Google is an odd company. They have used the personal vs corporate data ownership line like a jump rope over the years. We have watched them for a long time and all we can say is that their track record on protecting personal information and privacy has been both good and bad with them being on the bad side for most of recent history. After being a vehement opposer of bills like SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect our Intellectual Property Act) they quickly dropped those stances and started facilitating blanket takedown noticed from the MPAA (now the MPA) and RIAA. The blanket notices often came from law firms that provided little more than links to Google which Google then removed from their search engine and YouTube.

It Cloud services are exceptionally popular as a cost effective and simple method to maintain common operational needs. Everything from email to fully fledged infrastructures can be maintained in the “cloud”. All of these can be accomplished at lower overall cost than trying to maintain the same systems on prem. By shifting the general operation, maintenance and even security to the cloud service provider organizations get to reduce their total ownership cost including reducing the number of skilled employees they need to keep on staff. This reduction in the total cost of ownership and maintenance is a huge item when you are trying to ensure profitability.

April must be the month for new malware tools to be released, or at least announced as we have already heard about new forms of attack/infection from the group behind Emotet and now we hear that Conti has replaced BazarLoader with new malware tracked as Bumblebee. The newly disclosed malware is also under active development with multiple new features showing up this month.

A new flaw has been identified in the Node.js package manager, NPM. The flaw is being described as a logical flaw, but in reading over the data it seems more like a permissions flaw. The good news is that as of April 26, the flaw has been addressed by NPM, the bad is that it was in play until then. According to the researchers that discovered it, the flaw related to the way you can attach other accounts to an uploaded package.