Review: Hot new tools to fight insider threats

In the 1979 film When a Stranger Calls, the horror is provided when police tell a young babysitter that the harassing phone calls she has been receiving are coming from inside the house. It was terrifying for viewers because the intruder had already gotten inside, and was presumably free to wreak whatever havoc he wanted, unimpeded by locked doors or other perimeter defenses. In 2016, that same level of fear is being rightfully felt towards a similar danger in cybersecurity: the insider threat.An entire industry has sprung up to provide a defense against insider threats. We tested products from Fortscale, Avanan, and PFU Systems, with each one concentrating on a different aspect of the problem.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Is XMPP Control- or Management-Plane Protocol?

My readers are consistently asking me whether XMPP and OVSDB are control- or management-plane protocols (to make matters worse, publicly available information tends to be confusing).

For example, one of them wrote…

Intel beefs up VR ammo with Extreme Edition Core i7 chips

Intel considers virtual reality a key growth vector as it reshapes to survive in a post-PC world, and new Core i7 Extreme Edition chips will play a big role in that transition.The new chips, code-named Broadwell-E, are speed demons with up to 10 cores, a new high for Intel PC chips. Primarily for gaming PCs, the new chips will also go in desktops certified to work with headsets like Oculus Rift and HTC Vive.The Core i7-6900 series and 6800 series chips are targeted at enthusiasts looking for the latest and greatest technologies in PCs. These chips can be overclocked and unlocked, which could instantly upgrade PC performance by cranking up CPU frequency.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

VRRP Skew Time (and always be learning…)

It’s funny how you can work with something for years, but miss a small detail. This week I learnt about Skew Time for VRRP. The reason for it is completely obvious once you think about it, but for some reason the detail had escaped me for all these years.

VRRP Hellos

VRRP sends out a “hello” multicast every <hello> seconds. Usually this is something like every 1 or 3 seconds. Unlike HSRP, only the current master sends out hello messages. This contains the current master priority & status.

The backup devices listen out for this hello message. If they think they have a higher priority, or if they fail to hear the hello message, they will assume the role of master.

Down Interval

Changing from backup to master because of one missed hello could cause network instability. There’s a common rule used for all keepalive-type messages, where backup devices will wait for three missed polls/keepalives before declaring something ‘down.’

VRRP is similar. It waits three poll intervals before declaring the master ‘down,’ and attempting to Continue reading

Worth Reading: Plumgrid, Cumulus, and SDN

With the advent of Software Defined Networking, enterprises are able to manage their network through a series of abstracted layers, offering a flexibility that was out of reach even 10 years ago. While this may seem futuristic to some, SDN is quickly becoming the new standard when working with containers, networks, and VMs at scale. The New Stack

The post Worth Reading: Plumgrid, Cumulus, and SDN appeared first on 'net work.

Can != Should, Is != Ought

Maybe I’m getting too old for my own good. Or maybe studying philosophy is making me older. Here in the US, though, it is Memorial Day, a day where people normally grill burgers and dogs, throw a few back, and forget to ask why. It’s just another day off, and days off are good for—well, for something.

Memorial Day, in the US, stands in memorial for those who fought—and, specifically died—for our freedom. But what is freedom? In my world, there are two types of freedom: freedom from, and freedom to. Two pieces this week made me think through this difference once again, and how we are increasingly confusing the two concepts.

But the big thing that changed this week is a Google home device is no longer a theoretical possibility. It’s here. And on a sunny day at the outdoor amphitheater, just a half mile away from the Googleplex, the audience watched as a video showed the device at work in the home of a typical American family. There was laughter when the dad broadcast his playlist into every room in the home, waking up his sleeping children — and then later remotely turned on the lights to make Continue reading

Stealth Falcon group uses custom spyware, fake journalists to target UAE dissidents

Meet Stealth Falcon, a sophisticated and likely state-sponsored cyberespionage group, which is hell bent on conducting targeted spyware attacks “against Emriati journalists, activists and dissidents.” The digital attacks started in 2012 and are still being carried out against United Arab Emirates (UAE) dissidents. It’s not “just” spying with custom spyware that leads to dissidents being “arbitrarily detained;” once identified as criticizing the authorities, UAE dissidents can be forcibly disappeared.“The UAE has gotten much more sophisticated since we first caught them using Hacking Team software in 2012,” Bill Marczak, a senior researcher at Citizen Lab told the New York Times. “They've clearly upped their game. They're not on the level of the United States or the Russians, but they're clearly moving up the chain.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Stealth Falcon group uses custom spyware, fake journalists to target UAE dissidents

Meet Stealth Falcon, a sophisticated and likely state-sponsored cyberespionage group, which is hell bent on conducting targeted spyware attacks “against Emriati journalists, activists and dissidents.” The digital attacks started in 2012 and are still being carried out against United Arab Emirates (UAE) dissidents. It’s not “just” spying with custom spyware that leads to dissidents being “arbitrarily detained;” once identified as criticizing the authorities, UAE dissidents can be forcibly disappeared.“The UAE has gotten much more sophisticated since we first caught them using Hacking Team software in 2012,” Bill Marczak, a senior researcher at Citizen Lab told the New York Times. “They've clearly upped their game. They're not on the level of the United States or the Russians, but they're clearly moving up the chain.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: The Problem with Analytics

There is a difference between knowledge and understanding. Knowledge typically comes down to knowing facts while understanding is the application of knowledge to the mastery of systems. You can know a lot while understanding very little. Cringely

The post Worth Reading: The Problem with Analytics appeared first on 'net work.

