All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🔍 Google and industry partners have disrupted IPIDEA, a large residential proxy network used to conceal malicious activity. The operation combined court action to seize domains with intelligence-sharing and platform enforcement, including expanded protections in Google Play Protect that remove apps embedding IPIDEA SDKs and block further installs. Google reports these steps have reduced the pool of proxy devices by millions and expect knock-on effects across reseller-linked services. The network’s SDKs were tied to multiple botnets and used by numerous threat actors to obscure follow-on attacks.

🔍 Conversational Analytics in BigQuery (preview) brings an AI-powered reasoning agent into BigQuery Studio, enabling users to query, visualize, and forecast directly with natural language. The agent generates and executes SQL grounded in your schema, metadata, and verified queries, and it exposes the SQL and reasoning behind each answer to build trust. Security, governance, and audit logging are enforced by BigQuery’s compliance controls, and the feature also supports unstructured data and API integration for custom agents.

🚀 Google.Cloud.VertexAI.Extensions brings Microsoft.Extensions.AI abstractions to .NET developers, enabling access to Google Gemini models on Vertex AI via a unified API. The preview package implements core interfaces — IChatClient, IEmbeddingGenerator, and an experimental IImageGenerator — and supports chat, streaming responses, embeddings, and image generation samples. It targets developers who want provider-agnostic integration and invites feedback while in pre-release.

🚀 Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra) now supports pre-warming of tables so customers can proactively prepare new and existing tables for anticipated traffic peaks. The capability works for both provisioned and on-demand capacity modes, including multi-Region replicated tables, and is applied during create or update operations. Pre-warming runs non-disruptively and asynchronously, incurs a one-time charge based on the difference from baseline capacity, and is available in all AWS Commercial and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions where Keyspaces is offered.

📞 Microsoft will add a Report a Call feature in Teams that lets users flag suspicious or unwanted one-to-one calls as potential scams or phishing. The option appears in call history on Windows, Mac and the web and is enabled by default; administrators can disable it in the Teams Admin Center under Calling settings. Limited metadata — timestamps, duration, caller ID and participant Teams IDs — is shared with the organization and Microsoft, and reports are viewable in the Microsoft Defender portal or Teams Admin Center. Targeted Release begins mid-March, with worldwide general availability planned by late April.

🤖 Cloudflare published Moltworker, an adaptation of the open-source Moltbot personal AI agent designed to run on the Cloudflare Developer Platform instead of dedicated local hardware. The implementation combines Workers, the Sandbox SDK, Browser Rendering, and R2 to run agent workloads at the edge with controlled persistence. Integration with AI Gateway adds centralized observability, BYOK support, unified billing and fallback behavior. The repo is open-source and the project is presented as a proof-of-concept that requires a paid Workers plan.

🔒 You can now change the server-side encryption type of encrypted objects in Amazon S3 without moving data. Use the UpdateObjectEncryption API to atomically change encryption keys across any object size or storage class, and run it at scale with S3 Batch Operations to standardize entire buckets while preserving object properties and Lifecycle eligibility. The capability supports migrating from SSE-S3 to SSE-KMS, swapping customer-managed KMS keys, and enabling S3 Bucket Keys to reduce KMS requests. The API is available in all AWS Regions via the AWS Management Console and SDKs.

🚀 AWS has introduced deployment Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) in the AWS MCP Server preview, enabling AI agents to perform multi-step web application deployments from MCP-compatible IDEs and CLIs using natural language prompts. The SOPs generate AWS CDK infrastructure, deploy CloudFormation stacks, and create CI/CD pipelines following recommended AWS security best practices. Supported frameworks include React, Vue.js, Angular, and Next.js. The preview in US East (N. Virginia) is available at no additional MCP cost; customers pay only for the AWS resources and data transfer they use.

🔒 Google has introduced stronger authentication safeguards and enhanced recovery tools to make smartphones harder targets for thieves. The update adds granular controls for Failed Authentication Lock, expands Identity Check to protect all apps using the Android Biometric Prompt (including Google Password Manager and third‑party banking apps), and introduces longer lockout times to slow guessing attempts. Remote Lock now offers an optional security challenge to verify ownership, and for new devices in Brazil Google will enable Theft Detection Lock and Remote Lock by default. Authentication safeguards require Android 16+; recovery tools require Android 10+.

🔒 CISOs must prioritize reducing dwell time by acting on high-quality, timely threat intelligence that maps to actual business risk rather than broad public feeds. AnyRun promotes STIX/TAXII-compatible TI Feeds that deliver validated IPs, domains, and hashes plus behavioral context from global sandbox analyses, claiming near-zero false positives and 99% unique indicators. Integrating these feeds into SIEM, EDR/XDR, TIP, or NDR is presented as a way to detect more threats, lower escalations, and accelerate MTTD/MTTR to preserve operational continuity.

