New Petyawrap Ransomware Attack Again Highlights Critical Need For Security Processes

Whenever there's a new attack on a global scale, the world trusts the Internet a little less. Today we are concerned with the many reports about this new ransomware attack called "Petyawrap", "Petrwrap" or an older name of "Petya."

The sad fact is: this new attack exploits the same vulnerabilities in Windows systems as last month's WannaCry attack. 

Fixes have been available for most Windows systems since March 2017!

The same tips Niel Harper provided last month to protect against ransomware also apply here.

Dan York

Patching Not Enough to Stop Petya

Voluminous amounts of information have already been disseminated regarding the “Petya” (or is it “NotPetya”? [1]) ransomware that hit the Ukraine hard [2] along with organizations such as “the American pharmaceutical giant Merck, the Danish shipping company AP Moller-Maersk, the British advertising firm WPP, Saint-Gobain […]

What Cisco’s new programmable switches mean for you

To help ring in the 2017 New Year, CNN wanted to do a live shot from a Royal Caribbean cruise ship, but had an issue: “They were concerned about being out at sea, would they have the ability to live-stream?” says Royal Caribbean’s CIO Mike Giresi.The answer was yes, and the live-shot went off without a hitch, in part because the ship’s Cisco network gear was programmable to prioritize the video trafficAs an early implementer, Royal Caribbean has found benefits from regarding Cisco’s programmable infrastructure as a flexible asset that can be driven by software. “There are huge advantages to looking at the network as a software layer,” Giresi says. “It gives us the ability to create products, drive an experience and deliver services that are integrated with the infrastructure.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

What Cisco’s new programmable switches mean for you

To help ring in the 2017 New Year, CNN wanted to do a live shot from a Royal Caribbean cruise ship, but had an issue: “They were concerned about being out at sea, would they have the ability to live-stream?” says Royal Caribbean’s CIO Mike Giresi.The answer was yes, and the live-shot went off without a hitch, in part because the ship’s Cisco network gear was programmable to prioritize the video trafficAs an early implementer, Royal Caribbean has found benefits from regarding Cisco’s programmable infrastructure as a flexible asset that can be driven by software. “There are huge advantages to looking at the network as a software layer,” Giresi says. “It gives us the ability to create products, drive an experience and deliver services that are integrated with the infrastructure.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Giving Out Grades For Exascale Efforts

Just by being the chief architect of the IBM’s BlueGene massively parallel supercomputer, which was built as part of a protein folding simulation grand challenge effort undertaken by IBM in the late 1990s, Al Gara would be someone whom the HPC community would listen to whenever he spoke. But Gara is now an Intel Fellow and also chief exascale architect at Intel, which has emerged as the second dominant supplier of supercomputer architectures alongside Big Blue’s OpenPower partnership with founding members Nvidia, Mellanox Technologies, and Google.

It may seem ironic that Gara did not stay around IBM to help this

Giving Out Grades For Exascale Efforts was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Epyc win for AMD in the server security battle

While everyone is talking about the impressive performance potential and scale of AMD’s new Epyc server chips, overlooked in all the hoopla are the security features of the chip that may prove just as appealing.To start off, there is the tag team of Secure Memory Encryption (SME) and Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV). Secure Memory Encryption allows for full encryption of data stored in DRAM, and SEV allows individual virtual machines to be assigned a unique cryptographic key, thus isolating them from each other as well as the OS hypervisor and administrator layer. These functions are based on a hardware security processor attached to the memory controller with a 128-bit AES encryption engine.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Epyc win for AMD in the server security battle

While everyone is talking about the impressive performance potential and scale of AMD’s new Epyc server chips, overlooked in all the hoopla are the security features of the chip that may prove just as appealing.To start off, there is the tag team of Secure Memory Encryption (SME) and Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV). Secure Memory Encryption allows for full encryption of data stored in DRAM, and SEV allows individual virtual machines to be assigned a unique cryptographic key, thus isolating them from each other as well as the OS hypervisor and administrator layer. These functions are based on a hardware security processor attached to the memory controller with a 128-bit AES encryption engine.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

DOE taps 6 firms for exascale computing research

The Department of Energy has awarded six tech firms a total of $258 million in funding for research and development into exascale computing. The move comes as the U.S. is falling behind in the world of top supercomputers.Energy Secretary Rick Perry announced that AMD, Cray, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM, Intel and Nvidia will receive financial support from the Department of Energy over the course of a three-year period. The funding will finance research and development in three main areas: hardware technology, software technology and application development.Each company will provide 40 percent of the overall project cost in addition to the government funding. The plan is for one of those companies to be able to deliver an exascale-capable supercomputer by 2021. It’s part of the DOE’s Exascale Computing Project (ECP), which in turn is part of its new PathForward program, designed to accelerate the research necessary to deploy the nation’s first exascale supercomputers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

DOE taps 6 firms for exascale computing research

The Department of Energy has awarded six tech firms a total of $258 million in funding for research and development into exascale computing. The move comes as the U.S. is falling behind in the world of top supercomputers.Energy Secretary Rick Perry announced that AMD, Cray, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM, Intel and Nvidia will receive financial support from the Department of Energy over the course of a three-year period. The funding will finance research and development in three main areas: hardware technology, software technology and application development.Each company will provide 40 percent of the overall project cost in addition to the government funding. The plan is for one of those companies to be able to deliver an exascale-capable supercomputer by 2021. It’s part of the DOE’s Exascale Computing Project (ECP), which in turn is part of its new PathForward program, designed to accelerate the research necessary to deploy the nation’s first exascale supercomputers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Static Routing configuration different ways

Today I am going to talk about the Static routing and default routing. Some of you already know about the both these but some of you guys are still not aware about this stuff. This article is basically for the starters in the Networking field.


Fig 1.1- Sample Static routing configuration

Let's talk about the IP routing first with the static routing. When using the ip route command, you can identify where packets should be routed to in two ways: 
  • The next-hop address 
  • The exit interface 
Way-1 :The Next-Hop Address
Router(config)#ip route 172.16.20.0 255.255.255.0 172.16.10.2
172.16.20.0 = destination network
255.255.255.0 = subnet mask 
172.16.10.2 = next-hop address
What does it means: To get to the destination network of 172.16.20.0, with a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0, send all packets to 172.16.10.2  

Way-2 :The exit interface
Router(config)#ip route 172.16.20.0 255.255.255.0 s0/0
172.16.20.0 = destination network 
255.255.255.0 = subnet mask s0/0 = exit interface
What does it means: To get to the destination network Continue reading