Foiled! 15 tricks to hold off the hackers

Malicious hackers have outsize reputations. They are über-geniuses who can guess any password in seconds, hack any system, and cause widespread havoc across multiple, unrelated networks with a single keystroke—or so Hollywood says. Those of us who fight hackers every day know the good guys are usually far smarter. Hackers simply have to be persistent.Each year, a few hackers do something truly new. But for the most part, hackers repeat the tried and true. It doesn’t take a supergenius to check for missing patches or craft a social engineering attack. Hacking by and large is tradework: Once you learn a few tricks and tools, the rest becomes routine. The truly inspired work is that of security defenders, those who successfully hack the hackers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Federal CIOs tackle the next phase of cloud migration

The cloud has been the default setting in federal government IT for long enough now that most agencies have migrated over some basic operations like email, but that still leaves the hard work undone.After some quick wins -- moving relatively lightweight applications over to a cloud environment -- many federal CIOs are now trying to figure out what comes next. That requires a more challenging calculus and a nuanced evaluation of the agency's IT portfolio to determine what applications and systems really belong in the cloud."Agencies are struggling with that idea of how do they really in an affirmative sort of way adopt cloud technologies," Bill Zielinski, director of the Office of Strategic Programs at the General Services Administration, said during a recent panel discussion hosted by Federal News Radio. "It's one thing to find those kind of freestanding, low-hanging brand-new sorts of things to put in -- quote unquote -- the cloud, but when you really start talking about constituting your IT enterprise with a significant portion of it being cloud, they're struggling."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

10 ways to achieve ROI on a network solution

Measuring ROIImage by ThinkstockWith the advent of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), WLAN network access to customers and visitors and virtualized systems, the demand for IP addresses has exploded. Small companies might have to manage more than 1,000 IP addresses and it is not unusual for larger companies to have 10,000 or more spread across many locations. Setting up and protecting the network infrastructure is a major challenge and needs to be even more sophisticated and dynamic than ever before.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Managing data by business objectives

Storage vendors pitch new systems in innumerable ways. Whether they tout performance claims about IOPS and low latency, protection, reliability, and security features or sell on convenience, capacity, cost, or even brand reputation, there are many options vendors can offer an IT team looking to fix a problem.Although these various abilities have been around for many years, they have long been confined to a storage-centric ecosystem. With the advent of advanced data management software, it finally becomes possible to shift to a data-centric architecture that enables IT admins to automatically align data with storage that meets enterprises’ business objectives.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

10 ways to achieve ROI on a network solution

Measuring ROIImage by ThinkstockWith the advent of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), WLAN network access to customers and visitors and virtualized systems, the demand for IP addresses has exploded. Small companies might have to manage more than 1,000 IP addresses and it is not unusual for larger companies to have 10,000 or more spread across many locations. Setting up and protecting the network infrastructure is a major challenge and needs to be even more sophisticated and dynamic than ever before.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

10 ways to achieve ROI on a network solution

Measuring ROIImage by ThinkstockWith the advent of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), WLAN network access to customers and visitors and virtualized systems, the demand for IP addresses has exploded. Small companies might have to manage more than 1,000 IP addresses and it is not unusual for larger companies to have 10,000 or more spread across many locations. Setting up and protecting the network infrastructure is a major challenge and needs to be even more sophisticated and dynamic than ever before.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Managing data by business objectives

Storage vendors pitch new systems in innumerable ways. Whether they tout performance claims about IOPS and low latency, protection, reliability, and security features or sell on convenience, capacity, cost, or even brand reputation, there are many options vendors can offer an IT team looking to fix a problem.Although these various abilities have been around for many years, they have long been confined to a storage-centric ecosystem. With the advent of advanced data management software, it finally becomes possible to shift to a data-centric architecture that enables IT admins to automatically align data with storage that meets enterprises’ business objectives.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Latest OWASP Top 10 looks at APIs, web apps

The new release of the OWASP Top 10 list is out for public comment from the Open Web Application Security Project, and while most of it remains the same there are a couple of new additions, focusing on protections for web applications and APIs.To make room for the new items, a couple of older ones were either removed or merged into new items.The fact that the list hasn't changed much since its first release in 2003 is both good and bad, said Jeff Williams, CTO and co-founder at Contrast Security.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Latest OWASP Top 10 looks at APIs, web apps

The new release of the OWASP Top 10 list is out for public comment from the Open Web Application Security Project, and while most of it remains the same there are a couple of new additions, focusing on protections for web applications and APIs.To make room for the new items, a couple of older ones were either removed or merged into new items.The fact that the list hasn't changed much since its first release in 2003 is both good and bad, said Jeff Williams, CTO and co-founder at Contrast Security.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Sysadmins: Say No to Compulsive Tuning Disorder

BlackBerry KeyOne to launch in US and Canada in late May

The BlackBerry KeyOne, an Android-based smartphone with a hardware keyboard, will be available in the U.S. and Canada from May 31, the phone's maker said Thursday.TCL Communications, the Chinese company that acquired rights to produce BlackBerry-brand handsets, originally had said the phone would go on sale in April, so the delay may disappoint potential users. This could be a bad time to test the patience of potential buyers, as Samsung and LG are both heavily promoting their new flagship handsets, the S8 and G6.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