🚀 The BigQuery AI Hackathon concluded on September 22, 2025, with 5,350 entrants and 277 submissions demonstrating practical uses of BigQuery's generative AI, vector search, and multimodal tools. Winners such as OncOmix AI, SpeakAura AI, and TriLink showcased solutions for precision oncology, speech therapy, and automated ticket triage. BigQuery AI also added SQL-first capabilities including AI.IF with Preview sublinear scaling, AI.CLASSIFY, AI.SEARCH, AI.SCORE, and AI.EMBED to simplify embedding, search, classification, and multimodal workflows while improving performance.

🚀 Amazon GameLift Servers now supports automatic scaling to and from zero instances, enabling game developers to eliminate charges for idle compute during inactive periods. This removes the need to keep instances running solely to preserve Fleet autoscaling, reducing infrastructure costs for titles with variable or unpredictable traffic. The capability is available in all supported regions and scales up automatically when game sessions are requested, simplifying operations and improving cost-efficiency.

🚀 Amazon EKS and EKS Distro now support Kubernetes 1.35, enabling creation of new clusters and upgrades of existing clusters via the EKS console, eksctl, or infrastructure-as-code tools. Kubernetes 1.35 introduces In-Place Pod Resource Updates to adjust CPU and memory without restarting pods, PreferSameNode traffic distribution to favor local endpoints, Node Topology Labels via the Downward API for region/zone awareness, and Image Volumes for delivering data artifacts such as AI models. EKS 1.35 is available in all AWS Regions where EKS is offered, including AWS GovCloud (US), and EKS Distro builds are published to the ECR Public Gallery and GitHub. Refer to the EKS documentation for available versions, upgrade guidance, lifecycle policies, and use EKS Cluster Insights to surface issues that could affect upgrades.

⚡ Amazon Web Services has made R7gd EC2 instances available in the Europe (Paris) Region, offering up to 3.8 TB of local NVMe-based SSD block storage. Powered by AWS Graviton3 processors with DDR5 memory and built on the AWS Nitro System, these instances target memory-intensive workloads such as open-source databases, in-memory caches, and real-time analytics. They provide high-speed, low-latency local storage suitable for scratch space, temporary files, and caches, and can be launched via the AWS Management Console.

🔒 Palo Alto Networks unveiled Quantum-Safe Security to help organizations transition to post-quantum cryptography without disrupting operations. It provides continuous, real-time cryptographic visibility by collecting telemetry from PAN-OS NGFW, Prisma Access and third-party tools to catalog certificates, algorithms, key exchanges and libraries. The solution prioritizes harvest now, decrypt later risks, guides staged remediation including hybrid algorithms and real-time encryption translation for legacy systems, and automates governance and compliance. Integration with SIEM, EDR and other systems supports gradual migration across complex environments.

🚀 In 2025, Spanner became a first-class database for AI and multi-model workloads, integrating vectors, graphs, and text search to provide richer context for generative applications. Google expanded AI integrations including ML.PREDICT, Vertex RAG Engine support, an Agent Development Kit, and ANN search with ScaNN to speed semantic retrieval. The release also bridged operational and analytical silos with a columnar engine and tighter BigQuery/Iceberg integrations, simplified Cassandra and MySQL migrations, boosted price-performance, and strengthened enterprise safeguards such as drop protection and default backup schedules.

🚀 Google Cloud announced concurrency for GKE node pool auto-creation, significantly reducing provisioning latency and improving autoscaling responsiveness. Internal benchmarks report up to an 85% improvement in provisioning speed, especially for heterogeneous, multi-tenant, and AI workloads that require multiple distinct node types. The improvement is available in version 1.34.1-gke.1829001 and requires only upgrading GKE; no additional configuration is necessary.

🔁 Amazon MSK Replicator is now available in the Asia Pacific (New Zealand) Region, enabling replication of streaming data across Amazon MSK clusters with a few clicks. The managed feature provides automatic asynchronous replication, scales underlying resources, and replicates Kafka metadata including topic configurations, ACLs, and consumer group offsets. You can orchestrate replication from the console or CLI and use cross‑region failover to resume processing during regional disruptions.

🔒 Meta has begun rolling out a new WhatsApp feature called Strict Account Settings that provides lockdown-style protections for journalists, public figures, and other high-risk users. The option, enabled only from a user's primary device under Settings > Privacy > Advanced, enforces the strictest privacy controls, including mandatory two-step verification and blocking media and calls from unknown senders. It also hides profile data, disables link previews, and limits features that could expose users to sophisticated spyware. Meta said the feature is intended for the small number of users who face targeted, high-risk campaigns.

🔁 Amazon DynamoDB multi-Region strong consistency (MRSC) global tables now integrate with AWS Fault Injection Service (FIS), enabling teams to run controlled experiments that pause regional replication to observe application behavior. You can create realistic regional-failure scenarios to validate monitoring, recovery, and resiliency mechanisms. This capability helps tune alarms, failover logic, and operational runbooks before real outages occur. Support is available in multiple AWS Regions and documentation outlines how to get started.