What Happened? The Amazon Route 53 BGP Hijack to Take Over Ethereum Cryptocurrency Wallets

Yesterday, we published a blog post sharing the news and some initial details about Amazon’s DNS route hijack event to steal Ethereum cryptocurrency from myetherwallet.com. In this post, we’ll explore more details about the incident from the BGP hijack’s perspective.

As noted by Dyn, CloudFlare, and various other entities who monitor Internet routing and health, Amazon’s Route 53 (the DNS service offered by AWS) prefixes were hijacked. A BGP update taken from Isolario suggests that on 24 April, its BGP feeders were correctly receiving 205.251.192.0/23, 205.251.194.0/23, 205.251.196.0/23, 205.251.198.0/23, originated from Amazon (AS16509), until 11:04:00 (UTC). But, at 11:05:41 (UTC), Isolario recorded the first more specific /24 malicious announcements via BGP feeder and the announcements originated from eNET (AS10297) to its peer 1&1 Internet SE (AS8560). Click to enlarge image.

RIPE Stats collected the first more specific malicious advertisement at 11:05:42 (UTC) originating from eNET (AS10297), but this time through peer Hurricane Electric (AS6939).

Exactly at the same time, 11:05:42 (UTC), the Isolario BGP feeder received another update originating from eNET (AS10297) and it was also coming via Hurricane Electric (AS6939). Click to enlarge image.

Hurricane Electric has a worldwide Continue reading

CiscoLive 2018: ‘Summer Camp for Geeks’

Are you ready for CiscoLive US 2018?  Ready for Summer Camp for Geeks?!    I think it is hard to truly be completely ready for the experience nowadays.  Why?  Because CiscoLive US is just huge with so many options of things to experience as an attendee…. more options than you have time for.  If you have been to CiscoLive US before… you KNOW this is true. And every year more and more …. and more and more … get added.  For 2018 my favorite CiscoLive add is the new ‘Content Cafe’ session type (30 minutes).  Other favorites of mine are the ‘Flip Sessions’ and the “Beers with Engineers”.  ?

Deciding where to spend your time and energy during #CLUS can be overwhelming and daunting.

What is my absolute #1 suggestion to anyone going to a CiscoLive event?  Easy – “Begin with the End in Mind“.  Know what your priorities are and then schedule your week accordingly.

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STEP #1: Create Your Cisco Live 2018 Priority List

Take your goals and translate them into a priority list.

STEP #2: Learn from the Past

If you have been to CiscoLive before… Continue reading

Schneider Electric announces Edge Module for IoT processing

Schneider Electric is the latest player to jump into the edge computing game for Internet of Things (IoT) devices with the announcement of its Edge Module for mobile and IoT applications. It follows the trend of processing IoT data where it is generated rather than sending it to a remote data center.Schneider Electric is a European giant that mostly specializes in energy management and power systems. So, it’s no surprise that the Edge Module comes with integrated power and cooling systems. That includes single- or three-phase power with a flexible power train in multiple ranges, N+1 standard cooling, and package cooling units mounted on the outside of the module to eliminate the need for external condensers or piping.To read this article in full, please click here

Visually Impaired Students in Rwanda Get a New Chance

Jacqueline is attending S4 secondary school HVP Gatagara. She used to read well, but when she reached primary five she went blind and started using audios.

“Studying with audios was challenging” she explains. “Sometimes I got bored and fell asleep. As time went by, I got experienced and I was able to pass my national examination regardless of my blindness.”

A project led by The Internet Society Rwanda Chapter and supported by Beyond the Net Funding Programme is implementing a breakthrough solution that will impact Rwanda’s education sector, addressing the urgent need of a functional learning environment for the visually impaired students.Visual impaired people are not aware of benefits they can get from the Internet. Awareness of what is possible and what is already available is crucial especially for blind students. Young Jacqueline believes that big things have small beginnings and that the Internet will give all students a better opportunity for a successful education: “We have a lot of books here, but we can’t take them home as others do. My request is to turn these books into audios and make them accessible to allow me and my classmates to keep on studying.”

A project called Continue reading

To improve network throughput, scrap the ones-and-zeros system

Abandoning a signal’s traditional binary ones and zeroes will improve throughput in fiber, a Dutch PhD researcher says. By increasing the number of bit states from the traditional two — the one and zero — to four or eight, adding more light colors, and changing clock rates for each wavelength, throughput will be significantly increased, he claims.“A higher number of levels implies more information per symbol, so four levels contain two bits of information, and eight levels contain three bits,” says Robbert van der Linden in an article on the Eindhoven University of Technology Department of Electrical Engineering website.To read this article in full, please click here

To improve network throughput, scrap the ones-and-zeros system

Abandoning a signal’s traditional binary ones and zeroes will improve throughput in fiber, a Dutch PhD researcher says. By increasing the number of bit states from the traditional two — the one and zero — to four or eight, adding more light colors, and changing clock rates for each wavelength, throughput will be significantly increased, he claims.“A higher number of levels implies more information per symbol, so four levels contain two bits of information, and eight levels contain three bits,” says Robbert van der Linden in an article on the Eindhoven University of Technology Department of Electrical Engineering website.To read this article in full, please click here

Technology Short Take 98

Welcome to Technology Short Take #98! Now that I’m starting to get settled into my new role at Heptio, I’ve managed to find some time to pull together another collection of links and articles pertaining to various data center technologies. Feedback is always welcome!

