Stanford Breach: CEO Basu’s Take on Data Safety
This week, we spotlight the cybersecurity breach within Stanford University’s Department of Public Safety. As breaches surge across academic institutions, the university grapples with a significant data compromise by a group known as “Akira”. Amidst the concern, our CEO Saswata Basu, stresses the critical need for large organizations to disperse their data and avoid centralizing sensitive information in vulnerable locations. Basu’s insights underscore the necessity of evolving security measures to outpace the sophisticated techniques of cybercriminals, reinforcing that ransom payments are ill-advised since they do not assure the safety or recovery of stolen data. Read more about Stanford University investigating data breach in Dept. of Public Safety on Fox News here and watch the video below.
Investigating the Stanford Breach
Discover the Shield: Fragmented Data Storage
Following the Stanford Breach “Storm of the Week,” the urgency for secure data is evident. As cyber threats escalate, the need for robust data protection is imperative. Our newest feature, “How Fragmented Data Storage Eliminates Data Hacks,” delves into a cutting-edge defensive strategy against cyber-attacks. Discover how dispersing data into smaller, spread-out chunks not only fortifies security but also bolsters data recovery and access. This approach may well be a crucial step for anyone aiming to shield their digital information from hackers. Learn about how fragmented data storage is reforming the approach to securing data by reading our in-depth article.
Mainnet and Active Set Update
Anticipation builds as the Active Set’s deployment draws near, with the development team applying the finishing touches. Testing has progressed well, and we are on the cusp of moving forward, possibly starting the process by tomorrow. Your excitement fuels our efforts—thank you for staying tuned!
Blockchain Updates:
The blockchain team has been actively testing the conductor and addressing issues to ensure that the mint ZCN step operates correctly. Although the minting process is now functional, rewards for authorizers are not visible, which is attributed to the absence of staking. This has been remedied along with other related issues. Further, a fix was applied to the bridge-burn-eth issue within zwalletcli, and the latest DEX contract was deployed to the Mumbai network for testing the increaseApproval() function. The team corrected a bug in the mint_zcn.sh script that involved incorrect token units and pinpointed the root cause for authorizers not receiving rewards due to their non-staked status.
NFTs on the dev network
Additionally, the blockchain team rectified auth staking and add-authorizer bugs that were causing failures in conductor tests. Issues pertaining to NFTs on the dev network were addressed, including a panic problem in the NFT mint UI and a misconfiguration involving a hard-coded Ethereum node RPC URL. The team’s exploration into ERC token swapping via Bancor led to the recognition of necessary UI changes. NFT functionality has been tested and confirmed on the Polygon mainnet, and the team has implemented a network switch for DEX/NFT in Chalk, as well as deploying the NFT contract to the Polygon mainnet.
The team has also investigated and resolved issues related to automatic market gas prices, fixed a problem in the DEX Alchemy tests during the Sell ZCN flow, and tackled the sharder stuck issue in authorizer conductor tests, which was due to DDoS aggregate requests from 0box. Finally, the authorizer node recovery conductor test was fixed.
The following core Pull Requests (PRs) were addressed:
- PR #2917: Node recovery workflow was added to staging.
- PR #2920: A fix was implemented for the authorizer reward.
- PR #2919: Fixed tablespace issue.
- PR #2923: Provider rewards delete was fixed.
- PR #2921: A script for DB snapshot migration was added.
- PR #2927: Diagnostic pages issue was fixed.
- PR #2931: New node recovery workflow was added.
- PR #2932: Cleanup step for CT workflow was fixed.
- PR #2928: Added blobber-5 and blobber-6 workflows.
- PR #2929: Fixed sharder recovery times.
- PR #1308: Resolved max file size updateWorker and added config for storage SC update interval.
- PR #1314: Fixed challenge stats.
- PR #1316: Addressed a race condition.
Stanford breach underscores the importance of innovative security measures.
In summary, we are close to exciting advancements with the Mainnet and Active Set, fueled by community anticipation. The data breach at Stanford underscores the importance of the innovative security measures our CEO, Saswata Basu, advocates. Meanwhile, our blockchain team’s persistent work ensures continuous progress. Keep an eye out for further developments.
