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Category Archives for "Networking"

How to Talk to Your Parents About Encryption

It’s December 25th, which means most of you are probably at home visiting with family. I asked a few of the security engineers here at CloudFlare how they explain their jobs when they’re home for the holidays, and most of them responded with something along the lines of, "Oh, I stopped trying to do that a long time ago." Apparently, working in the cryptography field doesn’t exactly make it easy to talk about work with your parents.

After chatting with our crypto experts some more, we figured out a decent way to explain the general idea of encryption and why it’s a critical part of the Internet. While this post may not explain exactly what security engineers do on a day-to-day basis, hopefully it will help you at least tell your parents why you have a job in the first place.

Banks and Their Big Fancy Buildings

To explain encryption to your parents, I’d start by asking them why they trust their bank. Let’s say they have some cash to deposit. They drive to their bank’s local branch, walk through a big fancy lobby, wait in line for a teller, and hand them their money. It may seem like Continue reading

DMVPN point-to-point GRE and mGRE

DMVPN spokes can use either point-to-point GRE tunnels or multipoint GRE tunnel interface. Recently, I received a question regarding DMVPN. In fact, the Reader asked me two questions: When is GRE used in network design? When is mGRE used in network design? Answering the aforementioned questions are the basics that you must know if you […]

The post DMVPN point-to-point GRE and mGRE appeared first on Network Design and Architecture.

Zdrasti, Sofia! CloudFlare’s 73rd Data Center Now Live

Sofia

Only days after the launch of our Hamburg data center, CloudFlare is excited to announce yet another European data center - this time in Sofia, Bulgaria. With over 1.2 million people, Sofia is a city with rich history tracing back over 7,000 years.

We were fascinated to note the coincidence that even as 1 in 73 of CloudFlare team members is Bulgarian, now 1 in 73 of CloudFlare data centers is in Bulgaria!

Localizing European traffic

European countries

Sofia expands the CloudFlare global network to span 20 European data centers - joining Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Paris, London, Vienna, Prague, Stockholm, Warsaw, Madrid, Milan, Dusseldorf, Marseille, Bucharest, Dublin, Manchester, Zurich, Copenhagen, Berlin and Hamburg.

Each time we launch a new data center, we improve the performance of millions of websites, expand the surface area available to fight attacks, and provide an additional point of redundancy to support our existing data centers.

Until today, many Bulgarian networks were served out of Frankfurt, over 1,000 miles away, based on their interconnection there with our tier one providers. Our newest deployment eliminates that distance, and improves the web Continue reading

Hyatt Hotels says payment-processing systems hit by malware

Hyatt Hotels has asked customers to review their payment card account statements closely, after it detected malware on the computers that run its payment-processing systems at locations it manages.The hotel chain did not provide more details on the breach, including the number of customers that might have been affected, but it appears from the alert to customers that hackers may have obtained critical credit card information.Hyatt is the latest in a number of companies in the hospitality industry, including Hilton Worldwide, Mandarin Oriental and Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide that were affected by hacker attacks. A number of retailers like Target also had their point-of-sale systems targeted.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

NORAD’s amazing 60-year Santa tracking history

Pretty remarkable stuff here. The  National Archive blog takes a look at the background of the nation’s premier defense unit’s tracking of Santa as he travels around the globe delivering his Christmas goodies.+More on Network World: The weirdest, wackiest and coolest sci/tech stories of 2015+ Some of the facts I thought were pretty cool: This Christmas Eve will be the 60th year the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) will have tracked Santa Claus’s journey. Colonel Harry Shoup began the tradition in 1955, after receiving a phone call from a child expecting to reach Santa Claus. The misdirected call was the result of the child reversing two numbers of a Santa Line phone number printed in a Sears advertisement, according to the National Archives. This year, 1,250 volunteers will staff the NORAD phone lines answering questions about the trip. The volunteers are a mix of Canadian and American military personnel and Department of Defense civilians. The Santa Tracker hotline can be reached at 1(877)446-6723 starting at 3AM MST on December 24th and continuing through 3AM MST on December 25th. Official NORAD Tracks Santa apps are available in the Windows, Apple and Google Play stores. Tracking opportunities are also Continue reading

