Humidity, not heat, is a hard drive’s biggest threat

Having been to Orlando in August, I know the meaning of the term "It's not the heat, it's the humidity." That was the first and only time I had my glasses fog up for just stepping outside.And it turns out humidity is a greater threat to hard drive reliability than high temperatures, according to a study from Rutgers University in partnership with GoDaddy and Microsoft. In their paper titled "Environmental Conditions and Disk Reliability in Free-cooled Datacenters" (PDF), the team said the most notable result was that all other conditions aside, the effects on controllers and adapters were felt most as humidity levels rose.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Creating a Dynamic Lab Environment with vEOS and GNS3 – Part II

SETTING UP A DHCP AND FILE SERVER FOR USE WITH ZTP

Creating a Dynamic Lab Environment with vEOS and GNS3 – Part I

GETTING STARTED

Preliminary Installation Setup

Creating the Management Network

SETTING UP vEOS

Creating a Base Image

Rules, smules, classified, smashified: Those things don’t seem to apply to Clinton

Rules, smules...they don't seem to apply to Hillary Clinton. The Washington Post has an excellent piece about the Clinton email scandal.For “personal comfort” reasons, she wanted to use her personal unencrypted BlackBerry for all her email, despite warnings that it could be vulnerable. She even took it overseas, although she supposedly said she “gets it” being a security risk. Don’t be silly and expect her to use a PC; oh no, she was seemingly a CrackBerry fanboy. She also didn’t bother to tell officials that her BlackBerry was tied to her infamous private email server. That server was supposedly also for her comfort – for her “convenience.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Former NSA deputy director says Edward Snowden lacks courage

In the first segment of an interview with Chris Inglis, former deputy director of NSA, the Irari Report talks with him about his perceptions of Edward Snowden’s motivations and intentions in committing his acts of espionage. In the video segment, Inglis discusses his impressions of Snowden, and theorizes as to why Snowden left for China, and to where he intended to defect.Edward Snowden's defection occurred during Inglis' tenure as Deputy Director of NSA, and as such, Inglis was extremely involved in overseeing the investigation incident and mitigation of the resulting damage. Inglis states that Snowden was indiscriminate in his release of information, and is full of rage. When asked to comment on why Snowden has not released any documents about Russian or Chinese domestic surveillance efforts, which are plentiful throughout NSA, and would have been readily available to Snowden while he was at NSA, Inglis stated that Snowden lacks any courage to speak up about any concerns while he might be held accountable.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Survey: With all eyes on security, talent shortage sends salaries sky high

Jason Hoffman started his career as an internal auditor, but after 7 years he was ready to leave the job he was "really good at" and try something different. The transition to security more than 18 years ago "was probably the best decision I made in my career," says Hoffman, who is now CSO at marketing automation software vendor Marketo. "I don’t think anyone in 1998 could have predicted how important security would be today." "Company executives and their boards are more acutely aware that security is not just an IT problem but it’s a business problem," says Hoffman. "As a result, security is getting more emphasis across all companies regardless of sector."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Merging firms appealing targets for attackers

Companies going through a merger or acquisition, as well as their lawyers, financial advisers, and other associated firms are all tempting targets for cyberattackers, according to a new report from Digital Shadows.The attackers use public sources for the first round of information gathering, then spearphishing and malware campaigns against targeted individuals. They are often undetected because many companies still ignore cybersecurity when doing due diligence, the report said.ALSO ON CSO: How to respond to ransomware threats The attackers are "apex predators" said Rick Holland, the company's vice president of strategy.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The CORD Architecture

Edge provider networks, supporting DSL, voice, and other services to consumers and small businesses, tend to be more heavily bound by vendor specific equipment and hardware centric standards. These networks are built around the more closed telephone standards, rather than the more open internetworking standards, and hence they tend to be more expensive to operate and manage. As one friend said about a company that supplies this equipment, “they just print money.” The large edge providers, such as AT&T and Verizon, however, are not endless pools of money. These providers are in a squeeze between the content providers, who are taking large shares of revenue, and consumers, who are always looking for a lower price option for communications and new and interesting services.

If this seems like an area that’s ripe for virtualization to you, you’re not alone. AT&T has been working on a project called CORD for a few years in this area; they published a series of papers on the topic that make for interesting reading:

• A set of slides covering the concept can be found here
• A recording of a talk on this topic can be found here
• A shorter white paper on the topic can Continue reading

PLUMgrid Touts Containers & CloudApex in 5.0 Release

CloudApex functionality is key.

Worth Reading: Yellow journalism on encryption

That’s not how encryption works. Instead, if “encryption” were the one thing the terrorists were using to hide, then you’d certainly find encrypted emails and encrypted messages — ones you couldn’t read without knowing the key. The lack of emails/messages instead hints that the terrorists were meeting in person, passing paper notes to each other, or using telepathy. All of these, even telepathy, are more likely explanation for the lack of evidence than “encryption”. It’s a typical example of yellow journalism. The public isn’t familiar with “encryption”, so it’s easy to sensationalize it, to make it seem like something sinister is going on. -via Errata Security

The post Worth Reading: Yellow journalism on encryption appeared first on 'net work.

