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Stop the Bots: Practical Lessons in Machine Learning

Stop the Bots: Practical Lessons in Machine Learning

Bot-powered credential stuffing is a scourge on the modern Internet. These attacks attempt to log into and take over a user’s account by assaulting password forms with a barrage of dictionary words and previously stolen account credentials, with the aim of performing fraudulent transactions, stealing sensitive data, and compromising personal information.

At Cloudflare we’ve built a suite of technologies to combat bots, many of them grounded in Machine Learning. ML is a hot topic these days, but the literature tends to focus on improving the core technology — and not how these learning machines are incorporated into real-world organizations.

Given how much experience we have with ML (which we employ for many security and performance products, in addition to bot management), we wanted to share some lessons learned with regard to how this technology manifests in actual products.

Stop the Bots: Practical Lessons in Machine Learning

There tend to be three stages every company goes through in the life cycle of infusing machine learning into their DNA. They are:

  • Business Intelligence
  • Standalone Machine Learning
  • Machine Learning Productization

These concepts are a little abstract — so let’s walk through how they might apply to a tangible field we all know and love: dental insurance.

Business Intelligence

Many companies already Continue reading

Worth Reading: Blockchain and Trust

One of the rules of sane social media presence should be don’t ever engage with evangelists believing in a particular technology religion, more so if their funding depends on them spreading the gospel. I was called old-school networking guru from ivory tower when pointing out the drawbacks of TRILL, and clueless incompetent (in more polite words) when retweeting a tweet pointing out the realities of carbon footprint of proof-of-work technologies.

Interestingly, just a few days after that Bruce Schneier published a lengthy essay on blockchain and trust, and even the evangelists find it a bit hard to call him incompetent on security topics. Please read what he wrote every time someone comes along explaining how blockchains will save the world (or solve whatever networking problems like VTEP-to-MAC mappings).

Docker Security Update: CVE-2018-5736 and Container Security Best Practices

On Monday, February 11, Docker released an update to fix a privilege escalation vulnerability (CVE-2019-5736) in runC, the Open Container Initiative (OCI) runtime specification used in Docker Engine and containerd. This vulnerability makes it possible for a malicious actor that has created a specially-crafted container image to gain administrative privileges on the host. Docker engineering worked with runC maintainers on the OCI to issue a patch for this vulnerability.

Docker recommends immediately applying the update to avoid any potential security threats. For Docker Engine-Community, this means updating to 18.09.2 or 18.06.2. For Docker Engine- Enterprise, this means updating to 18.09.2, 18.03.1-ee-6, or 17.06.2-ee-19. Read the release notes before applying the update due to specific instructions for Ubuntu and RHEL operating systems.

Summary of the Docker Engine versions that address the vulnerability:

 

Docker Engine Community

Docker Engine Enterprise

18.09.2

18.09.2

18.06.2

18.03.1-ee-6

17.06.2-ee-19

To better protect the container images run by Docker Engine, here are some additional recommendations and best practices:

Use Docker Official Images

Official Images are a curated set of Docker repositories hosted on Docker Hub that are designed to:

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