IDG Contributor Network: Network analysis can find malware before it strikes

Network traffic analysis should be used more in the fight against malware. That’s because pointers show up on the network “weeks and even months” in advance of new malicious software being uncovered, scientists from the Georgia Institute of Technology explain in an article on the school’s website.The researchers, who have been studying historic network traffic patterns, say the latest malware tracking should take advantage of inherent network-supplied barometers and stop simply focusing on trying to identify malware code already on networks and machines. By analyzing already-available, suspicious network traffic created by the hackers over a period of time, administrators will be able to pounce and render malware harmless before it can perform damage.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Network analysis can find malware before it strikes

Network traffic analysis should be used more in the fight against malware. That’s because pointers show up on the network “weeks and even months” in advance of new malicious software being uncovered, scientists from the Georgia Institute of Technology explain in an article on the school’s website.The researchers, who have been studying historic network traffic patterns, say the latest malware tracking should take advantage of inherent network-supplied barometers and stop simply focusing on trying to identify malware code already on networks and machines. By analyzing already-available, suspicious network traffic created by the hackers over a period of time, administrators will be able to pounce and render malware harmless before it can perform damage.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Network analysis can find malware before it strikes

Network traffic analysis should be used more in the fight against malware. That’s because pointers show up on the network “weeks and even months” in advance of new malicious software being uncovered, scientists from the Georgia Institute of Technology explain in an article on the school’s website.The researchers, who have been studying historic network traffic patterns, say the latest malware tracking should take advantage of inherent network-supplied barometers and stop simply focusing on trying to identify malware code already on networks and machines. By analyzing already-available, suspicious network traffic created by the hackers over a period of time, administrators will be able to pounce and render malware harmless before it can perform damage.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Optimize Data Center Infrastructure: Reduce the Number of Uplinks

The work of editing transcripts of my two switches presentation is (very slowly) moving forward. In the fourth part of the Optimize Your Data Center Infrastructure series I’m talking about reducing the number of uplinks.

One Month to Cisco Live Las Vegas

We’re down to just a month before it’s time for Cisco Live in Las Vegas 2017. I’m really looking forward to meeting with a lot of people and attending some great sessions. This will also be my first event as a Cisco Netvet I have a few focus areas for this year’s event.

Cisco IWAN

I have a few IWAN projects I’m working on and I’m going to deep dive into IWAN during CLUS. My plans here are to attend the techtorial on Sunday and meet with some of the prominent people behind IWAN. Those contacts are invaluable to have when you are working on complex scenarios. I also want to see what’s on the roadmap and if I can find out anything about how the acquisition of Viptela will affect IWAN, if at all. I also want to see if APIC-EM has matured to be more useful in brownfield scenarios. Another interesting thing I will try to learn more about is how to best do monitoring in an IWAN network.

Cisco ACI

We have a lot of customers moving to ACI right now. Many of them have “legacy” data centers based on the Catalyst 6500. Moving to a vendor Continue reading

How John Deere developed one of the best GPS locators in the world

One of the most accurate GPS-based location systems in the world isn’t a hyper-secret military technology or a top-of-the-line scientific device – it’s John Deere’s RTK network, a dual-band GPS system that lets farmers track their planting, harvesting and more to an accuracy of less than an inch.“It’s one of the most difficult and exciting programs that Deere’s ever done,” according to Terry Pickett, manager of advanced engineering at the company’s Intelligent Solutions Group.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: How Lyft gets a lift from Amazon’s cloud + Google’s machine-learning cloud pipeline explainedTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

74% off Omaker M4 Portable Bluetooth Shower and Outdoor Speaker with 12 Hour Playtime – Deal Alert

The M4 speaker from Omaker is IP54 rated, so its rugged splash, shock and dustproof design makes it ideal for shower and outdoor use. The latest Bluetooth 4.0 technology helps it pair quickly with your device (tap-to-pair with NFC capable devices) and maintain a long 33-foot connection range. Crystal clear sound quality and robust bass is realized through a 3W audio driver and passive subwoofer. The M4 is capable of producing 12 hours of music at 80% volume, up to three times longer than similar-sized portable speakers. It  fully recharges in just 3 hours using an included Micro USB cable. The unit averages 4.5 out of 5 stars from over 5,000 people on Amazon (read reviews), many of which report sound quality that rivals more expensive speakers. Amazon indicates that its list price has been reduced significantly to just $22.99. See the discounted Omaker M4 speaker now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Gravityscan, keeping WordPress sites safe

