Is your enterprise software committing security malpractice?

Back when this blog was dedicated to all things Microsoft I routinely railed against the spying aspects of Windows 10. Well, apparently that’s nothing compared to what enterprise security, analytics, and hardware management tools are doing.An analytics firm called ExtraHop examined the networks of its customers and found that their security and analytic software was quietly uploading information to servers outside of the customer's network. The company issued a report and warning last week.ExtraHop deliberately chose not to name names in its four examples of enterprise security tools that were sending out data without warning the customer or user. A spokesperson for the company told me via email, “ExtraHop wants the focus of the report to be the trend, which we have observed on multiple occasions and find alarming. Focusing on a specific group would detract from the broader point that this important issue requires more attention from enterprises.”To read this article in full, please click here

How to get the most out of network performance-management tools

(Editor’s note: Enterprise Management Associates took a look at how individual organizations use multiple network performance management (NPM) tools and how they try to integrate them to improve efficiency. In this article, EMA’s research director for network management Shamus McGillicuddy presents findings from “Network Performance Management for Today’s Digital Enterprise,” a recent survey of 250 network managers that suggests best practices for dealing with this issue.)The typical IT organization has three to six network performance management (NPM) tools installed today, and if they remain siloed, network operations will be fragmented and inefficient – a persistent challenge for network managers for many years.To read this article in full, please click here

Terminating Service for 8Chan

The mass shootings in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio are horrific tragedies. In the case of the El Paso shooting, the suspected terrorist gunman appears to have been inspired by the forum website known as 8chan. Based on evidence we've seen, it appears that he posted a screed to the site immediately before beginning his terrifying attack on the El Paso Walmart killing 20 people.

Unfortunately, this is not an isolated incident. Nearly the same thing happened on 8chan before the terror attack in Christchurch, New Zealand. The El Paso shooter specifically referenced the Christchurch incident and appears to have been inspired by the largely unmoderated discussions on 8chan which glorified the previous massacre. In a separate tragedy, the suspected killer in the Poway, California synagogue shooting also posted a hate-filled “open letter” on 8chan. 8chan has repeatedly proven itself to be a cesspool of hate.

8chan is among the more than 19 million Internet properties that use Cloudflare's service. We just sent notice that we are terminating 8chan as a customer effective at midnight tonight Pacific Time. The rationale is simple: they have proven themselves to be lawless and that lawlessness has caused multiple tragic deaths. Even if Continue reading

Securing devices for DEFCON

Weekly Top Posts: 2019-08-04

1. Dynatrace Scores $544M IPO, Cloudflare to Follow Suit
2. IBM Packs Red Hat OpenShift Into Cloud Paks
3. Cisco Pays $8.6M in First-Ever Security Software Whistleblower Payout
4. Lanner and GTT Leverage uCPE to Bolster SD-WAN Performance
5. Cohesity Adds Security Capabilities With CyberScan

Pomodoro Timer with Esp8266 ,micropython and slack – a small weekend project

Hi All,

Pomodoro technique is really effective, more than the technique it’s more or less like a good stress buster to me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique

There are few problems with the timer management

1.  It’s impractical for me to manually add 25-minute timer every time

2. I can do a small script but again my computer should always be on

3. Use some app or use a timer with sound (both of them are really disturbing for myself and also colleagues around me)

What did I use

1. With anything involving DIY/IoT, there are two important aspects – It should be small and portable and secondly, cost should below.

