based on the code of Windows 10, which should prevent upgrade glitches such as those seen in the past with Windows Vista.

“These user-friendly nods to the past are a double-edged sword, though,” he added.

“They’re great for continuity of experience, but they make you wonder what the 11 really stands for. Is this really more of an admittedly feature-rich Windows 10 update than a full-version release?”

The European Commission has announced plans to build a Joint Cyber Unit to tackle large scale cyber-attacks.

Recent ransomware incidents on critical services in Ireland and the US has “focused minds”, the commission said.

It argued cyber-attacks were a national security threat, as incidents in Europe rose from 432 in 2019 to 756 in 2020.

A dedicated team of multi-national cyber-experts will be rapidly deployed to European countries during serious attacks, it said.

Launching the proposals, European Commission vice-president Margaritis Schinas said last month’s hack on US fuel supplies was ‘the “nightmare scenario that we have to prepare against”.

Last month, a cyber-criminal gang called Darkside forced the Colonial Pipeline offline for nearly a week, causing panic buying and fuel shortages.

Ransomware hackers use malicious software to scramble and steal an organisation’s computer data – charging victims money to return services back to normal.

The US government has also recently formed a Ransomware Task Force, while the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre warns that ransomware is the biggest cyber-threat to UK.

The European Commission said that the ongoing ransomware attack on Ireland’s health service is another sign that cyber-attacks are a national security issue.

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The Health Service Executive (HSE) in Ireland was hit by a ransomware group called Conti which scrambled IT systems, causing major disruption to many hospitals.

HSE chief Paul Reid told the Oireachtas health committee on Wednesday that it will take months to fix the system.

He said it will cost as much as €100m (£85m) to recover, and will also have large “human costs”.

Thierry Breton, EU commissioner for the internal market, told reporters that the Joint Cyber Unit’s rapid reaction teams could have helped Ireland recover from the crisis.

He said the unit would help in similar scenarios by “deploying very quickly a dedicated team which we don’t have the capacity to do now. We know that the longer you wait the worse it is, so faster and more solidarity is what you can expect”.

Mr Breton insisted that the new unit will not compete with national cyber-entities or duplicate work.

He promised to build a team to provide support virtually and physically, using resources “from one country to another” to deliver operational and technical assistance.

The aim is to ensure that the Joint Cyber Unit will be operational by June next year, and that it will be fully established one year later, by 30 June 2023.

Bitcoin has fallen below $30,000 for the first time in more than five months, hit by China’s crackdown on the world’s most popular cryptocurrency.

The digital currency slipped to about $28,890, and has lost more than 50% of its value since reaching an all-time high of $64,870 in April.

China has told banks and payments platforms to stop supporting digital currency transactions.

It follows an order on Friday to stop Bitcoin mining in Sichuan province.

On Monday, China’s central bank said it had recently summoned several major banks and payments companies to call on them to take tougher action over the trading of cryptocurrencies.

Banks were told to not provide products or services such as trading, clearing and settlement for cryptocurrency transactions, the People’s Bank of China said in a statement.

China’s third-largest lender by assets, the Agricultural Bank of China, said it was following the PBOC’s guidance and would conduct due diligence on clients to root out illegal activities involving cryptocurrency mining and transactions.

China’s Postal Savings Bank also said it would not facilitate any cryptocurrency transactions.

The mobile and online payments platform Alipay, which is owned by Chinese financial technology giant Ant Group, said it would set up a monitoring system to detect illegal cryptocurrency transactions.

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The latest measure came after authorities in the southwest province of Sichuan on Friday ordered Bitcoin mining operations to close down.

Authorities ordered the closure of 26 mines last week, according to a notice widely circulated on Chinese social media sites and confirmed by a former Bitcoin miner.

Sichuan, a mountainous region in southwest China, is home to many cryptocurrency mines – basically huge centres with racks upon racks of computer processors, owing to the large number of hydroelectric power plants there.

China accounted for around 65% of global Bitcoin production last year, with Sichuan rating as its second largest producer, according to research by the University of Cambridge.

“Concerns mount over China’s ongoing clampdown and fears that widespread acceptance of Bitcoin and other digital currencies will be delayed because of concerns about their environmental impact,” noted analyst Fawad Razaqzada at trading site ThinkMarkets.