Networking

  • VMware has released a PowerCLI preview/fling for NSX-T; Kyle Ruddy has a write-up here. Looks like this preview provides some high-level cmdlets for NSX-T that weren’t available before.
  • Cilium, the open source project working to bring eBPF-powered networking and security to Kubernetes environments, has hit the 1.0 release. I will freely admit that I am a fan of what the Cilium folks are doing.
  • What’s that? Don’t know what eBPF is? Or XDP? Not to worry, the nice folks over at Netronome have a post that explains it all.
  • People do all kinds of interesting things with Raspberry Pis; here’s an article by Scott Helme on using a Pi to secure DNS traffic.

Servers/Hardware

  • This is more of a follow-up to one of my own articles than a pointer to someone else’s article. After continued use (including on business trips) of my Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon running Fedora 27, I continue to be impressed Continue reading

Avoid Write-Only Code

You probably know that fantastic feeling when you think your newly-discovered tool is a Hammer of Thor, capable of solving every problem (or at least crashing through it). I guess you’re also familiar with that sinking feeling when you’re trying to use your beloved hammer to whitewash a bikeshed.

Not surprisingly, the cruder the tool is, the quicker you’ll hit its limits, like when you try to do data processing in Jinja2 (hint: don’t).

Read more ...

SmoothOperator: reducing power fragmentation and improving power utilization in large-scale datacenters

SmoothOperator: reducing power fragmentation and improving power utilization in large-scale datacenters Hsu et al., ASPLOS’18

What do you do when your theory of constraints analysis reveals that power has become your major limiting factor? That is, you can’t add more servers to your existing datacenter(s) without blowing your power budget, and you don’t want to build a new datacenter just for that? In this paper, Hsu et al. analyse power utilisation in Facebook datacenters and find that overall power budget utilisation can be comparatively low, even while peak requirements are at capacity. We can’t easily smooth the workload (that’s driven by business and end-user requirements), but maybe we can do something to smooth the power usage.

Our experiments based on real production workload and power traces show that we are able to host up to 13% more machines in production, without changing the underlying power infrastructure. Utilizing the unleashed power headroom with dynamic reshaping, we achieve up to an estimated total of 15% and 11% throughput improvement for latency-critical service and batch service respectively at the same time, with up to 44% of energy slack reduction.

No more headroom and low utilisation…

There’s a maximum safe amount of power Continue reading

The Slow But Sure Return Of AMD In The Datacenter

It has been more than a decade since AMD was a force in computing in the datacenter. For that reason, we have not wasted a lot of time going over the ins and outs of its quarterly financials. But now that the Epyc CPUs and Radeon Instinct GPU accelerators are getting traction among hyperscalers, cloud builders, and selected enterprises, it is time to start keeping an eye on how AMD is doing financially.

With most of the financial analysis that we do here at The Next Platform, we use the middle of the Great Recession, in the first quarter …

The Slow But Sure Return Of AMD In The Datacenter was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

IDG Contributor Network: How to achieve and sustain peak performance in your data center

As Tom Brady once said, “if you don’t play to win, don’t play at all.” This mantra is reflected in Brady’s TB12 Method, a holistic lifecycle based on 12 principles that make up the optimal approach to exercise, training and living a life of vitality. It’s built on the premise of stopping an accident prior to it happening through pre-habitation and taking intelligent, strategic preventative measures. And while implementing all 12 principles is not required, their effect is cumulative: the more you can incorporate, the better your results will be.While this methodology applies to training superior athletes, data center managers have their own set of principles to ensure optimal data center performance. What we’ve dubbed the DCM10 Method, there are 10 fundamental steps every data center manager should use to evaluate their current data center and help transform its functionality. Similar to the TB12 Method, while not all of these steps are required to create a successful strategy, the more best practices applied will result in higher performance across the board.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: How to achieve and sustain peak performance in your data center

As Tom Brady once said, “if you don’t play to win, don’t play at all.” This mantra is reflected in Brady’s TB12 Method, a holistic lifecycle based on 12 principles that make up the optimal approach to exercise, training and living a life of vitality. It’s built on the premise of stopping an accident prior to it happening through pre-habitation and taking intelligent, strategic preventative measures. And while implementing all 12 principles is not required, their effect is cumulative: the more you can incorporate, the better your results will be.While this methodology applies to training superior athletes, data center managers have their own set of principles to ensure optimal data center performance. What we’ve dubbed the DCM10 Method, there are 10 fundamental steps every data center manager should use to evaluate their current data center and help transform its functionality. Similar to the TB12 Method, while not all of these steps are required to create a successful strategy, the more best practices applied will result in higher performance across the board.To read this article in full, please click here

Jazmin Fallas Kerr: Creating Opportunities for Women in Costa Rica

The age-old tradition of the physical marketplace may be crumbling, and many women-led families in Costa Rica are feeling the pinch. In fact, in Jazmin Fallas Kerr’s hometown, Desamparados, nearly half of all families with women as head of household are in poverty.

To combat that, Kerr made a digital bridge between creation and commerce. Hyena is an Internet-based marketplace which allows women artisans to sell their handiwork online for a fair price. The site now has more than 50 local women courting customers for their crafts. Kerr’s upbringing helped her develop the idea.

“I was inspired by my mother; she is a family leader and artisan,” Kerr said. “We are from an area of social vulnerability, and I know the difficulties these families face.”

The site helps solve a more universal problem. It gives women the flexibility and time to work outside of homemaking responsibilities.

“[I want to] empower women to create better opportunities for their families,” Kerr said. “It is being achieved through a platform involving different actors in society that involves from fair trade to online education.”

Winner of the “Creator of Digital Change” contest, Hyena exists thanks to that $3,000 prize money from the Continue reading

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