Diamanti joins AI/ML sector with its GPU platform that supports containerized workloads on Kubernetes

Diamanti announced availability of its enterprise platform with GPU support for running containerized workloads under Kubernetes, ideal for the demanding requirements of emerging artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) applications. 

In conjunction with its recent announcement of Diamanti Spektra, customers can now provide to their end users GPU capacity in cloud clusters for scaling AI/ML workloads on premises out to public clouds to accelerate model development and training.

Diamanti recently announced the close of a $35 million Series C funding round that the company plans to use to ramp global go-to-market initiatives, along with increased investment in engineering resources to drive the roadmap for Diamanti Spektra, as well as new software, SaaS, and hardware solutions for emerging AI and ML workloads.

“AI is quickly proving to be the most disruptive set of new technologies in decades thanks to breathtaking advances in computing power, volume, velocity and variety of data,” said Tom Barton, CEO of Diamanti. “Our platform offers unmatched extensibility and flexibility for containerized workloads and now our customers can add GPU support for a heterogeneous environment under the same Kubernetes umbrella to help with even the most demanding AI/ML requirements.”

The Diamanti platform for AI/ML workloads fully supports Nvidia’s NVLink cross connect GPU card technology for higher performing workloads, as well as Kubeflow, a machine learning framework for Kubernetes that provides highly-available Jupyter notebooks and ML pipelines.

“Cloud-native methodology and software are crossing over with AI and machine learning, with Kubernetes an increasingly attractive option for data scientists to orchestrate the distributed architecture required to run multiple machine learning libraries and frameworks in production at scale,” said Matt Aslett, research vice president, 451 Research. “One key use case across several verticals involves infrastructure that can be quickly spun up or down to support massive simulations.”

Early access Diamanti customers are already benefiting from the new platform support for GPUs in industries as varied as financial services, energy and travel, among others.

For AI/ML applications requiring GPUs, the new Diamanti Spektra solution can also now manage the full lifecycle of containerized workloads across on-premises and public clouds, moving applications and data between Kubernetes clusters as necessary. 

Diamanti Spektra combines the power of Diamanti’s hardware-boosted x86 platform along with cloud-based infrastructure to provide Kubernetes-as-a-Service. Diamanti Spektra is in technology preview.

Kaspersky research confirms that cybercriminals have been stealing guests’ credit card data from hotels worldwide

Kaspersky’s research of the RevengeHotels campaign has confirmed that over 20 hotels in Latin America, Europe and Asia have fallen victim to targeted malware attacks. As a result, travelers’ credit card data, which is stored in a hotel administration systems including those received from online travel agencies (OTAs), is at risk of being stolen and sold to cybercriminals worldwide.

The RevengeHotels campaign includes different groups using traditional Remote Access Trojans (RATs) to infect businesses in the hospitality sector. The campaign has been active since 2015 but has increased its presence in 2019. At least two groups, RevengeHotels and ProCC, were identified to be part of the campaign, however more cybercriminal groups are potentially involved.

The main attack vector includes emails with crafted malicious Word, Excel or PDF documents attached. Some of them exploit CVE-2017-0199, loading it using VBS and PowerShell scripts. It then installs customized versions of various RATs and other custom malware, such as ProCC, on the victim’s machine that could later execute commands and set up remote access to the infected systems.

Each spear-phishing email is crafted with special attention to detail. The emails impersonate real people from legitimate organizations who make a fake booking request for a large group of people. 

It is worth noting that even careful users could be tricked to open and download attachments from such emails as they include an abundance of details (for instance, copies of legal documents and reasons for booking at the hotel) and looked convincing. The only detail that would reveal the attacker would be a typosquatting domain of the organization.

Once infected, computers can be accessed remotely, and not just by the cybercriminal group itself. Evidence collected by Kaspersky researchers shows that remote access to hospitality desks and the data they contain is sold on criminal forums on a subscription basis. 

Malware collected data from hospitality desk clipboards, printer spoolers and captured screenshots (this function was triggered using specific words in English or Portuguese). As hotel personnel often copied clients’ credit card data from OTA’s in order to charge them, this data could also be compromised.

Kaspersky telemetry confirmed targets in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, France, Italy, Mexico, Portugal, Spain, Thailand and Turkey. However, based on data extracted from Bit.ly, a popular link shortening service used by the attackers to spread malicious links, Kaspersky researchers assume that users from many other countries have at least accessed the malicious link, suggesting that the number of countries with potential victims could be higher.

“As users grow wary of how protected their data truly is, cybercriminals turn to small businesses, which are often not very well protected from cyberattacks and possess a concentration of personal data,” said Dmitry Bestuzhev, head of global research and analysis team for Kaspersky Latin America. “Hoteliers and other small businesses dealing with customer data need to be more cautious and apply professional security solutions to avoid data leaks that could potentially not only affect customers, but also damage hotel reputations as well.”