The speed of ransomware: 3 seconds to encryption [Infographic]

Ransomware has reached epidemic proportions, especially among small and midsize businesses (SMBs). A 2015 Securities and Exchange Commission statement noted that SMBs are at "greater risk" of cybercrime, including ransomware, compared to larger enterprises, and they "are far more vulnerable once they are victimized."Security service provider Arctic Wolf Networks reports that it has seen a "433 percent increase in ransomware attacks this year among our SMB customers."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Google’s new acquisition makes building chatbots easier

Google took a shot at Facebook's chatbot-building services on Monday with its acquisition of API.ai, a company that helps developers build and improve conversational interfaces for their services. API.ai has more than 60,000 developers using its platform to create conversational user interfaces for apps like Slack, Facebook Messenger and Kik. Its tools make it easier for programs to parse human language and translate it into action. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.The company offers a vast suite of capabilities for natural language understanding, including pre-defined knowledge packages known as Domains, which make it easier for assistants to understand a variety of common requests any additional coding.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

SDN Essentials’ Doug Marschke Interview: The SDN Revolution

Hear from SDN Essentials' Doug Marschke on the SDN Revolution, the biggest challenges, and the value of analytics in SDN and NFV.

50% off Tactical Bracelet with Fire Starter, Compass and Military Grade 550 Paracord – Deal Alert

From starting fires, to fishing, to making a sustainable shelter, be more prepared for whatever the world throws your way with a tactical bracelet like this one from Aegis Gears. The band, adjustable between 6 and 9 inches, is made from 12 feet of Mil Spec grade type III paracord (in a king cobra weave) so it's extremely strong and reusable. It features a compass, a magnesium firestarter rod, and a serrated ultra-sharp eye knife fire striker. The bracelet averages 4.5 out of 5 stars on Amazon from over 300 people (read reviews). Its list price of $26 has been reduced 50% to just $13. See the discounted Aegis Gears Tactical Paracord Bracelet S Series now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Oracle pushes hybrid by letting customers rent cloud hardware

One of the big issues facing public cloud vendors is convincing companies to take on-premises workloads and move them to a public cloud data center. Oracle is trying to enable that shift with a new set of products that allow customers to get the same hardware that Oracle runs in its data centers behind their own firewalls. Executive Chairman Larry Ellison unveiled the Big Data@Customer and Exadata@Customer machines on Sunday, building on the company's Cloud@Customer hardware offering.It's a move by the company to take advantage of Oracle's expertise building hardware and combining it with software to reach customers as they're in the process of migrating to the cloud. Ellison expects on-premises and cloud workloads will have to coexist for at least 10 years, he said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Vista Equity Partners Takes Infoblox Private for $1.6B

After a roller coaster ride for the stock, Infoblox takes Vista's offer.

IBM targets x86 server territory with new Power servers

IBM sold off its x86 server business two years ago to Lenovo, thinking it was exiting a cut-throat, low-margin business. But the cloud has only intensified x86 server chip sales, and IBM is paying attention.The company is adapting a new range of Power servers -- which typically run powerful systems -- for the cloud. The Power E870C and E880C servers, announced Monday, are flexible in handling many tasks and can scale for distributed computing and cloud integration.The new servers, which support Ubuntu Linux and Unix, sound similar to x86 servers powering internal and external clouds at companies like Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon. But IBM is packing in an extra set of features to make these systems reliable and flexible for public and private clouds.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

CloudFlare’s new WordPress plugin

Over 25% of all websites use WordPress, and over 10% of all internet traffic flows through CloudFlare; WordPress + CloudFlare has always been a winning combination, and now with CloudFlare’s new WordPress plugin, it's easier than ever to make your site 60% faster.

Install or upgrade to CloudFlare's new plugin to speed up your WordPress site.

Our new plugin adds all of CloudFlare's performance and security benefits in a simple one-click install of recommended settings specifically developed for WordPress.

What our plugin can do for you

One-click WordPress-optimized settings is the easiest way to setup CloudFlare for your WordPress site.

Web application firewall (WAF) rulesets, available on CloudFlare’s paid plans, has built-in rulesets, including rules that mitigate WordPress specific threats and vulnerabilities. These security rules are always kept up-to-date: once the WAF is enabled, you can rest easy knowing your site is protected from all the latest threats.

Automatic cache purge occurs when you change the appearance of your website. This means that you can focus on your website, while we ensure that the latest content is always available to your visitors.

You can also change CloudFlare settings such as the Security Level, Image Optimization, etc. from within Continue reading

Microsoft adds SMB support to retail outlets

Microsoft's retail outlets, creatively known as Microsoft Store, has been its answer to the wildly successful Apple Stores that helped push a lot of Apple product into the hands of consumers, especially Macs.Up to now, the more than 100 Microsoft Stores have been focused on the consumer market. However, Microsoft announced an expansion of the stores to include what it calls SMB Zones, providing small and mid-sized businesses with a chance to check out business-oriented products and technology and also get some consultations.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: Someone is learning how to take down the Internet

Over the past year or two, someone has been probing the defenses of the companies that run critical pieces of the Internet. These probes take the form of precisely calibrated attacks designed to determine exactly how well these companies can defend themselves, and what would be required to take them down. We don’t know who is doing this, but it feels like a large a large nation state. China and Russia would be my first guesses. —Lawfare

The post Worth Reading: Someone is learning how to take down the Internet appeared first on 'net work.

