Cisco issues critical patch for Nexus switches to remove hardcoded credentials

Cisco Systems has released software updates for its Nexus 3000 and 3500 switches in order to remove a default administrative account with static credentials that could allow remote attackers to compromise devices.The account is created at installation time by the Cisco NX-OS software that runs on these switches and it cannot be changed or deleted without affecting the system's functionality, Cisco said in an advisory.The company rated the issue as critical because authenticating with this account can provide attackers with access to a bash shell with root privileges, meaning that they can fully control the device.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco issues critical patch for Nexus switches to remove hardcoded credentials

Cisco Systems has released software updates for its Nexus 3000 and 3500 switches in order to remove a default administrative account with static credentials that could allow remote attackers to compromise devices.The account is created at installation time by the Cisco NX-OS software that runs on these switches and it cannot be changed or deleted without affecting the system's functionality, Cisco said in an advisory.The company rated the issue as critical because authenticating with this account can provide attackers with access to a bash shell with root privileges, meaning that they can fully control the device.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco HCI & Springpath – Some Questions

Now that Cisco is freed from the VCE/vBlock engagement (rumoured to be exclusive arrangement), most people are wondering why Cisco took so long to announce this. Cisco announced another HyperConverged Infrastructure (HCI) platform this week. I say “another” because Cisco already works with several partners for Converged and Hyperconverged such as NetApp, VCE, Simplicity and […]

The post Cisco HCI & Springpath – Some Questions appeared first on EtherealMind.

Make threat intelligence meaningful: A 4-point plan

With data breaches grabbing headlines nearly every week, threat intelligence is shaping up as the next big thing in information security. That, of course, means there’s more hype and confusion to sift through.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Data Center Interconnect Design Options

Cisco makes a rare hardware play with Leaba Semiconductor acquisition

Cisco Systems is buying in some chip expertise that could help it in the datacenter.The networking giant's latest acquisition target is Leaba Semiconductor, a fabless semiconductor company based in Israel.The company is "in stealth mode," according to its website, which indicates only that it develops semiconductors to address "significant infrastructure challenges."Cisco had little more to say concerning Leaba's field of work in its blog post about the acquisition by Rob Salvagno, head of its mergers, acquisitions and venture investment team.However, according to information provided by Israel's Ministry of Economy, Leaba specializes in the design of chips for connecting memory, storage and compute in data center environments.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco makes a rare hardware play with Leaba Semiconductor acquisition

Cisco Systems is buying in some chip expertise that could help it in the datacenter.The networking giant's latest acquisition target is Leaba Semiconductor, a fabless semiconductor company based in Israel.The company is "in stealth mode," according to its website, which indicates only that it develops semiconductors to address "significant infrastructure challenges."Cisco had little more to say concerning Leaba's field of work in its blog post about the acquisition by Rob Salvagno, head of its mergers, acquisitions and venture investment team.However, according to information provided by Israel's Ministry of Economy, Leaba specializes in the design of chips for connecting memory, storage and compute in data center environments.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Next-Generation Firewalls Put To The Test

SDS And Flash: Better Together

Time To Face Up To Collaboration

5 ways to fail – WAN link acceptance

I’ve had an interesting few months doing WAN circuit turn-ups for a new Data Centre. I dealt with three major carriers, and each experience was worse than the next. I’m not sure why I held such high expectations but I was … Continue reading →

The post 5 ways to fail – WAN link acceptance appeared first on The Network Sherpa.

5 ways to fail – WAN link acceptance

I’ve had an interesting few months doing WAN circuit turn-ups for a new Data Centre. I dealt with three major carriers, and each experience was worse than the next. I’m not sure why I held such high expectations but I was surprised by their hopeless inefficiency in delivering what should have been a standard product. In this post I’ll examine the problems I saw and their root causes.
In all three situations, 1Gbps Layer-2 ethernet circuit was ordered with a copper ethernet handoff from a rack-installed NID/NTU/whatever-you-call-it-yourself. Lets look at the five issues I hit whilst troubleshooting.

