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Worth Reading: Hunting AdwindRAT

An increasing number of malware families employ SSL/TLS encryption in order to evade detection by Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS). In this blog post I’m gonna have a look at Adwind, which is a cross-platform Remote Access Trojan (RAT) that has been using SSL to conceal it’s traffic for several years. AdwindRAT typically connects SSL sessions to seemingly random TCP ports on the C2 servers. Hence, a heuristic that could potentially be used to hunt for Adwind RAT malware is to look for SSL traffic going to TCP ports that normally don’t use SSL. However, relying on ONLY that heuristic would generate way too many false positives. —Erik Hjelmvik @ Netrecsec

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Worth Reading: Planning for cloud’s limitations

Protecting data from losses requires a well-planned data-management strategy. Many strategic plans include using cloud services, but IT and other departments must understand the cloud’s strengths and limitations when it comes to protection. The benefits of the cloud include inexpensive storage costs, instant scale, high availability and the elimination of on-premises hardware infrastructure. Used properly, the cloud is essential for many firms that simply couldn’t offer their service through any other platform. Despite these advantages, the cloud has limitations, and firms should build their plans around their understanding of these limitations. —David Zimmerman @ the Data Center Journal

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Worth Reading: Retrieval and relevance

Our expectations for search have gotten higher and higher since Google has gotten better and better. These days, very few people search beyond the first page. If those search results aren’t good enough, they’ll either try again or they’ll quit. As Search Engine Watch reports, “Page 1 results garnered 92 percent of all traffic from the average search, with traffic dropping off by 95 percent for Page 2.” —Faizan Ahmed @ Free Code Camp

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Reaction: Networking Vendors are Only Good for the Free Lunch

I ran into an article over at the Register this week which painted the entire networking industry, from vendors to standards bodies, with a rather broad brush. While there are true bits and pieces in the piece, some balance seems to be in order. The article recaps a presentation by Peyton Koran at Electronic Arts (I suspect the Register spiced things up a little for effect); the line of argument seems to run something like this—

  • Vendors are only paying attention to larger customers, and/or a large group of customers asking for the same thing; if you are not in either group, then you get no service from any vendor
  • Vendors further bake secret sauce into their hardware, making it impossible to get what you want from your network without buying from them
  • Standards bodies are too slow, and hence useless
  • People are working around this, and getting to the inter-operable networks they really want, by moving to the cloud
  • There is another way: just treat your networking gear like servers, and write your own protocols—after all you probably already have programmers on staff who know how to do this

Let’s think about these a little more deeply.

Vendors only Continue reading

Worth Reading: Global content removals

From the Internet’s earliest days, the tension between a global communication network and local geography-based laws has been obvious. One scenario is that every jurisdiction’s local laws apply to the Internet globally, meaning that the country (or sub-national regulator) with the most restrictive law for any content category sets the global standard for that content. If this scenario comes to pass, the Internet will only contain content that is legal in every jurisdiction in the world — a small fraction of the content we as Americans might enjoy, because many countries restrict content that is clearly legal in the U.S. —Eric Goldman @ CircleID

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Worth Reading: Common issue detection for CPU profiling

Profiling of services is a useful method to find optimizations to improve service performance; the ODP (“On-Demand Profiling”) framework has helped identify many performance problems at LinkedIn. However, as these analyses and subsequent optimizations are done for individual services, common performance problems (patterns) are often rediscovered. This results in wasted effort for teams and doesn’t help with the global uptake of important fixes. —John Nicol, Chen Li, Peinan Chen, Tao Feng, and Hari Ramachandran @ LinkedIn

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On the ‘web: The Future of Data Center Fabrics

Recorded live at IETF 99, this Priority Queue episode is a roundtable conversation on new and emerging ideas for data center fabrics. Greg Ferro is joined by Jeff Tantsura, a chair of the routing working group at IETF; Russ White, a network architect at LinkedIn; and Tony Przygienda, who works for a vendor and claims to be the only grownup in this conversation. (You be the judge!)

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Worth Reading: Gen-Z

It has been almost a year now since Gen-Z launched, and the consortium is growing and the specifications are being cooked up by the techies. The core Gen-Z spec was published in December 2016 and updated in July to a 0.9 level; it is expected to be at the 1.0 level before the end of the year. The related The PHY spec is at about a 0.5 release level, and it should be at the 1.0 release level by the end of the year. And interestingly, the Gen-Z folks are showing off a new connector spec developed in conjunction with Tyco Electronics that uses 112 GT/sec signaling that delivers more bandwidth than PCI-Express or DDR4 slots in a much smaller form factor. (More on this in a second.) —Timothy Prickett Morgan @ The Next Platform

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Worth Reading: In defense of NATs