Components Used :

1. ESP8266
2. 0.96Inch 128×64 OLED display (Pictures below)
3. Micropython ( I could have gone with C++ but honestly I don’t know the language, hence I had to go through a lot of pain to make it work in microphone)
4. Slack for daytime notifications about timer stages

Challenges :

1. How do I make sure I don’t look at the clock every 25 minutes? Sound is not an option, so I used a slack webhook to notify me
2. Code was big and hence there were memory allocation issues in Continue reading

Pluribus UNUM – Engineering Simplicity for Your Data Centers

BrandPost: Managed or DIY SD-WAN? Survey Reveals Lessons from Early Adopters

When IT decision-makers research new technologies or products, the opinions of their peers often carry more weight than recommendations by vendors and industry pundits.  That’s why Frost & Sullivan is sharing the results of our 2018 SD-WAN survey. The survey provides insights from IT leaders across a range of industries and company sizes about their SD-WAN decisions and deployments.To read this article in full, please click here

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For August 2nd, 2019

Wake up! It's HighScalability time—once again:

 

Do you like this sort of Stuff? I'd greatly appreciate your support on Patreon. I wrote Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10 for people who need to understand the cloud. And who doesn't these days? On Amazon it has 52 mostly 5 star reviews (121 on Goodreads). They'll learn a lot and hold you in even greater awe.

Number Stuff:

Don't miss all that the Internet has to say on Scalability, click below and become eventually consistent with all scalability knowledge (which means this post has many more items to read so please keep on reading)...

Heavy Networking 463: Under The Hood Of 400G Ethernet With Cisco (Sponsored)

400G Ethernet switches will ship by the end of 2019. We get under the hood of the fastest-ever version of Ethernet to find out how it works, the challenges of building the gear, differences between QSFP-DD and OSFP optics, and more. Our guests are Ray Nering and Lane Wigley of Cisco, the sponsor for today's podcast.

The post Heavy Networking 463: Under The Hood Of 400G Ethernet With Cisco (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Conference Packing – The Little Things

It seems like conference season never really ends. Between RSA, Cisco Live, Black Hat, and VMworld, I’m always running around to something. I enjoy being able to meet new people and talk to companies at these events but I also find that a little bit of planning ahead helps immensely.

There’s always a lot of discussion from people about what to pack for a conference. There have been some great posts written about it, like this one from Bob McCouch in 2014. He definitely covers all the important stuff that people would want to know, such as comfortable shoes and a bag big enough to carry extra things just in case you come back with enough fidget spinners to sink an aircraft carrier.

However, I’ve found in recent years that the difference between just surviving a conference and really being prepared involves a few extra items I never thought I’d need to bring back when I first started doing this in 2006. Maybe it’s the Scoutmaster in me, but being prepared has gone from being a suggestion to a necessity. And here are a few of those little necessities that I have found I can’t live without.

First? Aid.

I’ve Continue reading

Xilinx closes SolarFlare purchase, promises high-performance networking

Network acceleration appears to be all the rage these days, what with Nvidia acquiring Mellanox, the advent of High Bandwidth Memory 2E targeting networking chips, and now Xilinx closing of its acquisition of low-latency network provider SolarFlare.SolarFlare makes a high-speed network interface card (NIC) using field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) to build SmartNICs sold under the X2 brand. These PCI Express network interface cards run network, storage, and compute acceleration, offloading that work from the CPU. SolarFlare also develops application acceleration software to fully utilize the cards.To read this article in full, please click here

Connection Restored

I was embarrassed to realize recently that it’s been well over two years since my last blog post. Life has a way of getting away from you, I suppose. But I’ve decided to try and reboot the blog, and hopefully get back to writing regularly. Let me kick things off my sharing what I’ve been up to recently.

Goodbye, DigitalOcean!

After nearly five years working at DigitalOcean, I made the difficult decision to part ways with the company. In my time there, I was fortunate to work with an amazing team, and witness the truly amazing evolution of a startup company from niche player to major cloud provider. Most of all, I’m thankful to DigitalOcean for the opportunity my role provided in extending from traditional network engineering into development and automation. I’ll miss working with my DO team, but I’m excited to see where the future will take them.

Continue reading · 1 comment

Technology Short Take 117

Welcome to Technology Short Take #117! Here’s my latest gathering of links and articles from the around the World Wide Web (an “old school” reference for you right there). I’ve got a little bit of something for most everyone, except for the storage nerds (I’m leaving that to my friend J Metz this time around). Here’s hoping you find something useful!