Work in finance or accounting? Watch out for ‘whaling’ attacks

If you work in finance or accounting and receive an email from your boss asking you to transfer some funds to an external account, you might want to think twice. That's because so-called "whaling" attacks -- a refined kind of phishing in which hackers use spoofed or similar-sounding domain names to make it look like the emails they send are from your CFO or CEO -- are on the rise, according to security firm Mimecast. In fact, 55 percent of the 442 IT professionals Mimecast surveyed this month said their organizations have seen an increase in the volume of whaling attacks over the last three months, the firm reported on Wednesday. Those organizations spanned the U.S., U.K., South Africa and Australia.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: How blocking bots created new business opportunities for Crunchbase

Founded in 2007, CrunchBase is a website offering massive amounts of data about startup activity. Want to know who founded a startup, who invested in it, or who they're competing with? CrunchBase has the answers. And in a marketplace that is somewhat frothy, CrunchBase is an increasingly heavily trafficked web property. The site contains over 650,000 profiles of individuals and companies and is a massive repository of data. As such, CrunchBase has a massive opportunity to monetize that data, and is accordingly concerned about people who seek to use that data for their own commercial aims.I spent time talking with Kurt Freytag, head of product at CrunchBase, to have a look at the engineering work that goes into the site. As the site grew in size and traffic, Freytag noticed oddly shaped traffic and random spikes that were putting significant strain on its infrastructure. Of course, it could have simply thrown more horsepower at the site, but Freytag was keen to identify real root causes for the issues. He quickly concluded that bot traffic was hitting the site hard and crawling through its data. While this is a primary concern in terms of performance, it also introduces real commercial Continue reading

Cisco switch software vulnerable

Cisco this week issued a security advisory on a vulnerability in its IOS XE software. IOS XE Release 16.1.1 could allow an attacker to cause an affected device to reload.The vulnerability is due to incorrect processing of packets that have a source MAC address of 0000:0000:0000, the advisory states. An attacker could exploit it by sending a frame that has a source MAC address of all zeros to an affected device.A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause the device to reload. All products that run IOS XE Release 16.1.1 are vulnerable, the advisory states. Two of those products are Cisco’s Catalyst 3850 and 3650 series switches.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Notable 2015 deaths in technology, science & inventions

The networking and computing world, as well as the worlds of science and inventions, lost well-known pioneers as well as younger movers and shakers during 2015. Here’s a brief look back at these people and their contributions (see Slideshow version here). LOOK BACK: 2014’s notable deathsRalph Ungermann: Co-founder of Zilog, Ungermann-Bass (Died June 2, age 73) Ungermann was a pioneer in both the PC industry via his 1974 co-founding of microprocessor maker Zilog and of the data communications industry via his 1978 launch of Ungermann-Bass, which Tandem Computers, and later Newbridge Networks, acquired. A serial entrepreneur, the Berkeley College-educated Ungermann also formed an ATM switching and multimedia networking company called First Virtual in 1994, before moving into the world of venture capital by co-founding a firm in Shanghai. In his obituary, Ungermann is quoted as having once said: " I like to pioneer things, create a space that does not exist. If you can imagine it, you can create it. It is much more fun and challenging to create an industry, than to follow someone else.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

OSFP Forwarding Address Part II: Redistribution and filtering don’t get along very well

Hoping you all enjoyed the first part of the OSPF forwarding address saga, I’m back with the promise to make things clear regarding a nicely built redistribution case. I’m not sure if you’ve ever come across it, or ever will, but it’s interesting because it explains why we need the rules to set the forward address (if you don’t remember them, you can take a look at Part I).

Let’s see what I’m talking about. Remember the second topology from Part I? Long story short, I tried to break it. Managed to partially do it, though I am still thinking of a way to make things worse, if possible :). The following setup consists in the starting point of Part II:

ospf_2_1

Initially, R2’s and R3’s interfaces towards R0 are included in area 0, in order for them to fulfill all the conditions to set the forwarding address in their T5 LSA. The snippets below show the initial state:

R1#show ip ospf interface brief
Interface    PID   Area            IP Address/Mask    Cost  State Nbrs F/C
Fa1/0           1          0               10.10.13.1/24            1        DR    1/1
Fa0/0          1          0               10.10.12.1/24            1        DR    1/1

R2#show ip ospf Continue reading

1 … 2,842 2,843 2,844 2,845 2,846 … 3,443