Financial Services Company Becomes More Secure and Agile

Flexible IT Infrastructure Required for Operation

Being #1 has its own kind of pressure. When you’re #2 in the market you have a clear goal: topple the #1. What’s the mindset of a market leader? Watch your back? Protect what you have? Ignore everything?

Harel lnsurance lnvestments & Financial Services is the leader of Israel’s insurance market. It has four big rivals competing for its business and must be conscious of outside disruptors turning the market on its head. An understandable strategy might be for Harel to sit tight and protect what it has.

Instead, Harel wants to transform its entire approach. It doesn’t just want to be big, it wants to be fast. It wants to succeed by being the first to launch new services, by exploring new forms of customer engagement, by being innovative.

Harel, formed through a series of mergers and acquisitions, wants to:

  • Create an efficient, flexible IT infrastructure to support its entire operation
  • Automate human process, shifting IT’s focus from maintenance to new service development
  • Remove barriers to storage, performance and network, allowing developers to be faster to market with new services

IT will become the ‘silent leader’ of change throughout the business, proactively steering Continue reading

How Regulation Could Break the Internet: In Conversation with Andrew Sullivan

A full day before Internet Society’s President and CEO Andrew Sullivan takes the stage at the world-renowned policy institute Chatham House at Cyber 2019, you’ll have a chance to have an in person discussion with him about the changes regulation may be bringing to our online world.

From the way we connect, share, learn, and work, the Internet has changed the world.

It has also brought challenges – and increasingly, governments have addressed these challenges with regulation.

But could this create unintended consequences? Is it possible to regulate the Internet while protecting its openness, interoperability, and global reach? The Internet Society in collaboration with Chatham House will explore these questions tomorrow at How Regulation Could Break the Internet: In Conversation with Andrew Sullivan.

Here’s how you can join:

The post How Regulation Could Break the Internet: In Conversation with Andrew Sullivan appeared first on Internet Society.

17 predictions about 5G networks and devices

“As market after market switches on 5G, we are at a truly momentous point in time. No previous generation of mobile technology has had the potential to drive economic growth to the extent that 5G promises. It goes beyond connecting people to fully realizing the Internet of Things (IoT) and the Fourth Industrial Revolution.”—The opening paragraph of the June 2019 Ericsson Mobility ReportAlmost every significant technology advancement now goes through what Gartner calls the “hype cycle.” These days, Everyone expects new technologies to be met with gushing optimism and dreamy visions of how it’s going to change the world in the blink of an eye. After a while, we all come to expect the vendors and the press to go overboard with excitement, at least until reality and disappointment set in when things don’t pan out exactly as expected.To read this article in full, please click here

Online Trust Audit Updates & Translations Now Available

A slightly updated version of the Online Trust Audit & Honor Roll is now available in English, French, and Spanish.

Changes include:

  • Accidentally marked Google Play as top scorer in Appendix C (instead of Google News)
  • Missing bar in graph on page 5
  • Several minor spacing, grammar, and miscellaneous edits

The Online Trust Audit & Honor Roll assesses nearly 1,200 organizations, recognizing excellence in online consumer protection, data security, and responsible privacy practices. This Audit of more than 1,200 predominantly consumer-facing websites is the largest undertaken by OTA, and was expanded this year to include payment services, video streaming, sports sites, and healthcare.

This is the first time in the Audit’s 10-year history that we’ve translated it, and we’re proud to bring it to a wider audience. Going forward, we will work toward adding more global sectors and regions into the report findings.

The Trust Audit Planning Committee, open to Internet Society organization members, has already had its first meeting to discuss the methodology for next year’s Audit. A public call for comment on the draft methodology will come later this year, so watch this blog or follow us on Twitter or Facebook to keep up with our Continue reading

How the Huawei ban could become a security threat | TECH(feed)

We’ve already talked about how the Huawei ban may affect business, but how will it affect security? Google has already warned of security threats should the company be unable to send updates to Huawei’s Android-powered devices. And even if Huawei responds with its own OS, will people trust it? In this episode of TECH(feed), Juliet discusses those security implications and what some people think the U.S. should do instead.

The Achilles Heel of the API

I’ve been developing yet more automation recently, and I’ve been hitting two major stumbling blocks that have had a negative impact on my ability to complete the tooling.

API Documentation

When APIs were first made available, the documentation from many vendors was simply incomplete; it seemed that the documentation team was always a release or two behind the people implementing the API. To fix that, a number of vendors have moved to a self-documenting API system along the lines of Swagger. The theory is that if you build an API endpoint, you’re automatically building the documentation for it at the same time, which is a super idea. This has improved the API’s endpoint coverage but in some cases has resulted in thorough documentation explaining what the endpoints are, but little to no documentation explaining why one would choose to use a particular endpoint. 

