The recent Sony attack is considered one of the worst cyberattacks in US corporate history. The hackers stole over 100 terabytes of data, including personal data of thousands of employees and business partners. So it’s not hard to imagine how chaotic it was for the 6,000 employees at Sony.  According to The Wall Street Journal, company email was immediately shut down after the attack, forcing every employee to resort to “an old-style communication network.” They relied on phones, gmail accounts and note pads to reach each other.

The FBI has launched a new campaign to hire a group of tech experts to join the agency and become "cyber special agents." An official FBI news story has been posted to describe the kind of role it's hiring for. The agency says that it's looking for people with experience in computer programming, malware analysis, and even ethical hacking.  An ethical hacker is someone hired by the owner of a computer system to try and break into it in order to test its security. Now, the FBI is looking to hire people with hacking skills to become cyber special agents.

US banks may have embarked upon a hacking campaign of their own, allegedly disabling servers used by Iran in a series of 2012 cyberattack.  Bloomberg is reporting that the FBI is investigating whether US financial institutions have started fighting back against hackers. US Representative Michael McCaul has described the current state of cyberattack as "kind of a Wild West right now," remarking that US companies have been launching cyberattacks without government permission.

Intel will produce its own custom chips for cloud providers next year, reports the New York Times.
The reason is simple: Intel can easily change chip designs and leave out unwanted core features or alter other properties, such as to gain compute and power optimization for public cloud servers. It’s a matter of a few commands to the production systems to get custom chips.[ From Amazon to Windows Azure, InfoWorld puts IaaS clouds to the test to find out which is best for you. | Stay up on cloud developments with InfoWorld's Cloud Computing newsletter. ]