Hacking Lessons From Security Compass’ Battle School
What I learned in hacking school.
Musing: Generalist to Specialist and Back Again
Recently I’ve been musing on IT Generalists vs Specialists. We used to have more generalist roles, covering all parts of the stack. ITIL then pushed us towards greater specialisation. I believe that we’ve gone back to valuing the Generalist, as the person who can glue components together. Will the pendulum swing again?
Generalists: Soup-to-Nuts
When I started working in IT, our roles were more generalist in nature. We did everything. To set up a new app, we racked the servers and switches, installed the OS, configured the network, installed the DB & application, and made it all work.
We weren’t specialists in any one area, but we knew how everything fitted together. So if something broke, we could probably figure it out. If we had to investigate a problem, we could follow it through all layers of the stack. When we found the problem, we had license to fix it.
ITIL takes over: Specialisation
Sometime around the early-mid 2000s the “ITIL Consultants” moved in. Their talk of structure, processes and SLAs seduced senior management. We couldn’t just have people who Got Shit Done. No, everyone needed to be placed in a box, with formal definitions around what they could & Continue reading
Auvik Release Notes – April 23 – RDP, VNC & UPS monitoring!
NEW! Remote Desktop & VNC Need to remotely log into a machine and troubleshoot? Say good-bye to clunky VPNs. Now you can launch aMay Mission: Bring home the bacon with Auvik
This month, we're pretty stoked to partner with our good friends at Auvik for our May "Sizzler" mission. This mission will get you usingVerizon’s Carrier SDN Makeover Includes Just About Everybody
All the big vendors (well, not Huawei) get a piece of the action as Verizon goes all-in with SDN.
Last Call for the HP & SDxCentral NFV Report Webinar!
Want to learn more about our 2015 NFV report? Sign up for the April 29th HP & SDxCentral NFV Report Webinar!
Earthquake rocks Internet in Nepal
Saturday’s earthquake in Nepal, which claimed the lives of at least 4,000 victims and injured many more, took a toll on the country’s Internet connectivity, which was already one of the least developed in the region. A recent evaluation of Internet infrastructure in South Asia commissioned by the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) classified Nepal’s international connectivity as ‘weak’ and its fixed and mobile infrastructure as ‘limited’.
While the loss of Internet connectivity pales in comparison to the loss of life, the ability to communicate both domestically and internationally will be crucial in coming days for the coordination of relief efforts already underway. Innovative services from Facebook and Google to facilitate communicating the status of those affected by the massive earthquake would be largely useless if Nepal had been knocked entirely offline. In fact, Nepal’s international links generally survived the earthquake, however last mile connectivity is another matter.
As we reported on Saturday, we began seeing severe Internet outages and instabilities immediately following the earthquake at 6:11 UTC. On the left is a timeline of outages through today and on the right is the volume of DNS queries Continue reading
Why numbering should start at zero?
How does Internet work - We know what is networking
Please note: This has nothing to do with networking in particular! Not if you look from only one perspective. If you look from totally different perspective, with Cisco ACI and all other SDN solutions, you will probably meet with Python programming language (because you will) and then, somewhere in beginning of Python exploration this is the first question that will cross your mind. Of course, if you think like me! Although not directly related to networking, the question bothered me for some time now and the answer is not only really logical when you read it but it is also
The Walls Are On Fire
There’s no denying the fact that firewalls are a necessary part of modern perimeter security. NAT isn’t a security construct. Attackers have the equivalent of megaton nuclear arsenals with access to so many DDoS networks. Security admins have to do everything they can to prevent these problems from happening. But one look at firewall market tells you something is terribly wrong.
Who’s Protecting First?
Take a look at this recent magic polygon from everyone’s favorite analyst firm:
FW Magic Polygon. Thanks to @EtherealMind.
I won’t deny that Checkpoint is on top. That’s mostly due to the fact that they have the biggest install base in enterprises. But I disagree with the rest of this mystical tesseract. How is Palo Alto a leader in the firewall market? I thought their devices were mostly designed around mitigating internal threats? And how is everyone not named Cisco, Palo Alto, or Fortinet regulated to the Niche Players corral?
The issue comes down to purpose. Most firewalls today aren’t packet filters. They aren’t designed to keep the bad guys out of your networks. They are unified threat management systems. That’s a fancy way of saying they have a whole bunch of software built on top Continue reading
Williamsburg
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How Do I Start My IPv6 Addressing Plan?
One of my readers was reading the Preparing an IPv6 Addressing Plan document on RIPE web site, and found that the document proposes two approaches to IPv6 addressing: encode location in high-order bits and subnet type in low-order bits (the traditional approach) or encode subnet type in high-order bits and location in low-order bits (totally counter intuitive to most networking engineers). His obvious question was: “Is anyone using type-first addressing in production network?”
Terastream project seems to be using service-first format; if you’re doing something similar, please leave a comment!
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