Link up at both ends – No CDP received

There was a lot of blaming the end-customer on this one. “Are you sure that CDP is enabled?”. There was a huge amount of frustration here. The carrier would send an email to confirm that ‘they had tested’, provide no actionable details of their troubleshooting, then close the ticket. This went on for days bouncing between the annoyingly named ‘deliver’ and ‘assure’ teams. The ‘deliver’ team felt they had delivered the circuit and the  ‘assure’ team assured us that the circuit wasn’t live and they couldn’t help us.

The ‘deliver’ team felt they had delivered the circuit and the  ‘assure’ Continue reading

Network-CI Part 2 – Small Network Demo

In this post I’ll demonstrate how to use the network-ci tools to automate the build, test and upgrade of a small 4-node network.

How fast is your network?

You always wonder how fast is your network, right? How long does it take the information travel over the network? I will share with you this special article, which you can use to find the speed of your network and define it with a numerical number. I will use ring, partial mesh and full-mesh physical topologies to […]

The post How fast is your network? appeared first on Cisco Network Design and Architecture | CCDE Bootcamp | orhanergun.net/newwp.

How fast is your network?

You always wonder how fast is your network, right? How long does it take the information travel over the network? I will share with you this special article, which you can use to find the speed of your network and define it with a numerical number. I will use ring, partial mesh and full-mesh physical topologies to […]

The post How fast is your network? appeared first on Cisco Network Design and Architecture | CCDE Bootcamp | orhanergun.net.

How fast is your network ?

How fast is your network ? You always wonder how fast is your network right ? How long does it take the information travel over the network ? I will share a special article for you which you can use to find the speed of your network and define it with a numerical number. I will use […]

The post How fast is your network ? appeared first on Cisco Network Design and Architecture | CCDE Bootcamp | OrhanErgun.net.

Data Center Fabrics and SDN

A few days ago Inside-IT published an interview Christoph Jaggi did with me. In case you don’t understand German, here’s the English version of it.

There is a lot of talk about data center fabrics. What problem do they try to solve?

The data center fabrics are supposed to solve a simple-to-define problem: building a unified data center infrastructure that seamlessly supports data and storage communications. As always, the devil hides in the details.

New Address

To make this blog a little easier to find, I’ve pointed rule11.us here as well. ntwrk.guru will continue to work, as well, but people seem to have a hard time remembering the url, so I added a second one.

The post New Address appeared first on 'net work.

400Gbps: Winter of Whopping Weekend DDoS Attacks

Over the last month, we’ve been watching some of the largest distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks ever seen unfold. As CloudFlare has grown we've brought on line systems capable of absorbing and accurately measuring attacks. Since we don't need to resort to crude techniques to block traffic we can measure and filter attacks with accuracy. Our systems sort bad packets from good, keep websites online and keep track of attack packet rates and bits per second.

The current spate of large attacks are all layer 3 (L3) DDoS. Layer 3 attacks consist of a large volume of packets hitting the target network, and the aim is usually to overwhelm the target network hardware or connectivity.

L3 attacks are dangerous because most of the time the only solution is to acquire large network capacity and buy beefy networking hardware, which is simply not an option for most independent website operators. Or, faced with huge packet rates, some providers simply turn off connections or entirely block IP addresses.

A Typical Day At CloudFlare

Historically, L3 attacks were the biggest headache for CloudFlare. Over the last two years, we’ve automated almost all of our L3 attack handling and these automatic systems protect Continue reading

Cisco Enterprise NFV, DNA, IWAN and a bunch of other acronyms

So Cisco had some big announcements today. Cisco Digital Network Architecture (DNA).  Ohhh, sounds fancy. Let me put on something a little more formal before I get too involved in the post. So what are all these awesome acronyms, you may be wondering? Well basically we start with DNA, which is the overall ecosystem that […]

The post Cisco Enterprise NFV, DNA, IWAN and a bunch of other acronyms appeared first on Packet Pushers.