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When the full data set was recovered, Hold found millions of credentials from Mail.ru, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft email accounts. All four companies told the BBC they were aware of the stolen credentials, and Mail.ru said that its investigation has initially suggested that the credentials may not still be active.

Email address and password combinations that have gone stale can still be useful to cybercriminals, however, for instance in targeted phishing attacks.

“This information is potent. It is floating around in the underground and this person has shown he’s willing to give the data away to people who are nice to him,” Hold Security founder and chief information security officer Alex Holden told Reuters. “These credentials can be abused multiple times.”

Hold Security has an established track record of uncovering breaches, including the theft of 1.2 billion credentials by the “Cybervor” gang in 2014.

Hold Security came into contact with the hacker as part of its regular interaction with the cybercriminal underworld, which supplements its automated information harvesting. The hacker claimed to have 900 million credentials in one batch, and after a protracted period of negotiation and refusing to pay the 50-rouble asking price, Hold managed to exchange “likes/votes to his social media page” in return for a compressed database containing a total of 1.17 billion stolen credentials from various breaches.

Source: TheWHIR

In Wednesday trading, EIG shares have fallen below $9, despite a refrain of optimism from both the company and analysts. The Associated Press reports that an average estimate of EIG’s earnings per share (EPS) from five analysts surveyed by Zack’s Investment Research was $0.26, and Risers & Fallers showed that five major investment firms weighing in since the start of the year had all reiterated prior neutral or positive ratings. Most recently among them, Credit Suisse maintained its “outperform” rating, and set its target price at $18.

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“This quarter demonstrated a collective focus as we balanced our efforts between the initial integration of Constant Contact and the other initiatives we are simultaneously driving,” EIG CEO and founder Hari Ravichandran said in an earnings call.

Ravichandran maintained that EIG’s cloud and WordPress products “are doing record numbers.”

“In 2016, we will be investing in marketing to drive our growth products and initiatives,” he said. “Our framework for the incremental spend considers some essential elements. First, as products are initially launched, subscriber acquisition costs are higher than they are at scale. Second, we’re entering into products with subscriber profiles that are different than our traditional hosting subscribers.”

The stock price had declined slightly through the first quarter prior to the earnings announcement. With a 34 percent increase in GAAP revenues over Q1 2015, and nearly 5.5 million total subscribers, EIG is undeniably still experiencing growth. Further, adjusting for one-time gains and costs, including a large tax benefit, EIG’s earnings were $0.24 per share. Earnings were roughly in line with analyst expectations.

EIG acquired SMB marketing platform Constant Contact in November in a deal WHIR blogger Tom Millitzer called “a turning point” for the the company, suggesting the parent should adopt Constant Contact as its top-level brand name to draw together its portfolio of dozens of hosting and web services brands.

Source: TheWHIR

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There is more encouraging news, however, as 36 percent said their response time decreased, versus 28 percent saying it had increased. SQL injection attacks, known vulnerabilities, rogue network devices, and security policy violations each take “mere minutes” for roughly half of those surveyed to detect.

“The most surprising finding of the survey is just how many organizations are less vulnerable today than they were a year ago, and, on a related note, how many have implemented security technologies and better security training,” Mav Turner, director, business strategy, SolarWinds said in a statement.

However, Turner warns, IT professionals need to avoid overestimating their defenses, as the stakes have risen, with 72 percent of breaches occurring at organizations who store customer data, and 45 percent store social security numbers. Over half considered the breaches to be medium or major severity.

“Given the heightened international media attention on IT security breaches, it was a pleasant surprise to see that 55 percent of respondents did not experience any security breaches in 2015, and only 24 percent believe a security breach is likely in 2016,” said Dr. Kristin Letourneau, director of research at Penton. “The survey data seems to reflect a shifting focus from fear of cyberattack, to the implementation, maintenance and refinement of established and effective security systems.”

When asked about best security practices, 83 percent identified endpoint security software as critical or very important, followed by patch management software (75 percent) and access management tools (71 percent). The top reasons for decreased vulnerability are adoption of intrusion detection and prevention systems, increased data encryption, patch management, security information and event management (SIEM) tools, and personnel security training.

Disclosure: Penton is the WHIR’s parent company.

Source: TheWHIR

CloudHealth’s cloud analytics platform enables clients to visualize, optimize, and automate of cloud environments, and the company said its clients have used its insights to formulate policies to significantly reduce cloud costs. Big name CloudHealth clients include Dow Jones and Acquia.

“We are very impressed with CloudHealth’s leadership, strategy and ability to execute in this rapidly evolving market,” said Das. “As the cloud plays an increasingly integral role in enterprise business, companies that can wring the most value out of their cloud resources are going to come out on top. CloudHealth helps its customers do just that, and we look forward to applying our enterprise experience and network to help the company drive growth.”

Source: TheWHIR

“This is a market that is so big and is growing so rapidly that companies can be growing by 10-30 percent per year and might feel good about themselves and yet they’d still be losing market share,” said John Dinsdale, a Chief Analyst and Research Director at Synergy Research Group. “The big question for them is whether or not they are building a sustainable and profitable business. This can be done by focusing on specific regions or specific services, but the bulk of the market demands huge scale, a broad footprint, very deep pockets and a long-term corporate focus.”

The “next 20” includes Alibaba, Century Link, Fujitsu, Orange, Rackspace, HPE, NTT, Salesforce, and VMware. Other companies with smaller shares than the biggest 24 companies still account for nearly 20 percent of the world market, with 30 percent growth.

Synergy found growth rates to be similar across regions, so the US continues to represent roughly half of the world market.

Research published last year by Synergy showed that infrastructure services are just one part of a much larger cloud revenue picture, which also includes the cloud infrastructure hardware market, which is led by Cisco and HP.

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Source: TheWHIR