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Category Archives for "Networking"

The Demise of G-Suite

In case you missed it this week, Google is killing off the free edition of Google Apps/G-Suite/Workspace. The short version is that you need to convert to a paid plan by May 1, 2022. If you don’t you’re going to lose everything in July. The initial offering of the free tier was back in 2006 and the free plan hasn’t been available since 2012. I suppose a decade is a long time to enjoy custom email but I’m still a bit miffed at the decision.

Value Added, Value Lost

It’s pretty easy to see that the free version of Workspace was designed to encourage people to use it and then upgrade to a paid account to gain more features. As time wore on Google realized that people were taking advantage of having a full suite of 50 accounts and never moving, which is why 2012 was the original cutoff date. Now there has been some other change that has forced their hand into dropping the plan entirely.

I won’t speculate about what’s happening because I’m sure it’s complex and tied to ad revenue and privacy restrictions that people are implementing that is reducing the value of the data Google has Continue reading

Emotet Is Not Dead (Yet)

The state of cyber security is a typical example of a cat-and-mouse game between hackers and defenders. Sometimes, a threat that appears to be under control, if not completely mitigated, comes back with a vengeance. This is exactly what happened to Emotet.   

It has been just about a year since the Emotet botnet was taken down, thanks to the international efforts of multiple law enforcement agencies. But the silence from Emotet attackers did not last long. Late last year, we saw report on the resurface of Emotet distributed by Trickbot. Recently VMware’s Threat Analysis Unit saw another Emotet campaign—where the attacks leveraged the increasingly abused Excel 4.0 (XL4) macros to spread Emotet payloads.  

In this blog post, we investigate the first stage of the recent Emotet attacks by analyzing one of the samples from the recent campaign and reveal novel tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) that were not used by Emotet in the past.

The Recent Emotet Campaign

Figure 1 shows the detection timeline of a recent Emotet campaign that affected some of our customers—mostly in the EMEA region. The campaign started on January 11 and peaked the next day before fading Continue reading

BrandPost: FedRAMP Helps Secure Federal and Other Networks as They Transition to Cloud

By: Dolan Sullivan, Vice President of Federal at Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company.Recently, it seems like you can’t go more than a few days without hearing about another significant cyberattack. From oil pipelines and meat producers to hospitals and city water supplies, no segment of our nation’s critical infrastructure is immune to hackers. As bad actors become more daring in their targets and more creative with their exploits, securing people, places, and things—wherever they are—has never been more urgent for Federal IT leaders.Against this backdrop of unprecedented cyberattacks on our nation, other factors are contributing to the increased need for more robust security measures and policies to protect our Federal networks. For example, telework continues out of necessity, and in some cases, staff preference. Adoption of smart controls for equipment, physical access to facilities, environmental management, and other uses of IoT, is growing. Improving cybersecurity to protect the Federal government networks is an Executive Order. And, the uptake of cloud apps and services has accelerated.To read this article in full, please click here

Lessons Learned from 6 Years of IO Scheduling at ScyllaDB

Pavel (Xemul) Emelyanov Pavel is a principal engineer at ScyllaDB. He is an ex-Linux kernel hacker now speeding up row cache, tweaking the IO scheduler and helping to pay back technical debt for component interdependencies. Scheduling requests of any kind always serves one purpose: gain control over the priorities of those requests. In the priority-less system, there’s no need to schedule; just putting whatever arrives into the queue and waiting until it finishes is enough. I’m a principal engineer for

Heavy Networking 614: eBPF, Cloud-Native Networking, And Other Modern Networking Trends

Today's Heavy Networking gets deep in the guts of what’s going on with all the modern trends in networking: cloud-native, containers, eBPF, Kubernetes, DPUs, and so on. Guests Brent Salisbury and Dave Tucker give their insider’s view of developments in cutting-edge networking tech. You’ll walk away with a better idea of what to pay attention to in the months and years to come.

The post Heavy Networking 614: eBPF, Cloud-Native Networking, And Other Modern Networking Trends appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Heavy Networking 614: eBPF, Cloud-Native Networking, And Other Modern Networking Trends

Today's Heavy Networking gets deep in the guts of what’s going on with all the modern trends in networking: cloud-native, containers, eBPF, Kubernetes, DPUs, and so on. Guests Brent Salisbury and Dave Tucker give their insider’s view of developments in cutting-edge networking tech. You’ll walk away with a better idea of what to pay attention to in the months and years to come.

Internet outage in Yemen amid airstrikes

Internet outage in Yemen amid airstrikes

The early hours of Friday, January 21, 2022, started in Yemen with a country-wide Internet outage. According to local and global news reports airstrikes are happening in the country and the outage is likely related, as there are reports that a telecommunications building in Al-Hudaydah where the FALCON undersea cable lands was hit.

Cloudflare Radar shows that Internet traffic dropped close to zero between 21:30 UTC (January 20, 2022) and by 22:00 UTC (01:00 in local time).

Internet outage in Yemen amid airstrikes

The outage affected the main state-owned ISP, Public Telecommunication Corporation (AS30873 in blue in the next chart), which represents almost all the Internet traffic in the country.

Internet outage in Yemen amid airstrikes

Looking at BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) updates from Yemen’s ASNs around the time of the outage, we see a clear spike at the same time the main ASN was affected ~21:55 UTC, January 20, 2022. These update messages are BGP signalling that Yemen’s main ASN was no longer routable, something similar to what we saw happening in The Gambia and Kazakhstan but for very different reasons.

