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Category Archives for "Networking"

UL takes on cybersecurity testing and certification

Underwriters Laboratories (UL) today announced a new Cybersecurity Assurance Program (CAP) that uses a new set of standards to test network-connected products for software vulnerabilities.The new UL certification will be for both vendors of Internet of Things (IoT) products and for buyers of products who want to mitigate risks.The testing standards were developed as part of a voluntary program involving industry officials as well as academics and the U.S. government.INSIDER: 5 ways to prepare for Internet of Things security threats President Obama's broad Cybersecurity National Action Plan, released in February, details a long-term strategy to improve cybersecurity awareness and protections. Obama's plan specifically notes that UL worked with the Department of Homeland Security to develop CAP to test and certify networked devices "whether they be refrigerators or medical infusion pumps, so that when you buy a new product, you can be sure it has been certified to meet security standards."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IoT tech goes from planning stage to execution

Internet of Things technologies can be complex and fragmented, but increasing numbers of pilot projects are emerging within smart cities, farms and at a wide range of businesses and industries."We are seeing adoption of IoT begin," said Mark Bartolomeo, vice president of IoT at Verizon, in an interview. "There are now use cases for IoT and less of an industry focus on the technology. The biggest macro trend lately is how IT can use the data [from IoT] more effectively to run a better business for customers."The carrier launched its ThingSpace development platform last October for companies to create and manage IoT applications more efficiently. In February, Verizon announced it had more than 4,000 developers using ThingSpace, and would open the software to third-party network and tech providers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: The past and future of the videoconference room, Part 3: The User Interface

In the first of this series of blogs, I discussed the history and future of videoconferencing cameras, in the second I discussed the hierarchy of rooms/spaces/environments for visual collaboration. This – part three – is about how to use the darned things.From the earliest days of technology in enterprise conference rooms the user interface (UI) has been a contentious, problematic and difficult part of users’ satisfaction with that technology. All UIs have to achieve a balance between simplicity and power. The more that they can do, the harder they are to operate. So because videoconferencing has traditionally been hard, the UI has needed to do a lot to meet the needs.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

What’s the deal with the massive Panama Papers data leak?

A data breach at Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca is being touted as the largest ever, at least in terms of the sheer volume of information leaked. The leaked information allegedly details the ways dozens of high-ranking politicians, their relatives or close associates in more than 40 countries, including the U.K., France, Russia, China, and India, have used offshore companies to hide income and avoid paying taxes. Starting on Sunday, more than 100 news organizations filed reports based on the leaked information. The numbers: The leaks reportedly cover 11.5 million confidential documents dating from the 1970s through late 2015. The 2.6 terabytes of leaked data include 4.8 million emails, 3 million database format files, 2.2 million PDFs, 1.1 million images, and 320,000 text documents.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Troubleshoot#2: Core Dumps for Network Engineers

Got a core dump file, please contact your TAC engineers for further support ! This is the common statement that we all see on vendors’ websites and in their recommendations and it definetly is true.  The reason is that a core dump file contains information that requires deep knowledge of the code of the cored …

The post Troubleshoot#2: Core Dumps for Network Engineers appeared first on Networkers-online.com.

Google fixes 39 Android flaws, some allow hackers to take over your phone

Google has released one of the largest Android monthly security updates, fixing a total of 39 vulnerabilities — 15 rated critical, including four that can lead to a complete device compromise.The patches, which are included in new firmware images that were released Monday for the company's Nexus devices, will also be published to the Android Open Source Project over the next 24 hours.They include a fix for a vulnerability that Google warned about two weeks ago and which is already being exploited by a publicly available rooting application. Tracked as CVE-2015-1805, the privilege escalation flaw was originally fixed in the Linux kernel in April 2014, but it didn't become clear until February this year that it also affects Android.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Will corporate sustainability save IT from itself?

Last week, flying out of SFO northward over the verdant hills of Marin, rising above the tankers anchored off Richmond swinging with the tide and the long plumes from the Sacramento River’s inflow to the bay like ribbons unfurling in the water, I reflected on a visit that touched five Silicon Valley sustainability stakeholders in two days. Enroute to my adopted home of Seattle, I am struck with the commonality of these sessions and an early release of Uptime Institute’s 2016 Industry Survey results. (Disclosure: I work for Uptime Institute and oversee the content group there.)There are new faces at the IT table. And one of them is sustainability. Two years ago, a place at the table for sustainability would have been provocative, and perhaps evoked derision. In 2015, less than a tenth of enterprise IT stakeholders had confidence in corporate sustainability to affect IT efficiency and costs. One short year later, 2016 is a vastly different matter and the data suggests that the time of corporate sustainability in IT is here now: 70% of enterprise IT organizations actively participate in corporate sustainability efforts. The influence of an outside party breaks down the ‘thwart by silo’ effect that Continue reading

The revenge of the listening sockets

Back in November we wrote a blog post about one latency spike. Today I'd like to share a continuation of that story. As it turns out, the misconfigured rmem setting wasn't the only source of added latency.

It looked like Mr Wolf hadn't finished his job.


After adjusting the previously discussed rmem sysctl we continued monitoring our systems' latency. Among other things we measured ping times to our edge servers. While the worst case improved and we didn't see 1000ms+ pings anymore, the line still wasn't flat. Here's a graph of ping latency between an idling internal machine and a production server. The test was done within the datacenter, the packets never went to the public internet. The Y axis of the chart shows ping times in milliseconds, the X axis is the time of the measurement. Measurements were taken every second for over 6 hours:

As you can see most pings finished below 1ms. But out of 21,600 measurements about 20 had high latency of up to 100ms. Not ideal, is it?

System tap

The latency occurred within our datacenter and the packets weren't lost. This suggested a kernel issue again. Linux responds to ICMP pings from its soft Continue reading

Consumers don’t think they’ll get hacked

Most people say they care about their online security and privacy. Poll after poll confirm what one would expect: They don’t want their identities stolen, phones hacked, credit cards compromised or bank accounts drained. They don’t welcome government or anyone else conducting surveillance on them, especially in their private lives.But those polls also show that an alarmingly small percentage of those same people don’t seem to be willing to make much effort to do what they say they want – protect their privacy and security.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

This startup uses math to show whether your network is safe

How do you know your network is safe from attacks and failures? Veriflow, a startup with backing from the U.S. Defense Department, says it can make sure.Veriflow applies a practice called formal verification, used in preparing Mars missions and military gear, to figure out ahead of time what could go wrong on a network. Using that information, it helps enterprises apply policies to prevent problems from starting or spreading.If this sounds more at home in a lab than in a data center, it may be because that's where it came from. Veriflow's CTO, CSO and principal engineer are all longtime academics who worked on the problem together at the University of Illinois, and the National Science Foundation is a funder.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here