As a result, with one API in particular I have been losing my mind trying to understand which endpoint I should use to accomplish a particular task, when no less than three of them appear to handle the same thing. I’m then left using trial and error to determine the correct path, and at the end Continue reading

Securing Certificate Issuance using Multipath Domain Control Validation

Securing Certificate Issuance using Multipath Domain Control Validation
Securing Certificate Issuance using Multipath Domain Control Validation

This blog post is part of Crypto Week 2019.

Trust on the Internet is underpinned by the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI). PKI grants servers the ability to securely serve websites by issuing digital certificates, providing the foundation for encrypted and authentic communication.

Certificates make HTTPS encryption possible by using the public key in the certificate to verify server identity. HTTPS is especially important for websites that transmit sensitive data, such as banking credentials or private messages. Thankfully, modern browsers, such as Google Chrome, flag websites not secured using HTTPS by marking them “Not secure,” allowing users to be more security conscious of the websites they visit.

This blog post introduces a new, free tool Cloudflare offers to CAs so they can further secure certificate issuance. But before we dive in too deep, let’s talk about where certificates come from.

Certificate Authorities

Certificate Authorities (CAs) are the institutions responsible for issuing certificates.

When issuing a certificate for any given domain, they use Domain Control Validation (DCV) to verify that the entity requesting a certificate for the domain is the legitimate owner of the domain. With DCV the domain owner:

  1. creates a DNS resource record for a domain;
  2. uploads a document to Continue reading

BrandPost: What do Tesla and SD-WAN Have in Common?

I am the proud owner of a Tesla, a recognized leader in electric vehicles, which makes my daily commute (of almost 3 hours) less stressful and more enjoyable. I also work for Silver Peak, recognized as a Leader in the 2018 Gartner Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure. Both Silver Peak and Tesla have unique positions in different markets. So, why should I make the tie between Tesla and Silver Peak? Not only do the two companies continue to innovate in their respective industries, they also continue to disrupt the status quo of the way things have worked for decades to make them work in today’s fast-paced world. Just as Tesla has transformed the automotive industry by developing the most innovative self-driving vehicle, at Silver Peak, we don’t think of SD-WAN just as a Software-Defined WAN, but as a self-driving wide area network that learns and adapts to keep pace with the changing requirements of today’s cloud-first enterprises.To read this article in full, please click here

Why I Do Not Use Underscores in DNS, A ‘War’ Story.

My ‘do not use underscores in DNS’ war story: Back in the day when NetBIOS name services (NBNS) mattered more than DNS, people would put names on the their machines so they could access the shared resources from the Windows finder. Developers and certain types of ‘security professionals’ who have opinions on underscores vs dashes […]

The post Why I Do Not Use Underscores in DNS, A ‘War’ Story. appeared first on EtherealMind.

10 of the world’s fastest supercomputers

10 of the world's fastest supercomputersImage by Henrik5000 / Getty ImagesThe TOP500 ranking of the fastest supercomputers in the world was announced today, with absolutely no change in the computers ranking in the top10 since the last semi-annual rating in June. Outside the top 10, though, there were changes, notably that it’s harder for a supercomputer to get on the TOP500 list at all: The lowest ranking supercomputer now delivers 1.14PFlop/sec, up from 1.02PFlop/sec in June. Overall, the aggregate performance of the entire TOP500 list sits at 1.65 exaflops. Check out the rest of this slideshow to see details on the current top-10-ranking machines.To read this article in full, please click here

Major Updates to Cisco Certifications

As you most likely will have seen, Cisco is “rebooting” their certifications to better align with what is expected of the future work force. As I’ve been busy with Cisco Live, I’m only now starting to write these posts. I’m expecting to write a couple of them rather than writing one LONG one.

As a member of the CCIE Advisory Council, I’ve been in the loop for a while and I truly believe these changes are for the better. We’ve tried to do what is best for people that are certified or looking to get certified. There will certainly be corner cases or questions that need answers, but we have done our best to leave noone behind.

This first post will look at what is changing at a high level and then we can dive deeper into the different certifications in the coming posts.

DevNet certifications – There has been some training on automation and even some exams, but no real certifications. This is all changing now. There will be corresponding DevNet certifications for CCNA, CCNP and in the future, CCIE. This offers more career paths within the Cisco world. I will cover the DevNet certifications in a future post.

Continue reading

Tech Bytes: Security Policy Orchestration And Automation With Tufin (Sponsored)

In this Tech Byte episode we delve into security policy orchestration and automation with sponsor Tufin. Tufin integrates with firewalls, next-gen firewalls, routers, switches and more to help you understand and automate controls and policies on premises and in the cloud.

The post Tech Bytes: Security Policy Orchestration And Automation With Tufin (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

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