The reports came swiftly on Friday morning, May 12—the first I saw were that dozens of hospitals in England were affected by ransomware, denying physicians access to patient medical records and causing surgery and other treatments to be delayed. Said the BBC:
The malware spread quickly on Friday, with medical staff in the UK reportedly seeing computers go down "one by one".NHS staff shared screenshots of the WannaCry programme, which demanded a payment of $300 (£230) in virtual currency Bitcoin to unlock the files for each computer.Throughout the day other, mainly European countries, reported infections.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The reports came swiftly on Friday morning, May 12—the first I saw were that dozens of hospitals in England were affected by ransomware, denying physicians access to patient medical records and causing surgery and other treatments to be delayed. Said the BBC:
The malware spread quickly on Friday, with medical staff in the UK reportedly seeing computers go down "one by one".NHS staff shared screenshots of the WannaCry programme, which demanded a payment of $300 (£230) in virtual currency Bitcoin to unlock the files for each computer.Throughout the day other, mainly European countries, reported infections.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Soon it will be time to say “goodbye” to my family’s VueZone video cameras. Over the past three years, we have made quite an investment in NetGear’s VueZone technology: two hubs, eight regular and night-vision cameras, and even weatherproof outdoor housings. Soon: Poof. Toodles. It was fun, now it’s done.We initially purchased one NetGear VueZone Home Video Monitoring System in August 2013 for $218.48 (including tax), plus additional cameras and housings along the way. A few months later, we bought a second system for another piece of property. In addition, we paid NetGear an annual fee for motion detection and to store video clips in the cloud whenever activity was detected.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Many web browsers have some variation of “private” browsing mode. In that mode, websites shouldn't be able to read cookies stored on your computer, nor should they be able to place permanent cookies onto your computer. (They think they can place cookies, but those cookies are deleted at the end of the session.)Normally, you have two ways to use those modes:
Deliberately decide to start a private session. On Firefox for the Mac, it’s File -> New Private Window. Ditto for Safari for the Mac. In Chrome for the Mac, it’s File -> New Incognito Window. The process is similar for Windows, and it is somewhat different on phones and tablets. The problem is that if you click a link in, say, an email, it will open in a regular, non-private window.
Set a default that every browser session will be private/incognito. (The method varies widely based on browser and operating system.) This method will handle external link requests by opening them in private/incognito mode. But since everything else will open that way too, you’ll have to manually log into every website you visit. That is a real nuisance. (You can set browsers to block cookies, but that’s bigger nuisance because Continue reading
Sally called the security desk. She can’t find her personal smartphone. Maybe she lost it. Perhaps it fell behind her sofa. Maybe she left it at a restaurant last night. Perhaps someone stole it. Or maybe she put it down somewhere this morning.Whatever the case may be, it's not good—especially since Sally is a well-regarded and trusted mid-level manager with mobile access to many corporate applications and intranet sites that have a lot of sensitive and proprietary information.Now what?There are several types of dangers presented by a lost Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) smartphone or tablet, and many IT professionals and security specialists think only about some of them. They are all problematic. We’ll run through some of the scenarios in a moment, but first: Does your company have policies about lost personal devices?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Sally called the security desk. She can’t find her personal smartphone. Maybe she lost it. Perhaps it fell behind her sofa. Maybe she left it at a restaurant last night. Perhaps someone stole it. Or maybe she put it down somewhere this morning.Whatever the case may be, it's not good—especially since Sally is a well-regarded and trusted mid-level manager with mobile access to many corporate applications and intranet sites that have a lot of sensitive and proprietary information.Now what?There are several types of dangers presented by a lost Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) smartphone or tablet, and many IT professionals and security specialists think only about some of them. They are all problematic. We’ll run through some of the scenarios in a moment, but first: Does your company have policies about lost personal devices?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Vendor lock-in is dead. Proprietary specifications are dead. Closed vendor ecosystems are dead. Today’s networks are increasingly defined on de facto and de jour open standards—call it open source, call it open APIs, call it whatever you want. It’s all about openness and collaboration. Vendor consortia are open, as are the many partnerships and pairings between standards-defining organizations.It’s about time, and it’s all good.The power of open source and open standards
In May, I attended TM Forum Live, the big telecommunications management conference in Nice, France, produced by the TM Forum. Once a bastion of operations support systems (OSS) and business support systems (BSS) for carriers, TM Forum is all about digital transformation and open standards. More than two dozen multivendor interoperability and proof-of-concept demonstrations—which the conference calls “Catalysts”—showed off the power of open source and open standards. But that was only the start.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Panama Papers should be a wake-up call to every CEO, COO, CTO and CIO in every company.Yes, it’s good that alleged malfeasance by governments and big institutions came to light. However, it’s also clear that many companies simply take for granted that their confidential information will remain confidential. This includes data that’s shared within the company, as well as information that’s shared with trusted external partners, such as law firms, financial advisors and consultants. We’re talking everything from instant messages to emails, from documents to databases, from passwords to billing records.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Panama Papers should be a wake-up call to every CEO, COO, CTO and CIO in every company.Yes, it’s good that alleged malfeasance by governments and big institutions came to light. However, it’s also clear that many companies simply take for granted that their confidential information will remain confidential. This includes data that’s shared within the company, as well as information that’s shared with trusted external partners, such as law firms, financial advisors and consultants. We’re talking everything from instant messages to emails, from documents to databases, from passwords to billing records.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It looks like a slick Jedi move, but it's actually the Internet of Things: When Hannes Sjöblad wants to pay for coffee, he waves his hand in front of the pay station. When he wants to open a door, he waves his hand in front of the digital lock. When he wants to start his car, he waves his hand in front of the ignition. No, he's not Obi-Wan Kenobi saving two rebel droids; Sjöblad is a famous Swedish bodyhacker who has implanted electronics, including a passive Near-Field Communications (NFC) transmitter, into his own hand. So, instead of using his smartphone or smartwatch to activate a payment terminal, a wave of the hand gets the job done.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
