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Category Archives for "Networking"

Worth Watching: The Economics of the Internet

Old economics explains the new economy well. When we buy something, we spend time and money searching for it, comparing it with other products, negotiating a price, and ensuring that we get what we paid for. This is what economists call ‘transaction costs.’ The internet dramatically reduces these costs, making it cheaper for people, businesses and governments to do business. -via the World Bank

The post Worth Watching: The Economics of the Internet appeared first on 'net work.

Mobile Network Slicing with Smart Mobile Cloud

This blog is co-authored with Bill Kaufman, Group Manager SDN Planning, Coriant As outlined in a recent blog on mobile operator challenges, there are a number of business and technical challenges mobile operators face in today’s environment.  As consumers and businesses demand more from their mobile operators, the existing proprietary, hardware-centric mobile networks make it... Read more →

Xen’s latest hypervisor updates are missing some security patches

The Xen Project released new versions of its virtual machine hypervisor, but forgot to fully include two security patches that had been previously made available.The Xen hypervisor is widely used by cloud computing providers and virtual private server hosting companies.Xen 4.6.1, released Monday, is flagged as a maintenance release, the kind that are put out roughly every four months and are supposed to include all bug and security patches released in the meantime."Due to two oversights the fixes for both XSA-155 and XSA-162 have only been partially applied to this release," the Xen Project noted in a blog post. The same is true for Xen 4.4.4, the maintenance release for the 4.4 branch that was released on Jan. 28, the Project said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Identifying the security pitfalls in SDN

Software-defined networks can be a boon to savvy organizations, offering opportunities to cut administrative costs while increasing network agility. But SDN technology can also create security risks, and how you manage those risks can mean the difference between a successful implementation and a disastrous one.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Should you worry about the Internet of Hackable Things?

If 2015 was the year of the Internet of Things, 2016 could be the year of the hacked Internet of Things. That could mean a lot of headaches for CIOs, whether they're fans of these new devices themselves or will be dealing with employees connecting them at work and managing the potential security exposure that brings. "The issue to date is that devices are vulnerable just by the fact that they exist and can connect to the Internet," says Jerry Irvine, member of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Cybersecurity Leadership Council and CIO of Prescient Solutions. "Anybody can get to a device if you don't secure them properly." To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How to prevent shadow IT

Stopping the armchair IT folksImage by Mette1977 What do complex IT policies, outdated software and lack of IT-supported services have in common? They all contribute to shadow IT, which occurs when employees circumvent procedures to use unapproved services and software. The last thing employees want to do when working on a project is check in with the IT department, so how can IT provide employees with necessary resources so shadow IT is no longer an issue? These InfoSec professionals share their suggestions for preventing shadow IT before it becomes the new normal. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Full Stacks and S-Curves

Here’s another interesting coincidence:

Homework for today: listen to the podcast, read the article, and start exploring some new technology (network automation immediately comes to mind).

IBM unveils z13s mainframe focused on security and hybrid clouds

IBM has unveiled its new z13s mainframe, which it claims offers encryption at twice the speed as previous mid-range systems, without compromising performanceThe company, which sold its x86 server business to Lenovo, continues to invest in new designs of its mainframe to handle new compute challenges. It launched in January last year, the z13, its first new mainframe in almost three years, with a new processor design, faster I/O and the ability to address up to 10TB of memory. The design of the z13 was focused on real-time encryption and embedded analytics.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Workaround for virtualenvwrapper for windows postactivate script

Virtualenvwrapper’s windows port (virtualenvwrapper-win) helps to manage your venvs on windows platform, yet it is not so straigtforward about using hooks like postactivate. That is what official documentation has to say about this: Hooks To run some commands after mkvirtualenv you can use hooks. First you need to define VIRTUALENVWRAPPER_HOOK_DIR variable. If it is set mkvirtualenv

Ansible up and running

After much delay – I’ve finally found time to take a look at Ansible.  I’ve spent some time looking at possible platforms to automate network deployment and Ansible seems to be a favorite in this arena.  One of the primary reasons for this is that Ansible is ‘clientless’ (I’m putting that in quotes for a reason, more on that in a later post).  So unlike Chef, Puppet, and Salt (Yes – there are proxy modes available in some products) Ansible does not require an installed client on the remote endpoints.  So let’s get right into a basic lab setup.

While the end goal will be to use Ansible to automate network appliances, we’re going to start with the a more standard use case – Linux servers.  The base lab we will start with is two servers, one acting as the Ansible server and the second being a Ansible client or remote server.  Both hosts are CentOS 7 based Linux hosts.  So our base lab looks like this…

image
Pretty exciting right?  I know, it’s not, but I want to start with the basics and build from there…

Note: I’ll refer to ansibleserver as Continue reading

Will Public Cloud Make Us Prisoners Of Pricing?

Let's say the vast majority of compute workloads in the world migrates to public cloud. Will public cloud pricing then become extortionate? Seems plausible if you assume that the technical talent migrates to public cloud companies. In that scenario, public cloud consumers are beholden to their technical master and would have to pay whatever is asked so that they can get their business done. However, I think the situation is more complex than that...

Securing BGP: A Case Study (3)

To recap (or rather, as they used to say in old television shows, “last time on ‘net Work…”), this series is looking at BGP security as an exercise (or case study) in understanding how to approach engineering problems. We started this series by asking three questions, the third of which was:

What is it we can actually prove in a packet switched network?

From there, in part 2 of this series, we looked at this question more deeply, asking three “sub questions” that are designed to help us tease out the answer this third question. Asking the right questions is a subtle, but crucial, part of learning how to deal with engineering problems of all sorts. Those questions can be summed up as:

  • Is the path through this peer going to pass through someone I don’t want it to pass through?
  • Is the path this peer is advertising a valid route to the destination?

Let’s quickly look at the first of these two to see why it’s not provable in the context of a packet switched network, using the network diagram below.

bgp-sec-02

When working with BGP at Internet scale, we tend to think of an autonomous system as one “thing”—we Continue reading

VoIP phone with default password can be used for covert surveillance

If you’d like an attacker to eavesdrop on your calls made on VoIP phones, then leave the default password in place. If not, then change it.Using default or weak passwords will continue to bite companies, but this time instead of spying via IP cameras, it was enterprise-grade VoIP phones being pwned. When a client asked information security consultant Paul Moore how to improve security without disrupting ease of VoIP phone deployment, Moore discovered the company was using the default password.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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