Networking

• Ronald de Jong sheds some light on a potential “gotcha” with distributed multi-tier routing configuration in NSX. The key takeaway here is that anytime there is firewalling or other stateful services in place, the traffic will route to the (non-distributed) service router instead of just the distributed routers.
• Northbound Networks provides some information on the P4 programming language.
• Via the Packet Pushers blog, Daniel Himes provides a guide to a starting point for enterprise (network) automation.

Servers/Hardware

• AnandTech has a nice article on the future PCIe 6.0 spec, expected in to land in 2021.

Security

• Ronnie Flathers shares how he uses Docker for penetration testing.
• Interested in running Hashcat on AWS EC2? See this article by Ben Mason.
• Another data breach, this time from Capital One, hit the news this past week. Corey Quinn has his Continue reading

Securing BGP on the host with the RPKI

An increasingly popular design for a data-center network is BGP on the host: each host ships with a BGP daemon to advertise the IPs it handles and receives the routes to its fellow servers. Compared to a L2-based design, it is very scalable, resilient, cross-vendor and safe to operate.¹ Take a look at “L3 routing to the hypervisor with BGP” for a usage example.

While routing on the host eliminates the security problems related to Ethernet networks, a server may announce any IP prefix. In the above picture, two of them are announcing 2001:db8:cc::/64. This could be a legit use of anycast or a prefix hijack. BGP offers several solutions to improve this aspect and one of them is to leverage the features around the RPKI infrastructure.

Short introduction to the RPKI​

On the Internet, BGP is mostly relying on trust. This contributes to various incidents due to operator errors, like the one that affected Cloudflare a few months ago, or to malicious attackers, like the hijack of Amazon Continue reading

IBM fuses its software with Red Hat’s to launch hybrid-cloud juggernaut

IBM has wasted no time aligning its own software with its newly acquired Red Hat technoloogy,saying its portfolio would be transformed to work cloud natively and augmented to run on Red Hat’s OpenShift platform.IBM in July finalized its $34 billion purchase of Red Hat and says it will use the Linux powerhouse's open-source know-how and Linux expertise to grow larger scale hybrid-cloud customer projects and to create a web of partnerships to simplify carrying them out.To read this article in full, please click here

Dynatrace Scores $544M IPO, Cloudflare to Follow Suit

Black Hat 2019 and DEF CON 27: What to expect at hacker summer camp | TECH(talk)

Every year, thousands of hackers arrive in Las Vegas for three large security conferences -- DEF CON, Black Hat and Bsides Las Vegas -- taking place from Monday through Sunday next week. CSO Online's J.M. Porup chats with Juliet about what to expect at the conferences' sessions and what he's looking forward to.

Accessing the Docker Daemon via an SSH Bastion Host

Today I came across this article, which informed me that (as of the 18.09 release) you can use SSH to connect to a Docker daemon remotely. That’s handy! The article uses docker-machine (a useful but underrated tool, I think) to demonstrate, but the first question in my mind was this: can I do this through an SSH bastion host? Read on for the answer.

If you’re not familiar with the concept of an SSH bastion host, it is a (typically hardened) host through which you, as a user, would proxy your SSH connections to other hosts. For example, you may have a bunch of EC2 instances in an AWS VPC that do not have public IP addresses. (That’s reasonable.) You could use an SSH bastion host—which would require a public IP address—to enable SSH access to otherwise inaccessible hosts. I wrote a post about using SSH bastion hosts back in 2015; give that post a read for more details.

The syntax for connecting to a Docker daemon via SSH looks something like this:

docker -H ssh://user@host <command>

So, if you wanted to run docker container ls to list the containers running on a remote system, you’d Continue reading

BiB 081: 128 Technology Rethinks The WAN Router