Network Address Translation (NAT) has often been described as an unfortunate aberration in the evolution of the Internet, and one that will be expunged with the completion of the transition to IPv6. I think that this view, which appears to form part of today’s conventional wisdom about the Internet, unnecessarily vilifies NATs. In my opinion, NATs are far from being an aberration, and instead, I see them as an informative step in the evolution of the Internet, particularly as they relate to possibilities in the evolution of name-based networking. Here’s why. —Geoff Huston @ APNIC

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Worth Reading: Security is a System Property

here’s lots of security advice in the press: keep your systems patched, use a password manager, don’t click on links in email, etc. But there’s one thing these adages omit: an attacker who is targeting you, rather than whoever falls for the phishing email, won’t be stopped by one defensive measure. Rather, they’ll go after the weakest part of your defenses. You have to protect everything — including things you hadn’t realized were relevant. Security is a systems problem: everything matters, including the links between the components and even the people who use the system. —Steven Bellovin @ CircleID

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Worth Reading: Time is not on your side

Many of the presenters, like Truman Boyes of Bloomberg and Peyton Maynard-Koran of EA, discussed the idea of building boxes from existing components instead of buying them from established networking vendors like Cisco and Arista. The argument does hold some valid ideas. If you can get your hardware from someone like EdgeCore or Accton and get your software from someone else like Pluribus Networks or Pica8 it looks like a slam dunk. You get 90% to 95% of a solution that you could get from Cisco with much less cost to you overall. —Networking Nerd

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Worth Reading: Improving metrics in cyber resiliency

With the growth in cloud computing, businesses rely on the network to access information about operational assets being stored away from the local server. Decoupling information assets from other operational assets could result in poor operational resiliency if the cloud is compromised. Therefore, to keep the operational resiliency unaffected, it is essential to bolster information asset resiliency in the cloud. To study the resiliency of cloud computing, the CSA formed a research team consisting of members from both private and public sectors within the Incident Management and Forensics Working Group and the Cloud Cyber Incident Sharing Center. —The Cloud Security Alliance

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Worth Reading: Cloud data storage data planes

And while such backup solutions solved the traditional data center backup to tape, and eventually disk, really well, the solution does not readily translate into a distributed multicloud solution. That’s where a data protection solution requires cloud-scale, multiprovider integration with clear separation of control, data movement and multitier data storage. The separation not only provides independent scaling at the control and data level, but also creates the opportunity for vendor or cloud provider independence. Additionally, the separation of data plane services allows the solution to leverage all current and future innovations around data movement, data copy and storage optimizations that the cloud storage provides natively. —Prasenjit Sarkar @ The New Stack

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Worth Reading: Why culture company matters

The impact of a company’s culture is reflected in a company’s ability to achieve their goals and productivity levels, and in their employees’ satisfaction. The company culture can make or break a business. Yet, company culture is the one thing that many aspiring programmers overlook in their job search. Unfortunately, they usually find out after accepting a job offer that they are working for a company with a very poor culture. That oversight can have a negative impact on their career. To better explain the impact of company culture, I am going to use experiences from my career to illustrate. —Jennifer Bland @ freecodecamp

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Worth Reading: Everything you need to know about Linux containers

If you look at the dictionary’s definition of containers, it would be ‘an object for holding and transporting something’. In the same way, Linux containers (mostly abbreviated as LXC in technical language) help in providing virtualisation to the Linux operating system. Tough to comprehend? Wait! Let’s suppose that your enterprise requires to move your code from one environment to another, or that you want to keep your machines and servers tidy and clean. Whether these systems are for development or production purposes, or if you want to try out some different application or development stack on your regular machine without contaminating it, the solution is containers. Linux containers empower enterprises and companies in wrapping and isolating their products with all the necessary files used for running them. —Vinayak Vaid @ opensource.org

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On the ‘web: What’s Wrong with BGP

Our guests are Russ White, a network architect at LinkedIn; and Sue Hares, a consultant and chair of the Inter-Domain Routing Working Group at the IETF. They discuss the history of BGP, the original problems it was intended to solve, and what might change. This is an informed and wide-ranging conversation that also covers whitebox, software quality, and more. Thanks to Huawei, which covered travel and accommodations to enable the Packet Pushers to attend IETF 99 and record some shows to spread the news about IETF projects and initiatives.

You can jump to the original post on Packet Pushers here.

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Worth Reading: When the cloud deletes our data

When we talk about people losing their data in the cloud, the conversation typically revolves around hackers, violating terms of service or sites going out of business. However, it is important to remember that in a cloud world we rarely have many rights when it comes to the data we upload or create in the cloud environments provided by many consumer companies and that data can be deleted without us even knowing until after it is far too late. Making matters more complicated, even the biggest brand names don’t necessarily operate their own cloud environments or own the underlying data that makes their services run, meaning that a change anywhere in this pipeline can result in irreplaceable data being lost. —Kalev Leetaru @ Forbes

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