Presenting Technical Topics To Technical People

Fred writes, “I’ve got a conference coming up in December that I’ve been invited to speak at. This is something I’ve wanted to do for sometime. However, having never done it, I’m looking for some tips on how to get started.”

Q: What’s the best way to find a topic that is new enough to be interesting, but relevant enough to be useful?

People go to conferences hoping, among other things, to gather information that they didn’t have before. What that is will vary by audience member. Designers, architects, and C-levels who are trying to stay ahead of the curve will want to know about the future — what tech is coming and the likely impact to their business and operations. Engineers and operations — the people down in the blood and guts of IT — will be more interested in hard skills.

By “hard,” I don’t mean difficult. I mean useful tools and techniques that they can bring back to their job with them and put to use.

• When addressing a technical audience, the most engaging talks will be technical ones that go into specifics. The catch here is that most talks are in the 30 to 60 minute range. Continue reading

17% off Sensi Wi-Fi Programmable Thermostat, Alexa Compatible – Deal Alert

According to Emerson, makers of this UP500W Sensi Wi-Fi Programmable Thermostat, their customers save up to 33% in energy costs every year using programmed heating and cooling schedules. The Sensi thermostat makes it easy to remotely control and schedule the comfort of your home using your phone, tablet or PC. You can start with a preloaded schedule that reflects common daily patterns and quickly adapt it to your unique schedule, or you can use the intuitive swipe controls to build a customized daily schedule in seconds. When your schedule changes, the app gives you continuous control to make adjustments, from across the room or across the world. And because it doesn't require a “C-wire” in most applications, Sensi works with most heating and cooling systems in the US and Canada. If you're an Alexa user (Amazon Echo, Dot, etc), you'll find it's fully compatible with your "smart home". Sensi averages 4.5 out of 5 stars from over 2,000 customers on Amazon (read reviews). It's typical list price of $129 has been reduced to $106.88.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The many dimensions of cloud value

Do you hear that grating sound of value clash among cloud providers? It’s the sound of attempted differentiation, that reason you buy Starbucks instead of Dunkin Donuts, Peet’s or perhaps Tim Horton’s brew. Brand thinkers want us to choose something we like because they know once we do, we will stay. We’re creatures of habit. We dislike the qualification process of choosing new vendors for coffee, as well as IT gear and services.Much marketing focus is going towards incremental services bundles that make one cloud vendor seem, or actually be, better than the offerings of another. Determine the value of the cloud services you need The first smoke cloud that obscures actual value of cloud services is the dizzying value calculator. This device, when present (and it’s often missing), allows you to plug in what you predict (you can predict, can’t you?) your ongoing costs will be for a particular set of data processing needs.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Oracle Goes All-In on Cloud and IaaS

Cloud can flip the 80/20 rule, CEO Mark Hurd says.

Meeting 21st Century Network Traffic Demands

Customer data traffic is exploding, demanding that today’s service providers fundamentally rethink their approaches to building data centers.

Nokia Makes Enterprise Push with Edge Computing, XaaS

Mobile Edge Computing will let enterprises connect low-latency applications at the edge of the network.

Enter the brave new world of Windows 10 license activation

Windows 10 brought a lot of changes to Microsoft's flagship desktop operating system when it debuted on July 29, 2015, and it has changed even more since then. With the release of the Anniversary Update in August (Build 1607 for Current Branch users, at Build 14393.105 as I write this), even license activation has changed. Here's what most users of the business-oriented Windows 10 Enterprise will see if they check their Activation screen:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Oracle CEO Mark Hurd: We have the whole cloud stack

Few enterprise IT transformations can match the importance of today’s long migration from on-premises, client-server computing to cloud computing. This week at Oracle’s mammoth OpenWorld conference in San Francisco, Oracle will make it abundantly clear that it intends to become a leader in all three flavors of cloud -- not only SaaS, where the company has already demonstrated strength, but also in PaaS and IaaS, where Oracle is a new player.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Nutanix IPO Likely to Raise $173M

Company valued at $1.64B, down from its high of $2B.

Reaction: Devops and Dumpster Fires

Networking is often a “best effort” type of configuration. We monkey around with something until it works, then roll it into production and hope it holds. As we keep building more patches on to of patches or try to implement new features that require something to be disabled or bypassed, that creates a house of cards that is only as strong as the first stiff wind. It’s far too easy to cause a network to fall over because of a change in a routing table or a series of bad decisions that aren’t enough to cause chaos unless done together. —Networking Nerd

Precisely.

But what are we to do about it. Tom’s Take is that we need to push back on applications. This, also, I completely agree with. But this only brings us to another problem—how do we make the case that applications need to be rewritten to work on a simpler network? The simple answer is—let’s teach coders how networks really work, so they can figure out how to better code to the environment in which their applications live. Let me be helpful here—I’ve been working on networks since somewhere around 1986, and on computers and electronics since Continue reading