BlackBerry KeyOne to launch in US and Canada in late May

The BlackBerry KeyOne, an Android-based smartphone with a hardware keyboard, will be available in the U.S. and Canada from May 31, the phone's maker said Thursday.TCL Communications, the Chinese company that acquired rights to produce BlackBerry-brand handsets, originally had said the phone would go on sale in April, so the delay may disappoint potential users. This could be a bad time to test the patience of potential buyers, as Samsung and LG are both heavily promoting their new flagship handsets, the S8 and G6.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Top techies giving 2017 college commencement speeches

Tomorrow's leadersImage by ThinkstockWith today’s push across the education landscape for more emphasis on STEM studies, it’s not surprising that top leaders and innovators in technology would be a draw as college commencement speakers. Here’s a roundup of some of the bigger names.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Top techies giving 2017 college commencement speeches

Tomorrow's leadersImage by ThinkstockWith today’s push across the education landscape for more emphasis on STEM studies, it’s not surprising that top leaders and innovators in technology would be a draw as college commencement speakers. Here’s a roundup of some of the bigger names.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: Who Moved My Control Plane?

Jordan Martin published a nice summary of what I’ve been preaching for years: centralized control plane doesn’t work (well) while controller-based network orchestration makes perfect sense.

While I totally agree with what he wrote he got the hype angle wrong:

Update: VMware NSX in Redundant L3-only Data Center Fabric

Short update for those that read the original blog post: it turns out that the answer to the question “Is it possible to run VMware NSX on redundantly-connected hosts in a pure L3 data center fabric?” is still NO.

VTEPs from different ESXi hosts can be in different subnets, but while a single ESXi host might have multiple VTEPs, the only supported way to use them is to put them in the same subnet. I removed the original blog post.

A huge thank you to everyone who pushed me with their comments and emails to find the correct answer.

BGPstream and The Curious Case of AS12389

The world of BGP routing is a fascinating place with lots of interesting BGP events happening every day. It can be challenging to keep track of it all and so two years ago we started the BGPstream website where we keep track of large scale outages and BGP hijacks. We list the events, basic info and visualize it with one of my favorite tools: BGPlay. For those who keep an eye on @bgpstream , you probably noticed a curious series of BGP hijacks today all by the same Autonomous system affecting many well known networks.

Starting at April 26 22:36 UTC till approximately 22:43 UTC AS12389 (PJSC Rostelecom) started to originate 50 prefixes for numerous other Autonomous systems. The 50 hijacked prefixes included 37 unique autonomous systems and the complete list of affected networks can be found below. If your organization is in this list feel free to reach out and we can provide more details if needed. Keep in mind that many of these hijacks are already published on BGPstream.com as well.

So back to this incident, what happened here? What makes the list of affected networks ‘curious’ is the high number of financial institutions such as for example:  MasterCard,Visa, Fortis,Alfa-Bank,card complete Continue reading

Samsung will launch new flagship smartphone months after Galaxy S8

Samsung Electronics said Thursday it was planning to launch in the second half of this year a new flagship phone, leading to speculation that the company is planning an alternative to the ill-fated Galaxy Note7 that had to be recalled last year.The launch of a new flagship smartphone this year and continuing sales of the Galaxy S8 and S8+ will help Samsung counter Apple’s launch of a new version of its iPhone. Apple usually unveils new phones in September."Samsung does announce a S series phone in the first half of the year and a Note series in the second half," said Kiranjeet Kaur, research manager for client devices at IDC Asia/Pacific. "So I am not sure if Samsung is alluding to the next Note or if they want to introduce a new series to avoid any questions or doubts that may arise because of the Note7 debacle."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How to check your Uber rating

One of the brilliant things about Uber, and Lyft for that matter, is that it allows riders to rank drivers and for drivers, in turn, to rank passengers. This is a clever way to not only ensure that drivers are up to the task, but to also to provide users with an incentive to refrain from unruly behavior.Historically, Uber has allowed users to check what their own personal rating is, though doing so often required users to jump through a few hoops. Earlier today, however, Uber made the entire process much more seamless. Which is to say, if you're curious as to what Uber drivers think of you as a passenger, it's now easier than ever to access that information.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Data center network monitoring best practices part 1: Metrics and alerts

One of the least loved areas of any data center network is monitoring. This is ironic because at its core, the network has two goals: 1) Get packets from A to B 2) Make sure packets got from A to B. It is not uncommon in the deployments I’ve seen for the monitoring budget to be effectively $0, and generally, an organization’s budget also reflects their priorities. Despite spending thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of dollars on networking equipment to facilitate goal #1 from above, there is often little money, thought and time spent in pursuit of Goal #2. In the next several paragraphs I’ll go into some basic data center network monitoring best practices that will work with any budget.

It is not hard to see why monitoring the data center network can be a daunting task. Monitoring your network, just like designing your network, takes a conscious plan of action. Tooling in the monitoring space today is highly fragmented with over 100+ “best of breed” tools that each accommodate a specific use case. Just evaluating all the tools would be a full time job. A recent Big Panda Report and their video overview of it (38 mins) Continue reading