"Ve are here to Pump You Up." I can't help but think about the old Saturday Night Live routines with bodybuilders Hans and Franz when looking at today's cloud data centers. They are big. They are bulked up. They are, indeed, pumped up. But how strong are they, really? As we would ask in IT terms: Do they scale? Can they perform? Or are they girly-man clouds?Those are hard questions.Knowing the capacity of a data center is next to impossible. The tech specs are easy – so many servers, so many CPUs, so many gigahertz, such-and-such network connectivity, so much storage I/O bandwidth. Those specs are easy, and also meaningless, without actually measuring the complete stack's end-to-end performance.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
DevOps is one of the hottest trends in software development. It's all about helping businesses achieve agile service delivery – that is, moving applications from development to test to deployment as quickly as possible.Fast application deployment may seem at odds with robust security practices, which often take a go-slow approach to new or changed applications in order to verify that the applications are safe before letting them touch live data or business networks — or be exposed to the Internet or customers.Fortunately, there's nothing inherently risky or dangerous about DevOps and agile service delivery, as long as the right security policies are created and followed, and if automation eliminates unnecessary delay in ensuring compliance.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Service orchestration is important, but there's a lot more to it than being able to allow customers to quickly self-provision connections and bandwidth. Orchestration should also mean being able to rapidly detect and resolve connection problems.I read a lot about service orchestration, and the top vendors and industry organizations that talk to me about it are manifold. There's the MetroEthernet Forum (MEF), with its Third Network, and Lifecycle Service Orchestration vision. There are companies like CENX, Cyan, and Tail-f (now part of Cisco). All too often, the messages are good, but repetitive: Customers are sick of waiting weeks or months for new connections. They want to be able to do their own moves, adds, and changes. They want to have MPLS service or Carrier Ethernet to have the agility of, say, the ubiquitous Internet.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Internet of Things is coming, and drastic traffic growth is going to blow your network sky-high. Should you scale up your on-premises data center? No. Should you move to the cloud? No. The best strategy, according to a speaker at the Interop 2015 conference, is to move your servers, applications, and data into your own servers in a top-tier colocation facility.That’s not the advice you’d expect to hear in 2015, when the industry message is relentlessly cloud, cloud, cloud, cloud, cloud – and when the Interop expert speaker, Jason Mendenhall, carries the business card title of Executive Vice President, Cloud. However, when you realize that Mr. Mendenhall works for Switch’s massive 1.6 million square foot colocation center in Las Vegas, his bias toward colos becomes clear.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
One of the coolest demonstrations at the RSA Conference in San Francisco was of a network functions virtualization (NFV)-based firewall and Deep Content Inspection engine embedded into the software-defined networking (SDN) control plane of a heavily laden network. The firewall/DCI engine filtered content and blocked SQL injection attacks in real time, without slowing down the simulated network. The OpenStack-based testbed was created and run by Spirent, a Southern California firm well known for its network testing platform. The security firm with the firewall and DCI engine was Wedge Networks, a Canadian company that's focused on the cloud.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Do you know SDN? Do you follow NFV? What about OSS? Those are yesterday's acronyms. The new buzzword is LSO, and it's going to be huge not only for carriers and other service providers, but also for enterprise customers.Lifecycle Service Orchestration is a catchphrase that embraces the range of activities performed by a telco or other communications service provider. An LSO platform would handle everything from provisioning the customer order to controlling the delivery of the service to gathering metrics and ensuring guaranteed performance levels to remediating fault to providing usage reports to offering analytics to customers.That's a lot to unpack, but the bottom line is that LSO is going to be big. According to the Service Provider Lifecycle Service Orchestration (LSO) Overview and Market Forecast report published by the Rayno Report in March 2015, LSO will be a $2.75 billion market by 2019 and will combine technologies found today in Operation Support Systems, Software Defined Networks, and Network Functions Virtualization.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Do you know SDN? Do you follow NFV? What about OSS? Those are yesterday's acronyms. The new buzzword is LSO, and it's going to be huge not only for carriers and other service providers, but also for enterprise customers.Lifecycle Service Orchestration is a catchphrase that embraces the range of activities performed by a telco or other communications service provider. An LSO platform would handle everything from provisioning the customer order to controlling the delivery of the service to gathering metrics and ensuring guaranteed performance levels to remediating fault to providing usage reports to offering analytics to customers.That's a lot to unpack, but the bottom line is that LSO is going to be big. According to the Service Provider Lifecycle Service Orchestration (LSO) Overview and Market Forecast report published by the Rayno Report in March 2015, LSO will be a $2.75 billion market by 2019 and will combine technologies found today in Operation Support Systems, Software Defined Networks, and Network Functions Virtualization.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Alan Zeichick