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Five Years After Egypt

egypt

This week marks a somber milestone in Internet history: the 5-year anniversary of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s order to shutdown his country’s access to the global Internet amid widespread protests.   Similar popular protests would sweep through the region during a time frame that became known as the Arab Spring.  Within days of the Egyptian blackout, Internet service would be restored and Mubarak would resign after 30 years in power.

egypt
As the Arab Spring protests spread to other countries, the trend of government-directed Internet blackouts continued in Syria, Libya, and Bahrain.  In the years since 2011, we have documented (on this blog and on our Twitter feed) government-directed blackouts in a number of countries, including Sudan, Iraq, and most recently Congo-Brazzaville.  While the protests in Tahrir Square came to exemplify the greater Arab Spring movement, the legacy of the Egyptian Internet blackout was that it ushered in the modern era of government-directed suppression of Internet communication.

Egypt

On the evening of 27 January 2011 (US Eastern Time), we were alerted to the Egyptian blackout by our BGP route monitoring system.  Within minutes, I was assisting my colleague Jim Cowie in Continue reading

PayPal is the latest victim of Java deserialization bugs in Web apps

PayPal has fixed a serious vulnerability in its back-end management system that could have allowed attackers to execute arbitrary commands on the server and potentially install a backdoor.The vulnerability is part of a class of bugs that stem from Java object deserialization and which security researchers have warned about a year ago.In programming languages, serialization is the process of converting data to a binary format for storing it or for sending it over the network. Deserialization is the reverse of that process.Deserialization is not an issue in itself, but like most processes that involve processing potentially untrusted input, measures need to be taken to ensure that it is performed safely. For example, an attacker could craft a serialized object that includes a Java class that the application accepts and which could be abused for something malicious.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: The new Rogue IT: A growing, invisible threat to your IT operations

Back in the day, "rogue IT" typically entailed departments building servers and putting them under their desks in an attempt to circumvent the IT department and all of the pesky security controls that came with IT-approved servers.Often, those servers sat under a desk, inside a closet or back room — unpatched, unprotected, and non-compliant — for long stretches of time before finally being discovered. Those were the good ol' days, compared to the new type of rogue IT that's quickly spreading through today's IT landscape. It's invisible, nearly undetectable, and completely unacceptable, to say the least. The new rogue IT involves departments buying things online (think Amazon Web Services, Google Services, and Microsoft Azure), and setting up off-the-books IT operations outside of your organization's boundaries. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

2016’s 25 geekiest 25th anniversaries

Back in 1991There was quite a collection of new technology and plain-old interesting geeky stuff in 1991. Included were the public debut of the World Wide Web, the introduction of Linux and the discovery of Otzi the Iceman. There was the lithium-ion battery, PGP encryption, Apple’s PowerBook, Terminator 2 and more. When through, if you’d like to catch up on the first nine installments of this series, check out 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008 and 2007.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Technology ‘net: End-to-end Disaggregation?

Quite a lot seems to be going on on the technology side of things—as the morning paper points out, everything seems to be changing at once right now. Ever feel like you’re sipping from a firehose? Maybe there’s a reason… Let’s discuss just a few of these in a little more detail.

First, there has been a lot of discussion around IPv6 in the last year or so. The folks within the IETF who designed IPv6 decided to do “more than just” adding more address space, instead deciding to change some fundamental things about the way IP works in the process of developing a new protocol. For instance, fragmentation by network devices is gone in IPv6, and the option headers are much richer. These kind of fundamental changes in protocol design invariably lead to the question—what impact do these things have on performance? A recent series of tests set out to answer this question. The results are pretty clear; over time, as IPv6 has been deployed natively, the protocol’s performance has moved closer to the performance of IPv4. There are still some gaps, but they are narrowing. Those gaps may never be gone, but IPv6 may come close enough, over Continue reading

Look out, Cisco: Major telcos join Facebook’s open hardware push

Big telcos including Verizon and AT&T have joined a Facebook-led project to build low-cost computing hardware, posing a fresh challenge for network vendors like Cisco and Juniper.The telcos have signed onto the Open Compute Project, a non-profit set up by Facebook in which end-user companies get together and design their own, no-frills hardware including servers, network and storage gear.The OCP members can include just the capabilities they need in a product, free of the "gratuitous differentiation" that bumps up prices in equipment from traditional vendors. They enlist low-cost manufacturers in Asia to produce the equipment.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Look out, Cisco: Major telcos join Facebook’s open hardware push

Big telcos including Verizon and AT&T have joined a Facebook-led project to build low-cost computing hardware, posing a fresh challenge for network vendors like Cisco and Juniper.The telcos have signed onto the Open Compute Project, a non-profit set up by Facebook in which end-user companies get together and design their own, no-frills hardware including servers, network and storage gear.The OCP members can include just the capabilities they need in a product, free of the "gratuitous differentiation" that bumps up prices in equipment from traditional vendors. They enlist low-cost manufacturers in Asia to produce the equipment.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Docker Networking on Software Gone Wild

A year and a half ago, Docker networking couldn’t span multiple hosts and used NAT with port mapping to expose container-based services to the outside world.