Internet outage in Yemen amid airstrikes

So far, 2022 has started with a few significant Internet disruptions for different reasons:

1. An Internet outage in The Gambia because of a cable problem.
2. An Internet Continue reading

Video: Machine Learning Techniques

After Javier Antich walked us through the AI/ML hype and described the basics of machine learning it was time for a more thorough look at:

  • Machine learning techniques, including unsupervised learning (clustering and anomaly detection), supervised learning (regression, classification and generation) and reinforced learning
  • Machine learning implementations, including neural networks, deep neural networks and convolutional neural networks.
You need Free ipSpace.net Subscription to access this webinar.

Video: Machine Learning Techniques

After Javier Antich walked us through the AI/ML hype and described the basics of machine learning it was time for a more thorough look at:

  • Machine learning techniques, including unsupervised learning (clustering and anomaly detection), supervised learning (regression, classification and generation) and reinforced learning
  • Machine learning implementations, including neural networks, deep neural networks and convolutional neural networks.
You need Free ipSpace.net Subscription to access this webinar.

Juniper Networks’ SD-WAN Can Now Be Operated Via Mist Cloud

Juniper Networks’ SD-WAN appliances and software can now be fully managed from Juniper’s Mist Cloud. It’s part of Juniper’s larger goal to Mist-ify its LAN and WAN portfolio. Juniper’s SD-WAN product is based on the Session Smart Routers (SSRs) from Juniper’s acquisition of 128 Technology. Customers can now use Mist Cloud to onboard SSR hardware, […]

The post Juniper Networks’ SD-WAN Can Now Be Operated Via Mist Cloud appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Edge computing in 2022: Double-digit growth

Worldwide spending on edge computing is expected to reach $176 billion in 2022, an increase of 14.8% over last year, according to new figures from analyst IDC.Edge computing started out rather modest in its use cases but has quickly expanded across industries and scope. Five years ago an edge network was a few mid-range servers in a ruggedized container. Now Nvidia and Lenovo are deploying GPU-based AI systems.How to choose an edge gateway “If we have learned anything over the last two years, the ability to quickly adapt to rapidly changing conditions is critical to business success. Organizations investing in edge computing combined with AI and modern application design will have an advantage when it comes to tackling whatever challenge comes next,” according to Dave McCarthy, research vice president for Cloud and Edge Infrastructure Services at IDC.To read this article in full, please click here

Edge computing in 2022: Double-digit growth

Worldwide spending on edge computing is expected to reach $176 billion in 2022, an increase of 14.8% over last year, according to new figures from analyst IDC.Edge computing started out rather modest in its use cases but has quickly expanded across industries and scope. Five years ago an edge network was a few mid-range servers in a ruggedized container. Now Nvidia and Lenovo are deploying GPU-based AI systems.How to choose an edge gateway “If we have learned anything over the last two years, the ability to quickly adapt to rapidly changing conditions is critical to business success. Organizations investing in edge computing combined with AI and modern application design will have an advantage when it comes to tackling whatever challenge comes next,” according to Dave McCarthy, research vice president for Cloud and Edge Infrastructure Services at IDC.To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco blends enterprise and industrial edge with new Catalyst switch

Cisco is expanding its Catalyst family of switches for enterprises that need to blend industrial and operational technology (OT) systemsThe the ruggedized Catalyst Industrial Ethernet 9300 1RU rack-mountable switch is based on the same programmable Unified Access Data Plane (UADP) ASIC found in other Catalyst 9000 and features 28 Gigabit Ethernet ports. Up to eight of the units can be stacked together and managed as one system.SD-WAN buyers guide: Key questions to ask vendors The 9300 runs the same IOS XE operating system as other Catalyst boxes and can be centrally  controlled via DNA Center, Cisco’s principal networking-control platform that features myriad services from analytics, network management, and automation capabilities to assurance setting, fabric provisioning, and policy-based segmentation.To read this article in full, please click here

New Cisco switch brings more networking features to the edge

Cisco is expanding its Catalyst family of switches for enterprises that need to blend industrial and operational technology (OT) systemsThe the ruggedized Catalyst Industrial Ethernet 9300 1RU rack-mountable switch is based on the same programmable Unified Access Data Plane (UADP) ASIC found in other Catalyst 9000 and features 28 Gigabit Ethernet ports. Up to eight of the units can be stacked together and managed as one system.SD-WAN buyers guide: Key questions to ask vendors The 9300 runs the same IOS XE operating system as other Catalyst boxes and can be centrally  controlled via DNA Center, Cisco’s principal networking-control platform that features myriad services from analytics, network management, and automation capabilities to assurance setting, fabric provisioning, and policy-based segmentation.To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco chases quantum tech

When it comes to hardcore quantum computing players Cisco might not be the first company you think of, but that could change a lot in 2022 and beyond.For starters, the company is investing in photonics development, which will enable quantum communications as well as other hardware and software technologies for quantum computing, networking, and cryptography. Researchers show quantum computers can reason Developing quantum technologies was also one of the top predictions on the 2022 predictions list of Cisco’s executive vice president, general manager and Chief Strategy Officer Liz Centoni. To read this article in full, please click here