New Crypto-mining Group Targeting Linux Servers, Creative Commons Holding a 24-Hour Web-a-thon for Open Education Week, Canonical Announces Support for Containerd, JDK Mission Control Now Available in Fedora 29 and Google Is Speeding Up the Back Button

A new crypto-mining group is targeting Linux servers. According to ZDNet, the attackers, called Pacha Group, are believed to be from China and have been attacking Linux servers since this past fall, inserting malware that mines cryptocurrency. Security researchers at Intezer discovered that the attackers “use brute-force attacks to compromise services like WordPress or PhpMyAdmin, and once they have an initial foothold, they escalate their access to the underlying server, where they deploy their malware, which Intezer has named Linux.GreedyAntd.” See the Intezer Blog for more details.

Canonical yesterday announced support for containerd in the 1.14 releases of Charmed Kubernetes and Microk8s. Carmine Rimi, product manager for Kubernetes at Canonical, says “Containerd has become the industry-standard container runtime focused on simplicity, robustness and portability. Enabling Kubernetes to drive containerd directly reduces the number of moving parts, reduces latency in pod startup times, and improves CPU and memory usage on every node in the cluster.” Containerd’s GitHub page is here.

JDK Mission Control is now available as a module in Fedora 29. JDK Mission Control is a profiling app for HotSpot JVMs, and it “has an advanced set of tools that enables efficient and detailed analysis of the extensive data collected by JDK Flight Recorder (JFR). JMC requires JDK 8 or later.”

Creative Commons announces a 24-hour Web-a-thon to be held on March 5–6 (depending on your time zone) as part of Open Eduction Week: “We have amazing speakers from around the world presenting in multiple languages. Experts from Algeria, Nigeria, Argentina, South Africa, Italy, Chile, United Kingdom, Afghanistan, United States, Ireland, Sweden, Canada and Poland will present their open education projects.” Sessions will be here. See this post for the presentation schedule.

Google is speeding up the back button with Chrome’s new “back/forward” cache. Ars Technica reports that Chrome’s new bfcache “lets the browser capture the entire state of a running page—including scripts that are in the middle of execution, the rendered images, and even the scroll position—and reload that state later. With bfcache, rather than having to reload the page from scratch, the page will look as if it was paused when you clicked a link to a new page and subsequently resumed when you hit back.”