Rackspace hacked + a re:Invent recap

A cyber attack on Rackspace has taken out hosted Microsoft Exchange servers for what appears to be the vast majority, if not all of its customers -- the company is urging those affected to switch to Microsoft 365 instead.

"In order to best protect the environment, this will continue to be an extended outage of Hosted Exchange" Rackspace said on Sunday.

Here's what we know thus far.

Over 125 different new services were released during AWS's annual re:Invent jamboree in Las Vegas last week. The Stack sat in on some keynotes to reflect on the new silicon, new software and some notable absences.

Our takes on AWS's "Zero-ETL" drive; "SimSpace Weaver", "Application Composer" and why CEO Adam Selipsky wasn't talking cloud costs...

The British government plans to make MSPs subject to the NIS Regulations.

That's a welcome move (for customers, if not for some MSPs themselves) to tighten up security requirements as supply chain attacks continues. Data centres also look set to be rolled into the expanded new CNI regulations.

The US Department of Defense was blunt about its cybersecurity failings in a recently updated Zero Trust strategy. Hackers, it said, "roam freely" in its networks. With the Army alone (one of its seven armed forces) using 2,370 on-premises systems and applications; 40,000+ different analytics products; 150 different system interfaces for its 72,000 IT staff overseeing 1.4 million users, that's a whole lot of attack surface. Here's what it's planning...

And finally it would be remiss of us not to note the launch of ChatGPT, OpenAI's striking new release. Demand was so high as reports came in of the AI engine's ability to write essays, code, amusing limericks, recipes and more with the lightest of prompts, that it crashed and OpenAI had to add more capacity.

Believe the hyperbole. The "chatbot" and the GPT 3.5 model it was trained on are going to be hugely impactful and there is going to be more to come very soon. The world continues to be disrupted by technology arguably faster than many are realising. Have a play with it yourself and let us know your views.