Docker is the hottest Linux container solution these days. Want to know more about it? Matt Oswalt is running Introduction to Docker webinar in a few days.

In August 2014 a small startup decided to change all that. Docker bought them before they managed to get public, and the rest is history.

Read more ...

Online advertising company fixes severe XSS flaw

An online advertising company has fixed a vulnerability in its platform that could have allowed hackers to steal information from a large number of users.The cross-site scripting (XSS) flaw in the platform of PublicityClerks was found by a U.K. security researcher who goes by the handle CEHSecurity on Twitter.Cross-site scripting flaws are one of the most common faults in websites. They allow an attacker to inject malicious code into a website, which then can be used to steal data and for other attacks."As soon as we were aware of the issue, we fixed it ASAP and ensured our advertisers and publishers were not affected," said James Hakim, PublicityClerks' founder and CEO.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Online advertising company fixes severe XSS flaw

An online advertising company has fixed a vulnerability in its platform that could have allowed hackers to steal information from a large number of users.The cross-site scripting (XSS) flaw in the platform of PublicityClerks was found by a U.K. security researcher who goes by the handle CEHSecurity on Twitter.Cross-site scripting flaws are one of the most common faults in websites. They allow an attacker to inject malicious code into a website, which then can be used to steal data and for other attacks.INSIDER: Traditional anti-virus is dead: Long live the new and improved AV "As soon as we were aware of the issue, we fixed it ASAP and ensured our advertisers and publishers were not affected," said James Hakim, PublicityClerks' founder and CEO.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Lenovo fixes hard-coded password in file-sharing utility

Lenovo has patched several software flaws in a file-sharing utility, which could allow attackers to browse and make copies of files.The flaws were found by Core Security, which described in an advisory a lengthy back and forth dialog with Lenovo starting in late October over the problems.The affected application is SHAREit, which is designed to let people share files from Windows computers or Android devices over a local LAN or through a Wi-Fi hotspot that's created.SHAREit is preloaded on Lenovo devices, including its ThinkPad and IdeaPad notebooks and other mobile devices. The vulnerable SHAREit versions are the Android 3.0.18_ww and Windows 2.5.1.1 packages, Core Security said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Lenovo fixes hard-coded password in file-sharing utility

Lenovo has patched several software flaws in a file-sharing utility, which could allow attackers to browse and make copies of files.The flaws were found by Core Security, which described in an advisory a lengthy back and forth dialog with Lenovo starting in late October over the problems.The affected application is SHAREit, which is designed to let people share files from Windows computers or Android devices over a local LAN or through a Wi-Fi hotspot that's created.INSIDER: Traditional anti-virus is dead: Long live the new and improved AV SHAREit is preloaded on Lenovo devices, including its ThinkPad and IdeaPad notebooks and other mobile devices. The vulnerable SHAREit versions are the Android 3.0.18_ww and Windows 2.5.1.1 packages, Core Security said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Unspoken Benefits of Open Networking

I have noticed a lot of very premature dismissal of a growing trend in the networking industry, which is the rise of open network operating systems. Nearly every post-announcement discussion that I hear among peers tends to sound something like this:

I am not Facebook or Google. I don’t want to install third-party software on my switches, so this “open networking” movement is not relevant to me or my organization.

I believe this sentiment is based on an incomplete understanding of all of the benefits of open networking. I’d like to bring up some additional points that aren’t being discussed as much as others, as it pertains to open network operating systems. I believe these additional benefits apply to a very large spectrum of organizations, not just the top 1% webscale companies.

This is not to say that closed-source operating systems do not have a place anymore, or that the current participants in the open networking ecosystem are perfect, or that we have anything but a long road ahead of us in this journey…my point in writing this post is simply to illuminate parts of the conversation that deserve more attention.

We discussed open operating systems in a recent video-enabled Continue reading

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