Last month China’s cabinet, the State Council, said it would crack down on cryptocurrency mining and trading as part of a campaign to control financial risks.

Some analysts have warned of potential further falls in the price of Bitcoin due to a price chart phenomenon known as a “death cross”, which occurs when a short-term average trendline crosses below a long-term average trendline.

Other cryptocurrencies also fell as investors worried about tougher regulation of digital currencies around the world.

Separately, the auction house Sotheby’s said that a rare pear-shaped diamond that is expected to sell for as much as $15m can be bought at an auction next month using cryptocurrencies.

It is the first time that such a large diamond has been offered in a public sale with cryptocurrency.

“I’ve been working in logistics for 30 years and I’ve never seen demand like this,” says Robin Woodbridge.

The company he works for, Prologis, owns and manages warehouse logistics parks across the UK.

They’re building as fast as they can, but it’s been a struggle to keep pace with the boom in online shopping in recent years.

And the pandemic has only served to accelerate the trend, making warehousing hot property.

Prologis’s biggest park, known as Dirft, is just off the M1 near Northampton. You can see the big sheds towering over the fields from the motorway. It’s a vast site with three rail freight terminals.

When you click to buy online, there’s a good chance the product will start its journey here, whether that’s baked beans, laptops, furniture or fashion.

Despite its size, it’s not big enough.

Hundreds of construction workers are beavering away on expanding the site.

“We’re building buildings speculatively, which means we haven’t got a customer lined up, and we’re letting them before we finish, something which doesn’t happen very often,” says Mr Woodbridge, who is head of capital deployment for the firm.

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It wasn’t that long ago that warehouses were unloved by investors, who continued to pour money into retail and office space.

But things look very different now. Our High Streets and town centres are grappling with too much retail space and the logistics sector can’t build warehouses quickly enough.

New research from Savills, commissioned by the UK Warehousing Association, shows the dramatic increase in warehouse space in the last six years.

In 2015, there was 428 million square feet of large warehouse space in the UK. That’s now risen by 32% – adding the equivalent of an extra 2,396 football pitches.

The occupancy mix has also changed. In 2015, High Street retailers were the dominant occupiers, but now they’ve been overtaken by third party logistics providers, like DHL and Yodel, who fulfil and deliver most of our online shopping.

The biggest take-up in space, as the chart below shows, has come from the so-called pureplay online retailers, firms which don’t have physical stores and only sell online, such as Boohoo. These online retailers have increased their warehouse footprint by 614% in just six years.

The sheds themselves are also getting bigger. At Dirft, a super-sized building is taking shape which is the size of ten football pitches. The warehouse will be Royal Mail’s biggest parcel hub, processing more than a million packages a day.

“Without these sheds, society can’t function. These facilities make everyday life possible”, says Mr Woodbridge.

He reckons that for every additional billion pounds in spending online, a further 775,000 sq ft of warehouse space is needed to support it.

When this vast logistics park is eventually filled, some 15,000 people are expected to be employed here. A new training academy will open shortly to help attract and train people for a career in logistics.

“Gone are the days when you had a man in a brown coat,” says Kevin Mofid, head of industrials and logistics research at Savills.

“As online retail has grown, the type of people required in warehousing has changed as well, now it’s robotics engineers and data scientists. Warehouses have become huge centres of technical excellence to gain efficiencies.”

And he believes there’s a long way to go before the UK reaches “peak shed”.

Savills tracks how much warehouse space companies require and says that demand is continuing to soar, by 232% in the first quarter of this year compared with the same period in 2020.

Kevin Mofid says this race for space reflects more than just our changing shopping habits.

“There’s also increased demand in manufacturing and automotive. For instance, there will be new battery plants for electric vehicles, and as a result of Brexit, companies will want to store more goods in the UK,” he believes.

It may prove a challenge to continue expanding at this pace.

Peter Ward, chief executive of the UK Warehousing Association says the government needs to recognise the importance to the economy of this fast-growing sector.

“While we hear a great deal about building 250,000 new homes each year over the next five years, the fact that this will create a million new delivery points seems to have been largely overlooked.

“It is high time for warehousing to be baked into planning policy, in the same way that GP surgeries and schools are an accepted part of infrastructure planning,” he says.