Today’s topics include Redlock Security revealing a Tesla cloud account data breach; Google consolidating Android Pay and Google Wallet; Samsung producing 32TB solid-state storage drives; and Microsoft’s Network Performance Monitor keeping tabs on ExpressRoute private cloud links.

According to a report by security company RedLock, an unsecured Kubernetes container management console allowed cyber-attackers to breach a Tesla cloud account that contained sensitive data, including telemetry data from the company’s electric cars.

The breach resulted from the exposure of Amazon Web Services security credentials after hackers penetrated Tesla’s Kubernetes console, which was not password protected, RedLock’s Cloud Security Intelligence team discovered.

This led to the exposure of the company’s Amazon S3 cloud account containing sensitive data. Hackers also accessed Tesla’s AWS compute services to mine crypto-currency and went to great lengths to hide their activity by not using a public mining pool, by using CloudFlare to hide their traffic, by using non-standard ports and by throttling their CPU usage.

Effective this week, Google's new Google Pay app for Android has replaced the company’s previously separate Android Pay and Google Wallet apps.

Users can use credit and debit cards saved to their Google Account with the new Google Pay app. Google is currently working on enabling support for Google Pay across all Google products to ensure that people shopping on Chrome or via Google Assistant-driven services will have the same checkout experience as Android users.

In addition, the company is working with retailers, developers and online partners to embed Google Pay on sites, within mobile apps and at physical locations around the world. Uniting payment services under the Pay brand enables a quicker, safer and more consistent checkout experience for users and makes it easier to access rewards and promotional offers and pay for purchases and services, the company said.

Samsung unveiled on Feb. 20 that it has begun mass-producing a 32-terabyte Serial Attached SCSI solid-state storage drive, which is currently the world’s largest capacity.

The new 30.72TB SSD, dubbed the PM1643, utilizes 64-layer, 3-bit 512-gigabit processors and Samsung's latest V-NAND technology. V-NAND is a type of non-volatile flash memory that retains data even in the absence of an electrical current.

These large new drives will be used to satisfy the growing storage needs for the government, financial services, health care, education, oil and gas exploration, pharmaceuticals, social media, business services, retail, and communications sectors.

This breakthrough was made possible by combining 32 of the new 1TB NAND flash packages, each comprising 16 stacked layers of 512Gb V-NAND chips.

In addition to the doubled capacity, Samsung claims that data-speed performance levels are nearly twice that of its previous generation high-capacity SSD, four times the random-read performance and three times the sequential-read performance.

After teaming up with Cisco last month to help joint customers get to the bottom of their Azure ExpressRoute networking issues, Microsoft is now using its cloud-based Network Performance Monitor tool to provide more visibility into the connections that power their hybrid cloud environments.

Azure ExpressRoute provides businesses with a direct, private link to Microsoft's cloud, bypassing the public internet, improving security and boosting reliability. Network Performance Monitor, part of the Microsoft Operations Management Suite of IT management tools for on-premises and cloud infrastructures, enables users to oversee their network links to the Azure cloud.

Now, with the general availability release of a new ExpressRoute extension for Network Performance Monitor, customers can use the same tool to keep an eye on their private links to Azure.