This tool can help you discover Cisco Smart Install protocol abuse

For the past few weeks attackers have been probing networks for switches that can potentially be hijacked using the Cisco Smart Install (SMI) protocol. Researchers from Cisco's Talos team have now released a tool that allows network owners to discover devices that might be vulnerable to such attacks.The Cisco SMI protocol is used for so-called zero-touch deployment of new devices, primarily access layer switches running Cisco IOS or IOS XE software. The protocol allows newly installed switches to automatically download their configuration via SMI from an existing switch or router configured as an integrated branch director (IBD).The director can copy the client's startup-config file or replace it with a custom one, can load a particular IOS image on the client and can execute high-privilege configuration mode commands on it. Because the SMI protocol does not support any authorization or authentication mechanism by default, attackers can potentially hijack SMI-enabled devices.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: Commercial incentives behind IPv6 deployment

The Best Practice Forum (BPF) on IPv6 at the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) explored what economic and commercial incentives drive providers, companies and organizations to deploy IPv6 on their networks and for their services. The BPF collected case studies, held open discussions online and at the 2016 IGF meeting, and produced a comprehensive output report. This article gives a high-level overview. —CircleID

The post Worth Reading: Commercial incentives behind IPv6 deployment appeared first on 'net work.

Cisco Jasper grows Internet of Things reach, breadth

Nearly a year after it bought Jasper for $1.4 billion, Cisco this week strengthened the company’s Internet of Things reach by adding support for an emerging low-power WAN technology and expanding its partner programs further into automotive and healthcare. Cisco bought Jasper and its Control Center platform to firmly establish a hold in the IoT world. And indeed, it has. CEO Chuck Robbins noted in Cisco’s recent earnings call that “Jasper connects more than 40 million devices including over 12 million connected vehicles, and we're adding more than 1.5 million new devices per month. The number of enterprise customers utilizing data from the Jasper platform has grown from 4,000 a year ago to more than 9,000 this quarter,” Robbins said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Make the internet great again

I miss the Old Internet.Call me a fuddy-duddy. Call me nostalgic for ye olden days. But I’ll say it right now, and I’ll stand by it: The internet was (in almost every way) better 15-plus years ago than it is today. And I’m not talking about just “the World Wide Web” either. All of it. It’s getting downright crummy. Let’s walk this through step by step. System resource usage  If you go to CNN.com today, the front page of their website will take up just shy of 100 MB of RAM while it is loaded. By comparison, the same page from the year 2000 takes literally 1/10th that (thanks Archive.org). CPU usage is even worse. The idle CNN.com from the year 2000 just sits there. Happily eating just about 0% of even the slowest CPUs. Today’s version gobbles up a good 10% of the i7 sitting in front of me—while sitting idle. For a single page. Displaying a few news headlines. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Understanding the TOSCA Landscape in 2017

2017 is shaping up as the year of TOSCA.

38% off iClever Ultra Portable Tri-folding Bluetooth Keyboard With Touchpad – Deal Alert

Work more efficiently while on the go. Compact, versatile, durable and light, this new keyboard from iClever folds on two innovative hinges that double as grips to keep your board steady, while the grips on each end keep it from sliding around. It pairs quickly with up to 3 devices, switching with the push of a button, and features a high sensitivity touchpad for mouse functionality. When folded, it takes up roughly the same space as a smartphone. Compatible with not only IOS and Android, but also supports Windows/Mac/Linux-based tablets, Blackberry, Playstation, WebOS, and Sybian. Its list price is $79.99, but you can buy it right now on Amazon for 38% off, or just $49.99. See the discounted iClever folding keyboard on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

SAP States Its Case in Platform-as-a-Service

SAP's cloud isn't just for databases any more.

821,000 user records exposed due to misconfigured MongoDB for smart stuffed toys

No one wants to learn that they have been hacked; if a company is not doing so well, then it might really be scared after it is breached. But burying your head in sand and hoping it will all go away if you ignore it for long enough is simply not going to make the breach disappear. In the case of CloudPets, owned by SpiralToys, it wasn’t the cute and huggable smart stuffed toys hackers were hugging, but the data. Here it is:- Toy captured kids voices- Data exposed via MongoDB- 2.2m recordings- DB ransom'd- And much more...https://t.co/HvePnZleXRTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

821,000 user records exposed due to misconfigured MongoDB for smart stuffed toys

No one wants to learn that they have been hacked; if a company is not doing so well, then it might really be scared after it is breached. But burying your head in sand and hoping it will all go away if you ignore it for long enough is simply not going to make the breach disappear. In the case of CloudPets, owned by SpiralToys, it wasn’t the cute and huggable smart stuffed toys hackers were hugging, but the data. Here it is:- Toy captured kids voices- Data exposed via MongoDB- 2.2m recordings- DB ransom'd- And much more...https://t.co/HvePnZleXRTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Review: Portal goes where no Wi-Fi router has gone before

The Portal router is a new class of Wi-Fi router, utilizing frequency bands not seen in other Wi-Fi products, whether a more traditional Wi-Fi router or some of the newer Wi-Fi mesh products. It’s still a dual-band (2.4 GHz and 5 GHz) router, but includes additional spectrum within the 5GHz space (designated as part of the Unlicensed National Information Infrastructure).The Portal router has the permission of the FCC to share some of the spectrum normally reserved for radar (U-NII-2 and U-NII-23). This gives Portal 15 extra channels to work with, in the frequency ranges from 5.260 to 5.700 GHz, where other routers in the U-NII-1 and UNII-3 space can operate across 9 channels in the 5.180-5.240 GHz range and 5.745-5.825 range. Because those ranges are also unlicensed, Portal can make use of those too, so in essence you would get 24 channels across the entire 5.180 through 5.825 GHz range.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco Prefers the Word ‘Automation’ to ‘SDN’

An Indian service provider deployed 150,000 Cisco routers.