US has asked Apple, Google to help unlock devices in more than 70 cases

U.S. government agencies have filed more than 70 orders requiring Apple or Google to help law enforcement agencies unlock mobile devices since 2008, despite the agency insisting its fight with Apple in a recent terrorism case was limited in scope.The Department of Justice dropped its California case against Apple after the FBI found a way to break into one of the San Bernardino shooters' iPhone without assistance.But the American Civil Liberties Union has identified 64 cases where representatives of the DOJ have filed All Writs Act orders seeking assistance from Apple or Google to unlock mobile devices. The ACLU's numbers are on top of 12 cases identified by Apple lawyer Marc Zwillinger in mid-February, the group said. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Custom developed Dripion backdoor used in highly targeted attacks in Asia, US

A new custom developed backdoor program has been used in highly targeted attacks against organizations from Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and the U.S. over the past year.Malware researchers from Symantec first came across the program, which they've named Dripion, in August 2015. However, due to its custom nature and sparse use, it has managed to fly under the radar since as early as November 2013.When their analysis began, the Symantec researchers believed Dripion was a local threat used against organizations in Taiwan, where most of its victims were found. However, since then, they have found computers infected with the backdoor in other countries as well.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Security Sessions: How to transition from tech professional to a business leader

Many security pros came up through the career ranks with a solid tech background. But security leadership demands more business acumen and expertise today. Lorna Koppel, Direction of Information Security for Tufts University, has been through this process in her career and shares her tips for making the transition smoothly and effectively.

Video And The Death Of Dialog

I was reading a trivia article the other day about the excellent movie Sex, Lies, & Videotape when a comment by the director, Stephen Soderbergh, caught my eye. The quote, from this article talks about how people use video as a way to distance ourselves from events. Soderbergh used it as a metaphor in a movie made in 1989. In today’s society, I think video is having this kind of impact on our careers and our discourse in a much bigger way.

Writing It Down In Pictures

People have become huge consumers of video. YouTube gets massive amounts of traffic. Devices have video recording capabilities built in. It’s not uncommon to see a GoPro camera attached to anything and everything and see people posting videos online of things that happen.

My son is a huge fan of videos about watching other people play video games. He’ll watch hours of video of someone playing a game and narrating the experience. When I tell him that he’s capable of playing the game himself he just tells me, “It’s not as fun that way Dad.” I, too, have noticed that a lot of things that would normally have been written down are Continue reading

How to set up a portable, non-cloud-based password manager

Nothing helps strong passwords become a central tenet of your electronic life than conscientious use of a password manager. However, the compromise of at least one cloud-based password manager last year and recent actions by a government agency may have given you second thoughts about using the cloud for something that instinctively feels like it should be managed locally.Those incidents aside, password managers remain the best way to avoid reusing weak passwords which is as commonplace as the number of password leaks that happen every year, even on large, reputable websites. And, if you don’t mind putting in a modicum of effort, you can still establish a non-cloud-based password manager that can be utilized across multiple devices.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Expert: Comprehensive software security for cars will take years

Software security for automobiles is improving but it will take another three or four years until manufacturers can put overarching security architecture in place, says Stefan Savage, winner of the 2015 ACM-Infosys Foundation Award in the Computing Sciences.“We’re at a point where the industry has to recognize that this is a real issue for them,” says Savage, a professor in the Computer Science and Engineering department at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering.+ MORE CAR SECURITY: Car hackers urge you to patch your Chrysler, Ram, Durango, or Jeep +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

SDxCentral Hires Marek as VP of Content

She brings 20 years of experience in telecom reporting.

Cross-VC NSX for Multi-site Solutions

The Cross-VC NSX feature introduced in VMware NSX 6.2, allows for NSX logical networking and security support across multiple vCenters. Logical switches (LS), distributed logical routers (DLR) and distributed firewall (DFW) can now be deployed across multiple vCenter domains. These Cross-VC NSX objects are called Universal objects. The universal objects are similar to distributed logical switches, routers, and firewall except they have global or universal scope, meaning they can span multiple vCenter instances. With Cross-VC NSX functionality, in addition to the prior local-scope single vCenter objects, users can implement Universal Logical Switches (ULS), Universal Distributed Logical Routers (UDLR), and Universal DFW (UDFW) across a multi-vCenter environment that can be within a single data center site or across multiple data center sites. In this post we’ll take a look at how we do this. Continue reading

The Trouble with Tor

The Tor Project makes a browser that allows anyone to surf the Internet anonymously. Tor stands for "the Onion router" and that describes how the service works. Traffic is routed through a number of relays run across the Internet where each relay only knows the next hop (because each hop is enclosed in a cryptographic envelope), not the ultimate destination, until the traffic gets to the final exit node which connects to the website — like peeling the layers of an onion.

CC BY 2.0 image by Ben Salter

Think of it like a black box: traffic goes into the box, is bounced around between a random set of relays, and ultimately comes out to connect to the requested site. Anonymity is assured because anyone monitoring the network would have a difficult time tying the individuals making the requests going into the black box with the requests coming out.

Importance and Challenges of Anonymity

Anonymity online is important for a number of reasons we at CloudFlare believe in. For instance, Tor is instrumental in ensuring that individuals living in repressive regimes can access information that may otherwise be blocked or illegal. We this is so important that we offer Continue reading

Network Access: It’s Not Simple Anymore