If your website, in common with roughly 25% of all websites, is running WordPress then it's pretty much certain that it's being constantly attacked. WordPress is to hackers what raw meat is to jackals because unless sites are assiduously maintained, they quickly become vulnerable to a huge number of exploits.The root cause of this vulnerability is WordPress' ecosystem of complex core software augmented by thousands of third party developers whose themes and plugins are often buggy and not quickly (or often, never) updated to fend off known security problems. Add to that many site owners being slow to update their core WordPress installation and you have an enormous and easily discovered collection of irresistible hacking targets.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Gravityscan, keeping WordPress sites safe

If your website, in common with roughly 25% of all websites, is running WordPress then it's pretty much certain that it's being constantly attacked. WordPress is to hackers what raw meat is to jackals because unless sites are assiduously maintained, they quickly become vulnerable to a huge number of exploits.The root cause of this vulnerability is WordPress' ecosystem of complex core software augmented by thousands of third party developers whose themes and plugins are often buggy and not quickly (or often, never) updated to fend off known security problems. Add to that many site owners being slow to update their core WordPress installation and you have an enormous and easily discovered collection of irresistible hacking targets.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Gravityscan, keeping WordPress sites safe

If your website, in common with roughly 25% of all websites, is running WordPress then it's pretty much certain that it's being constantly attacked. WordPress is to hackers what raw meat is to jackals because unless sites are assiduously maintained, they quickly become vulnerable to a huge number of exploits.The root cause of this vulnerability is WordPress' ecosystem of complex core software augmented by thousands of third party developers whose themes and plugins are often buggy and not quickly (or often, never) updated to fend off known security problems. Add to that many site owners being slow to update their core WordPress installation and you have an enormous and easily discovered collection of irresistible hacking targets.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Gravityscan, keeping WordPress sites safe

If your website, in common with roughly 25% of all websites, is running WordPress then it's pretty much certain that it's being constantly attacked. WordPress is to hackers what raw meat is to jackals because unless sites are assiduously maintained, they quickly become vulnerable to a huge number of exploits.The root cause of this vulnerability is WordPress' ecosystem of complex core software augmented by thousands of third party developers whose themes and plugins are often buggy and not quickly (or often, never) updated to fend off known security problems. Add to that many site owners being slow to update their core WordPress installation and you have an enormous and easily discovered collection of irresistible hacking targets.To read this article in full, please click here

Top 20 AI experts you should follow on Twitter

As artificial intelligence (AI) increases in importance in new technology and applications, several people have risen to the top of the field—achieving expert-level status and providing insight into breakthroughs, new applications and ideas about the technology.The people on this list are an interesting collage with very different backgrounds. Some are traditional AI Ph.D. scholars who have slogged through research long before AI’s recent resurgence. Others are cross-over experts from one advanced science who saw the benefit of AI in their research and became experts in a second field. + Also on Network World: What AI can and cannot do today + The short summaries of each persons’ biographical information add depth to the tweets. The biographical information was extracted from public sources, such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, university websites, Crunchbase and business websites. Given the suspicions about the authenticity of news stories, the biographical information about each person adds a level of diligence to choose if the reader finds personal value in following one of them.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IBM Gives Private Cloud Users Access to Open Source Databases

Why should the public cloud get all the buzz?

Worth Reading: Who pays security costs?

Computer security costs money. It costs more to develop secure software, and there’s an ongoing maintenance cost to patch the remaining holes. Spending more time and money up front will likely result in lesser maintenance costs going forward, but too few companies do that. Besides, even very secure operating systems like Windows 10 and iOS have had security problems and hence require patching. (I just installed iOS 10.3.2 on my phone. It fixed about two dozen security holes.) So — who pays? —CircleID

The post Worth Reading: Who pays security costs? appeared first on rule 11 reader.