IDG Contributor Network: Digital services on wireless key to providing great user experiences

Seven billion connected devices and counting—and we are only at the threshold of the massive, new class of connected devices known as the Internet of Things (IoT).Devices, such as sensors, remote robots and everyday objects, are rapidly becoming connected to expand the universe of IoT and to provide valuable data. In a network-centric world, the more devices that are connected in aggregate, the more value is created for the whole. And this value scales exponentially. It’s what’s called a network effect, and it can bring boundless possibilities for value and wealth creation in the next five years.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Digital services on wireless key to providing great user experiences

Seven billion connected devices and counting—and we are only at the threshold of the massive, new class of connected devices known as the Internet of Things (IoT).Devices, such as sensors, remote robots and everyday objects, are rapidly becoming connected to expand the universe of IoT and to provide valuable data. In a network-centric world, the more devices that are connected in aggregate, the more value is created for the whole. And this value scales exponentially. It’s what’s called a network effect, and it can bring boundless possibilities for value and wealth creation in the next five years.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Meizu technology can charge a smartphone in 20 minutes

Chinese smartphone maker Meizu claims its Super mCharge technology can recharge batteries in as little as 20 minutes.To prove its point, the company demonstrated the superfast charging capabilities during a press conference on the show floor of Mobile World Congress, which is being held in Barcelona.The charging speed is even faster than Qualcomm's recently introduced Quick Charge 4.0, which "is engineered to charge a typical smartphone from zero to 50 percent in about 15 minutes or less," the chip maker claimed in a statement.The charging demonstration was via a USB Type-C port, and the smartphone carried a 3,000-milliamp hour battery, which is the capacity range in newer smartphones. The trick is offloading some of the charging pressure off the battery to the USB cable, which can carry a maximum of 160 watts of power.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Dell Boomi bringing startup mentality to hybrid cloud market

While Dell sold off many software assets as part of the 2016 mega merger with EMC that created Dell Technologies, it kept Dell Boomi as a critical component for helping IT shops build and run hybrid clouds. Dell Boomi offers integration platform as a service (iPaaS) – a set of cloud-based capabilities for connecting everything from SaaS apps to EDI and internet of things applications. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

JNCIE-ENT Passed

Yes!!! I passed the Juniper JNCIE lab last year!!  It was actually back in May 2016 that I earned my JNCIE-ENT #567 and I wanted to finally take a moment and blog about my experiences, study approach, as well as my overall impression of the certification track.  Let me answer the first question that you may have, […]

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Enterprises enter the 5G spotlight at MWC

Mobile World Congress takes place this week, so it’s time again for carrier and vendors to serve up bold claims about what 5G cellular will do for users -- this time, with a dash of realism.“5G is not ready yet,” T-Mobile USA’s CTO Neville Ray said Monday morning. “It’s maturing quickly, but it’s not real today, and I can’t go and deploy a 5G radio to serve my customers with and give them a handset.”Like most other carriers, T-Mobile is testing pre-standard 5G technology, and Ray is enthusiastic about the next generation in the long term. But he reminded the audience that some parts of 5G, like using ultra-high frequencies to reach mobile devices, still face big technical challenges and 4G will still be around for years after the first big 5G rollouts happen around 2020.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Enterprises enter the 5G spotlight at MWC

Mobile World Congress takes place this week, so it’s time again for carrier and vendors to serve up bold claims about what 5G cellular will do for users -- this time, with a dash of realism.“5G is not ready yet,” T-Mobile USA’s CTO Neville Ray said Monday morning. “It’s maturing quickly, but it’s not real today, and I can’t go and deploy a 5G radio to serve my customers with and give them a handset.”Like most other carriers, T-Mobile is testing pre-standard 5G technology, and Ray is enthusiastic about the next generation in the long term. But he reminded the audience that some parts of 5G, like using ultra-high frequencies to reach mobile devices, still face big technical challenges and 4G will still be around for years after the first big 5G rollouts happen around 2020.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Trump announces budget cuts that may give China tech leadership

The White House plans to substantially hike defense spending, but it's going to cut other agency budgets with a big axe. It is nail-biting time for people who develop supercomputers and do other scientific work that relies on federal R&D funding.The White House said today it will increase defense spending, currently at about $600 billion, by $54 billion or 9%. But most other agencies, with the exception of "security agencies," will see budget reductions, it said at a briefing for reporters on Monday.This means the cuts will fall heavily on agencies such as the Department of Energy, which funds exascale supercomputing development. Another target may be the National Science Foundation, a major funder of basic scientific research. Overall, the cuts will be focused on civilian agencies because there isn't a lot of room to cut otherwise. The Trump administration is expected to leave Medicare and Social Security alone.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Trump announces budget cuts that may give China tech leadership

The White House plans to substantially hike defense spending, but it's going to cut other agency budgets with a big axe. It is nail-biting time for people who develop supercomputers and do other scientific work that relies on federal R&D funding.The White House said today it will increase defense spending, currently at about $600 billion, by $54 billion or 9%. But most other agencies, with the exception of "security agencies," will see budget reductions, it said at a briefing for reporters on Monday.This means the cuts will fall heavily on agencies such as the Department of Energy, which funds exascale supercomputing development. Another target may be the National Science Foundation, a major funder of basic scientific research. Overall, the cuts will be focused on civilian agencies because there isn't a lot of room to cut otherwise. The Trump administration is expected to leave Medicare and Social Security alone.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here