SUSE Appoints New CEO

SUSE has appointed Melissa Di Donato as the next CEO of the company to succeed Nils Brauckmann, who will be retiring and leaving SUSE.

"I am incredibly proud of SUSE's progress and growth over the last eight years, which has culminated in it securing independent status," Brauckmann said.

Prior to SUSE, Di Donato was chief operating officer and chief revenue officer at SAP, where she was responsible for the worldwide revenue, profit, and customer satisfaction of the company's digital core solutions.

"SUSE is at the cusp of a historic shift as open source software is now a critical part of any thriving enterprise's core business strategy," said Di Donato in a press release. "We are well-positioned to emerge as the clear leader of this shift, with our ability to power digital transformation for our customers at their own pace and with agile, enterprise-grade open source solutions, edge to core to cloud."

Di Donato also held senior executive positions at Salesforce and was recognized for her contributions to growing global organizations by winning the 2018 Digital Masters Award for Excellence in Commercial Management.

GitHub Blocks Access to Private Repositories in Certain Countries

GitHub announced that it has restricted access to some of its commercial services in countries that are on the US sanctioned list. The countries include Iran, North Korea, Syria, Crimea, etc.

Nat Friedman, CEO of GitHub, wrote on Twitter "It is painful for me to hear how trade restrictions have hurt people. We have gone to great lengths to do no more than what is required by the law, but of course, people are still affected. GitHub is subject to US trade law, just like any company that does business in the US."

Many developers complained that they lost access to their repositories when they tried to access them from these countries. GitHub has blocked access based on the IP address of the user. It's certainly going to flag many accounts in error. GitHub has created a form that users can complete to review their restrictions.

GitHub also confirmed that due to US trade laws, only commercial services are blocked. Users from these countries can freely access pages and public repositories. Users can also access GitHub's self-hosted platform to run their private repositories locally.

A New Ransomware Targeting Linux-Based NAS Devices

Linux-based network-attached storage (NAS) devices made by QNAP Systems are under a new ransomware attack, allowing bad actors to hold users' data hostage for ransom.

According to The Hacker News, independently discovered by researchers at two separate security firms, Intezer and Anomali, the new ransomware family targets poorly protected or vulnerable QNAP NAS servers either by brute-forcing weak SSH credentials or exploiting known vulnerabilities.

The ransomware implementations are called QNAPCrypt by Intezer and eCh0raix by Anomali. Written in the Go programming language, the ransomeware encrypts files with targeted extensions using AES encryption and appends an .encrypt extension to each.

For some unknown reason, the ransomware is being merciful to NAS devices located in Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia. "The ransomware terminates the file encryption process and exits without doing any harm to the files," reported The Hacker News.