10 more killer Raspberry Pi projects

Prolific developers of Raspberry PiImage by Mark GibbsWelcome to the third collection of Killer Raspberry Pi Projects. Our first and second collections were such a hit that we just had to produce another. There are so many interesting applications of the Raspberry Pi it's getting hard to pick and choose but, once again, we've sorted the wheat from the chaff to bring you ten more projects that embody the creativity and enthusiasm that defines the Raspberry Pi market. We have animatronic horror driven by Alexa, toy cars driven by deep learning, a couple of display projects, and cats recognized and monitored by Raspberry Pis. In short, more RPi goodness than you can shake a stick at.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

iPhone 8 might be cheaper than we thought

Apple's upcoming iPhone 8 is going to be jam-packed with all sorts of advanced technologies and compelling new features. Of course, the most obvious change will be the iPhone 8's brand new form factor. Seeing as how the iPhone form factor hasn't really changed at all since the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6s Plus were released in 2014, the iPhone 8 will finally provide users with a fresh new design.Hardly a secret at this point, the iPhone 8 will feature an edgeless OLED display wherein the entire front face of the device will be the display. As for the home button and the Touch ID sensor, rumor has it that Apple has figured out a way to embed these into the display itself. The end result is that the iPhone 8 will essentially look like one giant piece of glass, which, interestingly enough, has long been Jony Ive's vision of an ideal iPhone design.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Reflections on reflection (attacks)

Recently Akamai published an article about CLDAP reflection attacks. This got us thinking. We saw attacks from Conectionless LDAP servers back in November 2016 but totally ignored them because our systems were automatically dropping the attack traffic without any impact.

CC BY 2.0 image by RageZ

We decided to take a second look through our logs and share some statistics about reflection attacks we see regularly. In this blog post, I'll describe popular reflection attacks, explain how to defend against them and why Cloudflare and our customers are immune to most of them.

A recipe for reflection

Let's start with a brief reminder on how reflection attacks (often called "amplification attacks") work.

To bake a reflection attack, the villain needs four ingredients:

• A server capable of performing IP address spoofing.
• A protocol vulnerable to reflection/amplification. Any badly designed UDP-based request-response protocol will do.
• A list of "reflectors": servers that support the vulnerable protocol.
• A victim IP address.

The general idea:

• The villain sends fake UDP requests.
• The source IP address in these packets is spoofed: the attacker sticks the victim's IP address in the source IP address field, not their own IP address as they normally would.
• Each packet Continue reading

Speed, Power, Performance: NSX & Memorial Day Motorsports

With Memorial Day weekend coming up, for me, it’s all about hot dogs, hamburgers, and fast car racing. I am huge Formula 1 fanatic, but Memorial Day is a bonanza of racing from the F1 Monaco Grand Prix, to NASCAR’s Coke 600, and of course the Indianapolis 500 all on the same day! The raw speed and performance of these races remind me of a 2016 VMworld presentation (NET8030) on NSX performance.

The argument still comes up now and again that “hardware is faster than software.” Network guys like me just assume that’s true. So, it came as a surprise to me when I watched the session which turned that assumption on its head. In this session, the presenter demonstrated that software is faster than hardware, way faster. Of course, I was dubious at first but quickly learned that physical networking and virtual networking is like the difference between the pace car and the race car. I always assumed the physical switch was the race car, but in the throughput presentation, Samuel showed two VM’s running on the same host with NSX routing, switching, and firewalling between them could get up to 106G! This information surprised me. Sort of like the same experience I had Continue reading

Linux Foundation Grows So Much it Hires a Chief of Staff

Sheryl Chamberlain hails from the consulting company Capgemini.

Reading List: WannaCry and Ransomware

A good bit has been written about the recent WannaCry outbreak over the last few weeks; rather than stringing the best out through Worth Reading posts, I have collected the three best posts on the topic here.

There are a number of takeaways and lessons to learn from the far-reaching attack that we witnessed. Let me tie those to voluntary cooperation and collaboration which together represent the foundation for the Internet’s development. The reason for making this connection is because they provide the way to get the global cyber threat under control. Not just to keep ourselves and our vital systems and services protected, but to reverse the erosion of trust in the Internet. —CircleID

Over the weekend a cyber attack known as “WannaCry” infected hundreds of computers all over the world with ransomware (malware which encrypts your data until you pay a ransom, usually in Bitcoin). The attack takes advantage of an exploit for Windows known as “EternalBlue” which was in the possession of NSA and, in mid April, was made public by a group known as “The Shadow Brokers.” Microsoft issued a patch for the vulnerability on March 14 for all supported versions of Windows (Vista and Continue reading