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Category Archives for "Networking"

MPBGP Configuration

Hi everyone, JP here. You know as CCIE candidates, we are faced with one of the most difficult, and grueling, exams the networking world has to offer – the CCIE lab exam. As you may or may not be aware, Frame-Relay was replaced with L3VPN and DMVPN in the R&S Version 5 blueprint update. This means not only will we need to understand our IGP’s, MPLS, and VRF Lite, but we will need to fully understand how to configure MPBGP in order to transport our VPN labels and prefixes across the service provider’s network.

Using a topology from one of our mock labs, let’s have a look into the configuration of MP-BGP and make sure we understand it. Preview the diagram in HD here.

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In a Layer 3 VPN we are driven by the need to advertise customer prefixes across a service provider network, while keeping these customers isolated from one another. To do this using L3VPN, we need to carry more than just the IPv4 unicast address, which is all standard BGP is capable of. Additional information like the MPLS label, VPN label, and route-distinguisher need to be carried from one point of the network to the other. Let’s Continue reading

The unintended consequences of a RASP-focused application security strategy

Runtime application self-protection (RASP) is a promising solution for strengthening the security posture of an application while supporting faster development, but RASP can introduce serious unintended risks, particularly if developers are not producing quality code from the start.

RASP is a technology approach being evangelized by Joseph Feiman, a research vice president and fellow at Gartner. Last fall, in a report entitled “Stop Protecting Your Apps: It’s Time for Apps to Protect Themselves,” Feiman noted that application self-protection must be a CISO’s top priority because “modern security fails to test and protect all apps. Therefore, apps must be capable of security self-testing, self-diagnostics and self-protection.”

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CIOs embrace hybrid cloud and software-defined data centers

SAN FRANCISCO – Companies building mobile and Web applications to support their digital businesses depend on a mix of private and public clouds to exchange data, said Bill Fathers, VMware's executive vice president and general manager of cloud services, at the company’s VMworld customer event here Monday. Fathers said companies are struggling to deal with a "fundamental shift in application deployment patterns,” That's forced CIOs to think about "network architecture and data residency." In short: how data is moving back and forth between various on-premises systems and cloud environments the apps connect to. VMware is aiming to address these challenges with its unified hybrid cloud, which includes server, storage and network resources designed to enable companies to run any application on any device. The company announced several new software products in support of this initiative.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Despite reports of hacking, baby monitors remain woefully insecure

Disturbing reports in recent years of hackers hijacking baby monitors and screaming at children have creeped out parents, but these incidents apparently haven't spooked makers of these devices.A security analysis of nine baby monitors from different manufacturers revealed serious vulnerabilities and design flaws that could allow hackers to hijack their video feeds or take full control of the devices.The tests were performed by researchers from security firm Rapid7 during the first half of this year and the results were released Tuesday in a white paper. On a scale from A to F that rated their security functionality and implementation, eight of the devices received an F and one a D.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The RMS Titanic and cybersecurity

Little known fact: Yesterday was the 30th anniversary of Bob Ballard’s discovery of the RMS Titanic, several hundred miles off the coast of Newfoundland Canada. I’ve recently done some research into the ship, its builders, and its ultimate fate and believe that lessons learned from Titanic may be useful for the cybersecurity community at large. The Titanic tragedy teaches us of: The dangers of technology hubris. The Titanic was designed with the latest technology at the time to withstand severe storms in the north Atlantic. Because of this, the shipbuilders at Harland and Wolff decided to market the ship as “unsinkable.” Likewise, our industry has this absolute love affair with technology. I’m constantly briefed on the latest and greatest prevention or detection engine designed to withstand anything hackers can throw at it. Like the “unsinkable” Titanic, this is nothing but hot air. Bad guys will find ways around all of our defenses over time. Strong security demands people, process, and technology so the industry love affair with technology alone is counterproductive and leaves us susceptible to a sea of cybersecurity icebergs. The need for organizational coordination. There were two inquiries into the Titanic disaster, one in the U.S. Continue reading

How to get security right when embracing rapid software development

Accelerated software development brings with it particular advantages and disadvantages. On one hand, it increases the speed to market and allows for fast, frequent code releases, which trump slow, carefully planned ones that unleash a torrent of features at once. Continuous release cycles also allow teams to fine-tune software. With continuous updates, customers don’t have to wait for big releases that could take weeks or months.

Embracing failure without blame is also a key tenet of rapid acceleration. Teams grow faster this way, and management should embrace this culture change. Those who contribute to accidents can give detailed accounts of what happened without fear of repercussion, providing valuable learning opportunities for all involved.

