Latest news
28/02/2018: In response to the Spectre/Meltdown security vulnerabilities, Steelcyber Scientific wishes to inform customers of the following measures. All of our dedicated physical and virtual hosted systems have now been patched, according to the recommended practices by the manufacturers and have these issues mitigated from a security point of view. After applying these patches (Jan 5, 2018), a small number of our customers have experienced small to moderate performance regressions and stability issues on their HPC/storage hosted systems. Our technical team reviewed the cases and escalated them to our hardware vendor by mid January 2018. The result of this escalation was a confirmation by the processor manufacturer (Intel) that the patches can negatively affect performance, especially on their respective storage infrastructure hosted servers. As a result, Steelcyber Scientific decided to switch the storage and HPC backends of the affected customers to alternative hardware that is not affected by the stability/performance regressions. The cost of such a transfer was met by Steelcyber Scientific and the switching of their platforms was completed by Sunday Feb 25th 2018, according to our SLA terms for problem resolution.
16/10/2017: In response to the recent WPA2 Key Reinstallation AttaCKS KRACKS, Steelcyber Scientific issues the following advisory to help system and network administrators/IT professionals and users to understand and mitigate the vulnerability.
14/05/2017: In response to the recent limited global Ransomware of the Wanna Decryptor strain incident, Steelcyber Scientific has provided assistance and full data recovery only to a few selected customers that were affected by this. The affected customers had issues with Microsoft Windows platforms. An earlier pre-cursor of the incident was detected by LUARM running on CIFS/SMB server shares connected to Microsoft Windows computers. LUARM signatures are now available, as part of the surveillance countermeasures in an effort to detect remaining pockets of these incidents in small-medium sized business setups. We urge our customers to follow three simple rules that help avoid this type of malware to spread: a)Have a backup of your vital data b)Do not click on executables sent by email, even if the email appears to be from a known sender, c)Patch/software update all your systems, especially the ones connected to central file servers in your work environment. For more info, please do not hesitate to get in touch with us for assistance.
31/12/2016: Steelcyber Scientific has mitigated the issue of the leap second decision on its infrastructure. During the last three months, it has become apparent that Linux systems that contain out of date kernels, NTP clients and time zone files may develop undesired effects (filesystem crashes, system freezing) if a leap second is inserted via NTP, during the time syncronization step. To mitigate the issue, we have now updated all customer systems to ensure that there will be no complications as a result of this matter, following vendor approved standard practices. The mitigation steps also concern our networking and power/cooling systems of our data centers. We wish our customers a healthy and productive 2017.
20/12/2016: Steelcyber Scientific obtains Tier III Data Center Site Infrastructure certification: Steelcyber scientific is pleased to announce that all of its data center partners comply now to the Industry standard Tier III Data Center Site Infrastructure certification of the widely recognised UptimeInstitute. "It is a commitment that we ought to give to our paying customers and an achievement made possible by our hard working DevOps personnel. They worked to achieve for a second year (2015-2016) a 99.8% availability across all SLA agreements we established, we are very proud of this achievement and we look forward in improving it." declared our Chief Technical Officer Dr. George Magklaras. The Certification concerns our data Center Operations in Norway, UK, USA and Mexico.