Move over Skylake: An Asus PC with Intel’s Kaby Lake chip is coming in Q3

The wait for Intel's Kaby Lake chip will end in the third quarter this year, as the first PC with the 7th Generation Core chip was announced at Computex. Kaby Lake, the successor to Intel's Skylake Core processor chips, will be in the Asus Transformer 3 tablet. The device is much like Microsoft's Surface Pro 4, and will ship in the third quarter starting at US$799, according to a blog entry on Microsoft's website. The Transformer 3 was among a gaggle of PC and phone products announced by Asus at Computex. No other Kaby Lake PC has been announced yet, but expect Lenovo, HP, Dell and others to follow suit.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Migrating to BGP

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Nvidia chief downplays challenge from Google’s AI chip

Nvidia has staked a big chunk of its future on supplying powerful graphics chips used for artificial intelligence, so it wasn't a great day for the company when Google announced two weeks ago that it had built its own AI chip for use in its data centers.Google's Tensor Processing Unit, or TPU, was built specifically for deep learning, a branch of AI through which software trains itself to get better at deciphering the world around it, so it can recognize objects or understand spoken language, for example.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Nvidia chief downplays challenge from Google’s AI chip

Nvidia has staked a big chunk of its future on supplying powerful graphics chips used for artificial intelligence, so it wasn't a great day for the company when Google announced two weeks ago that it had built its own AI chip for use in its data centers.Google's Tensor Processing Unit, or TPU, was built specifically for deep learning, a branch of AI through which software trains itself to get better at deciphering the world around it, so it can recognize objects or understand spoken language, for example.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Flaw in popular WordPress plug-in Jetpack puts over a million websites at risk

Owners of WordPress-based websites should update the Jetpack plug-in as soon as possible because of a serious flaw that could expose their users to attacks.Jetpack is a popular plug-in that offers free website optimization, management and security features. It was developed by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com and the WordPress open-source project, and has over 1 million active installations.Researchers from Web security firm Sucuri have found a stored cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability that affects all Jetpack releases since 2012, starting with version 2.0.The issue is located in the Shortcode Embeds Jetpack module which allows users to embed external videos, images, documents, tweets and other resources into their content. It can be easily exploited to inject malicious JavaScript code into comments.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Flaw in popular WordPress plug-in Jetpack puts over a million websites at risk

Owners of WordPress-based websites should update the Jetpack plug-in as soon as possible because of a serious flaw that could expose their users to attacks.Jetpack is a popular plug-in that offers free website optimization, management and security features. It was developed by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com and the WordPress open-source project, and has over 1 million active installations.Researchers from Web security firm Sucuri have found a stored cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability that affects all Jetpack releases since 2012, starting with version 2.0.The issue is located in the Shortcode Embeds Jetpack module which allows users to embed external videos, images, documents, tweets and other resources into their content. It can be easily exploited to inject malicious JavaScript code into comments.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

MIT WiFi Technology Promises Precise Location Tracking

New products of the week 5.30.16

New products of the weekOur roundup of intriguing new products. Read how to submit an entry to Network World's products of the week slideshow.Actiance Platform for the healthcare and pharmaceutical industriesKey features: The Actiance Platform addresses communications challenges for healthcare and pharmaceutical organizations in the midst of changing regulations by ensuring companies meet industry-specific data retention and security requirements. With the Actiance Platform for the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries, organizations can embrace new communications channels while protecting data and ensuring compliance. More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

New products of the week 5.30.16

New products of the weekOur roundup of intriguing new products. Read how to submit an entry to Network World's products of the week slideshow.Actiance Platform for the healthcare and pharmaceutical industriesKey features: The Actiance Platform addresses communications challenges for healthcare and pharmaceutical organizations in the midst of changing regulations by ensuring companies meet industry-specific data retention and security requirements. With the Actiance Platform for the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries, organizations can embrace new communications channels while protecting data and ensuring compliance. More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Strain relief

I’ve got a problem with sagging cables, and I’ve got a simple solution. Examine the side-by-side images below which show the same fiber connection between a switch and a firewall. The image on the left shows a sagging cable which crosses in front of … Continue reading →

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Strain relief

I’ve got a problem with sagging cables, and I’ve got a simple solution. Examine the side-by-side images below which show the same fiber connection between a switch and a firewall. The image on the left shows a sagging cable which crosses in front of the switch in the rack unit just below it.
As you may know, this cabling install is a violation of the 167th rule of networking:

Thou shalt contain your cables to your own rack unit and shalt not, under any circumstances, impede access to other rack units or blades.

The image on the right ticks the box for me. There’s no room for a dedicated 1RU horizontal cable manager, but there is room for a zero-RU strain relief bar (as seen below). The result is a relatively neat cabling job. It’s no work of art, but it’s functional.
A strain-relief bar is a cheap metal bar that you can bolt on when you rack-mount your switch. It allows you to velcro your fiber patches to the bar, taking the strain to help prevent breaks and preventing the dreaded cable droop. You should, of course, take care to ensure you don’t block access to any field-replaceable units, cards or ports on your network device.
The strain-relief bar Continue reading