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Check Point’s SandBlast sandbox spells R.I.P for ROP attacks

Check Point is upgrading its sandboxing technology so it catches attacks earlier in the process and makes it harder for adversaries to evade detection.Called SandBlast, the new software monitors CPU activity looking for anomalies that indicate that attackers are using sophisticated methods that would go unnoticed with traditional sandboxing technology, according to Nathan Shuchami, head of threat prevention sales for Check Point.Traditional sandboxes, including Check Point’s, determine whether files are legitimate by opening them in a virtual environment to see what they do. To get past the sandboxes attackers have devised evasion techniques, such as delaying execution until the sandbox has given up or lying dormant until the machine it’s trying to infect reboots.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Automating New Network Build – Part 2 (BGP)

In this post we’ll have a look at how to automate a typical BGP setup. This is where configuration may get particularly messy especially in presence of backdoor links and complex routing failover policies. However, as I will show, it is still possible to create a standard set of routing manipulation policies and selectively apply them to the required adjacencies to achieve the desired effect.

Continue reading

Micromanaging networks considered harmful: on (k)nerd knobs

Nerd Knobs (or as we used to call them in TAC, knerd knobs) are the bane of the support engineer’s life. Well, that and crashes. And customer who call in with a decoded stack trace. Or don’t know where to put the floppy disc that came with the router into the router. But, anyway…

What is it with nerd knobs? Ivan has a great piece up this week on the topic. I think this is the closest he gets to what I think of as the real root cause for nerd knobs —

Instead of using cookie-cutter designs, we prefer to carefully craft unique snowflakes that magically integrate the legacy stuff that should have been dead years ago with the next-generation technologies… and every unique snowflake needs at least a nerd knob or two to make it work.

Greg has a response to Ivan up; again, I think he gets close to the problem with these thoughts —

Most IT managers have lost the ability to recognise technical debt and its impacts … Nerd Knobs are symptoms of much deeper problems/technical debt in the networking market and treat the cause not the symptom.

A somewhat orthogonal article caught my eye, Continue reading

Intel’s pint-sized Compute Stick PC powered up with Core M processor

Intel announced a Core M-based version of its Compute Stick pocket PC at the IFA show, part of a small coterie of unexpected announcements Intel made at the trade show here.As expected, Intel formally announced Skylake, its sixth-generation Core processor. Kirk Skaugen, a senior vice president at Intel, called the chip its “best processor ever.”Skylake can scale from over 90 watts down to just 4.5 watts, the power consumed by the Core M, now rebranded as the Core m. That makes it ideal for two-in-ones and even tiny devices like Intel’s Compute Stick, which had used an earlier version of Intel’s Atom processor when it debuted. Intel didn’t announce a price or a ship date for the new Compute Stick, however.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How CISOs can beat the information security skills-gap

The information security skills gap may have become a huge issue for Chief Security Offices (CSOs) and Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs), but there are a number of ways InfoSec teams can work around the shortage so to protect their networks and stay ahead of the attackers. Outsourcing staff When people think of outsourcing, they often think of outsourcing services. A company may, for example, choose to outsource its accounting, customer management, or recruitment. However, it’s worth noting that you can also outsource talent and this is a poignant note for an understaffed and under-skilled security industry.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Study: 81% of large health care organizations breached

In the past two years, 81 percent of hospitals and health insurance companies have had a data breach, according to a report released by KPMG."These are all incidents where they have determined they lost data," said Greg Bell, Cyber US Leader at KPMG. "This wasn't just a malware or a virus infection -- it actually went to exfiltration."The study surveyed 223 senior technology and security executives at health care organizations with over $500 million in annual revenues.However, only 66 percent of the insurance executives and 53 percent of hospital executives said they said that they were prepared for an attack.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Employees put business data at risk by installing gambling apps on their phones

If you work for a large, global company, chances are some of your peers have installed gambling apps on the mobile devices they use for work, and that's bad news for IT security.A study has found that the average company has more than one such gambling application in some employee devices, putting corporate data stored on those devices at risk.The analysis was performed by security firm Veracode, which scanned hundreds of thousands of mobile apps installed in corporate mobile environments. The study found that some companies had as many as 35 mobile gambling apps on their network environment.The company tested some of the most popular gambling apps it detected in corporate environments for potential security risks and found critical vulnerabilities that could enable hackers to gain access to a phone's contacts, emails, call history and location data, as well as to record conversations.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How VMware aims to distinguish itself in the cloud

VMware VP of Cloud Services Mathew Lodge acknowledges that the virtualization vendor “got started later than other folks” in the IaaS public cloud market, but he flatly denies that the company is slowing investment in this area. VMware’s position is that while it has catching up to do with cloud market leaders Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft, it also has strengths that can make it stand out.VMware used its annual VMworld conference in San Francisco this week to show off some of those differentiators, and teased more advances to come. HYBRID ALL THE WAY The company’s cloud strategy centers around VMware’s Unified Hybrid Cloud platform, as CEO Pat Gelsinger stressed in a pre-VMworld interview with Network World.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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